Slashdot is a *news* site for nerds, not a programming site. For the latter, head over to Perlmonks or someplace like that, and you can post regular expressions until your eyes glaze over.
That's really only true if his perspective is completely egocentric. Just saying.
Not that I don't understand the value of writing your own. I do. I have written my own of several things, rather than use generally available alternatives. Writing your own means you are intimately acquainted with every aspect of the code, so if you need to tweak the behavior in minor ways, it's easy. But just because you, the author, can use your own code to better effect, doesn't actually mean it *is* better. It means you understand it better, and that's not the same thing.
OTOH, tweaking the behavior of Emacs is pretty easy too, with elisp, and I know I don't have time to write my own text editor with all the features of Emacs that I use regularly, and anyone who does probably has pretty low feature requirements for a text editor, especially compared to Emacs.
I believe the correct acronym was Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. Eight megabytes is an exaggeration, of course, intended to be a ludicrously large number. The joke dates to the era when eight megabytes was such a preposterously large amount of physical RAM, nobody would even have that much, much less want to dedicate that much to one application. Yes, I remember that time. My first computer had 640K of RAM. I experimented with various text editors but eventually settled on UED, which packed some really nice functionality, and a great interface for the time, into 38704 bytes. I used that editor for years.
I even wrote some elisp to emulate some of UED's functionality and interface, when I first started using Emacs. At that time I believe my computer had 32MB of RAM...
> OMG, that's brilliant. > Using the same board > for chess AND > checkers!
I've seen one of those. Even better, if you flip it over, the other side is a backgammon board. You know, just in case you ever meet anyone who plays backgammon.
I'm pretty sure I saw the Ghostbusters game on Atari a fairly long time ago. Like, during the cold war, if I'm not mistaken. It was almost as lame as the E.T. game.
> Finally, the name may vary, but a hard ass D.A. could actually MAYBE attempt to charge > (you'd plea to a lesser charge at this point surely) that you've committed willful > destruction of property in that the resulting surge of power for every single instance > the power was cycled reduced the longevity of the device.
Turning a device off constitutes willful destruction? Seriously? Come on. If the judge is sufficiently in their pocket that he allows this argument, you'd be screwed no matter what. They could just as well charge you with racketeering and blackmail because, umm, you were holding the TV for ransom.
Trespass is possible, but they have to claim that they asked you to leave, and it's the kind of offense that mostly gets you escorted off their property, generally speaking.
The angle they really are going to have to work if they want to have any hope of getting you in any significant trouble is the tampering angle, that you were messing with their equipment and thus interfering with their ability to do what it is they do. At minimum by shutting down the television you disrupted a "service" (their lawyer must say this with a straight face) that they were providing to their customers, which potentially could be argued to interfere with the operation of their business, blah, blah, blah. An intelligent judge will presumably say, "Wait, all he did was turn off an annoying television. Did you try asking him to knock it off?" Of course, calculating the odds that you will get an intelligent judge is left as an exercise.
> Posted AC because I'm probably not supposed to tell people that.
It would be impossible to keep that secret. But to significantly exploit it you'd have to have a way of determining at any given time is *which* of them are real. (Of course, you could hire a group of bored teenagers to probe this with a low-threat attack that won't get them in any serious trouble...)
> You probably have a form of ADHD that allows you to become hyper concentrated.
That makes no sense whatsoever. If he had any form of ADHD, he would be, if anything, hypo concentrated, because that's what ADHD *is*, by definition. Under no circumstances does it confer the ability to focus more exclusively on one thing.
Asperger's, conceivably (though Occam's razor would suggest otherwise). ADHD, no.
Bloodshed? I was thinking more in terms of spectacular amounts of wealth...
1. Buy up all the coffee plantations in Columbia 2. Deploy agents to all other coffee-producing countries with Coffee-B-Gone. 3. ??? 4. Profit!
Coffee drinkers will pay whatever it takes to get themselves going in the morning, so after putting this plan into effect, the brilliant enterpreneur should be able to buy a medium-sized island to retire on. Honshu, perhaps.
> On Windows, tabbed completion grabs the FIRST entry that matches. That's what cmd.exe does. (We'll not talk about command.com, okay?)
> On Linux, tabbed completion lists ALL the entries that match. That's what bash does.
However, eshell takes into consideration what you've already typed (e.g., the command) and when possible chooses the *best* completion, e.g., if you're doing a cd command, it will always complete with a directory if there's one that matches; unzip prefers.zip files, and so on. It takes a little getting used to, but it's nice.
I like the tab completion in eshell. It takes the context of what you've already typed (e.g., the name of the command) into consideration when choosing the best completions.
> I'm sure everyone at some point is surprised of tabbed completion.
Apparently most of the kids these days haven't figured it out yet, because they're falling all over themselves to use graphical file managers, which take about eight times as long to do anything as a plain old shell with reasonably good tab completion. Most of the Linux distributions not only *install* Nautilus by default these days, but put it in your session by default too. I still haven't found a use for it.
> if Solaris doesn't support a convenient option, it must be a weird GNU thing. Either > that or it was invented after 1987 and Sun is still evaluating it for inclusion.
If you use BSD for six months, you'll discover that a lot of those convenient command-line tool options really *are* Gnu extensions, and just because every Linux distribution since SLS has supported them all doesn't mean the rest of the world has ever heard of them. Also, as a general rule, the idea of useful things being installed by default seems to be pretty much lost on the non-Linux world.
I don't happen to know about grep -R, though.
Disclaimer: it's been over a year since I quit using FreeBSD, so my info may be out of date. Slightly.
Absolutely. Perl not only obsoletes sed and awk, but also sh and a number of other things, and you don't have to keep track of separate syntax (including command-line syntax) for each of them. One tool does everything.
Well, two tools: perl and a good text editor. Who needs anything else?
Of course, for one-liners you can just run your perl script directly from the shell prompt without bothering to put it in a file. Then again, if you're a serious Emacs user, the shell prompt is almost certainly running in your text editor in the first place. (Yeah, eshell rocks. Who needs bash?)
You want to look like you *really* know computers, to someone who *really* doesn't? On a Windows system, open up a command prompt, and do this: cd \ dir/s
Honest to goodness, they invariably assume you're doing something really clever.
> the religious groups were mostly interested in making everybody follow their morality and got booted for it
Stuff and nonsense.
A lot of them (anabaptists in particular) were pretty much just interesting in meeting regularly, in private, with a group of like-minded people, rather than in the state church (which was crowded with unbelievers). But that was illegal. In large parts of Europe it's still kind of frowned upon and has consequences both social and physical. In Germany, for instance, just a few years ago (mid nineties; it's possible that it's still true even, but I haven't kept up to date) if you withdrew from the (degenerate and essentially apostate) state church and joined a minority religious group instead, your family could run into problems trying to get you legally buried when you die.
Ironically, the influx of Muslims in recent years is actually helping to create improved freedom and acceptance for Christians.
> s/ONE/TWO is something from some coding language, meaning substitute TWO for ONE.
It's from more than one source. Perl is probably the best-known language that uses this substitution operator, but I think Larry got the syntax from an older Unix tool (sed or awk or something like that), and there are other things that use it as well.
> Assuming an Obama win on Tuesday and a serious shift towards Democrats (what polls largely suggest), > are we finally going to see some serious investigations and accountability for this current administration?
You might see that. However...
> But I do hope the courts eventually get around to reeling back in the egregious power-grabs > of the current executive. I also hope the next executive doesn't attempt to maintain such.
Good luck with that. Obama may be from the other party, but he's still a politician, running for the office of US President, trying to get elected to said office, on purpose. If you really think he's going to voluntarily give up power, I've got an invention you might be interested in investing in, which recaptures the spent fuel from the exhaust of a motor vehicle, uses the heat of the exhaust to recharge the fuel, and channels the resulting usable gas back into the fuel tank.
> More specific to elections though, isn't it about time we abolished > the electoral college and go right to a popular vote?
That would have... consequences.
Right now, elections are decided in the swing states, which tend to be populated with a fair percentage of moderates, so both parties sort of temper their views and stay away from the extremes. This leaves both conservatives and liberals somewhat dissatisfied, but it also leaves us able to live in the same country without killing one another most of the time.
Consider that moving to a strict popular vote system would *instantly* transform election politics from the current tactic (of trying to win over the moderate swing voters) into an all-out get-out-the-vote campaign in the areas that are solidly one way or the other (urban versus rural).
It is my considered opinion that abolishing the electoral college would start us down the path toward, eventually, a second civil war.
> I believe in the US, there's no requirement to be registered with any municipality at all.
That's correct. In fact, the idea of everyone being registered with a municipality would be completely alien here and would probably meet with widespread resistance. It's not just that we're not *required* to register with a municipality. I've never heard of anyone doing it. Honestly, to me it mostly sounds like needless paperwork, the sort of thing the Japanese would come up with. But there are plenty of people who would see it as Orwellian.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is a *news* site for nerds, not a programming site. For the latter, head over to Perlmonks or someplace like that, and you can post regular expressions until your eyes glaze over.
Emacs has pretty good regex support, and is available for Windows. HTH.HAND.
> he's 100% correct from his perspective.
That's really only true if his perspective is completely egocentric. Just saying.
Not that I don't understand the value of writing your own. I do. I have written my own of several things, rather than use generally available alternatives. Writing your own means you are intimately acquainted with every aspect of the code, so if you need to tweak the behavior in minor ways, it's easy. But just because you, the author, can use your own code to better effect, doesn't actually mean it *is* better. It means you understand it better, and that's not the same thing.
OTOH, tweaking the behavior of Emacs is pretty easy too, with elisp, and I know I don't have time to write my own text editor with all the features of Emacs that I use regularly, and anyone who does probably has pretty low feature requirements for a text editor, especially compared to Emacs.
I believe the correct acronym was Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. Eight megabytes is an exaggeration, of course, intended to be a ludicrously large number. The joke dates to the era when eight megabytes was such a preposterously large amount of physical RAM, nobody would even have that much, much less want to dedicate that much to one application. Yes, I remember that time. My first computer had 640K of RAM. I experimented with various text editors but eventually settled on UED, which packed some really nice functionality, and a great interface for the time, into 38704 bytes. I used that editor for years.
I even wrote some elisp to emulate some of UED's functionality and interface, when I first started using Emacs. At that time I believe my computer had 32MB of RAM...
> OMG, that's brilliant.
> Using the same board
> for chess AND
> checkers!
I've seen one of those. Even better, if you flip it over, the other side is a backgammon board. You know, just in case you ever meet anyone who plays backgammon.
> Shampoo for president!
Who's the veep candidate?
I'm pretty sure I saw the Ghostbusters game on Atari a fairly long time ago. Like, during the cold war, if I'm not mistaken. It was almost as lame as the E.T. game.
> Finally, the name may vary, but a hard ass D.A. could actually MAYBE attempt to charge
> (you'd plea to a lesser charge at this point surely) that you've committed willful
> destruction of property in that the resulting surge of power for every single instance
> the power was cycled reduced the longevity of the device.
Turning a device off constitutes willful destruction? Seriously? Come on. If the judge is sufficiently in their pocket that he allows this argument, you'd be screwed no matter what. They could just as well charge you with racketeering and blackmail because, umm, you were holding the TV for ransom.
Trespass is possible, but they have to claim that they asked you to leave, and it's the kind of offense that mostly gets you escorted off their property, generally speaking.
The angle they really are going to have to work if they want to have any hope of getting you in any significant trouble is the tampering angle, that you were messing with their equipment and thus interfering with their ability to do what it is they do. At minimum by shutting down the television you disrupted a "service" (their lawyer must say this with a straight face) that they were providing to their customers, which potentially could be argued to interfere with the operation of their business, blah, blah, blah. An intelligent judge will presumably say, "Wait, all he did was turn off an annoying television. Did you try asking him to knock it off?" Of course, calculating the odds that you will get an intelligent judge is left as an exercise.
> Posted AC because I'm probably not supposed to tell people that.
It would be impossible to keep that secret. But to significantly exploit it you'd have to have a way of determining at any given time is *which* of them are real. (Of course, you could hire a group of bored teenagers to probe this with a low-threat attack that won't get them in any serious trouble...)
> You probably have a form of ADHD that allows you to become hyper concentrated.
That makes no sense whatsoever. If he had any form of ADHD, he would be, if anything, hypo concentrated, because that's what ADHD *is*, by definition. Under no circumstances does it confer the ability to focus more exclusively on one thing.
Asperger's, conceivably (though Occam's razor would suggest otherwise). ADHD, no.
Bloodshed? I was thinking more in terms of spectacular amounts of wealth...
1. Buy up all the coffee plantations in Columbia
2. Deploy agents to all other coffee-producing countries with Coffee-B-Gone.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Coffee drinkers will pay whatever it takes to get themselves going in the morning, so after putting this plan into effect, the brilliant enterpreneur should be able to buy a medium-sized island to retire on. Honshu, perhaps.
> On Windows, tabbed completion grabs the FIRST entry that matches.
.zip files, and so on. It takes a little getting used to, but it's nice.
That's what cmd.exe does. (We'll not talk about command.com, okay?)
> On Linux, tabbed completion lists ALL the entries that match.
That's what bash does.
However, eshell takes into consideration what you've already typed (e.g., the command) and when possible chooses the *best* completion, e.g., if you're doing a cd command, it will always complete with a directory if there's one that matches; unzip prefers
I like the tab completion in eshell. It takes the context of what you've already typed (e.g., the name of the command) into consideration when choosing the best completions.
> I'm sure everyone at some point is surprised of tabbed completion.
Apparently most of the kids these days haven't figured it out yet, because they're falling all over themselves to use graphical file managers, which take about eight times as long to do anything as a plain old shell with reasonably good tab completion. Most of the Linux distributions not only *install* Nautilus by default these days, but put it in your session by default too. I still haven't found a use for it.
> if Solaris doesn't support a convenient option, it must be a weird GNU thing. Either
> that or it was invented after 1987 and Sun is still evaluating it for inclusion.
If you use BSD for six months, you'll discover that a lot of those convenient command-line tool options really *are* Gnu extensions, and just because every Linux distribution since SLS has supported them all doesn't mean the rest of the world has ever heard of them. Also, as a general rule, the idea of useful things being installed by default seems to be pretty much lost on the non-Linux world.
I don't happen to know about grep -R, though.
Disclaimer: it's been over a year since I quit using FreeBSD, so my info may be out of date. Slightly.
> I presume the modern unix user prefers perl.
Absolutely. Perl not only obsoletes sed and awk, but also sh and a number of other things, and you don't have to keep track of separate syntax (including command-line syntax) for each of them. One tool does everything.
Well, two tools: perl and a good text editor. Who needs anything else?
Of course, for one-liners you can just run your perl script directly from the shell prompt without bothering to put it in a file. Then again, if you're a serious Emacs user, the shell prompt is almost certainly running in your text editor in the first place. (Yeah, eshell rocks. Who needs bash?)
You want to look like you *really* know computers, to someone who *really* doesn't? On a Windows system, open up a command prompt, and do this: /s
cd \
dir
Honest to goodness, they invariably assume you're doing something really clever.
> Win3.1 did not have BSOD!
Apparently you never used Windows 3.1 much.
> Everything would just freeze and you had to do three-finger salute.
Oh, it did that too.
> the religious groups were mostly interested in making everybody follow their morality and got booted for it
Stuff and nonsense.
A lot of them (anabaptists in particular) were pretty much just interesting in meeting regularly, in private, with a group of like-minded people, rather than in the state church (which was crowded with unbelievers). But that was illegal. In large parts of Europe it's still kind of frowned upon and has consequences both social and physical. In Germany, for instance, just a few years ago (mid nineties; it's possible that it's still true even, but I haven't kept up to date) if you withdrew from the (degenerate and essentially apostate) state church and joined a minority religious group instead, your family could run into problems trying to get you legally buried when you die.
Ironically, the influx of Muslims in recent years is actually helping to create improved freedom and acceptance for Christians.
Oh, and...
s/(TWO)/$1 . chr(47) . ";"/e;
> s/ONE/TWO is something from some coding language, meaning substitute TWO for ONE.
It's from more than one source. Perl is probably the best-known language that uses this substitution operator, but I think Larry got the syntax from an older Unix tool (sed or awk or something like that), and there are other things that use it as well.
HTH.HAND.
Umm, I'm pretty sure YHBT. Just saying.
> Assuming an Obama win on Tuesday and a serious shift towards Democrats (what polls largely suggest),
> are we finally going to see some serious investigations and accountability for this current administration?
You might see that. However...
> But I do hope the courts eventually get around to reeling back in the egregious power-grabs
> of the current executive. I also hope the next executive doesn't attempt to maintain such.
Good luck with that. Obama may be from the other party, but he's still a politician, running for the office of US President, trying to get elected to said office, on purpose. If you really think he's going to voluntarily give up power, I've got an invention you might be interested in investing in, which recaptures the spent fuel from the exhaust of a motor vehicle, uses the heat of the exhaust to recharge the fuel, and channels the resulting usable gas back into the fuel tank.
> More specific to elections though, isn't it about time we abolished
> the electoral college and go right to a popular vote?
That would have... consequences.
Right now, elections are decided in the swing states, which tend to be populated with a fair percentage of moderates, so both parties sort of temper their views and stay away from the extremes. This leaves both conservatives and liberals somewhat dissatisfied, but it also leaves us able to live in the same country without killing one another most of the time.
Consider that moving to a strict popular vote system would *instantly* transform election politics from the current tactic (of trying to win over the moderate swing voters) into an all-out get-out-the-vote campaign in the areas that are solidly one way or the other (urban versus rural).
It is my considered opinion that abolishing the electoral college would start us down the path toward, eventually, a second civil war.
> I believe in the US, there's no requirement to be registered with any municipality at all.
That's correct. In fact, the idea of everyone being registered with a municipality would be completely alien here and would probably meet with widespread resistance. It's not just that we're not *required* to register with a municipality. I've never heard of anyone doing it. Honestly, to me it mostly sounds like needless paperwork, the sort of thing the Japanese would come up with. But there are plenty of people who would see it as Orwellian.
> Two words. Selective Service.
It's unconstitutional to deny the vote to conscientious objectors (e.g., the Amish).