Do you mean American English chips or British English chips? I am guessing you mean the foil bag around "crisps" rather than newspaper... Anyway, GPS is much weaker than the mobile network, and I wouldn't be surprised if a few layers of newspaper stopped the signal. That's the main problem with this watch thingy. Most of the time it will just report "dunno where your kiddie is, can't acquire any satellites". It doesn't work indoors, it doesn't work near buildings... It's dead useful when you are walking around in the great outdoors, but in a city it is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.
This is great. For $400 you can make it more likely that the nonce will go for your next door neighbour's kids instead of yours. Which is nice. Pretty soon everyone will have to pay this $400 "protection tax"... At which point it will be worthless because your kids are now just as likely to be targetted as your neighbours'. Oh what a wonderful world.
So when you got lost as a kid, what happened? Did you wander for months, and end up being raised by wild animals in the jungle? I think not... Yes, even before the days of such technological gimmicks, people did actually manage to exist...
Yes, and futhermore the batteries are not going to last long. My wristwatch GPS is supposed to do about 70 readings or something. Then I have to recharge it. You certainly don't leave it getting constant readings... Bye bye battery! Add the fact that this thing has to act as a pager too...
Oh yeah and I bet it has an uncuttable wrist strap too. Seriously, this thing is junk. I mean, I have one of those Casio GPS watches, but at least I know it's a gimmick...
That's due to the steering geometry, not the gyroscopic effect. You could look at it like this: You are sitting backwards on the bike, and it is going forwards down the hill. The problem is that real wheel steering is inherently unstable.
Then why do we have different names for them? Back to school for you!
Re:Will it enforce readable code?
on
Perl 5.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Hahaha, get back under your bridge, troll! VB lower level than C... LOL I'm only a little Burrahobbit and I wouldn't make above a mouthful... So don't even bother!
Re:Will it enforce readable code?
on
Perl 5.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
I use pointers in C++. What is scary about pointers? Why use a complex structure when a simple one will do? It's better to not branch at all, than to branch in assembly. What actual evidence do you have that code is getting more sloppy? Or are you just waving your hands around making general statements, with the subtext that no-one can code as well as you?
Rubbish. Linus Torvalds is the soul of Linux. Everyone else is just a hanger-on. Debian represents a particular political movement. Linus made Linux to "scratch an itch", not for a political statement.
Regular expressions are implemented with finite automata. Finite automata are not implemented with regular expressions. Regular expressions are a red herring here... It is finite automata that you actually want your coders to understand. The rest of your argument is just hand-waving, "almost always", "in general", "generally"... Very weak.
I know regular expressions, but funnily enough I almost never need them. Occasionally I will do a regexp search if an exact search is not good enough. I don't have Perl installed, and I can't say I have ever needed it. I guess they are OK if you do a shitload of text processing, but my philosophy is that data should be processed in native (i.e. binary) form and text should only be used for interchange purposes. Even in that case, you can use text "protocols" such as XML, for which regexps are useless. So... If you have a buttload of (fairly) unstructured data to import... Knock yourself out. It doesn't happen to me. Text processing just isn't an issue for me. I don't think that makes me any less of a coder. My domain is simply different to yours.
Thankyou for your non-flammable answer. My Win2K doesn't crash very often. I am a game developer so I push it pretty hard, and sometimes the drivers aren't up to it. Not Microsoft's fault. I suppose that if I had the source to the drivers I could spend a week or so sorting that out. In reality I fire off an email, code a work-around, and get on with my life. Things are not really so different in Linux-land. Most people don't have the ability to debug driver problems. The GUI vs. shell thing is pretty much a religious issue. Some people might think it is fun to type "make run" or something but I prefer F7, Ctrl-F5. I am sure that you could set up your keyboard macros similarly. Whatever. The GUI works very well for me, and you may or may not be able to pry it from my cold, dead hands;) I don't have XP yet but the product activation thing was pretty much a storm in a tea-cup. If you bought it legally, it's not gonna be a big problem. I first installed Slackware in '93. I was into Unix at the time. It was OK... It never really inspired me that much though. To be fair, it pretty much sucked. I have installed various distributions since then. Ooh, look at all the pretty window managers... LOL As a developer, I have dealt with Microsoft for a long time. In my humble opinion they are pretty darned good to their developers. Their documentation has always been good (with a few notable exceptions). Now as an Xbox developer I can honestly say that I have never had as much pleasure working on a console. The libraries are good, the samples are good, the tools are second to none. My Xboxes are represented as shell namespaces. How freaking cool is that? I just copy files to an Explorer window. I can run the kernel debugger when things get hairy. You might not be able to relate to what I am saying but... I am just trying to tell you my perspective on things. As for Win9x. Let me tell you, I was at a "Chicago" developer conference in 95 (or was it 94?). It was so geeky. There was a woman (can't remember her name, but she was one of the hardcore developers) going into some serious detail about the Win16 Lock. Oh dear. What happened was, they took the 16 bit Windows 3.1, and added a load of 32 bit stuff to it. Only, the 16 bit stuff was non-re-entrant. They had some choices. The major two were: (A) Go through the whole source tree and make sure that specific resources were not used at the same time; (B) Just stick a bluddy great lock on any usage of the 16 bit subsystem. Guess what they did. Yes, and that is why Win9x sucks. To be fair, Microsoft never really intended Win9x to last for as long as it did. Cairo was supposed to come along and unify everything. Of course this did not happen until errrm.... Win2K or perhaps WinXP. But anyway. Anyone advocating Windows gave up on the Win9x line a very long time ago. It just wasn't advocatable! NT, on the other hand, is actually quite good, being as it is completely unrelated to the suckage that is Win9x! Anyway, I am about due another Linux install. Wish me luck!
Well, the last Linux I installed was Corel (what a bag o shite) and before that it was SuSE 6. Well, finally, someone sorted it out. Whoopee. And as for your condescending final note, well, what more could I expect?
Agreed. I'm installing Linux, and it's saying, "you haven't made a swap partition" or something. OK, well, I suppose I had better make one then. How big? Well errrm... Reboot into Windows, read the install readme, ok I printed it out now so I can refer to it again. It seems that my swap file size should be somehow related to the size of my physical memory. No hard and fast rules, and no real clues either. Shall I just make it quite big? Or will that slow it down? Should I read the kernel VM code to work out what it is doing or something? OK so I decide on a Gig of swap space. How much is that in cylinders? What is wrong with, "Linux will now create a swap partition. Click "OK" to do this automatically, or "Customize" if you would like to manually adjust the size or location of the partition"???
Well thanks, I will be sure to try that out next time I install Linux. The thing is though, no-one likes to become a newbie again. I have used Windows for 10+ years and I know my way around it. I'm sure I could know my way around Linux too, but would it be better? Or just different? I think of it a bit like learning languages. I could learn French (well, I already know it a bit, just like I know Linux a bit). What would that do for me? Not much. I don't live in France. I don't know anyone French who doesn't also speak English. I might learn it for fun, or if I needed to use it, but generally I get on pretty well with English. The French would like me to speak their language because it grows mindshare, but that is something that's good for them, not for me. That's my problem with a lot of this Linux advocacy. Show me why I would benefit from using it. And none of this hand-waving "it's superior in almost every way" kind of bullshit. I'm not stupid. I've been using computers for three quarters of my life. I can understand technical arguments so don't spare me the details.
(even though 90% of these can be found by a google search or the first 5 lines of the man page) That's all very well, if you know which feckin' man page you are supposed to be looking at. I used Unix at university ten years ago, so when I go for my biannual Linux install*, I am all like, "hmm, I remember that there was some sort of command to do that, umm it was two characters, ok 'ls/usr/bin', search search search, oh I wonder what that does, no that's not it,..." and so on.
* It's never taken me more than a couple of weeks to get pissed off and go back to Windows...
Now I don't know about you, but I ride a bicycle, and bicycles are dead quiet. The problem with this is that pedestrians keep stepping off the pavement (sidewalk) right in front of me (as in, someone did it yesterday). One thing that's quite good about cars is that they tend to make a bit of noise, and faster and bigger ones (the ones you really don't want to get hit by) tend to make the most. Well, nothing is louder than those little 2-stroke hairdryers, ok but there is a trend there. I do like the idea of these electric cars, but people are just not gonna hear them coming. I know you are supposed to actually look before you cross the road, but people just don't.
No, but then I don't need a licence to receive transmissions from microwave ovens either. Word to DrVxD, the courts have ruled that it's all completely above board.
Furthermore, I dunno if the 'merkin lot can get hold of it, but you need to check out "GLC" by the Comic Strip Presents... Featuring Robbie Coltrane playing Charles Bronson playing Ken Livingstone... Absolutely classic stuff! It's a bit of a strange situation really. He's one of the old school "Old Labour" lot, but somewhere along the line he managed to sort his image out, to the extent that he completely humiliated the Government, Blair and all that lot. I think everyone was a bit worried about his politics, but he effectively said, look, fuck all that, I'm gonna get off my arse and do something I feel passionately about. I don't think anyone thinks he isn't passionate about things... I think he got away with it, and good luck to him. Like you say, "Democracy". It's a funny old thing.
Actually it's £82. £78 is from Bath (I'm in Bristol too). Although this is top whack for second class (first class is a cool £134!!!). You can get there for £18.50 if you book a week in advance, but yeah, fuck that... I don't really want to go to London anyway, because it's a shithole, but when someone invites me I hardly ever get a week's notice... On the plus side, on the train you can read a book or use your laptop or whatever. Well, I don't have a laptop, and if I did take one to London it would probably get nicked. On the minus side... Where to start? The trains are not actually too bad (although I hear they are on other lines) but the stations smell of piss. The trains are late, pretty fucking inconceivable as they just travel along rails with no traffic in the way, but there you go. There's always some bitch on her mobile phone, talking conspicuously loudly about her packed social life. And some twat talking equally loudly on his mobile (probably to the aforementioned bitch) about rugby and the lads, and how everyone should "definitely get together at the weekend", "definitely", "yeah and all get really pissed"... I think we should all make an effort to use public transport instead of (inefficiently) using our cars, but when you look at the sad state of our trains, you have to despair a little bit... Buses would be ok if only they could actually move in London... You just get 50 people going nowhere in one vehicle... Many times I have been walking in London, and I'll see a car that I walked past five minutes before... And then I'll walk past it again! That is how bad the traffic is. London sucks!
Slashdot Mirror
How does Concorde get away with it?
Do you mean American English chips or British English chips? I am guessing you mean the foil bag around "crisps" rather than newspaper... Anyway, GPS is much weaker than the mobile network, and I wouldn't be surprised if a few layers of newspaper stopped the signal. That's the main problem with this watch thingy. Most of the time it will just report "dunno where your kiddie is, can't acquire any satellites". It doesn't work indoors, it doesn't work near buildings... It's dead useful when you are walking around in the great outdoors, but in a city it is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.
This is great. For $400 you can make it more likely that the nonce will go for your next door neighbour's kids instead of yours. Which is nice. Pretty soon everyone will have to pay this $400 "protection tax"... At which point it will be worthless because your kids are now just as likely to be targetted as your neighbours'. Oh what a wonderful world.
So when you got lost as a kid, what happened? Did you wander for months, and end up being raised by wild animals in the jungle?
I think not... Yes, even before the days of such technological gimmicks, people did actually manage to exist...
Yes, and futhermore the batteries are not going to last long. My wristwatch GPS is supposed to do about 70 readings or something. Then I have to recharge it. You certainly don't leave it getting constant readings... Bye bye battery! Add the fact that this thing has to act as a pager too...
Oh yeah and I bet it has an uncuttable wrist strap too. Seriously, this thing is junk. I mean, I have one of those Casio GPS watches, but at least I know it's a gimmick...
That's due to the steering geometry, not the gyroscopic effect. You could look at it like this: You are sitting backwards on the bike, and it is going forwards down the hill. The problem is that real wheel steering is inherently unstable.
Then why do we have different names for them?
Back to school for you!
Hahaha, get back under your bridge, troll!
VB lower level than C... LOL
I'm only a little Burrahobbit and I wouldn't make above a mouthful... So don't even bother!
You don't need the () with delete...
I use pointers in C++. What is scary about pointers?
Why use a complex structure when a simple one will do?
It's better to not branch at all, than to branch in assembly.
What actual evidence do you have that code is getting more sloppy? Or are you just waving your hands around making general statements, with the subtext that no-one can code as well as you?
Rubbish. Linus Torvalds is the soul of Linux. Everyone else is just a hanger-on. Debian represents a particular political movement. Linus made Linux to "scratch an itch", not for a political statement.
Regular expressions are implemented with finite automata. Finite automata are not implemented with regular expressions. Regular expressions are a red herring here... It is finite automata that you actually want your coders to understand.
The rest of your argument is just hand-waving, "almost always", "in general", "generally"... Very weak.
I know regular expressions, but funnily enough I almost never need them. Occasionally I will do a regexp search if an exact search is not good enough. I don't have Perl installed, and I can't say I have ever needed it.
I guess they are OK if you do a shitload of text processing, but my philosophy is that data should be processed in native (i.e. binary) form and text should only be used for interchange purposes. Even in that case, you can use text "protocols" such as XML, for which regexps are useless. So... If you have a buttload of (fairly) unstructured data to import... Knock yourself out. It doesn't happen to me. Text processing just isn't an issue for me. I don't think that makes me any less of a coder. My domain is simply different to yours.
Thankyou for your non-flammable answer. ;)
My Win2K doesn't crash very often. I am a game developer so I push it pretty hard, and sometimes the drivers aren't up to it. Not Microsoft's fault. I suppose that if I had the source to the drivers I could spend a week or so sorting that out. In reality I fire off an email, code a work-around, and get on with my life. Things are not really so different in Linux-land. Most people don't have the ability to debug driver problems.
The GUI vs. shell thing is pretty much a religious issue. Some people might think it is fun to type "make run" or something but I prefer F7, Ctrl-F5. I am sure that you could set up your keyboard macros similarly. Whatever. The GUI works very well for me, and you may or may not be able to pry it from my cold, dead hands
I don't have XP yet but the product activation thing was pretty much a storm in a tea-cup. If you bought it legally, it's not gonna be a big problem.
I first installed Slackware in '93. I was into Unix at the time. It was OK... It never really inspired me that much though. To be fair, it pretty much sucked. I have installed various distributions since then. Ooh, look at all the pretty window managers... LOL
As a developer, I have dealt with Microsoft for a long time. In my humble opinion they are pretty darned good to their developers. Their documentation has always been good (with a few notable exceptions). Now as an Xbox developer I can honestly say that I have never had as much pleasure working on a console. The libraries are good, the samples are good, the tools are second to none. My Xboxes are represented as shell namespaces. How freaking cool is that? I just copy files to an Explorer window. I can run the kernel debugger when things get hairy. You might not be able to relate to what I am saying but... I am just trying to tell you my perspective on things.
As for Win9x. Let me tell you, I was at a "Chicago" developer conference in 95 (or was it 94?). It was so geeky. There was a woman (can't remember her name, but she was one of the hardcore developers) going into some serious detail about the Win16 Lock. Oh dear. What happened was, they took the 16 bit Windows 3.1, and added a load of 32 bit stuff to it. Only, the 16 bit stuff was non-re-entrant. They had some choices. The major two were: (A) Go through the whole source tree and make sure that specific resources were not used at the same time; (B) Just stick a bluddy great lock on any usage of the 16 bit subsystem. Guess what they did. Yes, and that is why Win9x sucks. To be fair, Microsoft never really intended Win9x to last for as long as it did. Cairo was supposed to come along and unify everything. Of course this did not happen until errrm.... Win2K or perhaps WinXP. But anyway. Anyone advocating Windows gave up on the Win9x line a very long time ago. It just wasn't advocatable! NT, on the other hand, is actually quite good, being as it is completely unrelated to the suckage that is Win9x!
Anyway, I am about due another Linux install. Wish me luck!
Well, the last Linux I installed was Corel (what a bag o shite) and before that it was SuSE 6. Well, finally, someone sorted it out. Whoopee.
And as for your condescending final note, well, what more could I expect?
Agreed. I'm installing Linux, and it's saying, "you haven't made a swap partition" or something. OK, well, I suppose I had better make one then. How big? Well errrm... Reboot into Windows, read the install readme, ok I printed it out now so I can refer to it again. It seems that my swap file size should be somehow related to the size of my physical memory. No hard and fast rules, and no real clues either. Shall I just make it quite big? Or will that slow it down? Should I read the kernel VM code to work out what it is doing or something?
OK so I decide on a Gig of swap space. How much is that in cylinders?
What is wrong with, "Linux will now create a swap partition. Click "OK" to do this automatically, or "Customize" if you would like to manually adjust the size or location of the partition"???
Well thanks, I will be sure to try that out next time I install Linux.
The thing is though, no-one likes to become a newbie again. I have used Windows for 10+ years and I know my way around it. I'm sure I could know my way around Linux too, but would it be better? Or just different?
I think of it a bit like learning languages. I could learn French (well, I already know it a bit, just like I know Linux a bit). What would that do for me? Not much. I don't live in France. I don't know anyone French who doesn't also speak English. I might learn it for fun, or if I needed to use it, but generally I get on pretty well with English.
The French would like me to speak their language because it grows mindshare, but that is something that's good for them, not for me. That's my problem with a lot of this Linux advocacy. Show me why I would benefit from using it.
And none of this hand-waving "it's superior in almost every way" kind of bullshit. I'm not stupid. I've been using computers for three quarters of my life. I can understand technical arguments so don't spare me the details.
(even though 90% of these can be found by a google search or the first 5 lines of the man page) /usr/bin', search search search, oh I wonder what that does, no that's not it,..." and so on.
That's all very well, if you know which feckin' man page you are supposed to be looking at. I used Unix at university ten years ago, so when I go for my biannual Linux install*, I am all like, "hmm, I remember that there was some sort of command to do that, umm it was two characters, ok 'ls
* It's never taken me more than a couple of weeks to get pissed off and go back to Windows...
Now I don't know about you, but I ride a bicycle, and bicycles are dead quiet. The problem with this is that pedestrians keep stepping off the pavement (sidewalk) right in front of me (as in, someone did it yesterday).
One thing that's quite good about cars is that they tend to make a bit of noise, and faster and bigger ones (the ones you really don't want to get hit by) tend to make the most. Well, nothing is louder than those little 2-stroke hairdryers, ok but there is a trend there.
I do like the idea of these electric cars, but people are just not gonna hear them coming. I know you are supposed to actually look before you cross the road, but people just don't.
No, but then I don't need a licence to receive transmissions from microwave ovens either. Word to DrVxD, the courts have ruled that it's all completely above board.
Otherwise known as the London Orbital Car Park...
Furthermore, I dunno if the 'merkin lot can get hold of it, but you need to check out "GLC" by the Comic Strip Presents... Featuring Robbie Coltrane playing Charles Bronson playing Ken Livingstone... Absolutely classic stuff!
It's a bit of a strange situation really. He's one of the old school "Old Labour" lot, but somewhere along the line he managed to sort his image out, to the extent that he completely humiliated the Government, Blair and all that lot.
I think everyone was a bit worried about his politics, but he effectively said, look, fuck all that, I'm gonna get off my arse and do something I feel passionately about. I don't think anyone thinks he isn't passionate about things... I think he got away with it, and good luck to him.
Like you say, "Democracy". It's a funny old thing.
Sorry to just flat out contradict you, but the truth is actually the opposite of what you said. Radar detectors are perfectly legal here.
Actually it's £82. £78 is from Bath (I'm in Bristol too). Although this is top whack for second class (first class is a cool £134!!!). You can get there for £18.50 if you book a week in advance, but yeah, fuck that... I don't really want to go to London anyway, because it's a shithole, but when someone invites me I hardly ever get a week's notice...
On the plus side, on the train you can read a book or use your laptop or whatever. Well, I don't have a laptop, and if I did take one to London it would probably get nicked.
On the minus side... Where to start? The trains are not actually too bad (although I hear they are on other lines) but the stations smell of piss. The trains are late, pretty fucking inconceivable as they just travel along rails with no traffic in the way, but there you go. There's always some bitch on her mobile phone, talking conspicuously loudly about her packed social life. And some twat talking equally loudly on his mobile (probably to the aforementioned bitch) about rugby and the lads, and how everyone should "definitely get together at the weekend", "definitely", "yeah and all get really pissed"...
I think we should all make an effort to use public transport instead of (inefficiently) using our cars, but when you look at the sad state of our trains, you have to despair a little bit...
Buses would be ok if only they could actually move in London... You just get 50 people going nowhere in one vehicle... Many times I have been walking in London, and I'll see a car that I walked past five minutes before... And then I'll walk past it again! That is how bad the traffic is. London sucks!