I disagree on this parent post. IMHO there are good reasons for everything that the parent poster is complaining about.
huge text boxes ? Try opening a standard text search in your favorite O.S.; then take a picture
of your standard PC screen at mid range, so that the keyboard and the desk and the person sitting
would be (at least partly) visible. Then view the picture on a TV ,
from 3 meters away. Can you read the text? I guess not.
Whereas, people at home are supposed to be able to read it. Hence, the huge text box,
the screen-filling-records, the no-scrolling, and so on .
Moreover, the good point of the above is that it is O.S.-agnostic. You cannot tell if the detective
is using MS Windows, Mac Os, Unix, Linux, Blah-OS....
And this, in my opinion, is a good idea: we have too much product placement in TV already.
As for the blipping noise.. hearing a "key click sound" when typing,
was not so uncommon in the past;
in X11 you disabled and enabled it with the command 'xset c on/off'.
I guess that was fine for people that had used real typewriter machines.
(I used them as a kid, BTW).
If a battery is defective and may explode, how long would it take ?
For example, suppose you buy one replacement lithium battery nowadays; and you use it for X months; may you say "I have used it for X months, it did not explode, so it is not defective" ?
Or, otherwise, is it a defect that may show up in a random moment in the future?
Does anyone here at/. know?
7 Debian You chose Debian because you don't like to waste your time fiddling with Makefiles to install your system.
After 3 years of happy debian using, you apply and become a Debian Mantainer. Now
you waste your time fiddling with debian/rules file, to address stupid lintian warnings to comply with obscure parts of the Debian Policy.
Meanwhile, some people waste your and others time with endless discussions.
While you are deleting^H^H^H^H^H^Hreading the latest 400-email-long-flame-war, you hear that Ubuntu has a "Code of Conduct", and that people on Gentoo's IRC are polite
and helpful. Your wife warns you that you are strangling your mouse.
Your mind wanders... "super cow powers" is an option of APT....
but "sex" is not an option of GNU "echo".
You suddenly feel the call of Wild Real Life (tm).
You did not RTFA: waiters are number one in the list. Here it is, in the original form:
1. Storage of Magnetic Stripe Data - The most common cause of data breaches occurs when a merchant or service provider stores sensitive information encoded on the card's magnetic stripe in violation of the PCI Data Security Standard. This can occur because a number of point-of-sale systems improperly store this data, and the merchant may not be aware of it.
Then translate from market-speak:
service provider -> waiter (indeed, it does serve)
merchant -> owner of the restaurant
"point-of-sale systems" -> gadget that you stripe your card in
to store sensitive info -> pwn
After proper translation, it reads:
1. Storage of Magnetic Stripe Data - The most common cause of data breaches occurs when a waiter pwns your card's magnetic stripe in violation of law. This can occur because a number of gadgets are available around that will store this data; and the restaurant owner may not be aware of it.
See?
"Nowdays cool is Half-Life 2 type graphics. And I suppose the nearest to drawing a few boxes on the screen is coding DirectX/OpenGL shaders to do cool things on a few objects."
My best choice for teaching to a kid would be Python.
In that case, PyOpenGL (the Python - OpenGL binding )
would really save your day; you may introduce basilar Python; then pick one simple code examples
from PyOpenGL , and try what happens when you change the code here and there....
(yes, this looks more "a hacking class" than a "coding class"... but it is more fun).
What may be hard about using OpenGL is that you need to master 3D geometry in your mind. I dont think that would be OK for a 10 year old kid.
"Why doesn't Linux need defrags? As a matter of fact, I don't even know how to defrag a Linux drive."
As a matter of fact,
there does exist a defrag utility for Ext2 filesystem,.
I asked to Theodore Y. Ts'o about it once:
e2defrag utility hasn't been kept
up to date with the latest filesystem changes, only works on 1k
blocks, and if it gets interrupted in the middle of the process,
leaves your filesystem in a totally scrambled state. So it's not
really something I can recommend you using....
Moreover, from Ts'o answers to my question I deduced that
there is no Ext3 defragmenter; and no
kernel defragger that works in idle time (contrary to what another post said)
Some time ago a HD of mine stopped working; I bought a new one, and cried for the lost data; some time later, I tried again, and it worked, so I rushed to recover my data. Then I realized that, second time around, I had mounted it in the chassis upside down; I did a few tests, and indeed the drive would start only when mounted upside down. It has worked flawlessly ever since.
truth is, it is almost impossible for a computer program to understand English
just using phonemes: some phrases are indeed pronounced in the same exact way,
the most famous example being
"lettuce spray" and "let us pray". Some state of the art research is indeed
trying to peruse accents and intonation, to distinguish such phrases.
Of course, when you say "Our generations (current teenagers up to 30-somethings) have grown up with McDonalds and more" you mean "Our generations (current teenagers up to 30-somethings) that live in the U.S.A. have grown up with McDonalds and more". Outside of the U.S.A., Mc Donalds and other junk food is not so used (and the difference shows).
Probably that
article page
was changed after you read it; now it says
Memory Usage in MB Loading Six Tabs.
What I find strange is that it claims that Opera would consume 53 Mb of RAM with no web page, and 52MB of RAM with 6 web pages shown!
For some time I tried to connect to Digg RSS feeds, but found that it passes too many articles for me to be able to read them all; since/. presents less articles, I thought that it would present the best of what I would see on Digg... but actually, in my opinion, this is not the case: I have seen interesting facts appear on Digg and not on/. , and Very Bogus Stories(tm) appear on Digg, be marked as such, and then appear on/. What/. does best is present facts in a more professional looking way ; you know,
Digg is usually too sensational, all those capitals and exclamation marks; The Register enjoys a dry Brit humor that makes the article mostly incomprehensible to me;/. has this cool CNN feeling that makes it sound oh so competent.... unless you start comparing content, then you notice that reviewers are not doing their best jobs lately.
I was also surprised, from time to time, to see some posts that were marked as '5 intersting' while being blatantly false , and replies that were just marked 2 when they were correcting the error; this was another shot at my confidence in/. overall competence.
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.
I am concerned that Word 2007 will include direct publishing of blogs to the web from within the program.
Why do you say that?
Because Word's HTML output at any time in the past has always been terrible, embedding hundreds of unnecessary manual font changes, eschewing cascading style sheets, and generally producing HTML that makes a typical web developer want to vomit.
Is it because word's html output at any time in the past has always been terrible embedding hundreds of unnecessary manual font changes eschewing cascading style sheets and generally producing html that makes a typical web developer want to vomit that you came to me?
Yes, I am afraid that eventually MS's Word will include more features than Emacs.
Does it bother you that eventually ms's word will include more features than emacs?
Truth is, the linux kernel is getting too big, it takes ~400MB of harddisk to compile a standard kernel 2.6 for a distribution;
moreover this size of kernel makes for difficult decisions for distributions, that either exclude some part of it from binaries, or ship huge packages, most of whose are useless to most users. Just consider that the Debian packages went from ~10Mb for kernel 2.4 to ~15Mb for 2.6
The kernel is becoming too big, and some parts of it (think: hamradio, USB gadgets...) may well live outside of it. If SANE can manage scanners from userspace, why does webcams live in kernel space??
I am still craving for the day when Linus will define a "kernel ABI" for driver modules, and some parts of the kernel source
will get kicked out of the.tar.bz2
I believe this day will come; and there are good reason to believe it
suppose FOSS dream comes true, and linux ever become the mainstream desktop OS, and every vendor supplies FOSS drivers for their hw.... it will not make sense to ship any single gadget/protocol driver in the same.tar.bz2
even today, it does not make sense to ship drivers forever, for hw that is now unavailable to buy; but at the same time it would be unfair to
just drop the code to people who still own that hw.
having 220MB of source code without a published and enforced ABI for modules means that any change to some parts of the kernel, such as memory management, force almost everybody to rewrite their code ; this, in the long term, may foster innovation. It would be much better if there were some stable ABIs for drivers for lesser demanding drivers (such as webcams).
Summarizing, IMHO the current monolithic situation cannot scale up forever.
"You can do simple things easily - and in particular, you can do things where the information only passes in one direction quite easily, but anythign else is much much harder, because there is no "shared state" (by design)."
Why is Linus ruling out the fact that shared state may be put in
shared memory?
In mathematics you do not speak of "negligible points" ; you speak of
"negligible set of points". No surprise that ScuttleMonkey insertes iPods where they do not belong.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree on this parent post. IMHO there are good reasons for everything that the parent poster is complaining about.
huge text boxes ? Try opening a standard text search in your favorite O.S.; then take a picture of your standard PC screen at mid range, so that the keyboard and the desk and the person sitting would be (at least partly) visible. Then view the picture on a TV , from 3 meters away. Can you read the text? I guess not. Whereas, people at home are supposed to be able to read it. Hence, the huge text box, the screen-filling-records, the no-scrolling, and so on .
Moreover, the good point of the above is that it is O.S.-agnostic. You cannot tell if the detective is using MS Windows, Mac Os, Unix, Linux, Blah-OS.... And this, in my opinion, is a good idea: we have too much product placement in TV already.
As for the blipping noise.. hearing a "key click sound" when typing, was not so uncommon in the past; in X11 you disabled and enabled it with the command 'xset c on/off'. I guess that was fine for people that had used real typewriter machines. (I used them as a kid, BTW).
If a battery is defective and may explode, how long would it take ? For example, suppose you buy one replacement lithium battery nowadays; and you use it for X months; may you say "I have used it for X months, it did not explode, so it is not defective" ? Or, otherwise, is it a defect that may show up in a random moment in the future? Does anyone here at /. know?
it depends on your "PC upgrade". My last "PC upgrade" was worth 200$ ... I guess that would by a 108p television.
-
7 Debian You chose Debian because you don't like to waste your time fiddling with Makefiles to install your system.
....
but "sex" is not an option of GNU "echo".
You suddenly feel the call of Wild Real Life (tm).
(Ok that was admittetly an inside joke)After 3 years of happy debian using, you apply and become a Debian Mantainer. Now you waste your time fiddling with debian/rules file, to address stupid lintian warnings to comply with obscure parts of the Debian Policy.
Meanwhile, some people waste your and others time with endless discussions. While you are deleting^H^H^H^H^H^Hreading the latest 400-email-long-flame-war, you hear that Ubuntu has a "Code of Conduct", and that people on Gentoo's IRC are polite and helpful. Your wife warns you that you are strangling your mouse.
Your mind wanders... "super cow powers" is an option of APT
- service provider -> waiter (indeed, it does serve)
- merchant -> owner of the restaurant
- "point-of-sale systems" -> gadget that you stripe your card in
- to store sensitive info -> pwn
After proper translation, it reads: 1. Storage of Magnetic Stripe Data - The most common cause of data breaches occurs when a waiter pwns your card's magnetic stripe in violation of law. This can occur because a number of gadgets are available around that will store this data; and the restaurant owner may not be aware of it. See?"Nowdays cool is Half-Life 2 type graphics. And I suppose the nearest to drawing a few boxes on the screen is coding DirectX/OpenGL shaders to do cool things on a few objects."
My best choice for teaching to a kid would be Python. In that case, PyOpenGL (the Python - OpenGL binding ) would really save your day; you may introduce basilar Python; then pick one simple code examples from PyOpenGL , and try what happens when you change the code here and there.... (yes, this looks more "a hacking class" than a "coding class"... but it is more fun).
What may be hard about using OpenGL is that you need to master 3D geometry in your mind. I dont think that would be OK for a 10 year old kid.
"Why doesn't Linux need defrags? As a matter of fact, I don't even know how to defrag a Linux drive."
As a matter of fact, there does exist a defrag utility for Ext2 filesystem,. I asked to Theodore Y. Ts'o about it once: e2defrag utility hasn't been kept up to date with the latest filesystem changes, only works on 1k blocks, and if it gets interrupted in the middle of the process, leaves your filesystem in a totally scrambled state. So it's not really something I can recommend you using....
Moreover, from Ts'o answers to my question I deduced that there is no Ext3 defragmenter; and no kernel defragger that works in idle time (contrary to what another post said)
and, curiosly enough, dvdrtools is in Debian but considered "non-free" (I think because of libscg).
If subliminal messages had any significant effect we would know about it.
No, we wont know.
As wikipedia reminds: " A subliminal message is a signal or message embedded in another object, designed to pass below the normal limits of perception."
Thats the whole point: it is called subliminal if and only if you dont know.
(OK, just joking).
contrary to some opinions expressed above, death by sting-ray is not so improbable. Here is report of another case in Italy.
Some time ago a HD of mine stopped working; I bought a new one, and cried for the lost data; some time later, I tried again, and it worked, so I rushed to recover my data. Then I realized that, second time around, I had mounted it in the chassis upside down; I did a few tests, and indeed the drive would start only when mounted upside down. It has worked flawlessly ever since.
truth is, it is almost impossible for a computer program to understand English just using phonemes: some phrases are indeed pronounced in the same exact way, the most famous example being "lettuce spray" and "let us pray". Some state of the art research is indeed trying to peruse accents and intonation, to distinguish such phrases.
Of course, when you say "Our generations (current teenagers up to 30-somethings) have grown up with McDonalds and more" you mean "Our generations (current teenagers up to 30-somethings) that live in the U.S.A. have grown up with McDonalds and more". Outside of the U.S.A., Mc Donalds and other junk food is not so used (and the difference shows).
Probably that article page was changed after you read it; now it says Memory Usage in MB Loading Six Tabs.
What I find strange is that it claims that Opera would consume 53 Mb of RAM with no web page, and 52MB of RAM with 6 web pages shown!
nice house.... but did the paperclip run Linux?
(Later on, Elijah gave up trying to convince his robotic pal)
Moreover, this story had already been reported on digg as "Doctors puzzled over bizarre infection surfacing in South Texas", and then marked as Readers have reported that this story contains information that may not be accurate.
/. presents less articles, I thought that it would present the best of what I would see on Digg ... but actually, in my opinion, this is not the case: I have seen interesting facts appear on Digg and not on /. , and Very Bogus Stories(tm) appear on Digg, be marked as such, and then appear on /. What /. does best is present facts in a more professional looking way ; you know,
Digg is usually too sensational, all those capitals and exclamation marks; The Register enjoys a dry Brit humor that makes the article mostly incomprehensible to me; /. has this cool CNN feeling that makes it sound oh so competent.... unless you start comparing content, then you notice that reviewers are not doing their best jobs lately.
I was also surprised, from time to time, to see some posts that were marked as '5 intersting' while being blatantly false , and replies that were just marked 2 when they were correcting the error; this was another shot at my confidence in /. overall competence.
For some time I tried to connect to Digg RSS feeds, but found that it passes too many articles for me to be able to read them all; since
M-x doctor
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.
I am concerned that Word 2007 will include direct publishing of blogs to the web from within the program.
Why do you say that?
Because Word's HTML output at any time in the past has always been terrible, embedding hundreds of unnecessary manual font changes, eschewing cascading style sheets, and generally producing HTML that makes a typical web developer want to vomit.
Is it because word's html output at any time in the past has always
been terrible embedding hundreds of unnecessary manual font changes
eschewing cascading style sheets and generally producing html that
makes a typical web developer want to vomit that you came to me?
Yes, I am afraid that eventually MS's Word will include more features
than Emacs.
Does it bother you that eventually ms's word will include more features
than emacs?
Well, actually not. Thanks doctor.
Don't mention.
The kernel is becoming too big, and some parts of it (think: hamradio, USB gadgets
I am still craving for the day when Linus will define a "kernel ABI" for driver modules, and some parts of the kernel source will get kicked out of the
I believe this day will come; and there are good reason to believe it
-
suppose FOSS dream comes true, and linux ever become the mainstream desktop OS, and every vendor supplies FOSS drivers for their hw.... it will not make sense to ship any single gadget/protocol driver in the same
.tar.bz2
- even today, it does not make sense to ship drivers forever, for hw that is now unavailable to buy; but at the same time it would be unfair to
just drop the code to people who still own that hw.
- having 220MB of source code without a published and enforced ABI for modules means that any change to some parts of the kernel, such as memory management, force almost everybody to rewrite their code ; this, in the long term, may foster innovation. It would be much better if there were some stable ABIs for drivers for lesser demanding drivers (such as webcams).
Summarizing, IMHO the current monolithic situation cannot scale up forever."You can do simple things easily - and in particular, you can do things where the information only passes in one direction quite easily, but anythign else is much much harder, because there is no "shared state" (by design)."
Why is Linus ruling out the fact that shared state may be put in shared memory?
does anyone how to play the game "reversed", that is, go up in the list of links?
would someone please explain me what OMG stands for ?
world domination? I think Google is more into moon domination
In mathematics you do not speak of "negligible points" ; you speak of "negligible set of points". No surprise that ScuttleMonkey insertes iPods where they do not belong.
actually, getting to a.out was not that easy either: I remember fighting with 'cc foobar.c' for a while