Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted.OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version; I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.
And what about those of us who'd be happy to pay Scott Adams for his work but don't have a machine that'll run Windows?
If there were a version I could read on my Psion and/or Mac, I'd buy it (especially if it was an open format so I could run it though my formatting and Anglicisation programs...). But there isn't, so I'm stuffed...
I wish they would add a feature to mail to tell it to reauthenticate against POP or IMAP every number of user defined minutes.
Preferences->Account->Check for new mail. My ISP has only a five-minute window, so I tell mail to check for new mail every five minutes, and I never have any trouble sending mail. (Plus I get new mail promptly.)
surf over to Info-zip's site to download the source or binary.
Why bother, when it's already installed as part of Mac OS X? There's no manpage, but the executable is/usr/bin/zip (and/usr/bin/unzip). The 10.2.1 version says:
Copyright (C) 1990-1996 Mark Adler, Richard B. Wales, Jean-loup Gailly Onno van der Linden and Kai Uwe Rommel. Type 'zip -L' for the software License.
This is Zip 2.1 (April 27th 1996), by Info-ZIP. ...
Compiled with gcc Apple cpp-precomp 6.14 for Unix (Apple Mac OS X) on 07/14/02.
Isn't it the tendency in the PC industry for the low-end markets to grow and eventually squeeze out the high end? If so, M$ is now threatened by the same phenomenon that caused their meteoric rise in the first place!
And anyway, why does Linux have to `win' outright? Much as I detest M$ as a company, I'd be quite happy to see them continue in business as one player amongst many. There would be many benefits to a free choice of OSs -- provided they were competing on a level playing field, of course.
I only used it for a couple of terms (I was Cosmic), but towards the end of 90/91 I got addicted. Met some fascinating people, had some crazy adventures. I've forgotten most of it now -- seems like a lifetime ago.
Good thing I left when I did, though, otherwise I'd have no degree at all:)
Absolutely. I still spend far more time on CIX than I do on/., K5, and the other sites I visit put together. There's a strong community there, and... well, I won't extol its virtues too much, as I wouldn't want too many./ers to join:)
I'm not following Atkins exactly, just limiting myself to foods that are 10% carb or less (a friend recommended it to me after losing several stone). And in 2 months I've lost a stone and a half! (That's 21 pounds for you Yanks.) What's more, I'm eating as much as I want, and it's encouraged me to eat a lot healthier: far more fresh veg, etc.
To answer a couple of other points: the water loss only lasts as long as your glycogen -- less than 2 days. After that, you can lose muscle along with fat (though this is true of low-fat and low-calorie diets too, even more so), but most low-carb diets recommend exercise to prevent this. (Yes, I mentioned the `E' word, but it needn't be too frightening. I'm doing 15 minutes' worth a day at home, where no-one can see, and it's working for me. Based on the programme in The Hacker's Diet, but simplified and extended.)
And it's not just a standard low-calorie diet; for one thing, carbs give you an appetite. One of the characteristics of low-carb diets is that you don't feel as hungry.
I'm no endocrinologist. All I know is, it's working for me, and for everyone I know who's tried it.
IME with C, the type is usually either irrelevant to what you're doing, or clear from existing code. It's far more important to know the scope of a variable with that, you can quickly find the definition if you do need to know its type. (And of course, having to keep paging up to find types is a sign of badly-structured code.)
A handful of single-character prefixes will do the job neatly, e.g. nothing for variables defined in this function, `p' for function parameters, `s' for statics defined in this file, `g' for global variables, etc. We found these far less obtrusive, and far more useful, than type prefixes.
(In Java, you don't even need those - the only useful qualifier is one to distinguish instance variables from local ones (e.g. a single underscore for the former). But even that's not necessarily worth the bother.)
The Perl motto `There's more than one way to do it' is certainly a Good Thing(TM) when learning Perl, as it enables people to carry over some of their experience of other languages. It can also help experienced Perlsters when writing fresh code, leading to more concise idioms.
However, it's less useful when trying to follow other people's code, as it means there's more to understand. `There's more than one way he could have done it' may be a problem if he's chosen a different way from yours. This disadvantage becomes much more important for large systems, where careful standards and practices are often necessary to make them manageable - of course, this applies more to high-level design and interface issues than low-level coding ones, but each affects the other, and with an estimated 55-80% of programmer time spent on maintenance, it's a significant issue.
So, where do you draw the line between favouring the fresh coder and favouring the maintainer? Where do you think Perl sits at the moment, and with hindsight what (if anything) would you do to change that balance?
Agreed. Some people are inconsiderate $£@&#%s, but so far we've survived without a law against that...
What makes mobile phones so different from digital watches that play tunes, or PDAs with loud alarms, or squeakers, or horns, or anything else that makes a noise? Why ban the phone, instead of the noise it causes? Ditto talking; if we ban the noise of one person talking on a phone during a performance, shouldn't we also ban two people talking to each other?
Anyway, I reckon that as we get more used to having mobile phones, we'll learn to use them responsibly. (It happened with digital watches, for example.)
When I started my last permanent programming job (here in the UK), the contract had similarly-restrictive clauses, claiming ownership of all IP I created, all drawing, photographs and other artwork, etc. etc.; also reserving the right to monitor all my net usage, preventing me from owning any shares in any other companies without permission etc.
So I queried it. I replied to the job offer, explaining my particular concerns with the contract (that it wouldn't let me put my holiday snaps on my web site, for example; that it wouldn't let me write personal software in my own time, and that they had no right to monitor my net usage when not job-related, in my own time, and on my equipment). I isolated the four bits of the contract I had problems with, and suggested minimal changes to the wording (such as adding `in company time or on company equipment') that would make it fair.
I had no idea whether this would do any good, but by return of post came a new contract with all my suggested changes! I was lucky: it was a very small company, and they were very keen to get me. (I signed the amended contract immediately, and spent a very happy time there until they went bust...) In worse times and with a much larger company, I might have been less lucky. But it does no harm to try. Many companies might not realise just how restrictive or unfair their contracts are, until someone points it out.
Someone who actually did this is Patrick Moore (astronomer, long-running presenter of the BBC's `The Sky At Night', xylophone player, and eccentric). From his wonderful book `Bureaucrats: How To Annoy Them' (credited to `R. T. Fishall' but the back cover explains this to be PM):
"Some months ago I was sent three large volumes dealing with the history of Brazil, in which I was not in the least interested; all I know about Brazil is that it is the country where the nuts come from. I waited for the first demand. When it came, I wrote back as follows:
Dear Sirs:
Thank you for the books sent for storage in this Library. The storage charge is 50p per volume per week. The books have now been stored for a total of 4 weeks, making a preliminary charge of £6.00p. Your remittance by return of post will be appreciated.
I never heard another word!"
(Of course, this was twenty years ago when six quid was worth quite a bit more...)
You may be looking in the wrong place. Here in the UK, pre-recorded MDs are available, but rare. However, blanks are available everywhere, and they're quite common for recording your own music.
I've got about 500, for example, mostly recorded from my CD collection for listening in the car and on the move. I also record concerts with it. (Not what you think! I mean concerts I'm singing or playing in.) Yesterday, for example, I was helping to run a quiz night, and it was just the thing for the music round and other FX.
I've toyed with the idea of an iPod, but MD still wins on a few points: the quality's better (double the bitstream of most MP3s, and a substantially better algorithm too), and they're quicker for my use. (I can just grab an MD and be out of the door in seconds; I couldn't store all my CDs in HD -- uncompressed, I'd need 1TB or so, and I don't want to compress the %&*@ out of them.) Maybe one day I'll be able to store all I want on a solid-state player, but for now MD does just fine.
[fx: riotous applause, several curtain calls and an encore]
I thank you, from my heart, for your wonderful rendition. Oh! pity me, for such is my sense of duty that I shall feel myself bound to devote myself heart and soul to your extermination. My lot is not a happy one...
I have mixed feelings about this. As a Java user (on, amongst others, an old 1.1 platform with no 1.2 JVM to switch to), I hate the idea of yet another incompatible platform. And yet, as a Java developer, I agree that most of the points raised are warts that it's be nice to fix. (I disagree on a few of the details, and especially on removing primitives, but the article does its job in asking the right questions.)
However, there's already a mechanism for this, and one that he mentions in his first point! Stuff in 1.0 that's been deprecated since 1.1 can surely be removed with very little impact: responsible developers have had several years and 3 major JVM versions to fix their code by now. If people need to run code that old, they still have the old JVMs to run it on as well.
And most of his other points can be solved by deprecating existing API elements and providing alternatives. The old ones will still work for the time being, and developers can get busy adapting, so in a few years the cruft can be removed. That's what deprecation is for, after all!
Nope, still nothing that'll replace my Psion 5mx. Doesn't have a keyboard, and won't run for tens of hours on a pair of AAs.
Not bad in other respects (size, speed, storage, Bluetooth, USB). If it runs something other than Windows, that's good too. I'm not sure that portable HDs are the way to go, though; flash technology is getting bigger all the time, and gives greater speed for much less power.
The threat is neither from left nor right per se; it's from extreme authoritarians.
The two things are independent: one useful view of political thought is as a two-dimensional spread, with conventional `left'/`right' on a horizontal axis, and libertarian/authoritarian vertically. Historically, extreme authoritarians have tended to be at one end or other of the left/right spread, but there's no direct connection.
There's a whole genre there that's still relatively unknown. Trouble is, it goes under the name `Electronic Music' too - usually EM for short. It also gets called new age, synth music, avant garde, space music, ambient, new instrumental, electro-instrumental, adult contemporary, electronic rock, progressive electronica... though most of those are really related genres or sub-genres.
The artists you've named (also some of my faves) are on the edges; in the centre are Tangerine Dream (of course), Klaus Schulze, Ian Boddy, Mark Shreeve, AirSculpture, Ron Boots, Keller & Schonwalder, Paul Nagle, Steve Roach, Syndromeda, Pyramid Peak, John Dyson, Robert Schroeder, Johannes Munz, Paul Lawler, Waveform, Palantir, Dave Russell, Arc, Node, Asana, Kees Aerts, Free System Project, Kubusschnitt, Lightwave, Minds in Motion, Pete Namlook, Rainbow Serpent, Hemisphere, Radio Massacre International, Corporation, Spyra, Robert Rich, Lucifaere, Robert Marselje, and loads more.
It covers a range from the traditional sequencer-based `Berlin school' through more melodic, rhythmic and symphonic styles to areas which overlap with ambient, techno, and trance.
Most of this stuff is hard to find; my two main sources are Groove Unlimited (prev. Cue Records) and Synth Music Direct (with its own label, Neu Harmony). Both of these have their own releases as well as loads of other great music, reviews, information, online ordering, etc., and are well worth a look.
Deep linking is only a means to an end, isn't it? Isn't the real crime here that of passing off -- claiming credit for something that isn't yours? If so, then that should be the precedent, not deep linking itself.
Slashdot Mirror
And what about those of us who'd be happy to pay Scott Adams for his work but don't have a machine that'll run Windows?
If there were a version I could read on my Psion and/or Mac, I'd buy it (especially if it was an open format so I could run it though my formatting and Anglicisation programs...). But there isn't, so I'm stuffed...
Preferences->Account->Check for new mail. My ISP has only a five-minute window, so I tell mail to check for new mail every five minutes, and I never have any trouble sending mail. (Plus I get new mail promptly.)
Why bother, when it's already installed as part of Mac OS X? There's no manpage, but the executable is /usr/bin/zip (and /usr/bin/unzip). The 10.2.1 version says:
And anyway, why does Linux have to `win' outright? Much as I detest M$ as a company, I'd be quite happy to see them continue in business as one player amongst many. There would be many benefits to a free choice of OSs -- provided they were competing on a level playing field, of course.
I only used it for a couple of terms (I was Cosmic), but towards the end of 90/91 I got addicted. Met some fascinating people, had some crazy adventures. I've forgotten most of it now -- seems like a lifetime ago.
Good thing I left when I did, though, otherwise I'd have no degree at all :)
Absolutely. I still spend far more time on CIX than I do on /., K5, and the other sites I visit put together. There's a strong community there, and... well, I won't extol its virtues too much, as I wouldn't want too many ./ers to join :)
To answer a couple of other points: the water loss only lasts as long as your glycogen -- less than 2 days. After that, you can lose muscle along with fat (though this is true of low-fat and low-calorie diets too, even more so), but most low-carb diets recommend exercise to prevent this. (Yes, I mentioned the `E' word, but it needn't be too frightening. I'm doing 15 minutes' worth a day at home, where no-one can see, and it's working for me. Based on the programme in The Hacker's Diet, but simplified and extended.)
And it's not just a standard low-calorie diet; for one thing, carbs give you an appetite. One of the characteristics of low-carb diets is that you don't feel as hungry.
I'm no endocrinologist. All I know is, it's working for me, and for everyone I know who's tried it.
IME with C, the type is usually either irrelevant to what you're doing, or clear from existing code. It's far more important to know the scope of a variable with that, you can quickly find the definition if you do need to know its type. (And of course, having to keep paging up to find types is a sign of badly-structured code.)
A handful of single-character prefixes will do the job neatly, e.g. nothing for variables defined in this function, `p' for function parameters, `s' for statics defined in this file, `g' for global variables, etc. We found these far less obtrusive, and far more useful, than type prefixes.
(In Java, you don't even need those - the only useful qualifier is one to distinguish instance variables from local ones (e.g. a single underscore for the former). But even that's not necessarily worth the bother.)
A woman walks into a bar and asks for an Entendre. "Single or double?" asks the barman. "Double," she says. The barman replies "Oooh, a large one!"
However, it's less useful when trying to follow other people's code, as it means there's more to understand. `There's more than one way he could have done it' may be a problem if he's chosen a different way from yours. This disadvantage becomes much more important for large systems, where careful standards and practices are often necessary to make them manageable - of course, this applies more to high-level design and interface issues than low-level coding ones, but each affects the other, and with an estimated 55-80% of programmer time spent on maintenance, it's a significant issue.
So, where do you draw the line between favouring the fresh coder and favouring the maintainer? Where do you think Perl sits at the moment, and with hindsight what (if anything) would you do to change that balance?
If you believe that there's a job to be had, then you're not objectivist enough!
What makes mobile phones so different from digital watches that play tunes, or PDAs with loud alarms, or squeakers, or horns, or anything else that makes a noise? Why ban the phone, instead of the noise it causes? Ditto talking; if we ban the noise of one person talking on a phone during a performance, shouldn't we also ban two people talking to each other?
Anyway, I reckon that as we get more used to having mobile phones, we'll learn to use them responsibly. (It happened with digital watches, for example.)
So I queried it. I replied to the job offer, explaining my particular concerns with the contract (that it wouldn't let me put my holiday snaps on my web site, for example; that it wouldn't let me write personal software in my own time, and that they had no right to monitor my net usage when not job-related, in my own time, and on my equipment). I isolated the four bits of the contract I had problems with, and suggested minimal changes to the wording (such as adding `in company time or on company equipment') that would make it fair.
I had no idea whether this would do any good, but by return of post came a new contract with all my suggested changes! I was lucky: it was a very small company, and they were very keen to get me. (I signed the amended contract immediately, and spent a very happy time there until they went bust...) In worse times and with a much larger company, I might have been less lucky. But it does no harm to try. Many companies might not realise just how restrictive or unfair their contracts are, until someone points it out.
"Some months ago I was sent three large volumes dealing with the history of Brazil, in which I was not in the least interested; all I know about Brazil is that it is the country where the nuts come from. I waited for the first demand. When it came, I wrote back as follows:
I never heard another word!"(Of course, this was twenty years ago when six quid was worth quite a bit more...)
I've got about 500, for example, mostly recorded from my CD collection for listening in the car and on the move. I also record concerts with it. (Not what you think! I mean concerts I'm singing or playing in.) Yesterday, for example, I was helping to run a quiz night, and it was just the thing for the music round and other FX.
I've toyed with the idea of an iPod, but MD still wins on a few points: the quality's better (double the bitstream of most MP3s, and a substantially better algorithm too), and they're quicker for my use. (I can just grab an MD and be out of the door in seconds; I couldn't store all my CDs in HD -- uncompressed, I'd need 1TB or so, and I don't want to compress the %&*@ out of them.) Maybe one day I'll be able to store all I want on a solid-state player, but for now MD does just fine.
I thank you, from my heart, for your wonderful rendition. Oh! pity me, for such is my sense of duty that I shall feel myself bound to devote myself heart and soul to your extermination. My lot is not a happy one...
However, there's already a mechanism for this, and one that he mentions in his first point! Stuff in 1.0 that's been deprecated since 1.1 can surely be removed with very little impact: responsible developers have had several years and 3 major JVM versions to fix their code by now. If people need to run code that old, they still have the old JVMs to run it on as well.
And most of his other points can be solved by deprecating existing API elements and providing alternatives. The old ones will still work for the time being, and developers can get busy adapting, so in a few years the cruft can be removed. That's what deprecation is for, after all!
Don't all these repeated claims of life on Mars say more about us and our obsessions than they do about Mars itself?
Yeah, but who still uses the AWT? Swing has a JFileChooser which is loads better. Don't judge Java by the state it was in 4 or 5 years ago.
EQ: Just Say No!
Not bad in other respects (size, speed, storage, Bluetooth, USB). If it runs something other than Windows, that's good too. I'm not sure that portable HDs are the way to go, though; flash technology is getting bigger all the time, and gives greater speed for much less power.
The two things are independent: one useful view of political thought is as a two-dimensional spread, with conventional `left'/`right' on a horizontal axis, and libertarian/authoritarian vertically. Historically, extreme authoritarians have tended to be at one end or other of the left/right spread, but there's no direct connection.
The artists you've named (also some of my faves) are on the edges; in the centre are Tangerine Dream (of course), Klaus Schulze, Ian Boddy, Mark Shreeve, AirSculpture, Ron Boots, Keller & Schonwalder, Paul Nagle, Steve Roach, Syndromeda, Pyramid Peak, John Dyson, Robert Schroeder, Johannes Munz, Paul Lawler, Waveform, Palantir, Dave Russell, Arc, Node, Asana, Kees Aerts, Free System Project, Kubusschnitt, Lightwave, Minds in Motion, Pete Namlook, Rainbow Serpent, Hemisphere, Radio Massacre International, Corporation, Spyra, Robert Rich, Lucifaere, Robert Marselje, and loads more.
It covers a range from the traditional sequencer-based `Berlin school' through more melodic, rhythmic and symphonic styles to areas which overlap with ambient, techno, and trance.
Most of this stuff is hard to find; my two main sources are Groove Unlimited (prev. Cue Records) and Synth Music Direct (with its own label, Neu Harmony). Both of these have their own releases as well as loads of other great music, reviews, information, online ordering, etc., and are well worth a look.
Deep linking is only a means to an end, isn't it? Isn't the real crime here that of passing off -- claiming credit for something that isn't yours? If so, then that should be the precedent, not deep linking itself.