What bugs? OK, I happen to prefer emacs (only because I cut my teeth on TECO), so I don't keep track of the vi(m) changelogs, but given the heat of the flames generated by zealots of both sides, I would have thought most bugs should have been ironed out by now.
Note this is why passive voice is disfavored; it is often unnecessarily ambiguous.
On the other hand, some media (scientific journals in particular) insist on the passive voice.
In any case, though, there is no substitute for learning to use a language well enough to get one's message across effectively and without causing unintended offence.
I personally find grammar checkers (and sometimes spell checkers) frustrating and occasionally offensive because they usually attempt to cramp a literary style of writing into an emasculated and ultimately dull lowest common denominator.
It is easy to illustrate this: simply enter a few words of poetry of your choice into a word processor, and look for the grammar checker's response. Try this:
"Black he stood as night, and shook a dreadful dart." [Milton]
or...
"Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs, Upon the slimy sea." [Coleridge]
As a matter if interest: since those examples are off the top of my head, if anyone here is using a machine with this sort of software, I would be interested to see what the software makes of them.
Is anyone using WordPerfect any more? I'm not disparaging the product BTW (I used it for years from when it was first available on Data General AOS/VS machines through v5.1 on SOD, er, DOS boxes) but it seems to me that most organisations dispensed with WP years ago...
Well, to be fair, for my Linux customers, I also install AbiWord and Gnumeric.
Not to start a flamewar here, since in my experience Gnumeric is actually quite a good offering; it does the majority of things that Excel does at least as well. But I have never found Abiword to be anything better than a very poor relation. I suspect that this might be a symptom of a small developer base, but in any case I tire very quickly of its lack of functionality, and consequently I use OpenOffice.org exclusively for dealing with documents and spreadsheets created by MSOffice products. Yes, OOo does still take ages to load (sigh) but it does the job gracefully when coexisting in a MS-based environment.
production work means you have huge excel sheets that calculate important things your company can't live without
Am I alone in considering that a very sad existence? If a company's staff has halfway decent skills, they should be able to get by with a piece of paper and (maybe) a telephone.
some servers may find themselves at a pretty bad shortage of upload bandwidth.
I suspect that "some" might be very inclusive. My expensive but not very good (this is Australia) ADSL connection is more than adequate for a lot of the servers I hit. Sourceforge forums are a very good example of this, to name but one...
All the US army has to do is a little basic research - maybe google Scottish islands and anthrax. I haven't tried that, but my early microbiology studies refer to ineffective tyndallisation processes there for eliminating anthrax.
From there, all they need to do is go there with a shovel, dig some bugs up and breed them in/on nutrient agar/broth.
From there, if they want to, it is very simple (i.e. can easily be done in an afternoon by common genetic engineering procedures) to insert genes into their chromosomes for resistance to common antibiotics.
If they can't power it (post-apocalypse?) then it again might be best to fall back on hardcopies
This seems to be one of my days for pet peeves; or maybe I'm just getting so old and cranky I have more of them than most.;-)
You don't need an apocalypse to bring down the power. Here in the so-called civilised world we can usually take it for granted that 240V (or 110V) AC will be available, but it doesn't take that much to take it down. New Orleans is a case in point. Or a well-considered terrorist attack.
I'm not trying to say OMGOMGWhatAboutTheChildren, the point I'm clumsily trying to make is simply that we are probably allowing ourselves to become too dependent on computers. If a document (say) is important to us, we should make damn sure it is accessible without having to depend on a gadget to read it.
If you want it to last, you can't beat carbon black pounded into cotton.
... Which reminds me of some old Japanese advice I once read, to the effect that in the event of a fire, you should throw your important documents into your well; the idea supposedly being that sumi (lampblack) ink on mulberry paper should be able to stand that kind of treatment...
Your mention of acidic paper brings up a favourite hobby-horse of mine. I've been saying for some time that we are due at some point not just for a digital dark-age, but one more akin to the last real dark age.
Up until about 1830, paper was typically produced from rag pulp, and this stuff was good for a long time.
Since then, the use of acidic wood-pulp in paper production has led to the majority of books and documents produced over the later 19th and 20th centuries being likely to crumble to dust in a relatively short time. I have many books printed as recently as 1990 that are very brittle and are consequently disintegrating, despite having been comparatively well looked after.
Given the last lot of FUD originating from Symantec (as reported in an earlier thread on/. in the last 24-ish hours), it would appear that Symantec are getting pretty desparate.
That's what worries me. There seems to be nothing to prevent a fraud from placing a RF gadget at hip-pocket height and making up his own transactions. It also seems that in a high-traffic situation, they are going to have to take steps to make sure the correct transaction is assigned to the correct card, rather than just $RANDOM_CARDS_IN_WALLETS.
Operating Systems are a simple reinstall, home contains my stuff. Same with spyware running as me instead of root.
Maybe a simple reinstall would be all _you_ need, but without a pretty strict backup regimen I would be stuck with a hell of a long job recompiling stuff. But if you're running spyware, you have nobody to blame but yourself: that's what ps ax | grep $USERNAME is for.
That depends on your point of view. When I first started working with computers, all lines of code were entered into our old Burroughs B3700 computer via an 029 card-punch. Believe me, editing with those was not much fun. Consequently, I was quite happy with most of the line editors (syntax resembling that of sed I used on subsequent machines. But the best of all was TECO, which was more strictly a character editor.
TECO was great because it was blazingly fast, small, easily scriptable and could edit any kind of file, including binaries. My first sessions with emacs (remember emacs was originally a box of macros for teco) were pretty frustrating because it was so slow: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
The fact that it hasn't happened yet is no indication that it won't, and for all you know it could be any day now.
OK, agreed up to a point, but the default setup for OS X and other unix-like operating systems usually limits write permissions outside the user's home directory. This is a very basic aspect of security, commonly not implemented on Windows boxes, which pretty much limits the damage a virus should be able to do.
Sounds like another good argument for turning off viewing of sigs. You might as well, they never contain anything germane to the topic in question anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
What bugs? OK, I happen to prefer emacs (only because I cut my teeth on TECO), so I don't keep track of the vi(m) changelogs, but given the heat of the flames generated by zealots of both sides, I would have thought most bugs should have been ironed out by now.
On the other hand, some media (scientific journals in particular) insist on the passive voice.
In any case, though, there is no substitute for learning to use a language well enough to get one's message across effectively and without causing unintended offence.
I personally find grammar checkers (and sometimes spell checkers) frustrating and occasionally offensive because they usually attempt to cramp a literary style of writing into an emasculated and ultimately dull lowest common denominator.
It is easy to illustrate this: simply enter a few words of poetry of your choice into a word processor, and look for the grammar checker's response. Try this:
"Black he stood as night, and shook a dreadful dart." [Milton]
or...
"Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs, Upon the slimy sea." [Coleridge]
As a matter if interest: since those examples are off the top of my head, if anyone here is using a machine with this sort of software, I would be interested to see what the software makes of them.
Indeed, and well said. What would the average slashdotter do with a 10^6 friends? Buy them all christmas presents? :-P
Since the submitter appears to be bored with SDRAM, and I still have a machine which uses it, he should simply give it to me.
:-)
"Sandisk in receivership after investment in lead weather balloons"
Like spammers, perhaps? I can see them being quick to take advantage of this kind of bandwidth, given a handful of zombied machines...
512k?
As if. Luxury... ;-)
Is anyone using WordPerfect any more? I'm not disparaging the product BTW (I used it for years from when it was first available on Data General AOS/VS machines through v5.1 on SOD, er, DOS boxes) but it seems to me that most organisations dispensed with WP years ago...
Not to start a flamewar here, since in my experience Gnumeric is actually quite a good offering; it does the majority of things that Excel does at least as well. But I have never found Abiword to be anything better than a very poor relation. I suspect that this might be a symptom of a small developer base, but in any case I tire very quickly of its lack of functionality, and consequently I use OpenOffice.org exclusively for dealing with documents and spreadsheets created by MSOffice products. Yes, OOo does still take ages to load (sigh) but it does the job gracefully when coexisting in a MS-based environment.
Am I alone in considering that a very sad existence? If a company's staff has halfway decent skills, they should be able to get by with a piece of paper and (maybe) a telephone.
Apparently not as flexible as "justice", though...
I suspect that "some" might be very inclusive. My expensive but not very good (this is Australia) ADSL connection is more than adequate for a lot of the servers I hit. Sourceforge forums are a very good example of this, to name but one...
All the US army has to do is a little basic research - maybe google Scottish islands and anthrax. I haven't tried that, but my early microbiology studies refer to ineffective tyndallisation processes there for eliminating anthrax.
From there, all they need to do is go there with a shovel, dig some bugs up and breed them in/on nutrient agar/broth.
From there, if they want to, it is very simple (i.e. can easily be done in an afternoon by common genetic engineering procedures) to insert genes into their chromosomes for resistance to common antibiotics.
And in other news: "Sun CEO has no friends"
or...
"Sun CEO a relic, says Slashdot"
:-D
He would probably have also made a good Holy Roman Emperor if he had got around to taking the public service exam. :-)
This seems to be one of my days for pet peeves; or maybe I'm just getting so old and cranky I have more of them than most. ;-)
You don't need an apocalypse to bring down the power. Here in the so-called civilised world we can usually take it for granted that 240V (or 110V) AC will be available, but it doesn't take that much to take it down. New Orleans is a case in point. Or a well-considered terrorist attack.
I'm not trying to say OMGOMGWhatAboutTheChildren, the point I'm clumsily trying to make is simply that we are probably allowing ourselves to become too dependent on computers. If a document (say) is important to us, we should make damn sure it is accessible without having to depend on a gadget to read it.
... Which reminds me of some old Japanese advice I once read, to the effect that in the event of a fire, you should throw your important documents into your well; the idea supposedly being that sumi (lampblack) ink on mulberry paper should be able to stand that kind of treatment...
Up until about 1830, paper was typically produced from rag pulp, and this stuff was good for a long time.
Since then, the use of acidic wood-pulp in paper production has led to the majority of books and documents produced over the later 19th and 20th centuries being likely to crumble to dust in a relatively short time. I have many books printed as recently as 1990 that are very brittle and are consequently disintegrating, despite having been comparatively well looked after.
... which is why it usually doesn't take them very long. ;-)
Given the last lot of FUD originating from Symantec (as reported in an earlier thread on /. in the last 24-ish hours), it would appear that Symantec are getting pretty desparate.
That's what worries me. There seems to be nothing to prevent a fraud from placing a RF gadget at hip-pocket height and making up his own transactions. It also seems that in a high-traffic situation, they are going to have to take steps to make sure the correct transaction is assigned to the correct card, rather than just $RANDOM_CARDS_IN_WALLETS.
Maybe a simple reinstall would be all _you_ need, but without a pretty strict backup regimen I would be stuck with a hell of a long job recompiling stuff. But if you're running spyware, you have nobody to blame but yourself: that's what ps ax | grep $USERNAME is for.
That depends on your point of view. When I first started working with computers, all lines of code were entered into our old Burroughs B3700 computer via an 029 card-punch. Believe me, editing with those was not much fun. Consequently, I was quite happy with most of the line editors (syntax resembling that of sed I used on subsequent machines. But the best of all was TECO, which was more strictly a character editor.
TECO was great because it was blazingly fast, small, easily scriptable and could edit any kind of file, including binaries. My first sessions with emacs (remember emacs was originally a box of macros for teco) were pretty frustrating because it was so slow: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
OK, agreed up to a point, but the default setup for OS X and other unix-like operating systems usually limits write permissions outside the user's home directory. This is a very basic aspect of security, commonly not implemented on Windows boxes, which pretty much limits the damage a virus should be able to do.
Sounds like another good argument for turning off viewing of sigs. You might as well, they never contain anything germane to the topic in question anyway.