A common misconception. However, as all True Believers know, God wrote in Lisp:
Now, some folks on the Internet put their faith in C++.
They swear that it's so powerful, it's what God used for us.
And maybe it lets mortals dredge their objects from the C.
But I think that explains why only God can make a tree.
MP3 is not really optimal for speech. E.g. speex would provide much better quality/bitrate ratio. Sadly, speex is not very well supported. (I would love to have a digital portable recorder with a built-in speex codec.)
Re:Post Mortem on BattleTech
on
FASA Dies
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· Score: 1
I've been reading these books since they came out and used to chat with Mike on GEnie, back in the good old days when there were some brains still at FASA. Some of those brains, also, hung out on GEnie. Somewhere I still have archives of thos messages. Good nostalgia there...
Could you please post those archives somewhere?
I for one would be interested in some insight on what FASA was like in the olden days...
I think we have again a case of the "beer vs speech" ambiguity with the word "free". Petreley apparently interprets the phrase with the "beer" sense of the word.
But I have never thought that "Information wants to be free" says anything about price. I think that the meaning is that since one can duplicate and distribute information utterly effortlessly nowadays, it only takes a single small leak for a piece of information to spread all over the world, if there is interest in it.
Of course, since this makes information common, it consequently often makes it pretty cheap. But that is just a side effect.
Information doesn't want to be costless, information wants to be unrestrained.
For whatever it's worth, check the contents(translated). It does say "DVD: Videos mit versteckten Botschaften" or "Video with hidden messages".
So apparently this isn't a/. hoax, at least. Of course it's hard to say if it's a c't hoax. Anyone have the actual physical magazine to verify what it really says?
The XFree86 Project, Inc. was a member of the X Consortium of old, too. At least in 1994 UUNET sponsored them and contributed the membership fee. So belonging to a standards body isn't anything new to them.
Actually, I'm kind of shady on the details of how they lost that membership. Could someone more knowledgeable tell what exactly happened when TOG took over X? I was under the impression that the new X.Org had more or less the same members as the X Consortium. Apparently not...
If you have a title about "Amiga Pioneers", I expect to find something about Jay Miner there, not some Commodore vice-prez. It's not like Commodore did the pioneering with Amiga, they just bought Jay's company when it would have died otherwise.
Don't forget the Hacker FAQ
on
Managing Geeks
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· Score: 1
On a lighter tone, the Hacker FAQ has provided the same sort of advice for ages. Check it out.
Yes, there are keyboards with a "native" dvorak layout. There are also (or you can make) transparent stickers to put on the keys so you can see both the dvorak and qwerty meanings of the keys.
You can also often manually remove the keys from the keyboard and rearrange them. However, this is often not sensible, because the keys in modern keyboards have a contour that makes them only really fit their original place.
In any case, all of these are really not necessary, and could even be considered harmful. Dvorak, unlike qwerty, is designed for touch-typing. You aren't even supposed to look at the keyboard when typing. So when you don't see the letters anywhere, you are forced to learn them by heart. Yes, it's hell for a month or so, but then you get used to it pretty quickly.
As for the relative merits of dvorak, I recommend it heartily. Dvorak may not be the "perfect" keyboard layout, but at least it has a sensible idea behind it. The only merit of qwerty nowadays is that everyone knows it. This "merit" finds a convenient analogue from the software world in M$ products.
As for myself, I've been using dvorak for about two years now. It took me a couple of months to learn it acceptably fluently, and currently I get a bit over 70 wps. Then again, I didn't know qwerty touch-typing when I started, so I had less to unlearn. YMMV.
I have also looked at the source code for many free projects such as GCC and GIMP and noticed that the code quality was quite low. For example, malloc() calls were usually unchecked (especially in GIMP). I have worked on commercial projects before, and checking malloc() is rule #1 -- if you happen to run out of memory while using GIMP, it'll blow up, where as commercial systems will simply fail to complete the current operations. If such a high profile package is of such low code quality, I expect the lesser profile packages are considerably more buggy.
Though it can be argued that the code quality in GIMP is low in places, I would just like to note that GIMP doesn't use vanilla malloc at all (well, almost), but the glib wrapper g_malloc. It doesn't need to be checked, because if the allocation fails, an error handler is automatically invoked. Thus, if the g_malloc call returns, it has succeeded.
Some plug-ins seem to use plain malloc, though. They should probably be fixed.
Hello. This, like many other comments here, is meta-discussion, and thus not really on topic. I wish there was a better place for it, but I cannot think of any. Pardon.
I don't find the several derogatory messages appearing here a disastrous problem. Practically all of them have been moderated down, and I must commend the moderators for such prompt action. Everyone is aware, hopefully, that at threshold -1 you do get to see utter crap. This time there is more of it, mostly because of a few persistent flamebaiters. However, as always, you get what you ask for, if you don't want to see the worst of the worst, keep your threshold higher. The moderation system works, in my opinion, remarkably well in general.
However, please, people, do not feed the flames by replying to completely obvious trolls. Trust the moderators to do their job. Flaming flamers is just a waste of mutual resources, most notably reading time.
I suspect that starting IP banning would not be worthwhile. It would open yet another can of worms about censorship, and IP banning is not a foolproof protection against misbehaving individuals in any case. Like I said, I find the current moderation system doing its job commendably well. The only problem that I see that the comments on this story have revealed is that people who really see effort to abuse the system may overwhelm, or at least overload the moderators, and it must be frustrating for them. I cannot really see an obvious way to remedy the situation.
There is one thing that I actually am worried about, though, perhaps reflecting the frustration of the moderators. There seem to be several comments that have been moderated down, that I for one really don't see deserving it. Please, moderators, remember that you should only consider the topicality, language, and information content of a comment, not the opinions it expresses.
In addition to the hordes of (quite appropriately downmoderated) comments mainly concerned with bodily fluids, there are some comments which merely criticize the late Mr. Stevens and point out that something good may, in their opinion, result from his demise. I find it most unsettling to see posts such as these, not blatantly offensive and quite topical, moderated down. Yes, the dead should be respected, because it's unfair to abuse someone who cannot defend himself. But that doesn't mean that one should suddenly only start saying positive things about the dead. People have a right to their opinions unbiased by their subject's death, and as long as they are expressed with dignity, and are topical, I see no reason to moderate them down, even if the moderators are offended by them.
Like some comments have already pointed out, had Bill Gates died, it's doubtful that comments remarking that his demise might be positive for Linux would get moderated down. As a more extreme example, consider the phrases "Good riddance, Hitler", and "Good riddance, Stevens", uttered right after the deaths of the respective individuals. If you are to be impartial, you should moderate both the same way.
Actually, I cannot help being reminded of the Daria episode "The Misery Chick" where a local celebrity dies, and Daria, being the only one criticizing him after his death, gets shunned by everyone. I wouldn't like to compare Slashdot readership to the students of Lawndale High...
PS. I wouldn't be at all surprised if JonKatz were to write a piece about this story, and all this discussion that followed, and again try to psychoanalyze the readership of slashdot..
Hey, that's Seebs' mom!
on
UNIX for Moms
·
· Score: 1
In case someone (who's obviously not a real hacker:-)) doesn't know, Peter Seebach is one of the most eminent C gurus on Usenet.
Check out his home page. Judging from that, I think I can hazard a guess as to the identity of the submitter of this piece..;-)
Slashdot Mirror
A common misconception. However, as all True Believers know, God wrote in Lisp:
MP3 is not really optimal for speech. E.g. speex would provide much better quality/bitrate ratio. Sadly, speex is not very well supported. (I would love to have a digital portable recorder with a built-in speex codec.)
Yet more reason for everyone to use Quikwriting.
It's faster once you learn it. I'm not sure whether it also is laden with patents, though.
GJC is indeed cool, and it had the name before GCJ. Watch those acronyms. :)
BTW, gcj and gjc work together. :)
Could you please post those archives somewhere? I for one would be interested in some insight on what FASA was like in the olden days...
I think we have again a case of the "beer vs speech" ambiguity with the word "free". Petreley apparently interprets the phrase with the "beer" sense of the word.
But I have never thought that "Information wants to be free" says anything about price. I think that the meaning is that since one can duplicate and distribute information utterly effortlessly nowadays, it only takes a single small leak for a piece of information to spread all over the world, if there is interest in it.
Of course, since this makes information common, it consequently often makes it pretty cheap. But that is just a side effect.
Information doesn't want to be costless, information wants to be unrestrained.
For whatever it's worth, check the contents (translated). It does say "DVD: Videos mit versteckten Botschaften" or "Video with hidden messages".
So apparently this isn't a /. hoax, at least. Of course it's hard to say if it's a c't hoax. Anyone have the actual physical magazine to verify what it really says?
The XFree86 Project, Inc. was a member of the X Consortium of old, too. At least in 1994 UUNET sponsored them and contributed the membership fee. So belonging to a standards body isn't anything new to them.
Actually, I'm kind of shady on the details of how they lost that membership. Could someone more knowledgeable tell what exactly happened when TOG took over X? I was under the impression that the new X.Org had more or less the same members as the X Consortium. Apparently not...
If you have a title about "Amiga Pioneers", I expect to find something about Jay Miner there, not some Commodore vice-prez. It's not like Commodore did the pioneering with Amiga, they just bought Jay's company when it would have died otherwise.
On a lighter tone, the Hacker FAQ has provided the same sort of advice for ages. Check it out.
Yes, there are keyboards with a "native" dvorak layout. There are also (or you can make) transparent stickers to put on the keys so you can see both the dvorak and qwerty meanings of the keys.
You can also often manually remove the keys from the keyboard and rearrange them. However, this is often not sensible, because the keys in modern keyboards have a contour that makes them only really fit their original place.
In any case, all of these are really not necessary, and could even be considered harmful. Dvorak, unlike qwerty, is designed for touch-typing. You aren't even supposed to look at the keyboard when typing. So when you don't see the letters anywhere, you are forced to learn them by heart. Yes, it's hell for a month or so, but then you get used to it pretty quickly.
As for the relative merits of dvorak, I recommend it heartily. Dvorak may not be the "perfect" keyboard layout, but at least it has a sensible idea behind it. The only merit of qwerty nowadays is that everyone knows it. This "merit" finds a convenient analogue from the software world in M$ products.
As for myself, I've been using dvorak for about two years now. It took me a couple of months to learn it acceptably fluently, and currently I get a bit over 70 wps. Then again, I didn't know qwerty touch-typing when I started, so I had less to unlearn. YMMV.
Hope this helps.
Though it can be argued that the code quality in GIMP is low in places, I would just like to note that GIMP doesn't use vanilla malloc at all (well, almost), but the glib wrapper g_malloc. It doesn't need to be checked, because if the allocation fails, an error handler is automatically invoked. Thus, if the g_malloc call returns, it has succeeded.
Some plug-ins seem to use plain malloc, though. They should probably be fixed.
Lauri Alanko
nether@gimp.org
Hello. This, like many other comments here, is meta-discussion, and thus not really on topic. I wish there was a better place for it, but I cannot think of any. Pardon.
I don't find the several derogatory messages appearing here a disastrous problem. Practically all of them have been moderated down, and I must commend the moderators for such prompt action. Everyone is aware, hopefully, that at threshold -1 you do get to see utter crap. This time there is more of it, mostly because of a few persistent flamebaiters. However, as always, you get what you ask for, if you don't want to see the worst of the worst, keep your threshold higher. The moderation system works, in my opinion, remarkably well in general.
However, please, people, do not feed the flames by replying to completely obvious trolls. Trust the moderators to do their job. Flaming flamers is just a waste of mutual resources, most notably reading time.
I suspect that starting IP banning would not be worthwhile. It would open yet another can of worms about censorship, and IP banning is not a foolproof protection against misbehaving individuals in any case. Like I said, I find the current moderation system doing its job commendably well. The only problem that I see that the comments on this story have revealed is that people who really see effort to abuse the system may overwhelm, or at least overload the moderators, and it must be frustrating for them. I cannot really see an obvious way to remedy the situation.
There is one thing that I actually am worried about, though, perhaps reflecting the frustration of the moderators. There seem to be several comments that have been moderated down, that I for one really don't see deserving it. Please, moderators, remember that you should only consider the topicality, language, and information content of a comment, not the opinions it expresses.
In addition to the hordes of (quite appropriately downmoderated) comments mainly concerned with bodily fluids, there are some comments which merely criticize the late Mr. Stevens and point out that something good may, in their opinion, result from his demise. I find it most unsettling to see posts such as these, not blatantly offensive and quite topical, moderated down. Yes, the dead should be respected, because it's unfair to abuse someone who cannot defend himself. But that doesn't mean that one should suddenly only start saying positive things about the dead. People have a right to their opinions unbiased by their subject's death, and as long as they are expressed with dignity, and are topical, I see no reason to moderate them down, even if the moderators are offended by them.
Like some comments have already pointed out, had Bill Gates died, it's doubtful that comments remarking that his demise might be positive for Linux would get moderated down. As a more extreme example, consider the phrases "Good riddance, Hitler", and "Good riddance, Stevens", uttered right after the deaths of the respective individuals. If you are to be impartial, you should moderate both the same way.
Actually, I cannot help being reminded of the Daria episode "The Misery Chick" where a local celebrity dies, and Daria, being the only one criticizing him after his death, gets shunned by everyone. I wouldn't like to compare Slashdot readership to the students of Lawndale High...
Lauri Alanko
la@iki.fi
PS. I wouldn't be at all surprised if JonKatz were to write a piece about this story, and all this discussion that followed, and again try to psychoanalyze the readership of slashdot..
In case someone (who's obviously not a real hacker :-)) doesn't know, Peter Seebach is one of the most eminent C gurus on Usenet.
Check out his home page. Judging from that, I think I can hazard a guess as to the identity of the submitter of this piece.. ;-)