From "The UNIX Programming Environment"
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, chapter 2.6 -- "The Directory Hierarchy":
"/etc (et cetera) we have also seen before. It contains various administrative files such as the password file and some systems programs such as/etc/getty, which initializes a terminal connection for/bin/login./etc/rc is a file of shell commands that is executed after the system is bootstrapped./etc/group list the members of each group."
I looked through Ritchie and Thompson's "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" and found no mention of/etc, so that's the best I could do from my own bookshelf.
Besides getting more sleep, which you obviously need, try some eyedrops. When I am tired and can't focus I can get an extra hour out of my eyes with some drops.
I don't understand why people say this is ugly. The lines are straight, the fonts readable, the interface usable. I don't understand most of the time why people think such and such a UI is ugly. I understand that for these people, aesthetics are a real issue, but their decision-making process seems totally arbitrary to me. Usually it seems that "ugly" just means not in line with the current artistic trend; what is ugly today may have been beautiful 10 years ago to even the same people.
It's sort of like people who loved synth pop in the eighties and now say it sounds cheesy. If it was good then, why is it cheesy now?
I've even heard people call Nethack ugly. How can it be ugly? It's just a bunch of text.
Anyway, it sort of saddens me that aesthetics are so heavily weighted over more important concerns, but I guess I have to accept it.
Top Billing
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
How did you get your name on all of this software? We don't see "John Carmack's Quake", or "Rand Miller's Myst", but we see Sid Meier everywhere, making you one of the only household names in game design. When the first "Sid Meier's...." title came out, did people know who you were, or just assume that you were an expert on pirates and the war between the states?
By the way, F-15 and F-19 were two of the greatest games of my teen years.
I think techies could get together and come up with their own compelling offerings based on the practices they wished they could use but couldn't because of management pressures. Instead of walking away, programmers should network among themselves and cooperate to offer carefully engineered, quality solutions.
Failing that, start another web company. Keep your staff small and don't expect to get rich off of it, but you can continue to do your deep coding.
In either case, outsource your sales, marketing, accounting, etc.
It's the only thing in the whole world I want. Why IE doesn't support it, I don't understand. IE generally does pretty well with a lot of things.
I guess there are two things in the whole world I want. The second is for IE to show me a big nasty error instead of my web page if it is not compliant with the DTD. If browsers worked that way the whole web would be in better shape.
I am grateful to to anyone trying to make sure our votes get counted properly and honored. It's a good start. This election, we're faced with two candidates who are two sides of the same military-industrial globalist elitist coin. I'll be there with my vote, and it may well be Badnarik. Sometimes we are lucky and a person who can run the country runs for President. The chances that one of the two main (only?) political parties will do so is slim. Intelligent debate and loud, informed voices are probably more important than elections. If we think we can walk into a voting booth and our job is done, we deserve what we get, don't we? If it isn't too late in our American dictatorship, I think I am going to get more involved in the political process. I live in Austin, TX, home of the great Alex Jones http://www.infowars.com/, who is an inspiring example of someone who is inserting himself in the process every way he knows how. I am not saying we should all be Alex, but if we have something important to say, like "Please stop ignoring the Bill of Rights," for example, we should find a way to say it and be heard.
Wi-Fi should work fine. Be sure to do whatever is necessary to get your modules to load, using generate-modprobe.conf or whatever tool is appropriate.
As for Synaptic touchpad, you can't just get away with using the PS/2 driver as is. You need to download synaptic's driver and enable it in the X server and have kernel support for it. Then it works better than ever.
I got an RCA eBook for my girlfriend. There is nothing wrong with it. The screen is nice to read, the battery lasts long enough, and it is comfortable to hold and turn pages.
It's just a pain in the ass to use with Linux, and the selection of books when you plug in via the modem is pretty bad, and you get this "bookshelf" hosted by some company you aren't sure will be around, and if they fold you lose your books, have no way to back them up to your Linux system, and are pretty much SOL. There are a few projects for creating new eBooks, but it isn't trivial to get them copied to the unit.
This really sucks; I'd love to replace certain types of paper books I have with one of these readers. I don't have any particular attachment to paper books for most purposes. And I'd love to be able to grab gutenberg's books and put them on her reader easily.
Samba3 is an amazing piece of software, don't get me wrong. Yet it exists to play patty-cake with Windows, and neither the Windows or the Linux side gets what it really wants. The NFS on the table doesn't look terrible, but what we have available now is pretty unusable. AFS, Coda, etc. probably aren't going to be a good solution either.
I am starting to get interested in whatever Novell has that can save us from this mess. Of course, something free would be best, some middle ground that any OS can implement without losing their own brand of authentication, roles, acls, file attributes, etc. Why this is still a problem for us creeping up on 2004 escapes me.
It is a great game. Depends on which NVIDIA card, though. A Riva TNT2 doesn't have (any? enough?) texture memory for the game, and I have found even with a GeForce3 it doesn't always run properly with less than 512MB RAM.
I have an old Tadpole microSparc laptop. It is a very solid piece of equipment. Most of it is encased in steel, and the keyboard is very rugged. The backlit 640x480 LCD is well-protected on the back and sides by this heavy case, unlike the flimsy plastic on the back of a lot of them these days.
Well, one day I was working into the dark hours, and put some stuff on the ground so I could get at the trunk of my car. I blindly groped around in the dark for the stuff I was putting in, closed up and got in the car to leave. I hit a bump, and for a second I thought I hit one of the neighborhood cats. I got out, and I was sickened to find I had run over my tadpole.
One corner was heavily abraded by the pavement, and the bag it was in had holes in it. I opened it up, and it powered on with no problems. I hope someday I can afford a recent model. These are build like tanks. Well, I don't really know how tanks are built, but if they are built like this thing, I would feel very safe in one.
This happened with my sequencer, Studio Vision Pro. The company, Opcode, was acquired by Gibson. I wanted to move my installation from my ancient powerbook to my G4, and found that Gibson was no longer supporting the product, and didn't leave a way for me to satisfy my key auth requirement (need a specific USB floppy drive to do it, if I am to do it at all!)
Perhaps spammer information can be disseminated via a p2p network in order to reduce load and create too many targets to take down? I suppose someone is doing this already and I need to hit google.
Maybe you only need an SUV for a 45 degree dirt road, but it would be a mistake to say that the web is a nicely paved horizontal highway. Sometimes you need that SUV (I drive a little Volkswagen, so I wish I didn't need to mention gas-guzzling SUVs to support my argument, but...)
I recently finished (well, is anything really ever finished) a large project using Ruby. I developed my own object persistence and a simple MVC mechanism. It works great, and we got it done MUCH faster than I could have in Java. Now I am going to rewrite in Java, though. I can get Struts and Hibernate for free and they take away much of the effort I spent in Ruby. I get multiple scopes to pass variables around, connection pooling, and other goodies for free.
Sure, ok, I can now get a lot of these things with Perl, PHP, or Ruby now. But I can't easily take my PHP objects out of my web app and use them in a standalone GUI. In mod_perl and mod_ruby, it isn't safe to run multiple versions of the same library, or really multiple applications in the same Apache instance. I could set up jails, but my servlet container already sandboxes my apps for me.
Trust me, I don't love Java. I think it is huge, bloated, overarchitected, sometimes slow, but like I say, sometimes you need an SUV.
I used to use SBC/Southwestern Bell for my phone service, and their customer service was consistently the most rude I had ever encountered. They'd disconnect me if I was a day late on my bill, refuse to answer questions about certain parts of my service, and call me EVERY DAY to ask if I will switch back.
Maybe it is different on the DSL side of the company, I don't know, but the phone company was just a nightmare to work with.
So, if I don't buy a VIA board today or in the next few days, I'll miss 64 bit computing? Then do all of the subsequent trains only take me to 32 bits, or do I go to 128 bits at that point? It's all so confusing.
I am really happy to hear that everyone is so down on making music sound perfect. The music I make pretty much sucks, and I can barely sing at all, but if that's what people like, right on! I may even drag some notes around in my sequencer to make sure I really suck.
Hrm, sometimes I do a good take though. I wonder if there is a product that is the opposite of autotune, that can put my voice out of tune so I can get street cred.
I'm with y'all on this. Just look at Rush, Dream Theatre, Yes, Genesis, Frank Zappa... just because you hit every note doesn't mean you can make music anyone would want to actually listen to.
Sounds terribly depressing
on
The Bug
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
On the one hand, it sounds interesting because it is about a programmer, and I am a programmer, too. On the other hand, why would I want to take all of the awful things that I fret about every day, and have them fed to me in what is described as a humorless novel about someone who is the manifestation of all of my inner fears.
I am reminded of that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, where the band is standing around Elvis's grave. "Really puts things in perspective." "Yeah, too much! Too much f**king perspective!"
This isn't true, actually. Once one mail gets through, the system lets in subsequent mails from that sender. So there is only the initial delay, after that CEO Joe can use his email as a fat instant messenger per usual.
This asdf jkl; thing really cramps my style, to put it punnily. Since I was a wee lad, I have been typing in my own style, without any major trouble. A few times along the line I have tried to type in the traditional way, and since I mentally know where the keys are by now, can adjust well enough to type that way at a modest rate. I find, though, that my hands become cramped very quickly then, especially on my Happy Hacking keyboard, but even on my large IBM Model M.
I have seen enough coworkers walking around with wrist braces bearing real enough grimaces to take the problem of wrist pain seriously, and don't think they were making it up. So I have experimented with "ergonomic" keyboards, including the Microsoft Natural. While it is comfortable to "touch type" on the Natural, it is even more comfortable to type my way. I believe it is because the way I type, my hands can always fall back to a relaxed position, elbows wherever they need to be, rather than the uncomfortable T-Rex arms I have when using the home row.
These researchers conceded that mousing might be at fault, and I have found that the best thing I have done for wrist and shoulder comfort was to get a Happy Hacking and a small trackball. The sole reason being that getting rid of the numeric keyboard put the mousing device a good deal closer to my hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, chapter 2.6 -- "The Directory Hierarchy":
/etc/getty, which initializes a terminal connection for /bin/login. /etc/rc is a file of shell commands that is executed after the system is bootstrapped. /etc/group list the members of each group."
/etc, so that's the best I could do from my own bookshelf.
"/etc (et cetera) we have also seen before. It contains various administrative files such as the password file and some systems programs such as
I looked through Ritchie and Thompson's "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" and found no mention of
Besides getting more sleep, which you obviously need, try some eyedrops. When I am tired and can't focus I can get an extra hour out of my eyes with some drops.
I don't understand why people say this is ugly. The lines are straight, the fonts readable, the interface usable. I don't understand most of the time why people think such and such a UI is ugly. I understand that for these people, aesthetics are a real issue, but their decision-making process seems totally arbitrary to me. Usually it seems that "ugly" just means not in line with the current artistic trend; what is ugly today may have been beautiful 10 years ago to even the same people.
It's sort of like people who loved synth pop in the eighties and now say it sounds cheesy. If it was good then, why is it cheesy now?
I've even heard people call Nethack ugly. How can it be ugly? It's just a bunch of text.
Anyway, it sort of saddens me that aesthetics are so heavily weighted over more important concerns, but I guess I have to accept it.
How did you get your name on all of this software? We don't see "John Carmack's Quake", or "Rand Miller's Myst", but we see Sid Meier everywhere, making you one of the only household names in game design. When the first "Sid Meier's ...." title came out, did people know who you were, or just assume that you were an expert on pirates and the war between the states?
By the way, F-15 and F-19 were two of the greatest games of my teen years.
I would love to worry about all of this, but for the last 15 years I haven't been able to ascend my chaotic human monk.
Sounds like everyone has given up.
I think techies could get together and come up with their own compelling offerings based on the practices they wished they could use but couldn't because of management pressures. Instead of walking away, programmers should network among themselves and cooperate to offer carefully engineered, quality solutions.
Failing that, start another web company. Keep your staff small and don't expect to get rich off of it, but you can continue to do your deep coding.
In either case, outsource your sales, marketing, accounting, etc.
It's the only thing in the whole world I want. Why IE doesn't support it, I don't understand. IE generally does pretty well with a lot of things.
I guess there are two things in the whole world I want. The second is for IE to show me a big nasty error instead of my web page if it is not compliant with the DTD. If browsers worked that way the whole web would be in better shape.
I am... the iso never boots; it just turns over to my hard drive. Other CD ROMS boot. I have tried writing the iso from both Windows and Mac.
No idea what's going on. It's on an Athlon 64 system on a Neo2 Platinum mobo.
I am grateful to to anyone trying to make sure our votes get counted properly and honored. It's a good start.
This election, we're faced with two candidates who are two sides of the same military-industrial globalist elitist coin. I'll be there with my vote, and it may well be Badnarik.
Sometimes we are lucky and a person who can run the country runs for President. The chances that one of the two main (only?) political parties will do so is slim.
Intelligent debate and loud, informed voices are probably more important than elections. If we think we can walk into a voting booth and our job is done, we deserve what we get, don't we? If it isn't too late in our American dictatorship, I think I am going to get more involved in the political process. I live in Austin, TX, home of the great Alex Jones http://www.infowars.com/, who is an inspiring example of someone who is inserting himself in the process every way he knows how. I am not saying we should all be Alex, but if we have something important to say, like "Please stop ignoring the Bill of Rights," for example, we should find a way to say it and be heard.
It might be nice to see Mark Hamill as Luke again now that his voice has gone from whiney to the Joker.
Wi-Fi should work fine. Be sure to do whatever is necessary to get your modules to load, using generate-modprobe.conf or whatever tool is appropriate.
As for Synaptic touchpad, you can't just get away with using the PS/2 driver as is. You need to download synaptic's driver and enable it in the X server and have kernel support for it. Then it works better than ever.
I got an RCA eBook for my girlfriend. There is nothing wrong with it. The screen is nice to read, the battery lasts long enough, and it is comfortable to hold and turn pages.
It's just a pain in the ass to use with Linux, and the selection of books when you plug in via the modem is pretty bad, and you get this "bookshelf" hosted by some company you aren't sure will be around, and if they fold you lose your books, have no way to back them up to your Linux system, and are pretty much SOL. There are a few projects for creating new eBooks, but it isn't trivial to get them copied to the unit.
This really sucks; I'd love to replace certain types of paper books I have with one of these readers. I don't have any particular attachment to paper books for most purposes. And I'd love to be able to grab gutenberg's books and put them on her reader easily.
Samba3 is an amazing piece of software, don't get me wrong. Yet it exists to play patty-cake with Windows, and neither the Windows or the Linux side gets what it really wants. The NFS on the table doesn't look terrible, but what we have available now is pretty unusable. AFS, Coda, etc. probably aren't going to be a good solution either.
I am starting to get interested in whatever Novell has that can save us from this mess. Of course, something free would be best, some middle ground that any OS can implement without losing their own brand of authentication, roles, acls, file attributes, etc. Why this is still a problem for us creeping up on 2004 escapes me.
It is a great game. Depends on which NVIDIA card, though. A Riva TNT2 doesn't have (any? enough?) texture memory for the game, and I have found even with a GeForce3 it doesn't always run properly with less than 512MB RAM.
I have an old Tadpole microSparc laptop. It is a very solid piece of equipment. Most of it is encased in steel, and the keyboard is very rugged. The backlit 640x480 LCD is well-protected on the back and sides by this heavy case, unlike the flimsy plastic on the back of a lot of them these days.
Well, one day I was working into the dark hours, and put some stuff on the ground so I could get at the trunk of my car. I blindly groped around in the dark for the stuff I was putting in, closed up and got in the car to leave. I hit a bump, and for a second I thought I hit one of the neighborhood cats. I got out, and I was sickened to find I had run over my tadpole.
One corner was heavily abraded by the pavement, and the bag it was in had holes in it. I opened it up, and it powered on with no problems. I hope someday I can afford a recent model. These are build like tanks. Well, I don't really know how tanks are built, but if they are built like this thing, I would feel very safe in one.
This happened with my sequencer, Studio Vision Pro. The company, Opcode, was acquired by Gibson. I wanted to move my installation from my ancient powerbook to my G4, and found that Gibson was no longer supporting the product, and didn't leave a way for me to satisfy my key auth requirement (need a specific USB floppy drive to do it, if I am to do it at all!)
I believe it was Love and Rockets who said:
You cannot go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
That's part of nature too.
Perhaps spammer information can be disseminated via a p2p network in order to reduce load and create too many targets to take down? I suppose someone is doing this already and I need to hit google.
Maybe you only need an SUV for a 45 degree dirt road, but it would be a mistake to say that the web is a nicely paved horizontal highway. Sometimes you need that SUV (I drive a little Volkswagen, so I wish I didn't need to mention gas-guzzling SUVs to support my argument, but...)
I recently finished (well, is anything really ever finished) a large project using Ruby. I developed my own object persistence and a simple MVC mechanism. It works great, and we got it done MUCH faster than I could have in Java. Now I am going to rewrite in Java, though. I can get Struts and Hibernate for free and they take away much of the effort I spent in Ruby. I get multiple scopes to pass variables around, connection pooling, and other goodies for free.
Sure, ok, I can now get a lot of these things with Perl, PHP, or Ruby now. But I can't easily take my PHP objects out of my web app and use them in a standalone GUI. In mod_perl and mod_ruby, it isn't safe to run multiple versions of the same library, or really multiple applications in the same Apache instance. I could set up jails, but my servlet container already sandboxes my apps for me.
Trust me, I don't love Java. I think it is huge, bloated, overarchitected, sometimes slow, but like I say, sometimes you need an SUV.
(but for your real car get a Volkswagen)
I used to use SBC/Southwestern Bell for my phone service, and their customer service was consistently the most rude I had ever encountered. They'd disconnect me if I was a day late on my bill, refuse to answer questions about certain parts of my service, and call me EVERY DAY to ask if I will switch back.
Maybe it is different on the DSL side of the company, I don't know, but the phone company was just a nightmare to work with.
So, if I don't buy a VIA board today or in the next few days, I'll miss 64 bit computing? Then do all of the subsequent trains only take me to 32 bits, or do I go to 128 bits at that point? It's all so confusing.
I am really happy to hear that everyone is so down on making music sound perfect. The music I make pretty much sucks, and I can barely sing at all, but if that's what people like, right on! I may even drag some notes around in my sequencer to make sure I really suck.
Hrm, sometimes I do a good take though. I wonder if there is a product that is the opposite of autotune, that can put my voice out of tune so I can get street cred.
I'm with y'all on this. Just look at Rush, Dream Theatre, Yes, Genesis, Frank Zappa... just because you hit every note doesn't mean you can make music anyone would want to actually listen to.
On the one hand, it sounds interesting because it is about a programmer, and I am a programmer, too. On the other hand, why would I want to take all of the awful things that I fret about every day, and have them fed to me in what is described as a humorless novel about someone who is the manifestation of all of my inner fears.
I am reminded of that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, where the band is standing around Elvis's grave. "Really puts things in perspective." "Yeah, too much! Too much f**king perspective!"
This isn't true, actually. Once one mail gets through, the system lets in subsequent mails from that sender. So there is only the initial delay, after that CEO Joe can use his email as a fat instant messenger per usual.
This asdf jkl; thing really cramps my style, to put it punnily. Since I was a wee lad, I have been typing in my own style, without any major trouble. A few times along the line I have tried to type in the traditional way, and since I mentally know where the keys are by now, can adjust well enough to type that way at a modest rate. I find, though, that my hands become cramped very quickly then, especially on my Happy Hacking keyboard, but even on my large IBM Model M.
I have seen enough coworkers walking around with wrist braces bearing real enough grimaces to take the problem of wrist pain seriously, and don't think they were making it up. So I have experimented with "ergonomic" keyboards, including the Microsoft Natural. While it is comfortable to "touch type" on the Natural, it is even more comfortable to type my way. I believe it is because the way I type, my hands can always fall back to a relaxed position, elbows wherever they need to be, rather than the uncomfortable T-Rex arms I have when using the home row.
These researchers conceded that mousing might be at fault, and I have found that the best thing I have done for wrist and shoulder comfort was to get a Happy Hacking and a small trackball. The sole reason being that getting rid of the numeric keyboard put the mousing device a good deal closer to my hand.