Once again, the MMO world grabs ideas from the world of Muds.
UnterMuds did the same thing 15 or so years ago - you could log in to your home Mud, then travel through portals to other Unter-compatible Muds.
(there was a downside - I took one character through a few portals that way, but then got stuck because the Mud I was on went down. Attempting to log in to my "home" Mud didn't work because it tried to forward me on to the next one.)
Web browser should have 'splittable' scroll bars like code editors and Excel have had for ages. Where you can split the window vertically into two panes, each with its own scrollbar. That would make reading a ton of websites, including Slashdot, much much more pleasant.
See also Eternal September. September used to be the time when a fresh wave of college students (in the USA) would get Usenet access for the first time, and it took a while to train them in the ways of netiquette. AOL was like a new wave arriving every week, starting in Sept '93, which overwhelmed most newsgroups' capacity to deal with them.
The correct way to use xargs is to use the -0 switch
... which only applies if you have a GNU-derived find/xargs/cpio. Not very helpful if you're stuck on (e.g.) HP-UX a couple of versions behind the current one, and with no chance of installing a suite of GNU tools.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Unix portability...
Now that, I can see. I've only been working in the field for a couple years but I can already see that the room for growth in software development is unparalelled. What I mean is that people who start out as grunt developers often have a chance to become a team manager--it depends on how well they can estimate mentally and breakdown a project into tasks (something programmers are required to do in code anyways).
I see things a little differently to you - if you want to progress in your career (i.e. make more $$), then your choices in IT are management, management, or maybe even... management. There's no good way for a technically-minded person to use their years of experience but stay technical and advance/earn more.
I have little interest in becoming any kind of manager, because I've seen other people do it - within 6 months they never do any hands-on work, they're all running around doing budgets and chasing timesheets and spending most of their days in meetings. Why would I want to do management work badly when I can do technical work well ? - and yet only the management track people get the chance to earn the real money.
FuturePower(R) wrote: (The session saver plugin apparently does not work with the latest Firefox.)
I'm running 1.0.7, with Session Saver 0.2 d1 nightly 28, and it runs fine. Saves my sanity on a regular basis (although if Firefox does start getting unstable, I usually take a safety copy of prefs.js (where SessionSaver stores its open tab information) just in case it gets trashed when FF goes down/gets killed).
The crashes are associated with high CPU use, sometimes as high as 99% and extremely high memory use. Notice that Firefox never gives back memory. If it is using 200 Megabytes, and all but one window and tab are closed, the memory use will still be 200 Megabytes!
Actually, it does seem to give back memory - I've noticed this a few times when opening a bunch of image-heavy tabs, memory usage will soar, but then drop back down again after I close those tabs.
All that said, I have noticed that with lots of tabs open (usually 30-50 tabs in each of 3 windows, for me), opening new tabs (especially if the tab title bar is appearing off the right-hand side of the window), Firefox often freezes for a few seconds (up to 30) with 100% CPU usage, and then settles down (usually).
I don't believe those statistics are an accurate representation of reality at all. The average age of a person who PURCHASES a game is not the same as the average age of the person PLAYING it.
Ummm, you weren't paying attention, were you ?
The original poster wrote :
According to the Entertainment Software Assocation, the average game is age 30, and the average purchaser of games is 37
Quite clearly making the distinction between the ages of the players and purchasers.
(of course, I presume they meant "average gamer" rather than "average game")
5. Ok, the command prompt could definitely use some work.
Actually, the Windows command prompt has had some work, in W2K and XP it's much more useful than it used to be. I haven't checked all features, but most of the things you'd expect from a decent Unixy shell are there.
Linux, compared feature-for-feature with Windows, is inferior in some areas, similar in others, and superior in some.
The real difference is in the processes used to create and maintain them, and that's where I believe Linux will win out in the end - they don't have a revenue stream to protect, and if enough people don't like the direction Linux (either the kernel or particular distributions) are heading, then can just take the source and fork it.
I work in an organisation that does this. Ratings are done quarterly, each employee rated on both job performance (1 (best) to 4) and "behaviours" (A (best) to C). Employees at the same level are then ranked, based on discussions between their managers, with rankings arranged in a bell curve similar to those described in other posts here - rank 1 for the top 10%, rank 2 the next 10%, ranks 3+ and 3 for the next two 35% chunks, and rank 4 for the final 10%. Anyone in the 4th rank for two quarters in a row starts getting noticed - the managers will try to work out how to get better performance out of them, maybe by moving departments or changing role. If all else fails, they get managed out of the organisation, of course...
This system isn't perfect, but it at least makes some attempt to be objective and consistent. Before this system came in, performance was managed through subjective impressions of managers, and was almost certainly less fair and more prone to grand-standing, networking/nepotism, and backstabbing than the current one.
I am reminded of this Winston Churchill quote :
Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.
vrai wrote :
Cats are hunters. They need lots of space for territory and lots of things to hunt. They are not indoor animals.
In Australia, people are advised to keep cats indoors as much as possible. Unfortunately, cats are indeed hunters, and they love nothing more than Fillet of Rare Australian Bird with a side dish of Small Defenceless Marsupial. I can't recall the figures now, but cats, especially when let out at night, can hunt down and wound or kill quite a large number of animals.
j-pimp (177072) wrote : Seriously though, do people not compile kernels anymore?
I haven't recompiled in a while, partly because I upgraded to RH 8.0, and the included kernel source doesn't include the.config file they compiled it with. I'm worried that I'll generate a config missing some crucial option that made things "just work", and waste time trying to find out what it was. Also, I choose to spend my time on productive pursuits (keeping up with alt.sysadmin.recovery, playing Neverwinter Nights, that sort of thing), rather than fussing around with kernels. The other thing, of course, is that most things "just work" - USB scanner, USB flash stick, etc.
Gah, it'd help if I got my numbers right :
I pay $AUD 80, not 90 (about $USD 60), the download limit is 12Gb/month, not 8, and the excess charge is $AUD 0.08/Mb, not 0.12.
(pity you can't edit your own posts, like on almost every other blogging/journalling/newslogging-type site... )
A few points here :
- obviously, the monthly usage chosen was over the download cap (the excess charge is priced to penalize overusers)
- download allowances have come down a lot over the past 12-18 months in Australia (the OECD data was 2002)
- there are other ISPs than Telstra to choose from, and there are other pipes in/out of Australia than those used by Telstra.
As a slightly more realistic data point, I pay $AUS 90/month ($USD 68) for 512/256k, with 8 Gb download limit (then $AUD 0.12 per Mb, I think), from Internode. Still pretty high, but I could go down to 256/128k, with 2Gb limit, for $AUD 50 ($USD 38) - which compares much more favourably on the chart above.
Internode aren't the cheapest DSL provider in Oz, either, but their service and support levels are very good (when I first connected with them, I had problems getting connected (Telstra-related, ironically), so I logged on to the net on the old dialup, posted to the forums at whirlpool.net.au, and had a response in an hour or so - from the head of the company, at 11pm on a Friday night !).
(anyway, this sort of comparison will always hit these sorts of apples/oranges problems. You could probably choose a way to measure DSL costs which would put (almost) any one of the countries listed above cheapest) )
Someone wrote :
I don't believe the entire South American continent shares a single IP range containing only 254 useable addresses.
What you describe here, 200.x.x.x, is a/8, not a/24. A/24 might be something like 200.47.218.x
(for once, I agree with the people who say there should be a "-1, Wrong" moderation).
You have it exactly backwards - 200.x.x.x represents a range of IP addresses where the first 8 bits are known (11001000), and the remaining 24 are unknown (those 'x's above). Thus, a/24 network, 16 million-odd addresses, starting from 200.0.0.0 and going to 200.255.255.255.
200.47.218.x is a/8.
On Windows (2K at work, XP at home) I put the taskbar on the right hand side of the screen, made it wide enough to see most or all of the window titles, and set it to auto hide. For example, this window (Mozilla) shows up as "Expose Metacity With Expocity -... ".
I also run a virtual desktop program called "MultiDesk", which gives me 4 desktops. Between those two, I have no problem finding one of the 20 e-mails, 10 xterms, or random other windows/apps I have open.
On Linux, on the other hand, I don't think I've looked at the taskbar in the last month - I have 9 virtual desktops, and few enough windows in each that alt-tab works fine for me (in whichever WM I'm using, alt-tab highlights the outlines/positions of the windows as I tab through them, which works well for me since they're all over the place:-> ).
What he was doing in 1979 was academic work, and the source code was available. In the years since then, Unix has been locked away by various companies (e.g. SCO). Linux isn't about making the best user experience, it's about a return to making improvements based on freely shared knowledge.
My perspective is that all this "mebi" and "gibi" stuff sounds like something thought up by a 5 year old ! Really, what were they smoking if they thought adults (and/or geeks:-> ) would use these terms ?
I used to Mud a lot - if you graphed my grades at Uni, you'd see a big downward curve (not that they were all that high to begin with) when I discovered Usenet news and then Muds (Thank goodness the Web wasn't around then (1990), otherwise I would have failed miserably !)
After all these years I don't spend much time mudding, but I still play a few :
TinyTIM : A MUSH, with a slightly warped sense of humour. No gaming system as such, except whatever individuals have hacked up in MUSH code (by definition, anything more complicated than a locking door is a gross hack in MUSH code:-> ). For me, mainly used for a little socialising, occasional random building.
DartMud : LPMud based, with a skill-based system, player-based economy, strong emphasis on role-playing, many quests, races, etc., and the occasional comet wiping out the main city (well, that's only happened once, but once is plenty;-) ).
Every now and then I peek in at LustyMud and Round Table III, just for old time's sake, but I don't actively play there these days.
For me, the conflict is that the companies that have the interest in the content are the same as the ones doing the distribution. I'm all for record companies and artists making money, but I don't think they should be involved in the actual distribution of their product. When was the last time you walked up to a corner convenience store that was owned by the Coca Cola Company? Never.
Coca Cola may not own whole stores, but they often own fridges, at least here (Australia). In a small shop with one or two fridges, owned by one company (Coke or Pepsi), you'll only see products from that one company. Even in supermarkets, Coke & Pepsi pay for shelf space.
The net result to me is that I have much less choice than I'd like - for example, it's just about impossible to find a decent ginger beer (the non-alcoholic kind) in any small shops that operate by this system.
It's also hard for the smaller brands to compete in supermarkets, e.g. in one supermarket I go to regularly, about 1/4 of the soft drinks aisle has Coke (various flavours and bottle sizes), another 1/4 has
other drinks made by Coca Cola, another 1/4 for Pepsi-related drinks, and the final 1/4 shared between the smaller brands (Schweppes, Tarax, supermarket "own brand", etc) and other drinks.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I've spent too much time looking at code,
Yes. Yes, you have.
Once again, the MMO world grabs ideas from the world of Muds.
UnterMuds did the same thing 15 or so years ago - you could log in to your home Mud, then travel through portals to other Unter-compatible Muds.
(there was a downside - I took one character through a few portals that way, but then got stuck because the Mud I was on went down. Attempting to log in to my "home" Mud didn't work because it tried to forward me on to the next one.)
Web browser should have 'splittable' scroll bars like code editors and Excel have had for ages. Where you can split the window vertically into two panes, each with its own scrollbar. That would make reading a ton of websites, including Slashdot, much much more pleasant.
...
But frames are so 1998
"an career in IT" - COMMON
To be fair, 20 years ago IT really wasn't as common as it is now.
The sad bit is, he was almost certainly trying to say "come on" - I've seen this a few times around slashdot lately.
See also Eternal September. September used to be the time when a fresh wave of college students (in the USA) would get Usenet access for the first time, and it took a while to train them in the ways of netiquette. AOL was like a new wave arriving every week, starting in Sept '93, which overwhelmed most newsgroups' capacity to deal with them.
The correct way to use xargs is to use the -0 switch
... which only applies if you have a GNU-derived find/xargs/cpio. Not very helpful if you're stuck on (e.g.) HP-UX a couple of versions behind the current one, and with no chance of installing a suite of GNU tools.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Unix portability ...
Now that, I can see. I've only been working in the field for a couple years but I can already see that the room for growth in software development is unparalelled. What I mean is that people who start out as grunt developers often have a chance to become a team manager--it depends on how well they can estimate mentally and breakdown a project into tasks (something programmers are required to do in code anyways).
I see things a little differently to you - if you want to progress in your career (i.e. make more $$), then your choices in IT are management, management, or maybe even
I have little interest in becoming any kind of manager, because I've seen other people do it - within 6 months they never do any hands-on work, they're all running around doing budgets and chasing timesheets and spending most of their days in meetings.
Why would I want to do management work badly when I can do technical work well ? - and yet only the management track people get the chance to earn the real money.
FuturePower(R) wrote :
(The session saver plugin apparently does not work with the latest Firefox.)
I'm running 1.0.7, with Session Saver 0.2 d1 nightly 28, and it runs fine. Saves my sanity on a regular basis (although if Firefox does start getting unstable, I usually take a safety copy of prefs.js (where SessionSaver stores its open tab information) just in case it gets trashed when FF goes down/gets killed).
The crashes are associated with high CPU use, sometimes as high as 99% and extremely high memory use. Notice that Firefox never gives back memory. If it is using 200 Megabytes, and all but one window and tab are closed, the memory use will still be 200 Megabytes!
Actually, it does seem to give back memory - I've noticed this a few times when opening a bunch of image-heavy tabs, memory usage will soar, but then drop back down again after I close those tabs.
All that said, I have noticed that with lots of tabs open (usually 30-50 tabs in each of 3 windows, for me), opening new tabs (especially if the tab title bar is appearing off the right-hand side of the window), Firefox often freezes for a few seconds (up to 30) with 100% CPU usage, and then settles down (usually).
I don't believe those statistics are an accurate representation of reality at all. The average age of a person who PURCHASES a game is not the same as the average age of the person PLAYING it.
Ummm, you weren't paying attention, were you ?
The original poster wrote :
According to the Entertainment Software Assocation, the average game is age 30, and the average purchaser of games is 37
Quite clearly making the distinction between the ages of the players and purchasers. (of course, I presume they meant "average gamer" rather than "average game")
Typical, ran out of mod points on Friday and here's a comment that needs some ...
But what lawyer would take a large paycut just to work with a bunch of geeks in QA ?
Actually, the Windows command prompt has had some work, in W2K and XP it's much more useful than it used to be. I haven't checked all features, but most of the things you'd expect from a decent Unixy shell are there.
Linux, compared feature-for-feature with Windows, is inferior in some areas, similar in others, and superior in some.
The real difference is in the processes used to create and maintain them, and that's where I believe Linux will win out in the end - they don't have a revenue stream to protect, and if enough people don't like the direction Linux (either the kernel or particular distributions) are heading, then can just take the source and fork it.
David.
This system isn't perfect, but it at least makes some attempt to be objective and consistent. Before this system came in, performance was managed through subjective impressions of managers, and was almost certainly less fair and more prone to grand-standing, networking/nepotism, and backstabbing than the current one.
I am reminded of this Winston Churchill quote :
David.
It was on the front page of The Age website this afternoon (afternoon Melbourne time, your time may differ :-) ).
...
Here it is, assuming the link doesn't change by tomorrow
vrai wrote : Cats are hunters. They need lots of space for territory and lots of things to hunt. They are not indoor animals.
In Australia, people are advised to keep cats indoors as much as possible. Unfortunately, cats are indeed hunters, and they love nothing more than Fillet of Rare Australian Bird with a side dish of Small Defenceless Marsupial. I can't recall the figures now, but cats, especially when let out at night, can hunt down and wound or kill quite a large number of animals.
David.
j-pimp (177072) wrote :
.config file they compiled it with. I'm worried that I'll generate a config missing some crucial option that made things "just work", and waste time trying to find out what it was. Also, I choose to spend my time on productive pursuits (keeping up with alt.sysadmin.recovery, playing Neverwinter Nights, that sort of thing), rather than fussing around with kernels. The other thing, of course, is that most things "just work" - USB scanner, USB flash stick, etc.
Seriously though, do people not compile kernels anymore?
I haven't recompiled in a while, partly because I upgraded to RH 8.0, and the included kernel source doesn't include the
David.
(replying to self)
... )
Gah, it'd help if I got my numbers right : I pay $AUD 80, not 90 (about $USD 60), the download limit is 12Gb/month, not 8, and the excess charge is $AUD 0.08/Mb, not 0.12.
(pity you can't edit your own posts, like on almost every other blogging/journalling/newslogging-type site
David.
Australia Telstra - Big Pond 121.67
A few points here :
- obviously, the monthly usage chosen was over the download cap (the excess charge is priced to penalize overusers)
- download allowances have come down a lot over the past 12-18 months in Australia (the OECD data was 2002)
- there are other ISPs than Telstra to choose from, and there are other pipes in/out of Australia than those used by Telstra.
As a slightly more realistic data point, I pay $AUS 90
Internode aren't the cheapest DSL provider in Oz, either, but their service and support levels are very good (when I first connected with them, I had problems getting connected (Telstra-related, ironically), so I logged on to the net on the old dialup, posted to the forums at whirlpool.net.au, and had a response in an hour or so - from the head of the company, at 11pm on a Friday night !).
(anyway, this sort of comparison will always hit these sorts of apples/oranges problems. You could probably choose a way to measure DSL costs which would put (almost) any one of the countries listed above cheapest) )
Someone wrote :
/8, not a /24. A /24 might be something like 200.47.218.x
/24 network, 16 million-odd addresses, starting from 200.0.0.0 and going to 200.255.255.255.
/8.
I don't believe the entire South American continent shares a single IP range containing only 254 useable addresses.
What you describe here, 200.x.x.x, is a
(for once, I agree with the people who say there should be a "-1, Wrong" moderation).
You have it exactly backwards - 200.x.x.x represents a range of IP addresses where the first 8 bits are known (11001000), and the remaining 24 are unknown (those 'x's above). Thus, a
200.47.218.x is a
Whew. I used to work in the Maths Dept. there, things have obviously improved since my day :->
David.
On Windows (2K at work, XP at home) I put the taskbar on the right hand side of the screen, made it wide enough to see most or all of the window titles, and set it to auto hide. For example, this window (Mozilla) shows up as "Expose Metacity With Expocity - ... ".
:-> ).
I also run a virtual desktop program called "MultiDesk", which gives me 4 desktops. Between those two, I have no problem finding one of the 20 e-mails, 10 xterms, or random other windows/apps I have open.
On Linux, on the other hand, I don't think I've looked at the taskbar in the last month - I have 9 virtual desktops, and few enough windows in each that alt-tab works fine for me (in whichever WM I'm using, alt-tab highlights the outlines/positions of the windows as I tab through them, which works well for me since they're all over the place
David.
What he was doing in 1979 was academic work, and the source code was available. In the years since then, Unix has been locked away by various companies (e.g. SCO). Linux isn't about making the best user experience, it's about a return to making improvements based on freely shared knowledge.
David.
My perspective is that all this "mebi" and "gibi" stuff sounds like something thought up by a 5 year old ! Really, what were they smoking if they thought adults (and/or geeks :-> ) would use these terms ?
David.
I used to Mud a lot - if you graphed my grades at Uni, you'd see a big downward curve (not that they were all that high to begin with) when I discovered Usenet news and then Muds (Thank goodness the Web wasn't around then (1990), otherwise I would have failed miserably !)
:-> ). For me, mainly used for a little socialising, occasional random building.
;-) ).
After all these years I don't spend much time mudding, but I still play a few :
TinyTIM : A MUSH, with a slightly warped sense of humour. No gaming system as such, except whatever individuals have hacked up in MUSH code (by definition, anything more complicated than a locking door is a gross hack in MUSH code
DartMud : LPMud based, with a skill-based system, player-based economy, strong emphasis on role-playing, many quests, races, etc., and the occasional comet wiping out the main city (well, that's only happened once, but once is plenty
Every now and then I peek in at LustyMud and Round Table III, just for old time's sake, but I don't actively play there these days.
David.
Coca Cola may not own whole stores, but they often own fridges, at least here (Australia). In a small shop with one or two fridges, owned by one company (Coke or Pepsi), you'll only see products from that one company. Even in supermarkets, Coke & Pepsi pay for shelf space.
The net result to me is that I have much less choice than I'd like - for example, it's just about impossible to find a decent ginger beer (the non-alcoholic kind) in any small shops that operate by this system.
It's also hard for the smaller brands to compete in supermarkets, e.g. in one supermarket I go to regularly, about 1/4 of the soft drinks aisle has Coke (various flavours and bottle sizes), another 1/4 has other drinks made by Coca Cola, another 1/4 for Pepsi-related drinks, and the final 1/4 shared between the smaller brands (Schweppes, Tarax, supermarket "own brand", etc) and other drinks.
David.