Re:Daily user thanks Bram
on
Vim Turns 20
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· Score: 1
The UI on the undo trees is so horrible that I never use it. Every time I've tried, looking up how to make it do what I want has been more effort than just redoing the work. Persistent undo, however, is a killer feature. It's something I've wanted since I first started using vim, and I was very glad when it was introduced (shame it's not on by default).
Re:I like gvim, except...
on
Vim Turns 20
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· Score: 1
Complain to whoever packages vi for Debian. FreeBSD provides nvi as the system vi and vim as a package. vi behaves like vi, vim behaves like vim. Cursor keys work in both.
Re:I like gvim, except...
on
Vim Turns 20
·
· Score: 1
No, vim is an editor that is designed to work like vi. gvim is vim, it just bundles its own customised terminal emulator. If you grab the vim source tarball, you'll find the gvim sources in there.
The problem with software patents is not that they are software, it's that the vast majority of them are obvious and they tend to be overly broad. Anyone encountering vaguely the same problem would produce the same solution, or one sufficiently similar that it would be covered by the patent.
The other problem is that patents really fail at their primary purpose: encouraging disclosure. No one looks for algorithms by doing a patent search. People look for published papers, existing libraries, or invent something themselves. Any one of these can end up violating a patent, but without gaining any of the advantages of the patent system.
People campaigning against software patents often get bogged down by assuming that this is something that is limited to software patents. It isn't. Talk to people in almost any industry, and you'll hear the same thing. They either have big cross-licensing agreements that let them ignore all patents and just keep out new people, or they find themselves constantly having to pay royalties for things that they invented independently.
I would have no problem with software patents if they were limited to the scope that the patent office claims: novel, non-obvious, useful. If this happened, I doubt even 1% of current patents would stand up.
rsync? Ouch! Sounds like a great way to wear out the disks and waste a lot of CPU.
If you want cheap remote replication, then use ZFS on both ends, and use zfs send / receive to move hourly snapshots to the machine that isn't running any services and isn't accepting any incoming traffic except the ZFS data stream.
So you revert to the last snapshot. Or you mount the last snapshot and recover that file (you are making regular snapshots of your volumes, right?). That is not the problem with RAID. The problems that RAID does not address are:
What happens if there is a bug in the filesystem driver that causes the disk to be slowly filled with nonsense? Or the machine is compromised and malware overwrites the existing data.
What happens when thieves steal the server? Or when lightning strikes and fries all of the disk controllers?
The second point is addressed by distributed filesystems - they may steal the server, but they (probably) won't steal the servers in both data centres at the same time. The first one can only really be addressed by off-site backups onto write-only media, or at least onto media that are removed from any machine that can write to them and stored safely.
RAID is not a complete backup solution, but RAID and snapshots do provide most of the benefits at a fraction of the cost. If you want the other benefits, you need to be willing to spend a lot more money.
I did an internship at a patent law firm in the UK, and I was told during the interview never to pronounce it pay-tent, as that's a sign of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. The accepted pronunciation within the legal profession in the UK is pah-tent. Pay-tent is largely common among people who saw the word written before they heard it spoken.
Is he your only MEP? If not, bug one of the others. One of mine is a member of the FFII, so she's pretty much guaranteed to vote against it. One is a member of UKIP, so he votes against everything without engaging his brain (to quote Gilbert and Sullivan, that is assuming that he's got any). The other two may not have made up their minds yet.
The shocking thing is that there was apparently someone somewhere who thought a cook was involved in preparing MREs. This person, like Tom Lehrer's mess sergeant, probably has his tastebuds shot off in the war...
That said, the desserts aren't too bad, although mainly because they are 90% sugar...
The clue that it was either satire or a troll should have been when he got to 'small businesses'. It's almost impossible for small businesses to get government contracts.
Steve Jobs was paid a $1 salary. Not sure about the USA, but I'm pretty sure that you are also supposed to declare non-monetary compensation. I vaguely remember one tech CxO (maybe Steve Jobs, possibly someone at Google) getting into trouble for not declaring free use of the corporate jet as taxable income.
Several people I was at university with had similar experiences. They'd smoke marijuana and tobacco mixed together, and ended up addicted to nicotine. Quitting THC was easy, quitting nicotine took them years of effort.
If you do that in the UK, then you can be asked to pay the entire debt back when you leave. If you are a UK citizen working abroad, then you still have to file a tax return in the UK (although if you are working in a country with a tax treaty with the UK, then income tax that you pay there is subtracted from the amount that is due). You only get out of the debt if you completely renounce your citizenship and live in a country with no treaty obligations to the UK. That's possible, but it's a much bigger step than most people are willing to take to avoid what amounts to an extra 2-5% on income tax...
I don't know what it's like in the USA, but one of the big problems that we have in the UK is that successive governments have successfully destroyed our higher-level vocational education system. The academic educational system has then been expected to take all of the people who should have been on vocational courses. This has meant:
Academic courses have been dumbed down because they've had to widen their selection criteria.
Academic courses have been forced to become more vocational because businesses want to hire people with vocational qualifications, and there aren't any anymore.
Students who would have done well and learned something useful with a vocational course now get a worthless academic qualification
The solution isn't to make the higher educational system vocational, it's to understand that there is a place for both academic and vocational higher education, and that an academic qualification is not intrinsically more valuable than a vocational one.
He seems to be under the impression that the storage devices have three states: one, zero, and undefined. This is not the case. There is no undefined state, when flash is erased all of the bits are set to one, when it is written some are set to zero. There is no difference in energy state between the a block that is erased and a block that is storing all ones. It is possible that the zero energy state has more mass than the one energy state, but that's not what he is claiming. Expect to see this show up in The Guardian's Bad Science column soon...
If you can't answer the question 'what does the support buy you?', then you can't answer this. Most of the time, when people talk about support at the enterprise level they mean adding features and fixing bugs that are important to the company paying the bills. Do you have the expertise in-house to do this? If so, then there is no advantage in Red Hat over CentOS (unless it means you can make some of your in-house people redundant). If not, then it has some value. If you can do it all in house, then do: that's the main economic advantage of Free Software, that you always have competition when it comes to providing support, you never have one vendor that is the only one that can fix the bugs that you care about.
If you can do it in house, then don't try to persuade your boss to let you pay Red Hat, persuade him to let you send any fixes or enhancements that your team makes to the relevant upstream projects. This is likely to be much more valuable to those projects than your handing over a pile of money to a third party.
Latency. You don't want to be hosting a datacenter for customers in North America in Europe (or vice versa) because the latency over the transatlantic link will slow everything down (not to mention cost a lot).
I didn't take it, because a lot of R&D money is going into panels at the moment. They've gone from about 8% to 12% efficiency for cheap rooftop panels in the last couple of years, and 15% panels are available now. The theoretical peak is somewhere around 40%, and the practical peak before it starts to get really expensive is probably somewhere in the 20-30% range. Given the current rates of development, if I wait about five years then I probably won't get the subsidy (it's slowly being phased out), but I will get twice as much electricity generated for the same investment. Of course, I'd still encourage all of the early adopters to buy now and drive the prices down for me...
That said, I only have a house to power. If I had a large datacenter, then I'd be a lot more tempted. The cost of waiting five years would be a lot more, and I'd probably want to rebuild everything in ten years anyway, so building something that will be obsolete in a decade isn't so important, especially because on such a large scale it's easy to incrementally replace panels as more efficient ones become available and the old ones wear out.
Slashdot Mirror
The UI on the undo trees is so horrible that I never use it. Every time I've tried, looking up how to make it do what I want has been more effort than just redoing the work. Persistent undo, however, is a killer feature. It's something I've wanted since I first started using vim, and I was very glad when it was introduced (shame it's not on by default).
Complain to whoever packages vi for Debian. FreeBSD provides nvi as the system vi and vim as a package. vi behaves like vi, vim behaves like vim. Cursor keys work in both.
No, vim is an editor that is designed to work like vi. gvim is vim, it just bundles its own customised terminal emulator. If you grab the vim source tarball, you'll find the gvim sources in there.
The Single UNIX Specification and POSIX require vi to exist. You may find stuff breaks in interesting ways if it doesn't...
The problem with software patents is not that they are software, it's that the vast majority of them are obvious and they tend to be overly broad. Anyone encountering vaguely the same problem would produce the same solution, or one sufficiently similar that it would be covered by the patent.
The other problem is that patents really fail at their primary purpose: encouraging disclosure. No one looks for algorithms by doing a patent search. People look for published papers, existing libraries, or invent something themselves. Any one of these can end up violating a patent, but without gaining any of the advantages of the patent system.
People campaigning against software patents often get bogged down by assuming that this is something that is limited to software patents. It isn't. Talk to people in almost any industry, and you'll hear the same thing. They either have big cross-licensing agreements that let them ignore all patents and just keep out new people, or they find themselves constantly having to pay royalties for things that they invented independently.
I would have no problem with software patents if they were limited to the scope that the patent office claims: novel, non-obvious, useful. If this happened, I doubt even 1% of current patents would stand up.
rsync? Ouch! Sounds like a great way to wear out the disks and waste a lot of CPU.
If you want cheap remote replication, then use ZFS on both ends, and use zfs send / receive to move hourly snapshots to the machine that isn't running any services and isn't accepting any incoming traffic except the ZFS data stream.
So you revert to the last snapshot. Or you mount the last snapshot and recover that file (you are making regular snapshots of your volumes, right?). That is not the problem with RAID. The problems that RAID does not address are:
The second point is addressed by distributed filesystems - they may steal the server, but they (probably) won't steal the servers in both data centres at the same time. The first one can only really be addressed by off-site backups onto write-only media, or at least onto media that are removed from any machine that can write to them and stored safely.
RAID is not a complete backup solution, but RAID and snapshots do provide most of the benefits at a fraction of the cost. If you want the other benefits, you need to be willing to spend a lot more money.
I did an internship at a patent law firm in the UK, and I was told during the interview never to pronounce it pay-tent, as that's a sign of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. The accepted pronunciation within the legal profession in the UK is pah-tent. Pay-tent is largely common among people who saw the word written before they heard it spoken.
Is he your only MEP? If not, bug one of the others. One of mine is a member of the FFII, so she's pretty much guaranteed to vote against it. One is a member of UKIP, so he votes against everything without engaging his brain (to quote Gilbert and Sullivan, that is assuming that he's got any). The other two may not have made up their minds yet.
For anyone else in the UK, don't forget that there is a government-funded portal for sending letters to elected representatives
Maybe you skipped the desserts? They may not be pure sugar, but they certainly taste like it...
The shocking thing is that there was apparently someone somewhere who thought a cook was involved in preparing MREs. This person, like Tom Lehrer's mess sergeant, probably has his tastebuds shot off in the war...
That said, the desserts aren't too bad, although mainly because they are 90% sugar...
Pirated? EA made C&C a free download a few years ago for the twelfth anniversary.
Ooo, can I be a contractor for the agency responsible for creating and maintaining the web site please?
The clue that it was either satire or a troll should have been when he got to 'small businesses'. It's almost impossible for small businesses to get government contracts.
Steve Jobs was paid a $1 salary. Not sure about the USA, but I'm pretty sure that you are also supposed to declare non-monetary compensation. I vaguely remember one tech CxO (maybe Steve Jobs, possibly someone at Google) getting into trouble for not declaring free use of the corporate jet as taxable income.
Please don't confuse GNA with GNAA.
Several people I was at university with had similar experiences. They'd smoke marijuana and tobacco mixed together, and ended up addicted to nicotine. Quitting THC was easy, quitting nicotine took them years of effort.
If you do that in the UK, then you can be asked to pay the entire debt back when you leave. If you are a UK citizen working abroad, then you still have to file a tax return in the UK (although if you are working in a country with a tax treaty with the UK, then income tax that you pay there is subtracted from the amount that is due). You only get out of the debt if you completely renounce your citizenship and live in a country with no treaty obligations to the UK. That's possible, but it's a much bigger step than most people are willing to take to avoid what amounts to an extra 2-5% on income tax...
The solution isn't to make the higher educational system vocational, it's to understand that there is a place for both academic and vocational higher education, and that an academic qualification is not intrinsically more valuable than a vocational one.
He seems to be under the impression that the storage devices have three states: one, zero, and undefined. This is not the case. There is no undefined state, when flash is erased all of the bits are set to one, when it is written some are set to zero. There is no difference in energy state between the a block that is erased and a block that is storing all ones. It is possible that the zero energy state has more mass than the one energy state, but that's not what he is claiming. Expect to see this show up in The Guardian's Bad Science column soon...
If you can't answer the question 'what does the support buy you?', then you can't answer this. Most of the time, when people talk about support at the enterprise level they mean adding features and fixing bugs that are important to the company paying the bills. Do you have the expertise in-house to do this? If so, then there is no advantage in Red Hat over CentOS (unless it means you can make some of your in-house people redundant). If not, then it has some value. If you can do it all in house, then do: that's the main economic advantage of Free Software, that you always have competition when it comes to providing support, you never have one vendor that is the only one that can fix the bugs that you care about.
If you can do it in house, then don't try to persuade your boss to let you pay Red Hat, persuade him to let you send any fixes or enhancements that your team makes to the relevant upstream projects. This is likely to be much more valuable to those projects than your handing over a pile of money to a third party.
Latency. You don't want to be hosting a datacenter for customers in North America in Europe (or vice versa) because the latency over the transatlantic link will slow everything down (not to mention cost a lot).
Slashdot thinks you're an idiot.
See what's wrong with the original statement now?
Apple is just investing in the Sun to encourage Oracle's lawsuits against Android.
I didn't take it, because a lot of R&D money is going into panels at the moment. They've gone from about 8% to 12% efficiency for cheap rooftop panels in the last couple of years, and 15% panels are available now. The theoretical peak is somewhere around 40%, and the practical peak before it starts to get really expensive is probably somewhere in the 20-30% range. Given the current rates of development, if I wait about five years then I probably won't get the subsidy (it's slowly being phased out), but I will get twice as much electricity generated for the same investment. Of course, I'd still encourage all of the early adopters to buy now and drive the prices down for me...
That said, I only have a house to power. If I had a large datacenter, then I'd be a lot more tempted. The cost of waiting five years would be a lot more, and I'd probably want to rebuild everything in ten years anyway, so building something that will be obsolete in a decade isn't so important, especially because on such a large scale it's easy to incrementally replace panels as more efficient ones become available and the old ones wear out.