> Now see, you're not being equal here and thats the problem with most people > who only program in perl, php, python,... Do all that in perl w/o using > CPAN and all from scratch -- which is the exact limitations you're placing > on C.
No, frankly, if I placed that limitation on C (no includes), Hello World would be more than ten lines, much less that program. No, you can use as many standard, freely-available, off-the-shelf libraries as you want, provided any fairly accomplished C programmer would know where to find them.
This is one thing advocates of languages like C often don't get about Perl -- most of your application is already written, almost no matter what you're doing, and has been tested by other Perl programmers who have used it on various platforms under various circumstances. CPAN is the soul of Perl.
> Sadly, I can't find any shop ideas specific to electronics and computer > repair. What is considered essential for a good workbench?
Think about what you're going to do on this workbench, where you're going to want to place things, and what you need as a result. For example, you will very likely want to be able to slap a motherboard tray on there and have a place to stick drives and a PSU where the cables can reach. Little shelves for the drives maybe. Similarly, you're going to want a place to put a tower. You'll want outlets of course and an ethernet jack or three. Very likely you will want a KVM switch. Would it be handy to have a keyboard/mouse tray that pulls out from underneath? Or are you the sort who wants those things sitting on top of the bench? Where are you going to want your monitor? Plan these things on paper before you start building.
Oh, and leave room for racks of screwdriver tips and things. Underneath is probably where you'll put your boxes of cables and spare parts, but what about screws. Hmmm... you'll want shallow spots to hold various types of case screws, drive screws, and so on. These must either be central and easy to reach or, better, movable.
> This leaves exactly how many big players in the dialup market?
Ummm... Well, there's AOL, but nobody uses them 'cause they suck. There's Earthlink, but nobody uses them much either. There'ss MSN... I think I know one person who uses MSN. There's Juno, but almost nobody uses Juno either, because it's inferior. A few cheapskates use that NetZero, but to most of us it's worth the extra ten bucks a month to get decent service. There's demon, but you have to live in the UK.
In any given community un the US, on the other hand, there are anywhere between 3 and 30 local or regional outfits who all charge the same monthly rate for unmetered access, provide enough lines that you never have trouble getting on, provide good, solid, reliable email, access to usenet if you want it, and (gasp) have an office within thirty minutes' drive of your house, and a tech support guy who lives in the area and speaks English. We call these places "ISPs", and almost everyone I know uses one of them.
I get my access through Bright Choice, which is located in Ontario, about 20 minutes from here. They provide the dialup lines but outsource most of the other stuff to bright.net, which is local to Ohio. There are a number of competitors. Probably the single most popular ISP around here is richnet, which is based in Mansfield, about 30 minutes from here. Almost nobody uses AOL, though *theoretically* they're based in Columbus, an hour from here. MSN is (very marginally) more popular than AOL because they have a reseller here in town (at the local Radio Shack), but I've not heard good things about their service from their users. Richnet and bright.net OTOH get good word of mouth recommendations consistently. I bet richnet has a 30% market share in Galion, maybe more. With so many mostly-identical options, that's quite a lot of share for one outfit to have.
> It says they use ntfs.sys and even ntoskrnl.exe from your XP partition. > Wondering if there are legal problems with this.
One supposes that if you have an NTFS partition with these files on it, the files are licensed for you to use and therefore legal. (If not, you have a problem that goes beyond captive-ntfs.) Unless there is some specific verbiage in the EULA that expressly prohibits use of the drivers when the NT kernel isn't running, or some such restriction, I'm not sure what the legal problem would be. I find it difficult to imagine that the MS legal team would have dreamed up that kind of restriction, since it's not the sort of thing they would expect people to do. What happens when the EULA is revised is another matter, but this would have to get on the MS radar for that to happen, which will take at least a year, then another six months or so until the next update/revision cycle, and hopefully by then the native read/write NTFS support in the 2.6 kernel will be of such quality as to make the whole point moot.
> Allthough this will be extremely usefull for the people having to cope > with ntfs, i'd rather wait until the kernel supports it fully (there's > allready a "partial" driver in the kernel 2.6). But personally, i just > stick to FAT32.
The usefulness of this is primarily geared toward situations where NTFS is already extant (e.g., OEM installs of WinXP). In these scenerios, if you want to multiboot and share data between the two OSes, use Knoppix as a rescue system, or anything along those lines, you *need* read/write NTFS support. You don't need this if you have your choice of filesystems, because you can just use another filesystem, but if you are in a situation where you need this, nothing else will do. So it's important. It's especially important for Knoppix, which is often used as a rescue system; now it can be used as a rescue system for NT/2K/XP, as well as for 9x/Me.
No, you wouldn't choose to use this on a new install when you have your choice of filesystems. For that you'd pick Reiser or ext2/3 probably, or FAT for a data partition in a multiboot scenerio (since that gives the best compatibility and works with every major OS and most minor ones as well). But that's not the intention of captive-ntfs. It's for working with existing filesystems.
> how it can offer better hardware detection and often better features than > other, "commercial" Linux distros?
I've found the hardware detection in Knoppix to be almost exactly on par with Mandrake -- what works with one works with the other. As far as "better features", the main feature I like in Knoppix is the ability to boot from CD-ROM:-) but apart from that, what features do you mean, that are not in other distros?
The guys who run Google aren't suits. They're techies. They're not going to go for this. They're going to tell SCO, "Please hold while I transfer you to our legal department".
> If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by > the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
If you were a more qualified historian, you might remember that kids twenty years ago played with the regular, non-Mindstorms type of legos, the ones that are _not_ being discontinued (presumably, because they're cheaper to make and so the markup is better).
> symlinks from the toplevel to the floppy and zip directories within/mnt
Actually, I don't have a symlink to/mnt/floppy (because I don't use floppies much anymore), and I don't have a zip drive, but I *do* have symlinks in/ to several smbmount directories pointing to directories on other computers on my home LAN, such as the family Windoze PC upstairs. (I name these after the name of the PC in question -- e.g.,/trex for the main share on trex.) Also for other filesystems on my main desktop, e.g.,/dos,/95, and/winme for the main filesystems of older OSes. (I still keep some things there, because I still occasionlly boot those older systems for one reason or another. Yes, even DOS, from time to time.)
> Gimp uses the multiple-dynamic-windows approach, rather than the docking > toolbar approach.
This is a matter of taste. I actually prefer it, because it gives you more flexibility in arranging things. (Most of these windows can be not only repositioned but also usefully resized and reshaped. About the only one it's not useful to reshape is the tool options window.) It is true, however, that this can be bothersome for people who prefer not to mess with customizing the positions of things.
> They may appear or resize right in front of another window that you need to see
I find that they always appear in the last place I left them, so once you get a good arrangement worked out you should be able to keep it. It is true that your arrangement needs to devote a fair amount of space to Gimp windows, but that is unavoidable if you want to have all the necessary tools readily available.
> Compare to MS Office, OpenOffice, or Photoshop, where the existing tool > windows simply change their content.
This is quite troublesome on occasion. For example, in OpenOffice when you have the cursor in a table cell, the table toolbar *replaces* one of your regular toolbars, meaning that for several very common, frequently-wanted things you have to dig into the menus and wade through dialog boxes. I run into this quite often, and it's annoying. Now, the Gimp's approach would not be an appropriate solution for OpenOffice, so I'm not sure what there is to do about this problem, but I think the problem would be much, much worse if the OpenOffice toolbar system for example were employed in an image editor. Do you really want to have the gradients become inaccessible whenever you have an active selection, or things like that?
> Because Gimp "tool" windows are "top-level" windows, you cannot use alt-tab > to switch between Applications anymore since you will have 5-10 more windows > to go through.
Oh. I barely noticed this since I normally have 30-40 windows open anyway (even though I used tabbed browsing to keep my 20-30 web pages all in one window). If an extra six or eight windows is a problem for you, you really need to look into multiple virtual desktops. (Personally, I never use them.)
> It also clutters the taskbar. (Some environments can group windows to > help with this, but this causes other problems)
Yeah, I don't like task grouping either and always turn it off. Instead I put the task list on a panel entirely of its own, with nothing else (no clock, no nothing) at the bottom edge of the screen. That frees up extra space on the task list. Then I put my launchers and drawers and applets and things on a panel that goes down the left edge. Also, I never minimize anything, so the window I want usually has a corner or something visible, unless I have a big window (like my web browser -- I keep that almost filling the screen usually) above it, in which case I just send the big window to the back.
> You must click on each window, or you must minimize the other application.
I never minimize anything, because that makes it a pain to get back. I always just send things to the back, if I want them out of the way. Since I keep my launchers on my left panel, or in drawers on my left panel, I don't keep any shortcuts on the desktop, so unless I just feel the need to gaze idly at my wallpaper, I never need to minimize anything. Usually I only have two or three windows big enough to block out everything behind them (one web browser, one Emacs with Gnus in it, and sometimes OpenOffice), I just send those to the back and everything else then is in front of them and therefore has at least one edge or corner accessible for clicking. (It helps to have a 19" monitor or so, so you can crank up the resolution a little (without needing to squint like you would on a smaller one) and have more room for stuff. Frankly you really need a good-sized monitor for serious image work anyway, whether you're using Gimp, Photoshop, or whatever.)
> But a computer is fucking heavy. My pack is heavy enough with food and > shelter and extra clothes. About the most high tech thing I take is my > iso-butane stove and my water filter.
Dude, your priorities are off. A butane stove? That's way heavier than a laptop, and totally unnecessary. (It's *much* more fun to cook with real fire. Take a box of strike-anywhere matches.) Water filter? C'mon, get real. If you're seriously worried about the water, boil it, but in most of North America (as long as you're not right downhill from a big city) the ground water is potable as it stands. Just watch to see if the birds are drinking it. Extra clothes? What *for*? It's not like you're going out to the mall every afternoon and need to look hip. Shelter? Shelter? I suppose that means a tent... personally I'd just take a nice plastic bag (to put the computer gear into if it rains) and maybe a hat.
I suppose you're also taking a sleeping bag (dude, just wear a light jacket), a big old pillow (put your head on your pack, stupid), toothpaste (water works fine), shampoo and conditioner, a toaster, and a car door so you can roll down the window if you get hot. By the time I finish taking superfluous stuff out of that megapack of yours, there'll be room in there for a full tower and 20" CRT. Make it a 17" PowerBook instead and you can say you're travelling light.
Sometimes it comes in through those horrible "window" things. I know, I know, real geeks aren't supposed to have windows, but sometimes in the workplace you will have a desk in the same office area as someone with windows...
> There is no program that I know of which is widely thought to be perfect, > at least with people who have actually tried alternatives.
The closest in this respect is probably Emacs. Nobody really thinks it's perfect per se, but many of its users who have tried numerous alternatives (including the really popular ones e.g., vim) consider Emacs to be orders of magnitude better than the alternatives that they have tried. (Because of the learning curve, few people try Emacs first. Most Emacs users are former users of other text editors that they found to be inadequate.) Perfect? Not yet, but maybe when version 22 comes out...
> but the Gimp's (at least the earlier version; I haven't looked at the > latest one) spawning of separate toolbars for each image is (was?) terrible.
Wow, that must be a really old version you used. The Gimp has used just one toolbox window, regardless of how many images you open, for as long as I've been using it. (I guess that goes back to when I first started playing with RedHat 6.0. I used Debian some before that, but the version I used was so old that it didn't come with an X server.)
> That combined with the philosophy of "everything is done from the context > menu"
I actually like this, once I got used to it, because it means less mouse movement. However, the rumor is that the new version of Gimp now has these menus at the top of each image window also, which will be useful especially for Mac users who haven't bothered to buy a real mouse. (You can get a context menu with a one-button Apple mouse, but it takes longer, because you have to wait for the half-click to register as not being a full click.)
> and the messy array of tool and property boxes that inevitably clutter > the screen (on that point, Photoshop isn't much better)
There is a reason Gimp and Photoshop both do this: all those controls are *needed*, but if they were all put into one big toolbar it would take up half the screen for most folks (people with big displays would fare a bit better). With having them in separate windows at least they can be arranged at will (and overlapped partly) to show at any given time the stuff you're actively working with. The 1.3 development versions of the Gimp (and presumably therefore also the 2.0 prerelease) have some improvements in this area, but the problem fundamentally won't go away unless people all start refusing to buy a computer with less than about a twenty-inch display.
The reason simpler painting tools like MS Paint don't have this problem is because they're simply missing most of the features that take up all that space. For example, they don't have a Layers dialog because they don't support layers (which, frankly, makes them next to useless for serious image editing). Brushes? MS Paint can fit all of its brushes in a 10x20-pixel area on the toolbar; Photoshop and the Gimp have a somewhat larger collection, plus the ability to make your own brushes, and so on, so they need a much larger brush-selection area. Tool options? Each tool in MS Paint has at most one option, which has only a small number of possible settings (e.g., the line tool can be set to one of about six thicknesses), so it fits nicely on the toolbar, right in the same space as the brush selection, since the brush is only used with the paintbrush tool and therefore is its option. A number of the tools in Gimp have several useful settings, some of which (such as the opacity setting on several tools) can usefully be set to a wide range of values. So a whole separate box is used for tool options. You can minimize it if you don't use the tool options, but frankly if you're doing any real image work you're going to find that those options come in handy. I could go on to talk of filters and other features, but you get the idea.
> A lot of people say Gimp is difficult to use. Is it difficult for people > who are used to Photoshop or is it difficult for everybody?
If you are accustomed to low-powered tools like MS Paint (the thingy in Accessories in Windows), the Gimp will set you back for a few minutes. For example, there's no rectangle-drawing tool, because you don't need one. You just use the rectangle selection tool and then do one of the various things you can do with a selection (e.g., stroke around the edge of it with the current brush). This is actually a much more powerful approach, because it's more flexible. You're not limited to selecting one of six line thicknesses for the rectangle; you can use any brushtip, including a soft brush (i.e., one that fades toward the edges), a shaped brush, et cetera. Plus of course you can do that with any kind of selection, including one you've made with the magic wand or the bezier tool. However, when you first start drawing with Gimp, your immediate reaction is, "Hey, how do I draw a rectangle? All I want to do is draw a simple rectangle!"
There are a couple dozen gotchas like this one. Most of them are covered in the tips that come up (by default) one each time you start the Gimp. The biggest one is getting used to layers, but once you do, you will NEVER go back to a non-layered image editor. (Photoshop of course has layers too.) Another gotcha I can think of off the top of my head is the alpha channel. This is an *extremely* useful feature, but if you're not used to it, you'll erase something and then expect to be able to draw on the erased area of the same layer, but that will only change the color, not the alpha channel. For that you have to use the eraser in unerase mode. (Once you get used to this it's definitely a Good Thing, being able to unerase and get back whatever color was there before. If you want to draw over it without unerasing, just use another layer; you should be using a new layer for each part of the image anyway, as in the long run that makes the image easier to work with.)
> What about DVDs? I think I'm the last geek in the US without a DVD in his PC.
No, I don't have one. Don't have any use for one. I do have a CD writer...
If software ever starts coming on DVD instead of CD, maybe I'll have to get one, I'm not holding my breath. The CD is too standardized; it'll only be replaced by something that's a *lot* better (i.e., holds a *lot* more). In the early days of PCs, people would by incremental upgrades because everyone who had a computer was a geek and wanted to push the envelope. After the 1.4MB floppy, enough regular people had PCs that the next several improvements (2.8MB floppies, remember those? What about LS120 SuperDisks?) never caught on. The thing that will eventually replace the floppy, and we're only *starting* to see this happen now, is the writable CD. That's almost a 500-fold improvement in storage capacity.
The CD-ROM today is at least as standardized as the 1.44MB floppy disk was in 1996. I predict it won't be replaced, for most people, with anything less than a 500-fold improvement in storage capacity (i.e., 300 GB), probably twice that or more. Frankly, with networking getting to be the way it is, there's very little reason to want a larger read-only drive than 600GB; anything that large you just download anyway. Pretty much the only reason to want a DVD drive is if you want to watch movies, but most people who want to watch a lot of movies have a television screen they want to watch them on, so they get one of those hardware DVD players. For those of us who don't care that much about movies, or don't have to see them the very instant they come out, VHS is still totally viable -- and necessary, if you want to watch anything you or your friends or family tape, because nobody seems to be buying DVD-recording video cameras. They cost too much I guess.
Now, read/write drives are another matter, but the writable DVD drives and blank media cost so much more... the CD writer is the sweet price point by a very wide margin still at this point.
Novell didn't have *that* much to sell, in terms of Unix. (They had other stuff besides Unix, of course.) Most of the Unix copyrights that really mattered, AT&T had already lost in court to UC Berkeley. I'm sure Novell had some rights to some improvements that they (and maybe even AT&T before them) had made since, plus some additional bits and pieces, but most of the core Unix copyrights belong to BSD. What Novell had (and we're discussing whether SCO has all of it as well) is if anything actually less than Sun or the other Unix vendors have, since by the time of the BSD split they'd already made a number of improvements, and they protected them better than AT&T did and did not lose them in the court case. AT&T/Novell/SCO only have what they've done since that time, and what is more they haven't done as much with it since that time as Sun, IBM, HP, and so on have done.
I'm all for respecting copyright, but SCO doesn't have jack, with or without the stuff Novell may or may not have sold them.
> In Perl, we write that in ten lines and play golf with it.
In fact...
use WWW::Mechanize; use DBI; $\=$/; my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=slashdot;host=loc alhost", 'dbuser', 'dbpasswd', {'RaiseError' => 1}); my $query = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * from headlines WHERE title=? and seen='yes'"); my $update = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO headlines SET seen='yes', title=?"); while (1) {
($m = WWW::Mechanize->new())->get("http://slashdot.org");
$m->form_number(1); $m->set_fields(unickname=>'slashuser',upasswd=>'sl ashpass'); $m->click();
for (($m->content()) =~ m/size="?4[^>]*><b>(.*?)<\/b>/ig ) {
$query->execute($_); (print and $update->execute($_)) unless $query->fetchrow_array() }
sleep 10 }
You do realize, do you not, that 100 lines is a whole lot of Perl. I know, in C that's barely enough to declare your data structures for a medium-sized CGI script, but a Perl program tends to be shorter. (There *are* really large apps written in Perl (Bugzilla comes to mind), but if they were written in C they'd be 2-10 times larger, depending on what they do.)
For example, consider an application that connects to the slashdot web server, retrieves the main page, fills in the username and password, submits the form, extracts the list of headlines from the result, checks them against a MySQL database to see which ones are new since last time, displays those, and then sleeps for some predetermined amount of time. In C, that's probably well over 100 lines of code. In Perl, we write that in ten lines and play golf with it. Yeah, that's using a couple of modules from the CPAN, but that's roughly the equivalent of includes in C, and I *know* you don't want to try the above in C without including some string handling libraries.
> The first International Readable Perl Code Contest
Readable Perl is easy. (Actually, I find even bad Perl code easier to read than "good" C code.) No, if you want a challenge in readability, we should have an International Readable PostScript Code Contest. That language is ugly.
> They should use plain UT (which is UTC without leap seconds).
That's hardly more obscure than just using UTC. They should use microfortnights since the beginning of the reign of Cyrus the Great, expressed in one's complement notation.
Adaptive AI is needed for some games, where "intelligence" is a key feature of playing the game. (I put "intelligence" in quotation marks because I'm using the traditional definition that includes quite a lot of things that computers can do, such as examine by brute force all the possibilities for the next N moves in a chess game, or test various board positions against every single word in a large dictionary in a Scrabble game. If you think of intelligence in terms of abstract reasoning and qualitative learning, then we'd be doing well just to make a game that can do those things at all, much less adaptively.)
> The essential point in adaptive AI on games is to be difficult enough for > anyone to be entertaining, without getting frustrating
I think you want the player to get *slightly* frustrated *occasionally*. Not badly, and not often, but if the player always wins without putting in some extra effort, that's no fun either. When the player's tactics and skills stagnate, you want to start beating him some of the time. (Not all of the time. Not, even, most of the time, I think. But some of the time.)
One way to make game difficulty adaptive, without serious AI, is to make expectations scale with accomplishments. This is easier in some types of games than in others. Tetris is a great example of a game that can become infinitely hard. Is the player stacking perfectly, covering no empty spaces? Well, then, raise the probabilities on the hard pieces. Is the player in deep doodoo, stacked past the middle of the board? Throw him some easy pieces. (Most tetris games don't do enough with easy and hard pieces.) And of course there's the ever-increasing speed. Not all games have such easy ways of raising or lowering the expectations, without fundamentally changing the consequences of the player's actions and therefore the strategy. Games like freeciv are particularly in need of good AI.
Slashdot Mirror
> Now see, you're not being equal here and thats the problem with most people ... Do all that in perl w/o using
> who only program in perl, php, python,
> CPAN and all from scratch -- which is the exact limitations you're placing
> on C.
No, frankly, if I placed that limitation on C (no includes), Hello World would
be more than ten lines, much less that program. No, you can use as many
standard, freely-available, off-the-shelf libraries as you want, provided
any fairly accomplished C programmer would know where to find them.
This is one thing advocates of languages like C often don't get about Perl --
most of your application is already written, almost no matter what you're
doing, and has been tested by other Perl programmers who have used it on
various platforms under various circumstances. CPAN is the soul of Perl.
> Sadly, I can't find any shop ideas specific to electronics and computer
> repair. What is considered essential for a good workbench?
Think about what you're going to do on this workbench, where you're going to
want to place things, and what you need as a result. For example, you will
very likely want to be able to slap a motherboard tray on there and have a
place to stick drives and a PSU where the cables can reach. Little shelves
for the drives maybe. Similarly, you're going to want a place to put a tower.
You'll want outlets of course and an ethernet jack or three. Very likely you
will want a KVM switch. Would it be handy to have a keyboard/mouse tray
that pulls out from underneath? Or are you the sort who wants those things
sitting on top of the bench? Where are you going to want your monitor? Plan
these things on paper before you start building.
Oh, and leave room for racks of screwdriver tips and things. Underneath is
probably where you'll put your boxes of cables and spare parts, but what about
screws. Hmmm... you'll want shallow spots to hold various types of case
screws, drive screws, and so on. These must either be central and easy to
reach or, better, movable.
Oh, and make it out of non-conductive materiels.
> This leaves exactly how many big players in the dialup market?
Ummm... Well, there's AOL, but nobody uses them 'cause they suck. There's
Earthlink, but nobody uses them much either. There'ss MSN... I think I know
one person who uses MSN. There's Juno, but almost nobody uses Juno either,
because it's inferior. A few cheapskates use that NetZero, but to most of us
it's worth the extra ten bucks a month to get decent service. There's demon,
but you have to live in the UK.
In any given community un the US, on the other hand, there are anywhere between
3 and 30 local or regional outfits who all charge the same monthly rate for
unmetered access, provide enough lines that you never have trouble getting on,
provide good, solid, reliable email, access to usenet if you want it, and
(gasp) have an office within thirty minutes' drive of your house, and a tech
support guy who lives in the area and speaks English. We call these places
"ISPs", and almost everyone I know uses one of them.
I get my access through Bright Choice, which is located in Ontario, about
20 minutes from here. They provide the dialup lines but outsource most of
the other stuff to bright.net, which is local to Ohio. There are a number
of competitors. Probably the single most popular ISP around here is richnet,
which is based in Mansfield, about 30 minutes from here. Almost nobody uses
AOL, though *theoretically* they're based in Columbus, an hour from here.
MSN is (very marginally) more popular than AOL because they have a reseller
here in town (at the local Radio Shack), but I've not heard good things about
their service from their users. Richnet and bright.net OTOH get good word
of mouth recommendations consistently. I bet richnet has a 30% market share
in Galion, maybe more. With so many mostly-identical options, that's quite
a lot of share for one outfit to have.
> It says they use ntfs.sys and even ntoskrnl.exe from your XP partition.
> Wondering if there are legal problems with this.
One supposes that if you have an NTFS partition with these files on it, the
files are licensed for you to use and therefore legal. (If not, you have a
problem that goes beyond captive-ntfs.) Unless there is some specific
verbiage in the EULA that expressly prohibits use of the drivers when the
NT kernel isn't running, or some such restriction, I'm not sure what the
legal problem would be. I find it difficult to imagine that the MS legal
team would have dreamed up that kind of restriction, since it's not the sort
of thing they would expect people to do. What happens when the EULA is
revised is another matter, but this would have to get on the MS radar for
that to happen, which will take at least a year, then another six months or
so until the next update/revision cycle, and hopefully by then the native
read/write NTFS support in the 2.6 kernel will be of such quality as to make
the whole point moot.
> Allthough this will be extremely usefull for the people having to cope
> with ntfs, i'd rather wait until the kernel supports it fully (there's
> allready a "partial" driver in the kernel 2.6). But personally, i just
> stick to FAT32.
The usefulness of this is primarily geared toward situations where NTFS is
already extant (e.g., OEM installs of WinXP). In these scenerios, if you
want to multiboot and share data between the two OSes, use Knoppix as a
rescue system, or anything along those lines, you *need* read/write NTFS
support. You don't need this if you have your choice of filesystems,
because you can just use another filesystem, but if you are in a situation
where you need this, nothing else will do. So it's important. It's
especially important for Knoppix, which is often used as a rescue system;
now it can be used as a rescue system for NT/2K/XP, as well as for 9x/Me.
No, you wouldn't choose to use this on a new install when you have your choice
of filesystems. For that you'd pick Reiser or ext2/3 probably, or FAT for a
data partition in a multiboot scenerio (since that gives the best compatibility
and works with every major OS and most minor ones as well). But that's not the
intention of captive-ntfs. It's for working with existing filesystems.
> how it can offer better hardware detection and often better features than
:-) but apart from that, what features do you mean, that are not in
> other, "commercial" Linux distros?
I've found the hardware detection in Knoppix to be almost exactly on par with
Mandrake -- what works with one works with the other. As far as "better
features", the main feature I like in Knoppix is the ability to boot from
CD-ROM
other distros?
The guys who run Google aren't suits. They're techies. They're not going to
go for this. They're going to tell SCO, "Please hold while I transfer you to
our legal department".
> If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by
> the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
If you were a more qualified historian, you might remember that kids twenty
years ago played with the regular, non-Mindstorms type of legos, the ones that
are _not_ being discontinued (presumably, because they're cheaper to make and
so the markup is better).
> symlinks from the toplevel to the floppy and zip directories within /mnt
/mnt/floppy (because I don't use floppies / /trex for the main share on trex.) Also /dos, /95, and /winme for
Actually, I don't have a symlink to
much anymore), and I don't have a zip drive, but I *do* have symlinks in
to several smbmount directories pointing to directories on other computers on
my home LAN, such as the family Windoze PC upstairs. (I name these after the
name of the PC in question -- e.g.,
for other filesystems on my main desktop, e.g.,
the main filesystems of older OSes. (I still keep some things there, because
I still occasionlly boot those older systems for one reason or another. Yes,
even DOS, from time to time.)
> Gimp uses the multiple-dynamic-windows approach, rather than the docking
> toolbar approach.
This is a matter of taste. I actually prefer it, because it gives you more
flexibility in arranging things. (Most of these windows can be not only
repositioned but also usefully resized and reshaped. About the only one it's
not useful to reshape is the tool options window.) It is true, however, that
this can be bothersome for people who prefer not to mess with customizing the
positions of things.
> They may appear or resize right in front of another window that you need to see
I find that they always appear in the last place I left them, so once you get a
good arrangement worked out you should be able to keep it. It is true that your
arrangement needs to devote a fair amount of space to Gimp windows, but that is
unavoidable if you want to have all the necessary tools readily available.
> Compare to MS Office, OpenOffice, or Photoshop, where the existing tool
> windows simply change their content.
This is quite troublesome on occasion. For example, in OpenOffice when you
have the cursor in a table cell, the table toolbar *replaces* one of your
regular toolbars, meaning that for several very common, frequently-wanted
things you have to dig into the menus and wade through dialog boxes. I run
into this quite often, and it's annoying. Now, the Gimp's approach would not
be an appropriate solution for OpenOffice, so I'm not sure what there is to
do about this problem, but I think the problem would be much, much worse if
the OpenOffice toolbar system for example were employed in an image editor.
Do you really want to have the gradients become inaccessible whenever you
have an active selection, or things like that?
> Because Gimp "tool" windows are "top-level" windows, you cannot use alt-tab
> to switch between Applications anymore since you will have 5-10 more windows
> to go through.
Oh. I barely noticed this since I normally have 30-40 windows open anyway
(even though I used tabbed browsing to keep my 20-30 web pages all in one
window). If an extra six or eight windows is a problem for you, you really
need to look into multiple virtual desktops. (Personally, I never use them.)
> It also clutters the taskbar. (Some environments can group windows to
> help with this, but this causes other problems)
Yeah, I don't like task grouping either and always turn it off. Instead I
put the task list on a panel entirely of its own, with nothing else (no clock,
no nothing) at the bottom edge of the screen. That frees up extra space on
the task list. Then I put my launchers and drawers and applets and things on
a panel that goes down the left edge. Also, I never minimize anything, so the
window I want usually has a corner or something visible, unless I have a big
window (like my web browser -- I keep that almost filling the screen usually)
above it, in which case I just send the big window to the back.
> You must click on each window, or you must minimize the other application.
I never minimize anything, because that makes it a pain to get back. I always
just send things to the back, if I want them out of the way. Since I keep my
launchers on my left panel, or in drawers on my left panel, I don't keep any
shortcuts on the desktop, so unless I just feel the need to gaze idly at my
wallpaper, I never need to minimize anything. Usually I only have two or
three windows big enough to block out everything behind them (one web browser,
one Emacs with Gnus in it, and sometimes OpenOffice), I just send those to
the back and everything else then is in front of them and therefore has at
least one edge or corner accessible for clicking. (It helps to have a 19"
monitor or so, so you can crank up the resolution a little (without needing
to squint like you would on a smaller one) and have more room for stuff.
Frankly you really need a good-sized monitor for serious image work anyway,
whether you're using Gimp, Photoshop, or whatever.)
> Um, Sebastopol's not near any rolling San Francisco hills.
Isn't it in, like, Crimea, on the coast of the Black Sea, or someplace like that?
> But a computer is fucking heavy. My pack is heavy enough with food and
> shelter and extra clothes. About the most high tech thing I take is my
> iso-butane stove and my water filter.
Dude, your priorities are off. A butane stove? That's way heavier than a
laptop, and totally unnecessary. (It's *much* more fun to cook with real
fire. Take a box of strike-anywhere matches.) Water filter? C'mon, get
real. If you're seriously worried about the water, boil it, but in most of
North America (as long as you're not right downhill from a big city) the
ground water is potable as it stands. Just watch to see if the birds are
drinking it. Extra clothes? What *for*? It's not like you're going out
to the mall every afternoon and need to look hip. Shelter? Shelter? I
suppose that means a tent... personally I'd just take a nice plastic bag
(to put the computer gear into if it rains) and maybe a hat.
I suppose you're also taking a sleeping bag (dude, just wear a light jacket),
a big old pillow (put your head on your pack, stupid), toothpaste (water works
fine), shampoo and conditioner, a toaster, and a car door so you can roll
down the window if you get hot. By the time I finish taking superfluous
stuff out of that megapack of yours, there'll be room in there for a full
tower and 20" CRT. Make it a 17" PowerBook instead and you can say you're
travelling light.
> Nerds don't go out into the sun.
Sometimes it comes in through those horrible "window" things. I know, I know,
real geeks aren't supposed to have windows, but sometimes in the workplace you
will have a desk in the same office area as someone with windows...
> There is no program that I know of which is widely thought to be perfect,
> at least with people who have actually tried alternatives.
The closest in this respect is probably Emacs. Nobody really thinks it's
perfect per se, but many of its users who have tried numerous alternatives
(including the really popular ones e.g., vim) consider Emacs to be orders of
magnitude better than the alternatives that they have tried. (Because of
the learning curve, few people try Emacs first. Most Emacs users are former
users of other text editors that they found to be inadequate.) Perfect?
Not yet, but maybe when version 22 comes out...
> but the Gimp's (at least the earlier version; I haven't looked at the
> latest one) spawning of separate toolbars for each image is (was?) terrible.
Wow, that must be a really old version you used. The Gimp has used just one
toolbox window, regardless of how many images you open, for as long as I've
been using it. (I guess that goes back to when I first started playing with
RedHat 6.0. I used Debian some before that, but the version I used was so
old that it didn't come with an X server.)
> That combined with the philosophy of "everything is done from the context
> menu"
I actually like this, once I got used to it, because it means less mouse
movement. However, the rumor is that the new version of Gimp now has these
menus at the top of each image window also, which will be useful especially
for Mac users who haven't bothered to buy a real mouse. (You can get a
context menu with a one-button Apple mouse, but it takes longer, because
you have to wait for the half-click to register as not being a full click.)
> and the messy array of tool and property boxes that inevitably clutter
> the screen (on that point, Photoshop isn't much better)
There is a reason Gimp and Photoshop both do this: all those controls are
*needed*, but if they were all put into one big toolbar it would take up
half the screen for most folks (people with big displays would fare a bit
better). With having them in separate windows at least they can be arranged
at will (and overlapped partly) to show at any given time the stuff you're
actively working with. The 1.3 development versions of the Gimp (and
presumably therefore also the 2.0 prerelease) have some improvements in this
area, but the problem fundamentally won't go away unless people all start
refusing to buy a computer with less than about a twenty-inch display.
The reason simpler painting tools like MS Paint don't have this problem is
because they're simply missing most of the features that take up all that
space. For example, they don't have a Layers dialog because they don't
support layers (which, frankly, makes them next to useless for serious
image editing). Brushes? MS Paint can fit all of its brushes in a
10x20-pixel area on the toolbar; Photoshop and the Gimp have a somewhat
larger collection, plus the ability to make your own brushes, and so on,
so they need a much larger brush-selection area. Tool options? Each tool
in MS Paint has at most one option, which has only a small number of
possible settings (e.g., the line tool can be set to one of about six
thicknesses), so it fits nicely on the toolbar, right in the same space
as the brush selection, since the brush is only used with the paintbrush
tool and therefore is its option. A number of the tools in Gimp have
several useful settings, some of which (such as the opacity setting on
several tools) can usefully be set to a wide range of values. So a whole
separate box is used for tool options. You can minimize it if you don't
use the tool options, but frankly if you're doing any real image work
you're going to find that those options come in handy. I could go on
to talk of filters and other features, but you get the idea.
> A lot of people say Gimp is difficult to use. Is it difficult for people
> who are used to Photoshop or is it difficult for everybody?
If you are accustomed to low-powered tools like MS Paint (the thingy in
Accessories in Windows), the Gimp will set you back for a few minutes. For
example, there's no rectangle-drawing tool, because you don't need one. You
just use the rectangle selection tool and then do one of the various things
you can do with a selection (e.g., stroke around the edge of it with the
current brush). This is actually a much more powerful approach, because
it's more flexible. You're not limited to selecting one of six line
thicknesses for the rectangle; you can use any brushtip, including a soft
brush (i.e., one that fades toward the edges), a shaped brush, et cetera.
Plus of course you can do that with any kind of selection, including one
you've made with the magic wand or the bezier tool. However, when you
first start drawing with Gimp, your immediate reaction is, "Hey, how do I
draw a rectangle? All I want to do is draw a simple rectangle!"
There are a couple dozen gotchas like this one. Most of them are covered in
the tips that come up (by default) one each time you start the Gimp. The
biggest one is getting used to layers, but once you do, you will NEVER go
back to a non-layered image editor. (Photoshop of course has layers too.)
Another gotcha I can think of off the top of my head is the alpha channel.
This is an *extremely* useful feature, but if you're not used to it, you'll
erase something and then expect to be able to draw on the erased area of
the same layer, but that will only change the color, not the alpha channel.
For that you have to use the eraser in unerase mode. (Once you get used
to this it's definitely a Good Thing, being able to unerase and get back
whatever color was there before. If you want to draw over it without
unerasing, just use another layer; you should be using a new layer for
each part of the image anyway, as in the long run that makes the image
easier to work with.)
> What about DVDs? I think I'm the last geek in the US without a DVD in his PC.
No, I don't have one. Don't have any use for one. I do have a CD writer...
If software ever starts coming on DVD instead of CD, maybe I'll have to
get one, I'm not holding my breath. The CD is too standardized; it'll only
be replaced by something that's a *lot* better (i.e., holds a *lot* more).
In the early days of PCs, people would by incremental upgrades because
everyone who had a computer was a geek and wanted to push the envelope.
After the 1.4MB floppy, enough regular people had PCs that the next several
improvements (2.8MB floppies, remember those? What about LS120 SuperDisks?)
never caught on. The thing that will eventually replace the floppy, and
we're only *starting* to see this happen now, is the writable CD. That's
almost a 500-fold improvement in storage capacity.
The CD-ROM today is at least as standardized as the 1.44MB floppy disk was in
1996. I predict it won't be replaced, for most people, with anything less
than a 500-fold improvement in storage capacity (i.e., 300 GB), probably
twice that or more. Frankly, with networking getting to be the way it is,
there's very little reason to want a larger read-only drive than 600GB;
anything that large you just download anyway. Pretty much the only reason
to want a DVD drive is if you want to watch movies, but most people who
want to watch a lot of movies have a television screen they want to watch
them on, so they get one of those hardware DVD players. For those of us
who don't care that much about movies, or don't have to see them the very
instant they come out, VHS is still totally viable -- and necessary, if you
want to watch anything you or your friends or family tape, because nobody
seems to be buying DVD-recording video cameras. They cost too much I guess.
Now, read/write drives are another matter, but the writable DVD drives
and blank media cost so much more... the CD writer is the sweet price
point by a very wide margin still at this point.
Novell didn't have *that* much to sell, in terms of Unix. (They had other stuff
besides Unix, of course.) Most of the Unix copyrights that really mattered,
AT&T had already lost in court to UC Berkeley. I'm sure Novell had some rights
to some improvements that they (and maybe even AT&T before them) had made
since, plus some additional bits and pieces, but most of the core Unix
copyrights belong to BSD. What Novell had (and we're discussing whether SCO
has all of it as well) is if anything actually less than Sun or the other Unix
vendors have, since by the time of the BSD split they'd already made a number
of improvements, and they protected them better than AT&T did and did not lose
them in the court case. AT&T/Novell/SCO only have what they've done since
that time, and what is more they haven't done as much with it since that
time as Sun, IBM, HP, and so on have done.
I'm all for respecting copyright, but SCO doesn't have jack, with or without
the stuff Novell may or may not have sold them.
> In Perl, we write that in ten lines and play golf with it.
c alhost", 'dbuser', 'dbpasswd', {'RaiseError' => 1});) ;l ashpass'); $m->click();
In fact...
use WWW::Mechanize; use DBI; $\=$/;
my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=slashdot;host=lo
my $query = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * from headlines WHERE title=? and seen='yes'");
my $update = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO headlines SET seen='yes', title=?");
while (1) {
($m = WWW::Mechanize->new())->get("http://slashdot.org"
$m->form_number(1); $m->set_fields(unickname=>'slashuser',upasswd=>'s
for (($m->content()) =~ m/size="?4[^>]*><b>(.*?)<\/b>/ig ) {
$query->execute($_); (print and $update->execute($_)) unless $query->fetchrow_array() }
sleep 10 }
> any application in Perl that's over 100 lines
You do realize, do you not, that 100 lines is a whole lot of Perl. I know, in
C that's barely enough to declare your data structures for a medium-sized
CGI script, but a Perl program tends to be shorter. (There *are* really
large apps written in Perl (Bugzilla comes to mind), but if they were written
in C they'd be 2-10 times larger, depending on what they do.)
For example, consider an application that connects to the slashdot web server,
retrieves the main page, fills in the username and password, submits the form,
extracts the list of headlines from the result, checks them against a MySQL
database to see which ones are new since last time, displays those, and then
sleeps for some predetermined amount of time. In C, that's probably well over
100 lines of code. In Perl, we write that in ten lines and play golf with it.
Yeah, that's using a couple of modules from the CPAN, but that's roughly the
equivalent of includes in C, and I *know* you don't want to try the above in
C without including some string handling libraries.
I don't know where Perl gets this totally undeserved reputation for obfuscation.
> The first International Readable Perl Code Contest
Readable Perl is easy. (Actually, I find even bad Perl code easier to read
than "good" C code.) No, if you want a challenge in readability, we should
have an International Readable PostScript Code Contest. That language is ugly.
> They should use plain UT (which is UTC without leap seconds).
That's hardly more obscure than just using UTC. They should use
microfortnights since the beginning of the reign of Cyrus the Great,
expressed in one's complement notation.
Adaptive AI is needed for some games, where "intelligence" is a key feature
of playing the game. (I put "intelligence" in quotation marks because I'm
using the traditional definition that includes quite a lot of things that
computers can do, such as examine by brute force all the possibilities for
the next N moves in a chess game, or test various board positions against
every single word in a large dictionary in a Scrabble game. If you think of
intelligence in terms of abstract reasoning and qualitative learning, then
we'd be doing well just to make a game that can do those things at all, much
less adaptively.)
> The essential point in adaptive AI on games is to be difficult enough for
> anyone to be entertaining, without getting frustrating
I think you want the player to get *slightly* frustrated *occasionally*. Not
badly, and not often, but if the player always wins without putting in some
extra effort, that's no fun either. When the player's tactics and skills
stagnate, you want to start beating him some of the time. (Not all of the
time. Not, even, most of the time, I think. But some of the time.)
One way to make game difficulty adaptive, without serious AI, is to make
expectations scale with accomplishments. This is easier in some types of
games than in others. Tetris is a great example of a game that can become
infinitely hard. Is the player stacking perfectly, covering no empty spaces?
Well, then, raise the probabilities on the hard pieces. Is the player in
deep doodoo, stacked past the middle of the board? Throw him some easy
pieces. (Most tetris games don't do enough with easy and hard pieces.)
And of course there's the ever-increasing speed. Not all games have such
easy ways of raising or lowering the expectations, without fundamentally
changing the consequences of the player's actions and therefore the strategy.
Games like freeciv are particularly in need of good AI.