mozilla is not fast (interface-wise) and robust yet
Agreed! Mozilla might be able to render a
700-post Slashdot nested table in 3 seconds,
but it takes as long to open the bloody-freaking
"File" menu.
Also, the GTK-style right-click widgets are
simply not as efficient as the Motif ones.
(Here's one place I feel Motif wins.) In
the Motif-based Netscape's, I can right click,
and while holding the button, slide over and
select "Back" and release, all in about a half-second. In the GTK-based Mozilla (and Netscape 6), I have to click, release, wait
for the window to pop up, select back, click,
release. Slow.
Another annoying tidbit of Mozilla (and NS6)
is that it blacks out the screen when it starts
loading a new page. On NS4.7x, I can click
on a link, and keep reading the current page (I can
even scroll up and down) while I wait for the
other page to load. In MZ and NS6, as soon as
it gets a byte from the remote webserver, it
blacks the page out. No more "pipelining" my
web-browsing as I visit lagged sites. Slower
still.
And then there's the small detail that refreshing
under various pop-ups and pull-downs is hit-or-miss, and the whole GUI packs up and
goes South a couple times an hour, and it all
just doesn't add up to an efficient, enjoyable browsing
experience.
Thanks! That gave me the solution I needed.
The key: Append "&newguid=42" to the
URL for the link, and the page loads since it
thinks I've visited the msid.msn.com site
and gotten a GUID from Microsoft. As long as
I randomize that GUID with every visit, it's
a meaningless number.
Maybe I can hack together a simple server that
I can redirect msid.msn.com to to generate
pseudo-random GUIDs with automagically...
Not really. The article is discussing the
odds of an extraterrestrial object hitting the
earth. Someone asked about the terminology being
used to state the odds that that will happen.
This post explains the terminology.
Actually, I think they're slightly different.
An "N in M" probibility means that the probability
p of that event occurring is given by p = N/M. Here, N specifies the
relative number of outcomes that represent the event
under consideration, and M represents the
relative number of total
number of possible outcomes.
In contrast, "M to N" means that if you performed
M + N trials, one event would occur M times and
the other would occur N times. Here, M and N
represent the relative number of outcomes of
two distinct events, with no statement made about
the total number of possible outcomes. Often, the number
associated with N is the event in question, and
the "other event" is merely "the event associated
with N didn't occur." In that case, the probability p that the event associated with N occurs is given by p = N / (N + M).
So, by this argument, 1-in-2 odds is equivalent to 1-to-1 odds. The idea is that the first nomenclature specifies the likelihood of a single event compared to the total of all events, and the second nomenclature specifies the likelihood of
one event relative to another event. Got that?
At any rate, with a 1-in-500 chance, the difference between 1-in-500 and 500-to-1 is
negligible.
Every MSNBC link that's posted here in/. doesn't
work for me. My browser just ping-pongs between
two different MSNBC web servers and refuses to
load a page. Does anyone have a link which actually works?
Technical details: Netscape 4.72 on Solaris, running w/ cookies off, behind two layers of proxy (one Junkbuster, one corporate). It also fails
to work on my machine at home (Netscape 4.7x on Linux, proxied through Junkbuster only).
Unhelpful comments about using a crappy browser gleefully ignored.
You can't whore for karma if you're above the karma cap. I actually lose karma for posting most of the time anyway, even if it's modded up, because inevitably someone wastes a point on a (-1, Overrated) mod. Like I care or anything.
On the plus side for me, I carved my 17GB drive
into multiple ~4GB partitions, so if there is any quadratic behavior, I cut it by
a factor of 4. Actually, I should reformat
those w/ 4K clusters and far fewer inodes, since
I'm mostly using them for bulk CD-ROM image storage. (The bulk of the fsck time
is spent checking block bitmaps and inodes. With 4K clusters, the block bitmaps are 1/4th the size, and I get far fewer indirect-blocks for huge CD images. With fewer inodes, I spend less time checking inodes that never have and never will point to files.)
Once installed, ReiserFS looks like EXT2 to the
applications, etc. You still need to "reformat"
the drive, though. There isn't a way to convert the filesystem in-place when going from EXT2 to
ReiserFS. (You can, however, convert an
EXT2 filesystem to EXT3 in-place.)
Re: "cat and paste": Cute. The scripts I write
are too involved for that though. Like that maze
solver...
Ok some questions: What do you mean "deleting the end of a line"?
You mean [Shift][D] to delete from cursor
to end of line?
And about hjkl... Well I wrote a PacMan
clone once which used those for arrows too..
Speaking of writing shells... I once wrote a
"metashell" that sat over/bin/sh in
shell script. It provided an alias facility,
command history, and commandline editing.
(The latter two with the help of a C helper
program.) The alias facility was set up to
integrate w/ screen so that certain
programs (like vi and less)would launch their own screen window.
Not that I'm saying that it isn't possible that Intel is doing this, but the fact that they suddenly submitted a bunch of patents hardly constitutes evidence.
Also, as I understand, it's pretty typical for patents on a CPU to be filed all in a burst around the same time the CPU's info's being rolled out
to market. Part of the reason for this is that
the patent disclosures themselves sit around
in the pipeline, gradually making their way to
the USPTO. Then the marketing-side of
the company decides to do a Release to Market of
some more details, so there's a sudden rush to
flush the pipeline so that the company doesn't
forego any patent protection on those patented
ideas that may be presented in the RTM.
At least, that's how it looks like it works here for the patents I was involved with on TI's TMS320C6400 CPU. I won't comment further on the
content of those patent applications, or the
purpose behind them other than to say I think
all the semiconductor companies play the same
game here.
So, don't just single out Intel, 'kay?
And put your conspiracy theories away. This
is just business as usual, and
its purpose is to give the originating
company an advantage and a defensible barrier
against direct competition by cloning. It
just so happens that cloning is more important
in Intel's world than many other worlds, so
people get hypersensitive about it.
Perhaps he meant fsck? I know if I take
down my machine incorrectly, I have to sit there
awhile when my 17GB disk fscks, although
more like 5 or 6 minutes, not anywhere near the
half-hour you'd guess by interpolating from
the original poster's numbers.
Are some of fsck's algorithms quadratic
in nature or something?
You obviously don't know what you're talking
about. You need a couple more layers of
indirection, and a bunch of Hungarian Notation
thrown in for good measure.
Thanks! Every time I see PS2, I wonder "What
does this have to do with mouse and keyboard
connectors?" (...which is the only lasting impression the PS/2 made on the world. Sorry, MCA may
have been better than ISA and even EISA, but
EISA had backward compatiblity.)
By the way, here's some ancient related trivia.
The INTV Productions video game cartridge "Triple Challenge" integrated the previously-released Chess, Checkers and Backgammon on a single game cartridge. In its original form, the Chess cartridge came equipped with a 1K SRAM onboard,
as the game required extra memory.
At the time INTV went to produce the Triple Challenge carts, they discovered that since RAM
had grown in capacity over the years, 1K SRAMs
weren't available in quantity for reasonable prices, and larger SRAMs were too expensive as
well. They almost had to cancel the Triple
Challenge cart.
That is, until they found someone with a stack
of 2K SRAMs, in which half the RAM was good, the
other half was bad. Since the game only needed
1K, it ignored the bad half, and off they went.
I used to use joe myself, as it was
nearly identical to the old Turbo Pascal 3.0
editor. (Both were inspired by WordStar 2000.)
Ok, have I totally dated myself yet? Honest,
I'm only 25.
Believe me, Pete, once you learn an editor like
VI, you can't go back. People say they get dizzy
watching me edit files in VI. Also, VIM has
rectangular cut-and-paste -- how could you NOT
find that cool?
For scripting, I'll just use the shell, you freak!:)
Yeah, but how do you type in the shell script?
When I made that statement in my earlier post,
I had a specific instance in mind at work. I
sent a new employee some lines to paste into
his.cshrc (I won't get into Bourne
vs. C shell wars here), and he pasted them in
using PICO. They word-wrapped and were totally
hosed. Screwed up his PATH too. Thankfully, I know the full path to VI
so I was able to repair the damage.
I don't usually need to know any PICO switches, since
I don't care to use it. The people who I know
that do use PICO at work are the sort
that barely understand Unix anyway. (I could
throw some more inflammatory fuel onto this fire, such as focus-follows-mouse, vs. focus-follows-click, and using CDE vs. anything
else, but I won't.) I just get stuck cleaning up
the damage.
It's good to know there is a way to turn
off word-wrapping, though. I'll let the affected
parties know, next time it comes up.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed! Mozilla might be able to render a 700-post Slashdot nested table in 3 seconds, but it takes as long to open the bloody-freaking "File" menu.
Also, the GTK-style right-click widgets are simply not as efficient as the Motif ones. (Here's one place I feel Motif wins.) In the Motif-based Netscape's, I can right click, and while holding the button, slide over and select "Back" and release, all in about a half-second. In the GTK-based Mozilla (and Netscape 6), I have to click, release, wait for the window to pop up, select back, click, release. Slow.
Another annoying tidbit of Mozilla (and NS6) is that it blacks out the screen when it starts loading a new page. On NS4.7x, I can click on a link, and keep reading the current page (I can even scroll up and down) while I wait for the other page to load. In MZ and NS6, as soon as it gets a byte from the remote webserver, it blacks the page out. No more "pipelining" my web-browsing as I visit lagged sites. Slower still.
And then there's the small detail that refreshing under various pop-ups and pull-downs is hit-or-miss, and the whole GUI packs up and goes South a couple times an hour, and it all just doesn't add up to an efficient, enjoyable browsing experience.
Anyway...
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
No, subliminal.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Thanks! That gave me the solution I needed. The key: Append "&newguid=42" to the URL for the link, and the page loads since it thinks I've visited the msid.msn.com site and gotten a GUID from Microsoft. As long as I randomize that GUID with every visit, it's a meaningless number.
Maybe I can hack together a simple server that I can redirect msid.msn.com to to generate pseudo-random GUIDs with automagically...
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Not really. The article is discussing the odds of an extraterrestrial object hitting the earth. Someone asked about the terminology being used to state the odds that that will happen. This post explains the terminology.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Actually, I think they're slightly different. An "N in M" probibility means that the probability p of that event occurring is given by p = N/M . Here, N specifies the relative number of outcomes that represent the event under consideration, and M represents the relative number of total number of possible outcomes.
In contrast, "M to N" means that if you performed M + N trials, one event would occur M times and the other would occur N times. Here, M and N represent the relative number of outcomes of two distinct events, with no statement made about the total number of possible outcomes. Often, the number associated with N is the event in question, and the "other event" is merely "the event associated with N didn't occur." In that case, the probability p that the event associated with N occurs is given by p = N / (N + M) .
So, by this argument, 1-in-2 odds is equivalent to 1-to-1 odds. The idea is that the first nomenclature specifies the likelihood of a single event compared to the total of all events, and the second nomenclature specifies the likelihood of one event relative to another event. Got that?
At any rate, with a 1-in-500 chance, the difference between 1-in-500 and 500-to-1 is negligible.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Every MSNBC link that's posted here in /. doesn't
work for me. My browser just ping-pongs between
two different MSNBC web servers and refuses to
load a page. Does anyone have a link which actually works?
Technical details: Netscape 4.72 on Solaris, running w/ cookies off, behind two layers of proxy (one Junkbuster, one corporate). It also fails to work on my machine at home (Netscape 4.7x on Linux, proxied through Junkbuster only).
Unhelpful comments about using a crappy browser gleefully ignored.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Maybe he's a mutant cross between Weird Al and Ned Flanders. Pathologically Ecclectic Recombinant Larry.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
You can't whore for karma if you're above the karma cap. I actually lose karma for posting most of the time anyway, even if it's modded up , because inevitably someone wastes a point on a (-1, Overrated) mod. Like I care or anything.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
No, Larry Wall is "Weird Al" Yankovic without the hair.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
On the plus side for me, I carved my 17GB drive into multiple ~4GB partitions, so if there is any quadratic behavior, I cut it by a factor of 4. Actually, I should reformat those w/ 4K clusters and far fewer inodes, since I'm mostly using them for bulk CD-ROM image storage. (The bulk of the fsck time is spent checking block bitmaps and inodes. With 4K clusters, the block bitmaps are 1/4th the size, and I get far fewer indirect-blocks for huge CD images. With fewer inodes, I spend less time checking inodes that never have and never will point to files.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Once installed, ReiserFS looks like EXT2 to the applications, etc. You still need to "reformat" the drive, though. There isn't a way to convert the filesystem in-place when going from EXT2 to ReiserFS. (You can, however, convert an EXT2 filesystem to EXT3 in-place.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Re: "cat and paste": Cute. The scripts I write are too involved for that though. Like that maze solver...
Ok some questions: What do you mean "deleting the end of a line"? You mean [Shift][D] to delete from cursor to end of line? And about hjkl... Well I wrote a PacMan clone once which used those for arrows too..
Speaking of writing shells... I once wrote a "metashell" that sat over /bin/sh in
shell script. It provided an alias facility,
command history, and commandline editing.
(The latter two with the help of a C helper
program.) The alias facility was set up to
integrate w/ screen so that certain
programs (like vi and less)would launch their own screen window.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Ha, ha. So I take it you saw the email I sent you with my wanna-be IOCCC entry?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Ah, but INTERCAL has prior art, with its bitwise, unary AND .
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Also, as I understand, it's pretty typical for patents on a CPU to be filed all in a burst around the same time the CPU's info's being rolled out to market. Part of the reason for this is that the patent disclosures themselves sit around in the pipeline, gradually making their way to the USPTO. Then the marketing-side of the company decides to do a Release to Market of some more details, so there's a sudden rush to flush the pipeline so that the company doesn't forego any patent protection on those patented ideas that may be presented in the RTM.
At least, that's how it looks like it works here for the patents I was involved with on TI's TMS320C6400 CPU. I won't comment further on the content of those patent applications, or the purpose behind them other than to say I think all the semiconductor companies play the same game here.
So, don't just single out Intel, 'kay? And put your conspiracy theories away. This is just business as usual, and its purpose is to give the originating company an advantage and a defensible barrier against direct competition by cloning. It just so happens that cloning is more important in Intel's world than many other worlds, so people get hypersensitive about it.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
The article says that Idea Corp actually holds most of the IP for Itanium. I'm sure they're not hurting.
And typically, patent royalties are paid per unit shipped, not per cycles executed.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
ALthough this was mod'd down as flamebait, if you have any actual hard info about what holes were 'sploited, that'd be useful to share, y'know?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Perhaps he meant fsck? I know if I take down my machine incorrectly, I have to sit there awhile when my 17GB disk fscks, although more like 5 or 6 minutes, not anywhere near the half-hour you'd guess by interpolating from the original poster's numbers.
Are some of fsck's algorithms quadratic in nature or something?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Gallagher. And his joke ("There's a brightness knob on the TV, but it doesn't work.") I don't think started with him.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. You need a couple more layers of indirection, and a bunch of Hungarian Notation thrown in for good measure.
(Tongue firmly planted in cheek.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
It works pretty good, but it gave me a horrible case of red-eye.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Thanks! Every time I see PS2, I wonder "What does this have to do with mouse and keyboard connectors?" (...which is the only lasting impression the PS/2 made on the world. Sorry, MCA may have been better than ISA and even EISA, but EISA had backward compatiblity.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
By the way, here's some ancient related trivia. The INTV Productions video game cartridge "Triple Challenge" integrated the previously-released Chess, Checkers and Backgammon on a single game cartridge. In its original form, the Chess cartridge came equipped with a 1K SRAM onboard, as the game required extra memory.
At the time INTV went to produce the Triple Challenge carts, they discovered that since RAM had grown in capacity over the years, 1K SRAMs weren't available in quantity for reasonable prices, and larger SRAMs were too expensive as well. They almost had to cancel the Triple Challenge cart.
That is, until they found someone with a stack of 2K SRAMs, in which half the RAM was good, the other half was bad. Since the game only needed 1K, it ignored the bad half, and off they went.
Cool, eh?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I used to use joe myself, as it was nearly identical to the old Turbo Pascal 3.0 editor. (Both were inspired by WordStar 2000.) Ok, have I totally dated myself yet? Honest, I'm only 25.
Believe me, Pete, once you learn an editor like VI, you can't go back. People say they get dizzy watching me edit files in VI. Also, VIM has rectangular cut-and-paste -- how could you NOT find that cool?
Yeah, but how do you type in the shell script? When I made that statement in my earlier post, I had a specific instance in mind at work. I sent a new employee some lines to paste into his .cshrc (I won't get into Bourne
vs. C shell wars here), and he pasted them in
using PICO. They word-wrapped and were totally
hosed. Screwed up his PATH too. Thankfully, I know the full path to VI
so I was able to repair the damage.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I don't usually need to know any PICO switches, since I don't care to use it. The people who I know that do use PICO at work are the sort that barely understand Unix anyway. (I could throw some more inflammatory fuel onto this fire, such as focus-follows-mouse, vs. focus-follows-click, and using CDE vs. anything else, but I won't.) I just get stuck cleaning up the damage.
It's good to know there is a way to turn off word-wrapping, though. I'll let the affected parties know, next time it comes up.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!