I've been blocking ads for so long, I was a bit amused when/. started giving us the option to disable ads. I haven't seen an ad here for years, and my karma has been maxed out since when it was shown as an integer (50).
I'm not sure why people get so hot under the collar about Unity. I don't personally care for it, but it is similar enough to Gnome 2.x to not be offensive (I suppose), and it probably isn't counter-intuitive for Mac users. Gnome 3 was a big disappointment for me, having been a fan of Gnome since the '90s. I'm now using KDE, and am quite happy now that 4.10 includes compositing, which used to be a bit unreliable with the combination of earlier versions of KDE with compiz.
Your two statements are really part of the same thing: Debian development is so slow, packages are usually out-of-date by the time the distro is released, and it's hard to find up-to-date packages because Debian development is so slow.
This has always been what has put me off Debian for use as anything other than a server platform (and it's not even my first choice for that).
How do you do that in Arch, now that the hosts file has been eliminated by the bloody, I mean, bleeding edge...of change...for the sake of change?
Is this something I don't know about? I used Arch on my laptops for some 4 years or so, until as recently as last week(*), and/etc/hosts worked just fine.
* [digression] I enjoyed the ride with Arch for a long time, having migrated from Slackware. Years ago, it was the similarity to Slackware (i.e. simplicity) in combination with a more feature-laden package manager that attracted me to Arch, but now a lot of that simplicity has evaporated in favour of all sorts of trendy doodads. I sort of got used to things getting broken in the course of rolling-release upgrades (or in some cases just staying broken from the start), but when pacman borked my machine for the umpteenth time last week, I blew Arch away and reinstalled Slackware. It was like coming home: everything "just works", and any individual applications that I want to be really current can be built by myself or obtained from trusted repositories.
Nevertheless, Aaron is pretty critical of Ubuntu Phone, and frankly, he has a point.
So he does. It doesn't necessarily mean Ubuntu Phone is a total crock of shit, it's just that it's not really the platform they imply it is. (Now what would be really cool would be a Slackware phone...)
What struck me, however, on following the link at the bottom of the article pointing to release of the phone product on 21st Feb, the first thing I saw was that YouTube clip of Stallman talking about Ubuntu and spyware.
Interesting that you should mention DG: I was heavily involved with their boxen back in the AOS/VS days, when their user manuals implicitly directed the user to SPEED (one of the better implementations of TECO I've seen) as the default editor, or the alternative of SED (a truly horrible screen editor that bears absolutely no resemblance to the *nix-land sed.) SPEED was a nicely scriptable editor, capable of performing all sorts of abstruse things on flat files, faster than some compiled binaries.
The main failing of the GIMP IMO is that it takes the approach that the best way to design a UI is to present every option, widget, and tool to you at once, and hope that eventually you will get used to it.
I think you must be confused. The GIMP does exactly the opposite, while Photoshop does precisely this.
It is really not that simple/cheap to check the entire world for trademarks.
Given the scope of Apple's legal resources, it should be. Especially for a company whose business model seems to involve suing the crap out of everybody rather than actually doing any innovation. And no, making a phone 0.00001 mm thinner than the model they released in 2007 does not count as innovation.
Paypal, bank account, credit card... It's all virtual money; numbers in a database.
But then, all money is virtual. It is a proxy to represent some sort of value, a bit more convenient than attempting to make a transaction with payment involving cows or goats. Though actually, I would *really* like a way to try this on FleaBay.;-)
The closest I've seen is the way we used to be able to write a cheque on anything, and provided there was a valid signature, the banks would honour it. I once heard of a guy who wrote a cheque on the side of a cow. And I remember paying a parking fine with a cheque written on loo paper. It only occurred to me after I had posted it that it should have been *used* loo paper.:)
And they still are right. Parliamentary enquiries have no teeth in the face of commercial operations. It's all about politics: "Look at me, I'm doing something-or-other about something-or-other. Watch this vacant space [ ]".
If we're going to go down the path of the internet being used solely for the purpose of a marketplace, I suspect I will continue my pattern of diminishing usage of it as the years go by. I was there right at the beginning when it was ARPANET and MILNET (and yes, I am even older than that). I understand that DRM has legitimate purposes, but so far, what I have mostly seen is its use to lock in consumers and restrict or deny (I'm looking at Amazon here) legitimate use.
If I am put in a position where in order to purchase certain content, I have to accept DRM encoding, the very first thing I do before I use the file is strip the DRM out. I call this future-proofing, on the grounds that some content providers (Amazon again) have been known to "take back" content, and on the grounds that a digital file should be subject to the same restrictions as a physical book, CD, DVD or whatever.
But I digress: in the earlier years of the internet, I used to spend a (probably too-)large proportion of my life online. Nowadays, having moved away from urban centres and needing to devote more time to getting a life (growing vegies, raising chooks etc) - and with an enforced bandwidth and traffic limit, I find it easier to keep a more distant perspective. So I no longer spend so many hours trawling the net for things hitherto unknown, and actually spend a few more hours at night in bed with my wife.
Unless you have a specific reason why you need assembly for a project, these days you will rarely find anyone who will be prepared to pay you for the time it takes.
Thus, 8086 or 8088 assembler is probably as good as anything from an educational point of view: it gets you into the mindset of low-level programming and how to go about it.
Back in the '70s and '80s, I used to do a lot of assembly on Burroughs, CDC, Sperry and Honeywell mainframes - and disassembly to patch binaries where the source (FORTRAN or COBOL) had been lost - and I think I was pretty good at it. But nowadays most employers will be much happier if you can cobble something together in any higher level language, and to hell with making your object code efficient.
It's not just extra work, but sometimes it really doesn't work.
The submission quotes a point that "you can teach the whole of chemistry with a whiteboard". This is true in the sense that this subject is one that actually benefits from a low-tech approach to lectures, since they are less distracting. However, if the budget's up for grabs, chemistry is one discipline where you really just can't have too much lab time, because that's where you learn the most.
I was fortunate in that my university realises this, and my undergraduate degree involved about 15 to 18 hours per week in the lab - and we even had lab-based exams, so there was no doubt as to whether or not we had picked up the necessary knowledge and skills. While you can save yourself a bit of time with a laptop on your bench (hoping it doesn't get wet), you can actually get by with nothing more than pencil and paper.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been blocking ads for so long, I was a bit amused when /. started giving us the option to disable ads. I haven't seen an ad here for years, and my karma has been maxed out since when it was shown as an integer (50).
I'm not sure why people get so hot under the collar about Unity. I don't personally care for it, but it is similar enough to Gnome 2.x to not be offensive (I suppose), and it probably isn't counter-intuitive for Mac users. Gnome 3 was a big disappointment for me, having been a fan of Gnome since the '90s. I'm now using KDE, and am quite happy now that 4.10 includes compositing, which used to be a bit unreliable with the combination of earlier versions of KDE with compiz.
Your two statements are really part of the same thing: Debian development is so slow, packages are usually out-of-date by the time the distro is released, and it's hard to find up-to-date packages because Debian development is so slow.
This has always been what has put me off Debian for use as anything other than a server platform (and it's not even my first choice for that).
Then that means Calibre's installer is broken. That has nothing to do with the OS.
I take your point, but that would have to be just about the only thing about Calibre that *is* broken. For me, Calibre is one killer app.
How do you do that in Arch, now that the hosts file has been eliminated by the bloody, I mean, bleeding edge ...of change ...for the sake of change?
Is this something I don't know about? I used Arch on my laptops for some 4 years or so, until as recently as last week(*), and /etc/hosts worked just fine.
* [digression] I enjoyed the ride with Arch for a long time, having migrated from Slackware. Years ago, it was the similarity to Slackware (i.e. simplicity) in combination with a more feature-laden package manager that attracted me to Arch, but now a lot of that simplicity has evaporated in favour of all sorts of trendy doodads. I sort of got used to things getting broken in the course of rolling-release upgrades (or in some cases just staying broken from the start), but when pacman borked my machine for the umpteenth time last week, I blew Arch away and reinstalled Slackware. It was like coming home: everything "just works", and any individual applications that I want to be really current can be built by myself or obtained from trusted repositories.
Nevertheless, Aaron is pretty critical of Ubuntu Phone, and frankly, he has a point.
So he does. It doesn't necessarily mean Ubuntu Phone is a total crock of shit, it's just that it's not really the platform they imply it is. (Now what would be really cool would be a Slackware phone...)
What struck me, however, on following the link at the bottom of the article pointing to release of the phone product on 21st Feb, the first thing I saw was that YouTube clip of Stallman talking about Ubuntu and spyware.
So then the question becomes "Why is this false story being posted on slashdot?"
Well, if you took the trouble to do such an unorthodox thing as reading the article, you might find out. Try it, it's only a few paragraphs.
Interesting that you should mention DG: I was heavily involved with their boxen back in the AOS/VS days, when their user manuals implicitly directed the user to SPEED (one of the better implementations of TECO I've seen) as the default editor, or the alternative of SED (a truly horrible screen editor that bears absolutely no resemblance to the *nix-land sed.) SPEED was a nicely scriptable editor, capable of performing all sorts of abstruse things on flat files, faster than some compiled binaries.
Well, I guess Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping doesn't sound like much any more, when most editors hog at least ten times that.
That's like asking "why would you install Linux on a toaster oven?"
Indeed. Everyone knows Linux runs better on a kerosene fridge.
Simple BOFH approach, assuming presence of the One True Editor(TM):
/usr/bin/{vi,vim,emacs} /usr/bin/teco
ln -s
It also tastes horrible.
You're all totally wrong. The one true editor is TECO....
zj-3d
Some people don't have a Facebook account because they grew up in the 1970s and...
...well, some people don't have a facefook account because they grew up.
The main failing of the GIMP IMO is that it takes the approach that the best way to design a UI is to present every option, widget, and tool to you at once, and hope that eventually you will get used to it.
I think you must be confused. The GIMP does exactly the opposite, while Photoshop does precisely this.
It is really not that simple/cheap to check the entire world for trademarks.
Given the scope of Apple's legal resources, it should be. Especially for a company whose business model seems to involve suing the crap out of everybody rather than actually doing any innovation. And no, making a phone 0.00001 mm thinner than the model they released in 2007 does not count as innovation.
But brazilians are americans...
I thought they were a kind of haircut.
Now, you'll excuse me as I jack my 'trodes into my deck...
Whatever that means, I'll trust you. Just try not to leave yucky stuff on your keyboard...
Paypal, bank account, credit card... It's all virtual money; numbers in a database.
But then, all money is virtual. It is a proxy to represent some sort of value, a bit more convenient than attempting to make a transaction with payment involving cows or goats. Though actually, I would *really* like a way to try this on FleaBay. ;-)
:)
The closest I've seen is the way we used to be able to write a cheque on anything, and provided there was a valid signature, the banks would honour it. I once heard of a guy who wrote a cheque on the side of a cow. And I remember paying a parking fine with a cheque written on loo paper. It only occurred to me after I had posted it that it should have been *used* loo paper.
And they still are right. Parliamentary enquiries have no teeth in the face of commercial operations. It's all about politics: "Look at me, I'm doing something-or-other about something-or-other. Watch this vacant space [ ]".
Not that this has anything to do with the GP post, but there is nothing that 95% of users of Photoshop couldn't do at least as well with GIMP.
If we're going to go down the path of the internet being used solely for the purpose of a marketplace, I suspect I will continue my pattern of diminishing usage of it as the years go by. I was there right at the beginning when it was ARPANET and MILNET (and yes, I am even older than that). I understand that DRM has legitimate purposes, but so far, what I have mostly seen is its use to lock in consumers and restrict or deny (I'm looking at Amazon here) legitimate use.
If I am put in a position where in order to purchase certain content, I have to accept DRM encoding, the very first thing I do before I use the file is strip the DRM out. I call this future-proofing, on the grounds that some content providers (Amazon again) have been known to "take back" content, and on the grounds that a digital file should be subject to the same restrictions as a physical book, CD, DVD or whatever.
But I digress: in the earlier years of the internet, I used to spend a (probably too-)large proportion of my life online. Nowadays, having moved away from urban centres and needing to devote more time to getting a life (growing vegies, raising chooks etc) - and with an enforced bandwidth and traffic limit, I find it easier to keep a more distant perspective. So I no longer spend so many hours trawling the net for things hitherto unknown, and actually spend a few more hours at night in bed with my wife.
Unless you have a specific reason why you need assembly for a project, these days you will rarely find anyone who will be prepared to pay you for the time it takes.
Thus, 8086 or 8088 assembler is probably as good as anything from an educational point of view: it gets you into the mindset of low-level programming and how to go about it.
Back in the '70s and '80s, I used to do a lot of assembly on Burroughs, CDC, Sperry and Honeywell mainframes - and disassembly to patch binaries where the source (FORTRAN or COBOL) had been lost - and I think I was pretty good at it. But nowadays most employers will be much happier if you can cobble something together in any higher level language, and to hell with making your object code efficient.
It's not just extra work, but sometimes it really doesn't work.
The submission quotes a point that "you can teach the whole of chemistry with a whiteboard". This is true in the sense that this subject is one that actually benefits from a low-tech approach to lectures, since they are less distracting. However, if the budget's up for grabs, chemistry is one discipline where you really just can't have too much lab time, because that's where you learn the most.
I was fortunate in that my university realises this, and my undergraduate degree involved about 15 to 18 hours per week in the lab - and we even had lab-based exams, so there was no doubt as to whether or not we had picked up the necessary knowledge and skills. While you can save yourself a bit of time with a laptop on your bench (hoping it doesn't get wet), you can actually get by with nothing more than pencil and paper.
You should swap out your phone for a rock, it's clearly superior.
I would definitely agree that using a rock is certainly the best way of communicating with some people.