Sorry, if I was any offensive. if you are not good at programming, but still have a motivation (you seem have as youd a patience to look at those snipplets for an hour), then you'd better go learn programming starting from high-level concepts.
Read the book Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, which will teach you programming in concepts, rather than to specific language or paradigm practices. Being armored with concepts any language or paradigm will be much easier for to be understood.
With regard to text processing, is it in a different category altogether from Java/Javascript/PERL/MUMPS/REALbasic?
For meaningless and arbitrary text (text without syntax/semantic or with a very primitive syntax still no semantic or when you consider text as a arbitrary set of strings despite any syntax or semantic) processing neither of imperative languages is good.
If you want to work with text as with meaningful set of information, where both syntax and semantic should be taken to consideration and processed as well, then you need other languages. Haskell, ML, Lisp is first what comes to mind for semantic text processing. With some limits I still can include Python to the list of recommended languages for text processing as it has some elements of functional programming plus it's the most advanced scripting language among imperative ones, besides it's OOP is good enogh for the subject.
Conclusion: if your mind is corrupted by imperative languages than choose at least Python for text processing. But if your mind is still flexible than choose Haskell or Lisp or ML.
In your post your repeating that it *is* useful. I hear you. No need to repeat it again and again. Just give me three reasons *why* it is useful. Two reasons? Just one? Cannot find any? That's what I thought...
Wow!!! SHADOWED menus??? I can just feel my productivity being enhanced already!
I could never understand how a shape of menu could improve my productivity.
I understand how hyperlinks, topic maps, listboxes, menu by itself can make my work more productive as it improves my navigation. I understand how colors and font styles can make my work more productive as the carry additional semantic information with the text or graphic elements. I even understand how semi-transparent windows (if a semi-transparency is implemented in real-time) helps me to see what's going on behind to catch alert, which would be missed otherwise, or to read the text, which would be hidden when you need it.
But shadows of borders do not improve any navigation, they do not carry any semantic and they do not let the text behin more accessible.
What is so special with shadows that helps to improve the productivity?
I wonder if it will become part of the next stable release of GNOME.
Then it will be called GNOME X... wait, Gnome is already X ! Moreover, it's X11 ! I guess OSX has a long way to catch GNOME before it will be called OSX11:)
Exactly! The solution is to integrate audio and video controllers to the same AGP card. Unless, you want in addition to AGP to have AAP, Advanced Audio Port, second (after AGP) port designed to break universalism of PCI buss.
Then again, if I take Mandrake Linux, ditch KDE, Gnome, and X, and use one of the lightweight framebuffer based non-x GUIS, is it still linux?
Neither KDE nor GNOME nor Xfree make Linux. Linux OS is OS with Linux kernel. If you run same OS with HURD or BSD kernels than it's not Linux anymore. Example: Gentoo/Linux vs Gentoo/BSD.
There are also conventions about what should be on a top of the kernel to make Linux OS as operating system. That includes a user security model, virtual filesystem, virtual memory etc. In more detail there are few groups of Linux de-facto standards defining how that operating is providing through/etc,/sbin,/var,/bin and partially/usr. Those standards are still recognizable to avoid any mistaking Linux with BSD. And personally, I don't see any place for GUI in those standards.
I was running same versions of KDE and Gnome and Xfree in Linux and BSD and Solaris. I did not see any essential difference that would force me to say "Linux/KDE vs BSD/KDE". GUI is not OS. Period.
In some OSes (proprietary) GUI that is delivered with that OS is not ported to other OS (yet!). Examples: Aqua for OSX and win32/MFC (do they have a better name?) for MS Windows. Of course Aqua is more progressive than win32 mainly since I can run OS without Aqua.
But no way I can call OSX as BSD. FreeBSD and OpenBSD and NetBSD kernel are very similar. If I ported the application to one of them then it will build on another one. Moreover, it's most likely it will run on another one without recompilation. For OSX it's not true. Especiall speaking about binary compatibility. Can I run any NetBSD/PPC binary on OSX or vice versa? If recompilation will still bring a lot of issues. Thus, no way I can call OSX as BSD. Isn't it simple?
Why Apple should care about name/license/whatever of their OS if the real source of profit they have is from hardware. Unless Steve Jobs again cares about his own personal ambitions and wants to sell OS even with loses.
OSX is the microkernel (aka in Next) + BSD drivers + BSD core userland + GUI Aqua. I wouldn't call it flavor of BSD - it's completely another design (kernel, FS, file tree) with just some re-sue of BSD pieces. There is obviously a BSD layer between Next microkernel and Aqua to me, but that doesn't let me to call it BSD. BTW, I wonder would it be called OSX when I'll hack it to rip Aqua off?
In case any of you haven't noticed - any user with a login on your computer - including a guest account - is able to enter in their username and password to the screensaver login box and get to your session without any issue.
Sounds like MacOSX can be called UNIX in a same way as Windows-95. I think that's because BSD layer on MacOSX is like cygwin on Windows - it wasn't designed to be there.
And yes, neither Windows NT nor Linux users should consider switching to MacOSX. The GUI of their OS might not have a taste, but at least it has a general design idea of what is a protection of user sessions.
It crashes my Mozilla always. No other page on/. crashes it. And this one doesn't crash other browsers (Galeon, Epiphany). And it doesn't crash Mozilla untilla I login. But If I am loged in and try this page - it crashs Mozilla.
I don't think it's offtopic as it's related to exactly this page, not any other.
OOo Calc can save in Excel 97/2000/XP, which oftnen (but not always) cause less problems (than saving in Excel 95 format) for MS Excel 2000 to load it. Gnumeric can save only in MS Excel 95. I don't think it's a bug. It's rather a lack of a feature, specifically an absence of support of Excel/97/2000/XP format in Gnumeric.
I don't know what's the difference b/w Excel/95 and Excel/97/2000/XP formats, but if I can I would like to help the project from the QA side. Is a support for the Excel/97/2000/XP format in the development tree of Gnumeric?
I found OOo more compatible with recent MS Excel formats. But Gnumeric starts and runs way faster. So, when I don't care about excel files I always run Gnumeric. Functions I need are basically the same.
What's wrong with Tux on Xbox? Is Microsoft scared of GPL and thinks that the firmware (or even a hardware) will "virally" GPLized?
Seriously, I understand that I cannot make illegal copies from my music CD for somebody else - the copyright is protected. But at home I can do whatever I want to do with that CD - it's a first sale concept.
I thought it's exactly the same about everything else I buy for my home: I can rip it apart if I want to. (I know, I cannot kill somebody, but that is certainly a different story)
Besides, are those Xbox hackers in USA? If not, can Microsoft apply local laws of other countries to such hackers? I understand that the laws of USA are very crazy. But there are many other countries where the concept of freedom has not been THAT abused. What's wrong to hack Xbox there?
My point is that Microsoft has no (or little) chances in the court against those hackers, especially if they are in other countries.
Kill them all!
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
They don't need any melamine. As I need a gun to shoot a driver of every car I hear music.
I love music. But I hate to hear someone else's music. And also I hate whn my 6 month old baby is disturbed by the sound that outloud all other motor engines around. Even more, I hat to hear their music in my appartment at 7th floor.
I think once the law doesn't protect me from those crazy guys, then I have to go crazy myself and kill them all. One by one. I am serious. Just where is my gun?
Mozilla is the best implementation of standards of web-pages. But as for plugins - NO WAY! I know, there is no standards for flash and shockwave. But what is published should be also in count. And as for today, most of flash/shockwave enriched sites doesn't work properly on non-IE browsers and/or they crash browsers, mozilla included.
I'd love to ignore flash and shockwave, but many corporate users don't. And many web-designers out ther either. So, when I am asked "which browser we should use in that department or in that project" - I still ahve to answer "IE, b/c of flash and shockwave".
P.S. Mozilla on x86/Linux has even more (than on win32) of compatibility/stability probems with flash, while shockwave is just not available. Mozilla on non-x86/Linux doesn't have any support of Macromedia.
P.S. The situation with Java applets is very-very similar. Despite the fact that both Java and Mozilla are in fact from Sun (which doesn't use neither Java or Mozilla internally).
Sure, YOU aren't seeing the spam physically with your eyes, but it is still coming, consuming bandwidth and ISP resources.
In my case 90% of my email traffic is eaten by several development mail-lists, each 10 msg/hour. I doubt that spammers can compete with that. (and of course I filter the mail-list traffic to dedicated mail-boxes)
What is the signal to noise ratio in your private mailbox?
I have about 2 spam messages per month trying to catch my private mail-box (before being filtered and auto-answered with a challenge). Well, maybe it's b/c I give up only one of my 3 yahoo email addresses, not the private one. But then I am still fetching all email from yahoo and after fetching it's still a subject of the same filtering (with some exceptions: I let ebay and amazon and other B2B to hit my "grey" mail-folder). Thus, I should add about 10 spam (among 20 other good ones) messages per week, which are waiting my fetchyahoo script, while about 100 messages per week are filtered out by yahoo itself and therefore do not add to my private traffic. BTW, that's total for my 3 yahoo boxes.
Ha! Have you ever done tech support at an ISP? They'll have to hire 400 Bombay phone bank workers just to field the phone calls from people who can't understand why they're not getting email from their grandchildren.
400 Bobey workers is not a high price for cleaning up mailboxes of 40 millions. Besides, it will improve the overall level of computer education in America - sort of a good side-affect:)
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Better let's start the flame BSDL laws vs GPL laws. Oh, and how would LGPL make laws more reusable?
Read the book Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, which will teach you programming in concepts, rather than to specific language or paradigm practices. Being armored with concepts any language or paradigm will be much easier for to be understood.
For meaningless and arbitrary text (text without syntax/semantic or with a very primitive syntax still no semantic or when you consider text as a arbitrary set of strings despite any syntax or semantic) processing neither of imperative languages is good.
If you want to work with text as with meaningful set of information, where both syntax and semantic should be taken to consideration and processed as well, then you need other languages. Haskell, ML, Lisp is first what comes to mind for semantic text processing. With some limits I still can include Python to the list of recommended languages for text processing as it has some elements of functional programming plus it's the most advanced scripting language among imperative ones, besides it's OOP is good enogh for the subject.
Conclusion: if your mind is corrupted by imperative languages than choose at least Python for text processing. But if your mind is still flexible than choose Haskell or Lisp or ML.
It took me 5-10 seconds to understand each example. Are you sure that software progogramming is what you should do for living?
In your post your repeating that it *is* useful. I hear you. No need to repeat it again and again. Just give me three reasons *why* it is useful. Two reasons? Just one? Cannot find any? That's what I thought...
I could never understand how a shape of menu could improve my productivity.
I understand how hyperlinks, topic maps, listboxes, menu by itself can make my work more productive as it improves my navigation. I understand how colors and font styles can make my work more productive as the carry additional semantic information with the text or graphic elements. I even understand how semi-transparent windows (if a semi-transparency is implemented in real-time) helps me to see what's going on behind to catch alert, which would be missed otherwise, or to read the text, which would be hidden when you need it.
But shadows of borders do not improve any navigation, they do not carry any semantic and they do not let the text behin more accessible.
What is so special with shadows that helps to improve the productivity?
Then it will be called GNOME X... wait, Gnome is already X ! Moreover, it's X11 ! I guess OSX has a long way to catch GNOME before it will be called OSX11 :)
It's better designed. As a result it's more secure, more flexible and more network friendly.
Exactly! The solution is to integrate audio and video controllers to the same AGP card. Unless, you want in addition to AGP to have AAP, Advanced Audio Port, second (after AGP) port designed to break universalism of PCI buss.
Neither KDE nor GNOME nor Xfree make Linux. Linux OS is OS with Linux kernel. If you run same OS with HURD or BSD kernels than it's not Linux anymore. Example: Gentoo/Linux vs Gentoo/BSD.
There are also conventions about what should be on a top of the kernel to make Linux OS as operating system. That includes a user security model, virtual filesystem, virtual memory etc. In more detail there are few groups of Linux de-facto standards defining how that operating is providing through /etc, /sbin, /var, /bin and partially /usr. Those standards are still recognizable to avoid any mistaking Linux with BSD. And personally, I don't see any place for GUI in those standards.
I was running same versions of KDE and Gnome and Xfree in Linux and BSD and Solaris. I did not see any essential difference that would force me to say "Linux/KDE vs BSD/KDE". GUI is not OS. Period.
In some OSes (proprietary) GUI that is delivered with that OS is not ported to other OS (yet!). Examples: Aqua for OSX and win32/MFC (do they have a better name?) for MS Windows. Of course Aqua is more progressive than win32 mainly since I can run OS without Aqua.
But no way I can call OSX as BSD. FreeBSD and OpenBSD and NetBSD kernel are very similar. If I ported the application to one of them then it will build on another one. Moreover, it's most likely it will run on another one without recompilation. For OSX it's not true. Especiall speaking about binary compatibility. Can I run any NetBSD/PPC binary on OSX or vice versa? If recompilation will still bring a lot of issues. Thus, no way I can call OSX as BSD. Isn't it simple?
Why Apple should care about name/license/whatever of their OS if the real source of profit they have is from hardware. Unless Steve Jobs again cares about his own personal ambitions and wants to sell OS even with loses.
OSX is the microkernel (aka in Next) + BSD drivers + BSD core userland + GUI Aqua. I wouldn't call it flavor of BSD - it's completely another design (kernel, FS, file tree) with just some re-sue of BSD pieces. There is obviously a BSD layer between Next microkernel and Aqua to me, but that doesn't let me to call it BSD. BTW, I wonder would it be called OSX when I'll hack it to rip Aqua off?
Hopefully, since Panther OSX will have more reasons to be called Unix. But not until then.
In case any of you haven't noticed - any user with a login on your computer - including a guest account - is able to enter in their username and password to the screensaver login box and get to your session without any issue.
Sounds like MacOSX can be called UNIX in a same way as Windows-95. I think that's because BSD layer on MacOSX is like cygwin on Windows - it wasn't designed to be there.
And yes, neither Windows NT nor Linux users should consider switching to MacOSX. The GUI of their OS might not have a taste, but at least it has a general design idea of what is a protection of user sessions.
I don't think it's offtopic as it's related to exactly this page, not any other.
I don't know what's the difference b/w Excel/95 and Excel/97/2000/XP formats, but if I can I would like to help the project from the QA side. Is a support for the Excel/97/2000/XP format in the development tree of Gnumeric?
I found OOo more compatible with recent MS Excel formats. But Gnumeric starts and runs way faster. So, when I don't care about excel files I always run Gnumeric. Functions I need are basically the same.
The real test I expect is MFLOPS/$ where $ is a retail price of the desktop being tested.
Seriously, I understand that I cannot make illegal copies from my music CD for somebody else - the copyright is protected. But at home I can do whatever I want to do with that CD - it's a first sale concept.
I thought it's exactly the same about everything else I buy for my home: I can rip it apart if I want to. (I know, I cannot kill somebody, but that is certainly a different story)
Besides, are those Xbox hackers in USA? If not, can Microsoft apply local laws of other countries to such hackers? I understand that the laws of USA are very crazy. But there are many other countries where the concept of freedom has not been THAT abused. What's wrong to hack Xbox there?
My point is that Microsoft has no (or little) chances in the court against those hackers, especially if they are in other countries.
I love music. But I hate to hear someone else's music. And also I hate whn my 6 month old baby is disturbed by the sound that outloud all other motor engines around. Even more, I hat to hear their music in my appartment at 7th floor.
I think once the law doesn't protect me from those crazy guys, then I have to go crazy myself and kill them all. One by one. I am serious. Just where is my gun?
Oops. My fault. Mistaken with Netscape servers :(
I'd love to ignore flash and shockwave, but many corporate users don't. And many web-designers out ther either. So, when I am asked "which browser we should use in that department or in that project" - I still ahve to answer "IE, b/c of flash and shockwave".
P.S. Mozilla on x86/Linux has even more (than on win32) of compatibility/stability probems with flash, while shockwave is just not available. Mozilla on non-x86/Linux doesn't have any support of Macromedia.
P.S. The situation with Java applets is very-very similar. Despite the fact that both Java and Mozilla are in fact from Sun (which doesn't use neither Java or Mozilla internally).
I wonder why..
In my case 90% of my email traffic is eaten by several development mail-lists, each 10 msg/hour. I doubt that spammers can compete with that. (and of course I filter the mail-list traffic to dedicated mail-boxes)
What is the signal to noise ratio in your private mailbox?
I have about 2 spam messages per month trying to catch my private mail-box (before being filtered and auto-answered with a challenge). Well, maybe it's b/c I give up only one of my 3 yahoo email addresses, not the private one. But then I am still fetching all email from yahoo and after fetching it's still a subject of the same filtering (with some exceptions: I let ebay and amazon and other B2B to hit my "grey" mail-folder). Thus, I should add about 10 spam (among 20 other good ones) messages per week, which are waiting my fetchyahoo script, while about 100 messages per week are filtered out by yahoo itself and therefore do not add to my private traffic. BTW, that's total for my 3 yahoo boxes.
Ha! Have you ever done tech support at an ISP? They'll have to hire 400 Bombay phone bank workers just to field the phone calls from people who can't understand why they're not getting email from their grandchildren.
400 Bobey workers is not a high price for cleaning up mailboxes of 40 millions. Besides, it will improve the overall level of computer education in America - sort of a good side-affect :)