Uninstall? Not listed. Windows Setup? Not listed. Ok, Delete the directory. Success! Five minutes later when I was looking for other things to clear off, I found the directory had been recreated
MSIs can do this. The MSI is stored in a hidden directory, and it can reinstall itself if it detects that files have gone missing. Vendors can also set MSIs to not be visible in "add/remove programs". If movie maker is re-installing itself via an MSI, you can uninstall it outside of the "add/remove programs" gui, by running `msiexec/x (movie maker guid)`. I don't know what the guid is for this product, but you can find it in your registry or via google.
it should be sufficiently different to my day job to keep my interest up [...]. Above all, it should appeal to my inner geek
Why not do the majority of the work yourself? There is nothing more geeky or interesting than learning something new, from basic carpentry, to plumbing, to design work.
With my first house, I did the vast majority of the work myself, simply because cash was scarce. As time went on and I was able to save up some cash for expected work, I sometimes just hired the work out because it was something I tried and failed at, or was something that didn't interest me at all. But mostly I still do a lot of the projects myself.
Financially, you should try to compare the earnings that might be available to you to the cost of laborers and craftsmen. I live in the Bay Area, I can earn $80/hr for side projects easily (I could earn way more if I could pick and choose, but if I'm just trying to fill my free time, $80/hr seems to be the sweet spot). Craftsmen charge pretty close to that. So, depending on the specifics of the work on my home needs to happen, I'll either do it myself or try to raise the money with side jobs. It also depends upon what I want to learn.
For example, electrical work doesn't interest me at all, plus it scares me, so I always hire that out. But anything else I'll spend at least some time trying to figure out if I can learn how to do it myself.
As for moonlighting, you'll find the best work through people you know and who trust you. The best advice is to let everyone you know know 1) that you are looking for work 2) what you are great at 3) what your availability is. Eg, "I'm looking for work, I've used X technology to build web sites for Y years, and I'm available Z weekends per month.
Also, don't overextend yourself. Fixing up a house can take years. Don't get impatient, enjoy the process, and don't sacrifice your happiness for the sake of a faster schedule.
The purpose of government is to provide a sense of security; to provide an environment in which you can flourish.
Some might say that the purpose of government is to provide actual security, which can often be very different than some useless (and sometimes dangerous) sense of security.
I would love to see you continue to insist that police officers not be aggressive and that the areas you are in be unmonitored. Most people will demand a more aggressive stand by law enforcement
This line of reasoning makes me realize that we should resurrect Maria Montessori and make her the head of the DHS. I'm not a crime fighting expert, but am pretty sure that most effective way to be safer is to live among people who are aware of what's going on, and people who care for each other. Waiting for The Justice League to physically block you from danger seems naive. The Guardian Angel's strategy also seems wise: simply creating a presence of aware and brave people can make a difference.
Google will be paying for two competitors to Internet Explorer. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft complains about unfair competition.
What's wrong with hedging your bets? If Google is actually trying to compete with MS's browser (doubtful), it would be short-sighted to only invest in one alternative. If Google is trying to compete with MS's search and ad serving (likely), they now have the ability to fragment their market, which, in this case, probably means a larger over-all market for Google. They now have their fingers in two pretty different browsers, so folks who may have "not liked" Firefox have yet another alternative to IE.
MS may well complain about "unfair competition", but over the last 5 years they seem to have realized that they are quite capable of creating a decent browser, and it's in their interest to follow that path, rather than legal/pr/fud they historically have followed.
Only once it exists. Getting software to exist is an expensive and time-consuming process.
Just look at the cost of CAD or other design and engineering software. The prices are utterly ridiculous!
The prices usually correspond to the value that it provides to the users, factoring in the initial costs of making it, and factoring in the competitive landscape.
Here's an excellent plain-english explanation of software pricing and some of the factors therein.
why does a company who make ATM machines which don't lose a cent in millions of transactions and have a paper trail fail to do the same for voting machines?
Well, ATMs are, by design, transparent. You take out money, and your account has that much less money. If it takes out too much, dispenses too much, or otherwise is wrong, both parties will easily notice.
Voting machines have the requirement of being secret. That is, they are supposed to hide what the voter did.
Obviously this is not an impossible problem to solve. But just because ATMs and voting machines use similar hardware, that doesn't mean that they do the same thing.
I have to admit, I'm clueless about your Java dependency issues.
Usually this is because the container you are using depends upon version X of XML Library A (usually to read it's own config files, or other boring stuff) while some your own code or some third-party API you use depends upon version X+1 of that same Library A. It's not an impossible problem to get around, but it's a problem that exists in almost every non-trivial app I've ever worked on.
1) Implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves
What does this mean? It's not like you can sprinkle "threading" onto an app and have it magically improve things. There is quite a lot of thought on the subject of concurrent execution within the context of a browser, but it's not as if there is an existing software pattern that will just fix the issue that I think you are referring to.
3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:
This would be cool, but, again, it's not like it's easy. An OS can't even reliably give you these stats. `kill -3`ing a process is about as close as it comes. Or am I misunderstanding what you are asking for?
All of these "freedom" organizations turn quite orwellian themselves whenever someone disagrees with them.
There's a huge difference between covertly intruding on private communications and parsing a changelog on a wiki. It's not as if there are packet sniffers listening to what the military is doing, and I'm not even sure that that would count as "orwellian" if it were the case.
It's available with 1st party software. It's kind of lame, but it does the job.
Said tool is kind of beyond lame. All it does is group window objects together and manipulate the task bar so it only shows you the "current" windows. Maybe more recent versions are better, but doing stuff like "show desktop" minimized all windows on all "desktops" because there is only one desktop under the hood. I also recall alt-tab not working very well for some reason.
My understanding of Apple's implementation (haven't tried it yet) and the implementations running on X is that they create real, separate roots for you to put the windows into.
I don't know of any technical reason that a real implementation of this can't be hacked into Windows, but then again, with Windows, even multiple monitors are a PITA. Modal dialogs showing on the wrong monitor, modal dialogs showing on a non-existent monitor (!), window maximization not working properly if the screens are different geometries, etc.
I don't think you can be more protective of source code than they are today.
A lot of code is only loosely gaurded, because there are legal ways of protecting it. You can easily disassemble a lot of the.net api, or (when java was closed) a lot of the java api. But you can't really use it, because it would be obvious and illegal (or in violation of an agreement).
If MS and Sun had to be secretive by obfuscating their api or code, we'd be worse off because debugging and stack traces would be much less useful.
Not all code is inherently secret or sensitive, some of it just so-called IP, and a lot of it is currently not very secretive.
Obviously if you're talking about Photoshop or proprietary authentication schemes, that's a different story.
Why don't banks just roll out SecurID to everyone...?
Because it's more convenient to have the device on the card. I carry many credit cards, I don't want to have a corresponding securid device for each card.
I've been using Drorak since I learned to touch type. I don't understand your comment. I type both English and Japanese. Although Drorak is designed and optimized for English, the same letter patterns appear in other languages too. Certainly not to the same degree as in English, but they are there. I've never typed Japanese on Qwerty, so maybe I'm wrong, but I find Japanese very natural on Dvorak. I imagine that Spanish, French, Italian, etc are also very natural on Dvorak. I've never typed Hebrew or Russian or many other substantially different languages, so maybe Qwerty is in fact much better suited to these languages.
Also, every single programming language I've used has English keywords. There are few languages that support unicode source code, but still I've never seen any real software written in anything except English.
The worst aspects of Dvorak for programming are: - location of "_", "{", "}" etc. (Qwerty is not much better, but it is better) - pair programming is just about impossible on windows because its input switching is so bad. - several remote connection software packages support Dvorak badly. some not at all.
FYI, I'm not signed in and I see local news. On http://news.yahoo.com/ I see the following:
Sign In
New User? Sign Up
And:
San Francisco Area (BETA)
Berkeley, CA
Indeed, I'm browsing from a machine in Berkeley.
Take that for what it's worth.
Triggers are hidden application logic that are very hard to debug
Triggers are hidden *data* logic, and they should be hidden. They have the added benefit of being asyncronous if you choose, so if you need to write data fast, you can still lay it out in another format, or do something else arbitrary to it.
Stored procedures are like PERL
Agreed. But when you need them, you need them. They also go hand-in-hand with triggers frequently.
Views are a nice feature, but most often used to support business and reporting.
Views are an abstracted view of data. You can have a table called subscribers with lots of columns that tell you the status of the subscriber, and a view called current_subscribers that encapsulates all that logic.
create view current_subscribers as select id from subscribers where start_date now() and cancelled = 'N' and is_overdue = 'N';
You could argue that this logic belongs in you DAO, but that only works if you have one DAO runtime, which is not true for a lot of application environments.
IE6 has been out for 4 years... Firefox has been out for less than a year.
Just to clarify, Firefox uses many mozilla modules (gecko, network, xul, etc) that have been around since 1998 or 1999. Firefox is just a reworking of how all those things fit together. Much of the underlying code is easily older than IE6.
There's nothing unusual about that. The author is using the widely-known Hungry Notation, whereby prefixes and variable names are descriptive of the various food items that the author is currently preoccupied with.
What version of ffmpeg are you using? I'm using 0.4.6 and I don't see a "-target" option at all. Reading the docs, I don't even see an explanation about what it does or how it does it, although it seems to rely on other codecs, so I wonder how much better the quality is vis-a-vis mpeg2enc.
Are you piping a QuickTime for linux files to this, or DV, or what? The docs don't say what input its expecting outside of the very vague "-formats" option.
I know I don't know a whole lot about what all those options do, but they seem to be tuned to the best quality as far as I understand the documentation. I'm curious to learn more about better-quality mpeg encoding on linux. Any hints or urls are appreciated!
For software, Cinelerra is the best editing suite out there. I haven't used Final Cut Pro, but Cinelerra is much more useful than iMovie. I haven't used Premiere is years, and Cinelerra is on par with what I remember of Premiere. Cinelerra should be able to do everything that you need.
I've only done DV over firewire capture, and for that I would guess that any old firewire card would be fine. For analog capture, I'd look into using a Hauppauge 250 for capture. Just `cat/dev/video0 >/home/me/projects/bills-wedding/capture.mpeg`. You could also get the 350 which does hardware mpeg decoding (and you could hook a crt up to the tv out, too.)
The only thing that absolutely stinks about video on linux is the choice of mpeg codecs. I can do everything I need to create a decent looking movie, but once I mpegify it to burn it to dvd, the picture quality looks terrible (to my eyes, anyway. some people say it looks fine). I just got a Hauppauge 250 so I could do all my editing/compositing in DV, write that back to the camera via firewire, then capture the final cut with a dedicated hardware mpeg card over analog connections.
I actually looked into getting an old mac that I could stick in my garage and remotely mpegify my final cuts and burn them. At the time it was too much money for what I was doing (and I never did figure out how to script iMovie anyway), but it may be worth it to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Uninstall? Not listed. Windows Setup? Not listed. Ok, Delete the directory. Success! Five minutes later when I was looking for other things to clear off, I found the directory had been recreated
MSIs can do this. The MSI is stored in a hidden directory, and it can reinstall itself if it detects that files have gone missing. Vendors can also set MSIs to not be visible in "add/remove programs". If movie maker is re-installing itself via an MSI, you can uninstall it outside of the "add/remove programs" gui, by running `msiexec /x (movie maker guid)`. I don't know what the guid is for this product, but you can find it in your registry or via google.
it should be sufficiently different to my day job to keep my interest up [...]. Above all, it should appeal to my inner geek
Why not do the majority of the work yourself? There is nothing more geeky or interesting than learning something new, from basic carpentry, to plumbing, to design work.
With my first house, I did the vast majority of the work myself, simply because cash was scarce. As time went on and I was able to save up some cash for expected work, I sometimes just hired the work out because it was something I tried and failed at, or was something that didn't interest me at all. But mostly I still do a lot of the projects myself.
Financially, you should try to compare the earnings that might be available to you to the cost of laborers and craftsmen. I live in the Bay Area, I can earn $80/hr for side projects easily (I could earn way more if I could pick and choose, but if I'm just trying to fill my free time, $80/hr seems to be the sweet spot). Craftsmen charge pretty close to that. So, depending on the specifics of the work on my home needs to happen, I'll either do it myself or try to raise the money with side jobs. It also depends upon what I want to learn.
For example, electrical work doesn't interest me at all, plus it scares me, so I always hire that out. But anything else I'll spend at least some time trying to figure out if I can learn how to do it myself.
As for moonlighting, you'll find the best work through people you know and who trust you. The best advice is to let everyone you know know 1) that you are looking for work 2) what you are great at 3) what your availability is. Eg, "I'm looking for work, I've used X technology to build web sites for Y years, and I'm available Z weekends per month.
Also, don't overextend yourself. Fixing up a house can take years. Don't get impatient, enjoy the process, and don't sacrifice your happiness for the sake of a faster schedule.
Leap Seconds
The purpose of government is to provide a sense of security; to provide an environment in which you can flourish.
Some might say that the purpose of government is to provide actual security, which can often be very different than some useless (and sometimes dangerous) sense of security.
I would love to see you continue to insist that police officers not be aggressive and that the areas you are in be unmonitored. Most people will demand a more aggressive stand by law enforcement
This line of reasoning makes me realize that we should resurrect Maria Montessori and make her the head of the DHS. I'm not a crime fighting expert, but am pretty sure that most effective way to be safer is to live among people who are aware of what's going on, and people who care for each other. Waiting for The Justice League to physically block you from danger seems naive. The Guardian Angel's strategy also seems wise: simply creating a presence of aware and brave people can make a difference.
Google will be paying for two competitors to Internet Explorer. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft complains about unfair competition.
What's wrong with hedging your bets? If Google is actually trying to compete with MS's browser (doubtful), it would be short-sighted to only invest in one alternative. If Google is trying to compete with MS's search and ad serving (likely), they now have the ability to fragment their market, which, in this case, probably means a larger over-all market for Google. They now have their fingers in two pretty different browsers, so folks who may have "not liked" Firefox have yet another alternative to IE.
MS may well complain about "unfair competition", but over the last 5 years they seem to have realized that they are quite capable of creating a decent browser, and it's in their interest to follow that path, rather than legal/pr/fud they historically have followed.
Software [...] supply is LIMITLESS
Only once it exists. Getting software to exist is an expensive and time-consuming process.
Just look at the cost of CAD or other design and engineering software. The prices are utterly ridiculous!
The prices usually correspond to the value that it provides to the users, factoring in the initial costs of making it, and factoring in the competitive landscape.
Here's an excellent plain-english explanation of software pricing and some of the factors therein.
why does a company who make ATM machines which don't lose a cent in millions of transactions and have a paper trail fail to do the same for voting machines?
Well, ATMs are, by design, transparent. You take out money, and your account has that much less money. If it takes out too much, dispenses too much, or otherwise is wrong, both parties will easily notice.
Voting machines have the requirement of being secret. That is, they are supposed to hide what the voter did.
Obviously this is not an impossible problem to solve. But just because ATMs and voting machines use similar hardware, that doesn't mean that they do the same thing.
The librarian should be subject to a thorough questioning of her judgment
The library director in question is male.
1) Implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves
What does this mean? It's not like you can sprinkle "threading" onto an app and have it magically improve things. There is quite a lot of thought on the subject of concurrent execution within the context of a browser, but it's not as if there is an existing software pattern that will just fix the issue that I think you are referring to.
3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:
This would be cool, but, again, it's not like it's easy. An OS can't even reliably give you these stats. `kill -3`ing a process is about as close as it comes. Or am I misunderstanding what you are asking for?
The best new feature is the so-called Awesome Bar, the new url input.
It takes a couple hours to get used to, but it's simply fantastic. Kudos to the team that implemented it.
All of these "freedom" organizations turn quite orwellian themselves whenever someone disagrees with them.
There's a huge difference between covertly intruding on private communications and parsing a changelog on a wiki. It's not as if there are packet sniffers listening to what the military is doing, and I'm not even sure that that would count as "orwellian" if it were the case.
Google's clients are not people who search, or people who use gmail -- Google's clients are companies that pay for ads.
Whether or not Google has a monopoly on placing ads, I don't know, but I doubt it.
Said tool is kind of beyond lame. All it does is group window objects together and manipulate the task bar so it only shows you the "current" windows. Maybe more recent versions are better, but doing stuff like "show desktop" minimized all windows on all "desktops" because there is only one desktop under the hood. I also recall alt-tab not working very well for some reason.
My understanding of Apple's implementation (haven't tried it yet) and the implementations running on X is that they create real, separate roots for you to put the windows into.
I don't know of any technical reason that a real implementation of this can't be hacked into Windows, but then again, with Windows, even multiple monitors are a PITA. Modal dialogs showing on the wrong monitor, modal dialogs showing on a non-existent monitor (!), window maximization not working properly if the screens are different geometries, etc.
What are you talking about, you can buy yourself a copy of Tiger through The Apple Store
That's not a version of Tiger that you can install on an intel machine AFAICT:
Hardware Requirements * PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor
A lot of code is only loosely gaurded, because there are legal ways of protecting it. You can easily disassemble a lot of the .net api, or (when java was closed) a lot of the java api. But you can't really use it, because it would be obvious and illegal (or in violation of an agreement).
If MS and Sun had to be secretive by obfuscating their api or code, we'd be worse off because debugging and stack traces would be much less useful.
Not all code is inherently secret or sensitive, some of it just so-called IP, and a lot of it is currently not very secretive.
Obviously if you're talking about Photoshop or proprietary authentication schemes, that's a different story.
Because it's more convenient to have the device on the card. I carry many credit cards, I don't want to have a corresponding securid device for each card.
I've been using Drorak since I learned to touch type. I don't understand your comment. I type both English and Japanese. Although Drorak is designed and optimized for English, the same letter patterns appear in other languages too. Certainly not to the same degree as in English, but they are there. I've never typed Japanese on Qwerty, so maybe I'm wrong, but I find Japanese very natural on Dvorak. I imagine that Spanish, French, Italian, etc are also very natural on Dvorak. I've never typed Hebrew or Russian or many other substantially different languages, so maybe Qwerty is in fact much better suited to these languages.
Also, every single programming language I've used has English keywords. There are few languages that support unicode source code, but still I've never seen any real software written in anything except English.
The worst aspects of Dvorak for programming are:
- location of "_", "{", "}" etc. (Qwerty is not much better, but it is better)
- pair programming is just about impossible on windows because its input switching is so bad.
- several remote connection software packages support Dvorak badly. some not at all.
FYI, I'm not signed in and I see local news. On http://news.yahoo.com/ I see the following: Sign In New User? Sign Up And: San Francisco Area (BETA) Berkeley, CA Indeed, I'm browsing from a machine in Berkeley. Take that for what it's worth.
Triggers are hidden *data* logic, and they should be hidden. They have the added benefit of being asyncronous if you choose, so if you need to write data fast, you can still lay it out in another format, or do something else arbitrary to it.
Stored procedures are like PERL
Agreed. But when you need them, you need them. They also go hand-in-hand with triggers frequently.
Views are a nice feature, but most often used to support business and reporting.
Views are an abstracted view of data. You can have a table called subscribers with lots of columns that tell you the status of the subscriber, and a view called current_subscribers that encapsulates all that logic.
(psuedo sql)
create table subscribers (id, start_date, end_date, cancelled, payment_is_late, is_overdue);
create view current_subscribers as select id from subscribers where start_date now() and cancelled = 'N' and is_overdue = 'N';
You could argue that this logic belongs in you DAO, but that only works if you have one DAO runtime, which is not true for a lot of application environments.
Just to clarify, Firefox uses many mozilla modules (gecko, network, xul, etc) that have been around since 1998 or 1999. Firefox is just a reworking of how all those things fit together. Much of the underlying code is easily older than IE6.
There's nothing unusual about that. The author is using the widely-known Hungry Notation, whereby prefixes and variable names are descriptive of the various food items that the author is currently preoccupied with.
What version of ffmpeg are you using? I'm using 0.4.6 and I don't see a "-target" option at all. Reading the docs, I don't even see an explanation about what it does or how it does it, although it seems to rely on other codecs, so I wonder how much better the quality is vis-a-vis mpeg2enc.
Are you piping a QuickTime for linux files to this, or DV, or what? The docs don't say what input its expecting outside of the very vague "-formats" option.
I know I don't know a whole lot about what all those options do, but they seem to be tuned to the best quality as far as I understand the documentation. I'm curious to learn more about better-quality mpeg encoding on linux. Any hints or urls are appreciated!
I've only done DV over firewire capture, and for that I would guess that any old firewire card would be fine. For analog capture, I'd look into using a Hauppauge 250 for capture. Just `cat /dev/video0 > /home/me/projects/bills-wedding/capture.mpeg`. You could also get the 350 which does hardware mpeg decoding (and you could hook a crt up to the tv out, too.)
The only thing that absolutely stinks about video on linux is the choice of mpeg codecs. I can do everything I need to create a decent looking movie, but once I mpegify it to burn it to dvd, the picture quality looks terrible (to my eyes, anyway. some people say it looks fine). I just got a Hauppauge 250 so I could do all my editing/compositing in DV, write that back to the camera via firewire, then capture the final cut with a dedicated hardware mpeg card over analog connections.
I actually looked into getting an old mac that I could stick in my garage and remotely mpegify my final cuts and burn them. At the time it was too much money for what I was doing (and I never did figure out how to script iMovie anyway), but it may be worth it to you.