Because it's highly portable and simple to edit. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I like being able to look at a simple list of files and be able to know what the default shell action is for those files, and I like being able to change that default shell action simply by renaming the file. I certainly don't want to use filesystem metadata (limiting it to filesystems that implement that metadata mechanism), "shadow" files, or some other ridiculous hack.
So why do so many file browsers have an icon, surely this is redundant!
It may be convenient to remind YOU what is in those files, but it doesn't say what's in those files unless YOU put the extension there. It also doesn't say what you're going to do with those files, unless your system keeps a database of what "kind" of file uses "what" program. This is ridiculous, why didn't the operating system store a database of what "file" I use with what "program"? It could give me reasonable defaults, surely, based on type, but because the extension is just part of the name, it's just using the worst part of the name.
Consider if I have a bunch of graphics that I edit in the Gimp or in Photoshop in a special resources directory. Why should my computer think that if I receive an image via email that I want to look at it in the Gimp?
That.doc file you got in email is, in fact, a Word document.
No...it...isn't.
The.doc file I just received is an RTF-formatted stream. Or maybe another one I received was an OLE stream. There's nothing about that name that says it's belongs to Microsoft Word. The file _belongs_to_me_. Maybe it's uncompressed input for gzip. Maybe it's an archive of pictures. Who the fuck knows. Certainly, not the name of the file.
And the extension is simply part of the name of the file. Some operating systems have bastardized the "name of the file" to determine my preferences instead of, sensibly, storing that information elsewhere.
WTF? I don't want an extension telling me what to do with the file. I want to tell the computer what to do with the file. That's what everybody who isn't a moron wants (the morons want the computer to psychically infer what to do with the file, but they're unsatisfiable).
Exactly. If you consider the extension part of the (visible) name, then that's exactly right. But if the "extension" is a representation of that preference of yours, then it's exactly my point. This is how MacOS worked prior to MacOSX, and it was perfectly reasonable to have three different "JPEG" images on your computer that all opened in separate programs.
If I want to compile the file as C, I run 'gcc -c file'. If I want to print it, I run 'lpr file'. I don't want an extension to describe these things. Different platforms may provide different methods for choosing the action, but the choice of action is made by the user, not by the file.
When you go ``lpr file'', does lpr see the file name? Or is it determining whether to render to postscript or not using some other means.
Clearly, the name of the file has nothing to do with what is in it.
I don't think there's a serious distinction here to blur, just more and more specific information about a file. The fact that something is marked as text just gives you a broader definition of "what you can do with it".
No. The mime type is part of the name. Your operating system uses part of the name to determine which applications open it, view it, edit it, and hopefully to your preference. The mime type does NOT specify what's in the file. If it did, MSIE probably wouldn't guess.
No, I reckon it's more accurate to say that we want an accurate categorisation of what is in a file, and then the system (or by association the user) decides how to handle that data. I'm not convinced extensions are the answer to this problem, but MIME-types certainly seem more valid than magic numbers.
Extensions and MIME-types are the same. They're part of the name of the file. Maybe a redundant part, but definately part of the name.
Let's just say that when I'm editing source code I don't want a spellchecker, and when I'm writing a letter to my grandmother I'm not particularly interested in syntax highlighting.
So what? Does this mean.doc files open in Microsoft Word? Or OpenOffice? Why does the name of the file indicate what I'm going to do with it? Can't your system remember that you liked to create word-processor files with Abiword, read the ones you create in abiword, and read the ones that come from someplace else in OpenOffice until you decide to do something with it?
What possible reason is there to encode what to do with a file in it's name, EXCEPT to confuse people?
Sure, an editor that handles ASCII English text would be able to do it, but what if one wants to discriminate? Use of MIME-types (as one solution) gives us the ability to select a viewer for everything
I'm going to stop you there. Extensions describe what to do with a file, not what the file contains. Programs that are interested in what the file contains can use magic information. They do, they always will. Windows does it (MSIE), Nautilus does it, lots of things do it. That's what the user expects.
If I receive a file from my Grandmother, I don't want HER telling me what to do with it. The ``extension'' should simply be "no-action", except on systems that blur the distinction between what the file contains and what you want to do with it, this breaks down completely.... define an editor seperately for C, Java, and Grandmother's increasingly-delayed letter, without loss.
This doesn't have to be encoded in the name of the file. The Mime type and the extension are parts of the name of the file. That name could be changed a dozen times over, and the contents would be the same. If you wanted "Grandma's Letter.txt" to be edited in Wordpad instead of the usual Notepad that edits your text files, the contents and the extension have NOTHING to do with the system honoring your decision on that subject.
What you want, rather, what everyone wants, is a system where extensions describe _what_to_do_ with the file, and not _what_it_contains_. This is what Macintosh (Classic) systems do (did?). And they don't bother to display the "extension" in most cases. This provides an excellent reason by-itself as to why "extensions" aren't needed or wanted.
The system will keep track of what it needs to, but outside of your system, the extension is just a mere part of the name.
So you're saying you can imagine no possible scenario where you might want to use different applications to edit different text files?
That's right. I use VI (or VIM) for editing text files. If I have word-processing to do, I usually use ABIWORD, which will have a very different magic.
Though it's possible that the number of programs still using the ANSI APIs (since the Unicode version only works on NT, but the ANSI version works on 9x as well) may impose an artificial limit of 255 char paths on your file system.
It's not just possible, it's extremely common.
Looking at WINE debug logs for many different applications, I'd say as far as "reality" is concerned, Windows still has that 255 character limit.
But, where's the exclamation mark? TONS of Windows people (including me) use exclamation points as the first character to put files/directories to the top of the list. Linux constantly chokes on these characters. But, no mention of it at all in this article.
No it doesn't. Linux (like most UNIXes) have no problem with exclamation marks. In fact, the only characters specifically disallowed are NUL (for C compatability) and /
Your shell however, assigns a special meaning to the "!" character, and that special meaning can be removed by prefacing it with a backslash, i.e. "!" -> "\!" -- Linux and the filesystem and all the relevant system calls still use the "!" character itself in the name of the file.
Advertising works. Maybe not for every product for every person, but for some products for some people.
So why do I have to watch the ads for products I'm not interested in? It's just money down the toilet to them, why do THEY want to produce ads for products I'm not interested in?
Why else would they spend billions of dollars on it?
Because they need to justify that they've spent billions of dollars on it?
TV-time is limited. Not everyone can purchase that time slot, and they make their buying decision based on how many time slots they need to purchase to "reach" a given demographic.
However, unless they're selling on a new call-in number, or visiting a special web address, they have no idea exactly what their conversion rate is. Most ads are like that- especially the ones that are purchased by very large companies-- the ones that can afford the billions of dollars on timeslots.
They don't know what their conversion rate is, so they need SOMETHING to justify those billions of dollars. So in the same way that the RIAA is on music sharing and the MPAA is on watching a video in more than one VCR in the house, someone is pointing to the fast forward button.
Maybe it's the advertisers- after all, they need to justify those billions of dollars that they're not tracking and can't write off.
Maybe it's ABC, after all, they might be having a hard time raising the prices on advertisers if the advertisers are beginning to actually take a look at their conversions (or trying to).
Maybe it's Nielson, after all if they can't tell ABC and the Advertisers what they want to hear, nobody is going to listen to them anymore.
You sound like one of those people that says advertising doesn't work on you. Guess what, unless you're a robot advertising works exactly like they expect it to. It builds up brand recognition and then someday when you're actually in the market for life insurance or cookies, even though you weren't when you watched the commercial, you might think of them.
Check again. I never said advertisements "don't work on me". I said I skip the ads I'm not interested in. Guess what, you do to. Everyone does. Nobody pays any attention to an ad that doesn't have some interest for them.
I've seen a large number of ads that were very effective. I saw a beer commercial that was silly so I bought a case of that brand beer. I didn't necessarily enjoy the beer taste itself, but there was a certain level of amusement that came from repeating the skit.
I was very intrigued by an advertisement for a movie that I didn't know was coming out or that existed. Why without that ad, I wouldn't have gone and seen the movie.
Ads don't build up for some subliminal effects later on down the road. That's a big load of horse shit that people who have survived advertising tell gullable morons. Ads work by increasing visibility. Period.
So long as it's just blocking fast-forwarding on ABC shows and not other channels, let me be the first to say that I have absolutely no problem with this.
I know this is funny, but I think there's a serious problem with how these people measure success. ABC will announce success, gain more advertisers that think more eyeballs equals more conversions, and so ABC will have more money. CBS and NBC will want more money so they'll do it too.
In the end, the people who will get shafted are the advertisers - especially the ones that can't afford the more competitive spots- and the viewers.
And 'ol ABC will be a'laughing all the way to the bank...
Watch out, you'll be modded down by a horde of TiVo apologists who still don't get that they have already sold TiVo owners down the river several times (remember the 30-second skip?) and won't hesitate to again.
No I don't, actually. I've had a TiVo since their first models came out and I don't recall any of them having a 30-second skip.
More on your topic: I'm on a fence with my TiVo. I'm worried about the whole DRM thing. It hasn't affected me yet, but the instant it does, TiVO will lose a household with three TiVOs in it immediately.
Maybe it's ABC, maybe it's advertisers, or maybe it's Nielson, but these guys all need to understand that the whole point of advertisements is to convert customers to their product.
I'm not going to be converted to some life insurance, or a box of cookies, so why am I watching ads for those things? Rather, why are these people throwing money away on me if it's not going to turn into a conversion for them?
I skip any commercial I'm not interested in, and that's an awful lot of them. If I woke up one day and my fast-forward button no longer skipped commercials, it wouldn't equal a new conversion for these guys. So they'd still be out the money for the commercial, and on top of that, the money they gave to the lobbyist to disable my fast-forward button.
This is like saying spam-blockers are hurting the business of Viagra and timeshares. The people using blocking and deleting spam aren't going to buy viagra if just those spam-blockers were somehow less effective, and what's next, stopping the delete button from functioning when it's an advertisement?
Does ABC really think that if only they could get us to watch more SPAM, they'd somehow make more money?
I actually was thinking of Java, since it was while taking a Java programming class that OOP first clicked for me. I almost never recommend PHP for anything.:-P
I'm not really sure about this. On at least one model of Dell that I have here, Windows update always finds a newer nvidia driver available. Of course, if you install that driver, the machine inevitably blue screens on the next reboot and the driver has to be removed. But it is available from Microsoft.
I'd say it's Dell Windows at that point- it's an OEM bundle, and it's not exactly the same thing.
Microsoft's official XP install disks don't include nVidia driver.
It seems like "Incredible" is awfully vague. What I really want is out-of-the-box support for my nVidia card
Lots of people would like that. Contact nVidia and tell them this!
(common enough with non-FOSS distros)
Mac OS X is the only non-Free operating system that I know of that ships with nVidia's drivers. Windows users must install the third-party driver. Linux users may use the nv driver from Xorg, or they may sacrafice their freedom and install the third-party driver.
What distros are you talking about?
my crappy Netgear WG111 wireless USB adapter
Lots of people would like that. Contact Netgear and let them know this!
In general, wireless, sound, and to a lesser extent graphics support are what plagues Linux.
Really?
You can't get below 50msec latency on Windows without special sound cards and drivers, but I have no problem with this on ALSA and Linux.
Wireless support is extremely poor throughout windows- it tells applications IP is down (causing lost connections) whenever there's a 802.11 signal problem- something that's almost certainly intermittent.
Intel's own graphics drivers work better on Linux than they do on Windows, so what exactly are you talking about here?
Of course, Windows isn't really any better; they just have the advantages of actually having drivers developed for them by third parties
I'm not sure this is an advantage. Unless the driver was signed and "blessed" by Microsoft, it's quite often a very low-quality driver, and worse still- you're lucky if you receive any support on it.
In fact, unless you get an OEM bundle of Windows, you're likely to have very poor hardware support from the get-go, and unless you take the time to find signed quality drivers, you're going to have problems.
Of course, on Linux, there's a much larger source of high quality drivers- the sound drivers are much better than any of the Windows drivers (With some exceptions for some ASIO drivers), and graphics support is simply much better with Intel and Matrox boards. I'm told nVidia and ATI don't make particularly good drivers (for any platform), but it doesn't really matter to me because their drivers are non-Free.
Re:As much as I hate granting time to the Perl hat
on
Wicked Cool Perl Scripts
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· Score: 4, Funny
What does C written by hack-job Perl "programmers" look like?
Seriously. Incomprehensible and unmaintainable code can be written in any language, but in Perl even good code is unreadable.
It can be unreadable, but that doesn't mean that it is. Code can be good for lots of reasons- not just legibility:)
Perl is probably the language with the highest chance of accepting the output of a random number generator as a valid program.
That honor belongs to sendmail; We used to offhook the telephone couplers whenever someone had messed sendmail.cf up to get a good working setup from the line noise that'd leak through.
With its awful syntax, Perl is arguably the worst language for writing any utilites. Python and Ruby are a lot better.
You're right. It is arguable that it has awful syntax.
Maybe it's that it parses and often even understands awful syntax thats bad- but I much prefer it to people that think that their code must be clean and legible and readible just because they wrote it in Python or Ruby.
My advice for OOP in Perl: 1) learn how OOP is supposed to work in some other language 2) pretend that it works that way in Perl, and try not to think about how "bless" actually works.
And by "some other language", you mean C++ or PHP, right?
The problem is _those_ aren't Object Oriented languages- they're class-oriented, and so they have a strict taxonomy for all objects. Perl's object orientedness is much more like Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Ruby (and to a lesser extent: Java), and it _indeed_ works that way. Think of -> to mean "message send" instead of "method call" and it'll make a lot more sense.
Filesystems may be automatically and intelligently defragmented (while live, if the filesystem is decent) when disk I/O is at a minimum.
But my filesystem is never idle, or even nearly so. Nonetheless, fragmentation isn't exactly a bad thing, and doesn't necessarily have to cause problems (such as lost performance) by itself.
Worse still: How does the defragmenter know to avoid using this block? Or how does it know that it's a good candidate to be moved to the other end of the disk?
We could make a record of every block that we access and sort it- as later information for the defragmenter, but would it really help? Wouldn't the cost of updating that information be too high?
These real questions have been examined and explored, and the short answer of it is simply "we don't know."
Access patterns are so complicated it's not even funny.
That's where tiered storage comes in- instead of trying to make the perfect defragmentation utility, we simply "copy" all of our storage to the lesser speed disks and update all the pointers.
We'd still never know when it was safe to remove the data from the first disk, but at least we'd never have to know- if we needed space, we could simply reclaim any storage from the fast disk that had already been mirrored. We might guess wrong, but on next access, we could reinforce that it guessed wrong by copying it back.
As a result, we don't have to do extra writes in the middle, and we don't need a fancy defragmenter...
Currently, some operating systems (e.g. Windows XP) optimize file location for minimizing boot time. I don't see any reason the same concept couldn't be extended. It might not be a bad idea even in the absence of these other concepts.
NTFS does this by having a (small) table near the beginning of the disk. The ``files'' in it are packed in such a way that the entire table is read into memory- as the boot procedure "knows" that they will all be needed shortly.
Unfortunately, updating this table is expensive, and it isn't very large, so it cannot keep very many files.
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Because it's highly portable and simple to edit. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I like being able to look at a simple list of files and be able to know what the default shell action is for those files, and I like being able to change that default shell action simply by renaming the file. I certainly don't want to use filesystem metadata (limiting it to filesystems that implement that metadata mechanism), "shadow" files, or some other ridiculous hack.
So why do so many file browsers have an icon, surely this is redundant!
It may be convenient to remind YOU what is in those files, but it doesn't say what's in those files unless YOU put the extension there. It also doesn't say what you're going to do with those files, unless your system keeps a database of what "kind" of file uses "what" program. This is ridiculous, why didn't the operating system store a database of what "file" I use with what "program"? It could give me reasonable defaults, surely, based on type, but because the extension is just part of the name, it's just using the worst part of the name.
Consider if I have a bunch of graphics that I edit in the Gimp or in Photoshop in a special resources directory. Why should my computer think that if I receive an image via email that I want to look at it in the Gimp?
That .doc file you got in email is, in fact, a Word document.
.doc file I just received is an RTF-formatted stream. Or maybe another one I received was an OLE stream. There's nothing about that name that says it's belongs to Microsoft Word. The file _belongs_to_me_. Maybe it's uncompressed input for gzip. Maybe it's an archive of pictures. Who the fuck knows. Certainly, not the name of the file.
No...it...isn't.
The
And the extension is simply part of the name of the file. Some operating systems have bastardized the "name of the file" to determine my preferences instead of, sensibly, storing that information elsewhere.
WTF? I don't want an extension telling me what to do with the file. I want to tell the computer what to do with the file. That's what everybody who isn't a moron wants (the morons want the computer to psychically infer what to do with the file, but they're unsatisfiable).
Exactly. If you consider the extension part of the (visible) name, then that's exactly right. But if the "extension" is a representation of that preference of yours, then it's exactly my point. This is how MacOS worked prior to MacOSX, and it was perfectly reasonable to have three different "JPEG" images on your computer that all opened in separate programs.
If I want to compile the file as C, I run 'gcc -c file'. If I want to print it, I run 'lpr file'. I don't want an extension to describe these things. Different platforms may provide different methods for choosing the action, but the choice of action is made by the user, not by the file.
When you go ``lpr file'', does lpr see the file name? Or is it determining whether to render to postscript or not using some other means.
Clearly, the name of the file has nothing to do with what is in it.
I don't think there's a serious distinction here to blur, just more and more specific information about a file. The fact that something is marked as text just gives you a broader definition of "what you can do with it".
No. The mime type is part of the name. Your operating system uses part of the name to determine which applications open it, view it, edit it, and hopefully to your preference. The mime type does NOT specify what's in the file. If it did, MSIE probably wouldn't guess.
No, I reckon it's more accurate to say that we want an accurate categorisation of what is in a file, and then the system (or by association the user) decides how to handle that data. I'm not convinced extensions are the answer to this problem, but MIME-types certainly seem more valid than magic numbers.
Extensions and MIME-types are the same. They're part of the name of the file. Maybe a redundant part, but definately part of the name.
Let's just say that when I'm editing source code I don't want a spellchecker, and when I'm writing a letter to my grandmother I'm not particularly interested in syntax highlighting.
.doc files open in Microsoft Word? Or OpenOffice? Why does the name of the file indicate what I'm going to do with it? Can't your system remember that you liked to create word-processor files with Abiword, read the ones you create in abiword, and read the ones that come from someplace else in OpenOffice until you decide to do something with it?
So what? Does this mean
What possible reason is there to encode what to do with a file in it's name, EXCEPT to confuse people?
Sure, an editor that handles ASCII English text would be able to do it, but what if one wants to discriminate? Use of MIME-types (as one solution) gives us the ability to select a viewer for everything
... define an editor seperately for C, Java, and Grandmother's increasingly-delayed letter, without loss.
I'm going to stop you there. Extensions describe what to do with a file, not what the file contains. Programs that are interested in what the file contains can use magic information. They do, they always will. Windows does it (MSIE), Nautilus does it, lots of things do it. That's what the user expects.
If I receive a file from my Grandmother, I don't want HER telling me what to do with it. The ``extension'' should simply be "no-action", except on systems that blur the distinction between what the file contains and what you want to do with it, this breaks down completely.
This doesn't have to be encoded in the name of the file. The Mime type and the extension are parts of the name of the file. That name could be changed a dozen times over, and the contents would be the same. If you wanted "Grandma's Letter.txt" to be edited in Wordpad instead of the usual Notepad that edits your text files, the contents and the extension have NOTHING to do with the system honoring your decision on that subject.
What you want, rather, what everyone wants, is a system where extensions describe _what_to_do_ with the file, and not _what_it_contains_. This is what Macintosh (Classic) systems do (did?). And they don't bother to display the "extension" in most cases. This provides an excellent reason by-itself as to why "extensions" aren't needed or wanted.
The system will keep track of what it needs to, but outside of your system, the extension is just a mere part of the name.
So you're saying you can imagine no possible scenario where you might want to use different applications to edit different text files?
That's right. I use VI (or VIM) for editing text files. If I have word-processing to do, I usually use ABIWORD, which will have a very different magic.
And TiVo won't care, unless you're one of those who continues to pay monthly fees for their service.
:)
I am "one of those"
Though it's possible that the number of programs still using the ANSI APIs (since the Unicode version only works on NT, but the ANSI version works on 9x as well) may impose an artificial limit of 255 char paths on your file system.
It's not just possible, it's extremely common.
Looking at WINE debug logs for many different applications, I'd say as far as "reality" is concerned, Windows still has that 255 character limit.
Until file(1) can tell the difference between C code and Java code and a letter to my grandmother it's not so useful.
Are you sure?
What do you use to edit the C code, or Java code, or the letter to your grandmother?
How about to view these things?
Wouldn't the editor/viewer be something that handles "ASCII English text"?
But, where's the exclamation mark? TONS of Windows people (including me) use exclamation points as the first character to put files/directories to the top of the list. Linux constantly chokes on these characters. But, no mention of it at all in this article.
No it doesn't. Linux (like most UNIXes) have no problem with exclamation marks. In fact, the only characters specifically disallowed are NUL (for C compatability) and /
Your shell however, assigns a special meaning to the "!" character, and that special meaning can be removed by prefacing it with a backslash, i.e. "!" -> "\!" -- Linux and the filesystem and all the relevant system calls still use the "!" character itself in the name of the file.
Advertising works. Maybe not for every product for every person, but for some products for some people.
So why do I have to watch the ads for products I'm not interested in? It's just money down the toilet to them, why do THEY want to produce ads for products I'm not interested in?
Why else would they spend billions of dollars on it?
Because they need to justify that they've spent billions of dollars on it?
TV-time is limited. Not everyone can purchase that time slot, and they make their buying decision based on how many time slots they need to purchase to "reach" a given demographic.
However, unless they're selling on a new call-in number, or visiting a special web address, they have no idea exactly what their conversion rate is. Most ads are like that- especially the ones that are purchased by very large companies-- the ones that can afford the billions of dollars on timeslots.
They don't know what their conversion rate is, so they need SOMETHING to justify those billions of dollars. So in the same way that the RIAA is on music sharing and the MPAA is on watching a video in more than one VCR in the house, someone is pointing to the fast forward button.
Maybe it's the advertisers- after all, they need to justify those billions of dollars that they're not tracking and can't write off.
Maybe it's ABC, after all, they might be having a hard time raising the prices on advertisers if the advertisers are beginning to actually take a look at their conversions (or trying to).
Maybe it's Nielson, after all if they can't tell ABC and the Advertisers what they want to hear, nobody is going to listen to them anymore.
You sound like one of those people that says advertising doesn't work on you. Guess what, unless you're a robot advertising works exactly like they expect it to. It builds up brand recognition and then someday when you're actually in the market for life insurance or cookies, even though you weren't when you watched the commercial, you might think of them.
Check again. I never said advertisements "don't work on me". I said I skip the ads I'm not interested in. Guess what, you do to. Everyone does. Nobody pays any attention to an ad that doesn't have some interest for them.
I've seen a large number of ads that were very effective. I saw a beer commercial that was silly so I bought a case of that brand beer. I didn't necessarily enjoy the beer taste itself, but there was a certain level of amusement that came from repeating the skit.
I was very intrigued by an advertisement for a movie that I didn't know was coming out or that existed. Why without that ad, I wouldn't have gone and seen the movie.
Ads don't build up for some subliminal effects later on down the road. That's a big load of horse shit that people who have survived advertising tell gullable morons. Ads work by increasing visibility. Period.
Yeah, but you have to have a license to even watch tv
Is it really that different than a cable or satellite bill?
So long as it's just blocking fast-forwarding on ABC shows and not other channels, let me be the first to say that I have absolutely no problem with this.
I know this is funny, but I think there's a serious problem with how these people measure success. ABC will announce success, gain more advertisers that think more eyeballs equals more conversions, and so ABC will have more money. CBS and NBC will want more money so they'll do it too.
In the end, the people who will get shafted are the advertisers - especially the ones that can't afford the more competitive spots- and the viewers.
And 'ol ABC will be a'laughing all the way to the bank...
Watch out, you'll be modded down by a horde of TiVo apologists who still don't get that they have already sold TiVo owners down the river several times (remember the 30-second skip?) and won't hesitate to again.
No I don't, actually. I've had a TiVo since their first models came out and I don't recall any of them having a 30-second skip.
More on your topic: I'm on a fence with my TiVo. I'm worried about the whole DRM thing. It hasn't affected me yet, but the instant it does, TiVO will lose a household with three TiVOs in it immediately.
Maybe it's ABC, maybe it's advertisers, or maybe it's Nielson, but these guys all need to understand that the whole point of advertisements is to convert customers to their product.
I'm not going to be converted to some life insurance, or a box of cookies, so why am I watching ads for those things? Rather, why are these people throwing money away on me if it's not going to turn into a conversion for them?
I skip any commercial I'm not interested in, and that's an awful lot of them. If I woke up one day and my fast-forward button no longer skipped commercials, it wouldn't equal a new conversion for these guys. So they'd still be out the money for the commercial, and on top of that, the money they gave to the lobbyist to disable my fast-forward button.
This is like saying spam-blockers are hurting the business of Viagra and timeshares. The people using blocking and deleting spam aren't going to buy viagra if just those spam-blockers were somehow less effective, and what's next, stopping the delete button from functioning when it's an advertisement?
Does ABC really think that if only they could get us to watch more SPAM, they'd somehow make more money?
I actually was thinking of Java, since it was while taking a Java programming class that OOP first clicked for me. I almost never recommend PHP for anything. :-P
I am so, so, sorry.
I'm not really sure about this. On at least one model of Dell that I have here, Windows update always finds a newer nvidia driver available. Of course, if you install that driver, the machine inevitably blue screens on the next reboot and the driver has to be removed. But it is available from Microsoft.
I'd say it's Dell Windows at that point- it's an OEM bundle, and it's not exactly the same thing.
Microsoft's official XP install disks don't include nVidia driver.
It seems like "Incredible" is awfully vague. What I really want is out-of-the-box support for my nVidia card
Lots of people would like that. Contact nVidia and tell them this!
(common enough with non-FOSS distros)
Mac OS X is the only non-Free operating system that I know of that ships with nVidia's drivers. Windows users must install the third-party driver. Linux users may use the nv driver from Xorg, or they may sacrafice their freedom and install the third-party driver.
What distros are you talking about?
my crappy Netgear WG111 wireless USB adapter
Lots of people would like that. Contact Netgear and let them know this!
In general, wireless, sound, and to a lesser extent graphics support are what plagues Linux.
Really?
You can't get below 50msec latency on Windows without special sound cards and drivers, but I have no problem with this on ALSA and Linux.
Wireless support is extremely poor throughout windows- it tells applications IP is down (causing lost connections) whenever there's a 802.11 signal problem- something that's almost certainly intermittent.
Intel's own graphics drivers work better on Linux than they do on Windows, so what exactly are you talking about here?
Of course, Windows isn't really any better; they just have the advantages of actually having drivers developed for them by third parties
I'm not sure this is an advantage. Unless the driver was signed and "blessed" by Microsoft, it's quite often a very low-quality driver, and worse still- you're lucky if you receive any support on it.
In fact, unless you get an OEM bundle of Windows, you're likely to have very poor hardware support from the get-go, and unless you take the time to find signed quality drivers, you're going to have problems.
Of course, on Linux, there's a much larger source of high quality drivers- the sound drivers are much better than any of the Windows drivers (With some exceptions for some ASIO drivers), and graphics support is simply much better with Intel and Matrox boards. I'm told nVidia and ATI don't make particularly good drivers (for any platform), but it doesn't really matter to me because their drivers are non-Free.
What does C written by hack-job Perl "programmers" look like?
Java.
Seriously. Incomprehensible and unmaintainable code can be written in any language, but in Perl even good code is unreadable.
:)
It can be unreadable, but that doesn't mean that it is. Code can be good for lots of reasons- not just legibility
Perl is probably the language with the highest chance of accepting the output of a random number generator as a valid program.
That honor belongs to sendmail; We used to offhook the telephone couplers whenever someone had messed sendmail.cf up to get a good working setup from the line noise that'd leak through.
With its awful syntax, Perl is arguably the worst language for writing any utilites. Python and Ruby are a lot better.
You're right. It is arguable that it has awful syntax.
Maybe it's that it parses and often even understands awful syntax thats bad- but I much prefer it to people that think that their code must be clean and legible and readible just because they wrote it in Python or Ruby.
My advice for OOP in Perl:
1) learn how OOP is supposed to work in some other language
2) pretend that it works that way in Perl, and try not to think about how "bless" actually works.
And by "some other language", you mean C++ or PHP, right?
The problem is _those_ aren't Object Oriented languages- they're class-oriented, and so they have a strict taxonomy for all objects. Perl's object orientedness is much more like Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Ruby (and to a lesser extent: Java), and it _indeed_ works that way. Think of -> to mean "message send" instead of "method call" and it'll make a lot more sense.
Filesystems may be automatically and intelligently defragmented (while live, if the filesystem is decent) when disk I/O is at a minimum.
But my filesystem is never idle, or even nearly so. Nonetheless, fragmentation isn't exactly a bad thing, and doesn't necessarily have to cause problems (such as lost performance) by itself.
Worse still: How does the defragmenter know to avoid using this block? Or how does it know that it's a good candidate to be moved to the other end of the disk?
We could make a record of every block that we access and sort it- as later information for the defragmenter, but would it really help? Wouldn't the cost of updating that information be too high?
These real questions have been examined and explored, and the short answer of it is simply "we don't know."
Access patterns are so complicated it's not even funny.
That's where tiered storage comes in- instead of trying to make the perfect defragmentation utility, we simply "copy" all of our storage to the lesser speed disks and update all the pointers.
We'd still never know when it was safe to remove the data from the first disk, but at least we'd never have to know- if we needed space, we could simply reclaim any storage from the fast disk that had already been mirrored. We might guess wrong, but on next access, we could reinforce that it guessed wrong by copying it back.
As a result, we don't have to do extra writes in the middle, and we don't need a fancy defragmenter...
Currently, some operating systems (e.g. Windows XP) optimize file location for minimizing boot time. I don't see any reason the same concept couldn't be extended. It might not be a bad idea even in the absence of these other concepts.
NTFS does this by having a (small) table near the beginning of the disk. The ``files'' in it are packed in such a way that the entire table is read into memory- as the boot procedure "knows" that they will all be needed shortly.
Unfortunately, updating this table is expensive, and it isn't very large, so it cannot keep very many files.