At my university we currently have a software project running. Or rather, it's part of the curriculum that during basic studies every CS student has to do a one-year project, which changes every year. Our assignment is to redesign the IEEE Reengineering Bibliography (how fitting) using Java. The best solution is to be used by the IEEE - no wonder, since the old site was put together by the lecturer responsible for the project (he also maintains it and is responsible for 90% of the entries. It's not a very popular site). Put together rather badly, I might add - the site went live in 1995, wasn't updated design-wise a single time (do you remember what passed as good site design back in 1995? The site barely lives up to that) and on the server side is a horrible hodgepodge of awk, sed, CGI/C++ and Bourne shell scripts. Using CVS to backup the database, which happens to reside in two text files, one being a BibTeX document and the other one apparently in a custom format.
I'm not saying that awk, sed, the Bourne shell, C++, CVS and BibTeX are bad, but mixing them in a live application creates something vaguely resembling a Rube Goldberg device. Ugh.
It's almost stable on my AMD64 Gentoo box. The precompiled 1.0.7 was pretty solid (I used the precompiled one due to Flash issues with self-compiled Fx on AMD64), but 1.5.0 is horribly unstable. I can't switch virtual desktops without Fx and Thunderbird both silently terminating. Unfortunately I won't go back to 1.0.7 as 1.5 has some pretty useful improvements. So currently I'm living without multiple desktops... Well, I only used the second desktop to park XMMS anyway, but still I'd like Fx to be a bit more stable.
On the Mac Fx 1.5 is amazing. It's a bit faster than 1.0.7 and eats up less memory. It's also quite stable. The only thing that reliably freezes it is the FoxyTunes extension - starting Fx, then closing and reopening iTunes and then clicking to FoxyTunes reliably freezes Fx. Perhaps I should contact the author...
Hold on.. he said powerbook g4. That could be a lot slower than 1200 mhz. I don't know if you know this, but there is a big difference in performance between an 800 mhz and 1200mhz ibook for example. If he has an early version, there is no way in hell he's going to run openoffice. Its a big bloated piece of crap.
Thanks for correcting me; I misread his post and thought that he had an iBook. Mea culpa.
I personally hate php so much I use java.
I use both. Java as my main programming language and PHP as my main shell scripting language. It's not perfect but it's better than sh and somewhat user-friendly. I haven't run into compatibility issues yet, but then again I have yet to run into a working PHP 5 ebuild. Also, I don't use PHP for bigger projects. I would replace PHP with Ruby but I strongly prefer languages with a C-ish syntax.
Oh, I forgot about OpenOffice. Again, I don't think that is entirely written in java, and I simply do not own enough of a computer to run OO, but I tried. The document that I was trying to open was created on a 700MHz or so PC, but I could not do anything with it on my PowerBook G4. I asked the person to simply export it to a CSV so I could work with the spreadsheet.
Get more RAM. NeoOffice/J (a version of OpenOffice that was implemented completely in Java - not exactly fast but better than an X app) runs on my G4 iBook (1200 MHz) without problems. When I bought the 'Book it came with 256 MB of RAM and I could use NO/J, although it would get slow when multiple documents were open due to heavy swapping. After an upgrade to 768 MB I can have four documents in NO/J, Firefox, Thunderbird and VirtualPC running Windows 2000 open at the same time with acceptable performance.
USA also gets control over the technology used in the USA and by proxy by everyone else. Come on, do you really think that the hardware will miraculously work in Europe? Because you guys have legislation that mandates broken hardware means that we get broken hardwasre, as well - the only way to not get it would be to get our politicians to pass a law that explicitly states that the stuff has to be unbroken. Which would never get passed.
American anti-consumer legislation ends up hurting the whole world, which is why the politics and YRO stories are interesting for everyone, not just Americans.
But GGP proposed an elegant way of determining whether a particular self-aware robot was manufacutred in the United States. Ask the robot: "Something happens, what is your first reaction?" If the answer is "I call my lawyer" the robot is American. (Note that I' implying that all sue-junkies are American, not that all Americans are sue-junkies.)
Actually, if you had read the original prospect from Hasbro you'd know that the suits plug into the GI Joe(TM) Desert Warfare(TM) Humvee(TM), which has a reservoir for tap water, keeping it cool for up to five minutes.
I still wait for martial law to be declared. That would make anti-$sys$liberty terror legislation much easier. Also, there haven't been enough political schenanigans over there lately. Europe demands entertainment!;)
Come to think of it, it's obvious that they have to water-cool the soldiers. No one would survive driving around in those temperatures for too long, even if the AC brings the temperature down to 95C...
He's not the one running around in the desert wearing a T-shirt, long pants, long sleeves, helmet, flak jacket,canteen, side arm, automatic weaponn, ammo, etc . . . all while looking for people trying to kill him.
"Hello? Anyone who wants to kill me? Hello? Anyone? Are there any me-killers in this desert? Maybe someone with a mere strong antipathy towards me? Hello?"
Firstly, I have to agree with the sibling - income-adjusted fees make for a great deterrent. If there's no upper limit they might even stop corporations in their tracks (for example, if $CRIME is fined with 10% of the annual income it would seriouly hurt anyone from Joe Sixpack to Microsoft).
Secondly, most jurisdictions actually keep track of your criminal record and apply harsher penalties if you get caught more than once (with certain states' "three times and you're dead" policy being the absurd extreme), so it's not quite a good idea to continue if you get caught. Probation is also a great way to keep the jails empty while deterring people (after all you can get thrown in jail for stuff that normally wouldn't even get you community service and you have less of a private life because of the probation's conditions).
Lots of things that aren't science belong in science class. Because discussing them is (related to) science. For example one could dissect the rhethorics etc. in English or policics class. If stuff like Id legislation happened our religion teachers would just leap at the chance to discuss the connections between ID and creation. (Over here, "religion class" doesn't have much to do with religion, as it's often used as a substitute for philosophy class by schools who don't have philosophy teachers.)
Well, if the child would have been run over by, say, a tricycle and if the teller would have been shot at with, say, a soccer ball, they'd still be alive. So obviously we should replace all SUVs with tricycles and all guns with soccer balls. That would also make traffic more ecological and I would be more interested in sports because there would be no way to differentiate between a soccer championship and an action movie series. Maybe they could even put some exploding tricycles on the playing field, that would be cool.
Democracy != Happy End. Pre-Nazi Germany was a Democrarcy, too. It was poorly secured against antidemocratic policies (which is why the Nazis were able to take over the country without a coup), but it was a democracy.
Modern democracies are a great safeguard against fascism, but they dont magically make everything right. In order for a democracy to do that everyone has to be interested and well-informed - badly informed voters are actually more of a liability to a country than an asset. They vote whoever the media tell them to vote - not because they are stupid but because their only sources of information are heavily biased. A working democracy requires active participation from everyone or it starts doing things that are not truly in the interest of the people. The less people are willing to spend time educating themselves about the issues at hand the less representative the government becomes until it finally represents the needs of few.
Don't believe that now suddenly everything is alright again. There still are countless issues to be addressed. Until I see an election where more than 90 percent of the people participate I don't think that your democracy runs well enough to be able to auto-correct things.
It's even more entertaining when you're watching from a safe distance (a different country, that is). However, we still cringe, because you guys happen to set a lot of bad precedents. And with "you guys" I mean "your government and corporations".
The real question is: If the "absorbent mind" goes from 0 to 12 and the "reasoning mind" starts after that - where does the inquiring minds go? They want to know.
Heh, I prefer extremely blatant product placement used as a stilistic element. Remember Wayne's World?
For example we take a generic two-cops-vs.-the-bad-guys action/comedy movie. The protagonists know they're under surveillance and try to have an innocent-sounding conversation while they look for the bugs/cameras. What comes out is an unnaturally-sounding and utterly fabricated dialog that sounds as if it came straight out of an infomercial. Of course the bad guys are (visible to the audience) wondering what the heck the good guys are doing. Bonus points if the protagonists are even holding up/using the product in question in an infomercial-like way.
There are other ways to play with product placement, as well. For example there could be a movie/series featuring a neurotic character who compulsively turns around items so that the product name is facing the camera. When he is asked why he turns e.g. a cola can around to face (to the characters) an arbitrary direction, he answers: "I... I don't know. I had a feeling that someone was watching us from over there and I thought maybe he was thirsty."
Even better if the asker replies: "If you really think that someone who watches you from a dark corner is interested in your favourite soft drink maybe you should see a different psychatrist."
Slashdot Mirror
At my university we currently have a software project running. Or rather, it's part of the curriculum that during basic studies every CS student has to do a one-year project, which changes every year. Our assignment is to redesign the IEEE Reengineering Bibliography (how fitting) using Java. The best solution is to be used by the IEEE - no wonder, since the old site was put together by the lecturer responsible for the project (he also maintains it and is responsible for 90% of the entries. It's not a very popular site). Put together rather badly, I might add - the site went live in 1995, wasn't updated design-wise a single time (do you remember what passed as good site design back in 1995? The site barely lives up to that) and on the server side is a horrible hodgepodge of awk, sed, CGI/C++ and Bourne shell scripts. Using CVS to backup the database, which happens to reside in two text files, one being a BibTeX document and the other one apparently in a custom format.
I'm not saying that awk, sed, the Bourne shell, C++, CVS and BibTeX are bad, but mixing them in a live application creates something vaguely resembling a Rube Goldberg device. Ugh.
It's almost stable on my AMD64 Gentoo box. The precompiled 1.0.7 was pretty solid (I used the precompiled one due to Flash issues with self-compiled Fx on AMD64), but 1.5.0 is horribly unstable. I can't switch virtual desktops without Fx and Thunderbird both silently terminating. Unfortunately I won't go back to 1.0.7 as 1.5 has some pretty useful improvements. So currently I'm living without multiple desktops... Well, I only used the second desktop to park XMMS anyway, but still I'd like Fx to be a bit more stable.
On the Mac Fx 1.5 is amazing. It's a bit faster than 1.0.7 and eats up less memory. It's also quite stable. The only thing that reliably freezes it is the FoxyTunes extension - starting Fx, then closing and reopening iTunes and then clicking to FoxyTunes reliably freezes Fx. Perhaps I should contact the author...
Hold on.. he said powerbook g4. That could be a lot slower than 1200 mhz. I don't know if you know this, but there is a big difference in performance between an 800 mhz and 1200mhz ibook for example. If he has an early version, there is no way in hell he's going to run openoffice. Its a big bloated piece of crap.
Thanks for correcting me; I misread his post and thought that he had an iBook. Mea culpa.
I personally hate php so much I use java.
I use both. Java as my main programming language and PHP as my main shell scripting language. It's not perfect but it's better than sh and somewhat user-friendly. I haven't run into compatibility issues yet, but then again I have yet to run into a working PHP 5 ebuild. Also, I don't use PHP for bigger projects. I would replace PHP with Ruby but I strongly prefer languages with a C-ish syntax.
Oh, I forgot about OpenOffice. Again, I don't think that is entirely written in java, and I simply do not own enough of a computer to run OO, but I tried. The document that I was trying to open was created on a 700MHz or so PC, but I could not do anything with it on my PowerBook G4. I asked the person to simply export it to a CSV so I could work with the spreadsheet.
Get more RAM. NeoOffice/J (a version of OpenOffice that was implemented completely in Java - not exactly fast but better than an X app) runs on my G4 iBook (1200 MHz) without problems. When I bought the 'Book it came with 256 MB of RAM and I could use NO/J, although it would get slow when multiple documents were open due to heavy swapping. After an upgrade to 768 MB I can have four documents in NO/J, Firefox, Thunderbird and VirtualPC running Windows 2000 open at the same time with acceptable performance.
Except that in this case the owner is eating your face.
USA also gets control over the technology used in the USA and by proxy by everyone else. Come on, do you really think that the hardware will miraculously work in Europe? Because you guys have legislation that mandates broken hardware means that we get broken hardwasre, as well - the only way to not get it would be to get our politicians to pass a law that explicitly states that the stuff has to be unbroken. Which would never get passed.
American anti-consumer legislation ends up hurting the whole world, which is why the politics and YRO stories are interesting for everyone, not just Americans.
But GGP proposed an elegant way of determining whether a particular self-aware robot was manufacutred in the United States. Ask the robot: "Something happens, what is your first reaction?" If the answer is "I call my lawyer" the robot is American. (Note that I' implying that all sue-junkies are American, not that all Americans are sue-junkies.)
Atman and Brahman
Say... Are those Marvel or DC?
Actually, if you had read the original prospect from Hasbro you'd know that the suits plug into the GI Joe(TM) Desert Warfare(TM) Humvee(TM), which has a reservoir for tap water, keeping it cool for up to five minutes.
I still wait for martial law to be declared. That would make anti-$sys$liberty terror legislation much easier. Also, there haven't been enough political schenanigans over there lately. Europe demands entertainment! ;)
Come to think of it, it's obvious that they have to water-cool the soldiers. No one would survive driving around in those temperatures for too long, even if the AC brings the temperature down to 95C...
He's not the one running around in the desert wearing a T-shirt, long pants, long sleeves, helmet, flak jacket,canteen, side arm, automatic weaponn, ammo, etc . . . all while looking for people trying to kill him.
"Hello? Anyone who wants to kill me? Hello? Anyone? Are there any me-killers in this desert? Maybe someone with a mere strong antipathy towards me? Hello?"
Firstly, I have to agree with the sibling - income-adjusted fees make for a great deterrent. If there's no upper limit they might even stop corporations in their tracks (for example, if $CRIME is fined with 10% of the annual income it would seriouly hurt anyone from Joe Sixpack to Microsoft).
Secondly, most jurisdictions actually keep track of your criminal record and apply harsher penalties if you get caught more than once (with certain states' "three times and you're dead" policy being the absurd extreme), so it's not quite a good idea to continue if you get caught. Probation is also a great way to keep the jails empty while deterring people (after all you can get thrown in jail for stuff that normally wouldn't even get you community service and you have less of a private life because of the probation's conditions).
He's lying to us! There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!
Lots of things that aren't science belong in science class. Because discussing them is (related to) science. For example one could dissect the rhethorics etc. in English or policics class. If stuff like Id legislation happened our religion teachers would just leap at the chance to discuss the connections between ID and creation. (Over here, "religion class" doesn't have much to do with religion, as it's often used as a substitute for philosophy class by schools who don't have philosophy teachers.)
Well, if the child would have been run over by, say, a tricycle and if the teller would have been shot at with, say, a soccer ball, they'd still be alive. So obviously we should replace all SUVs with tricycles and all guns with soccer balls. That would also make traffic more ecological and I would be more interested in sports because there would be no way to differentiate between a soccer championship and an action movie series. Maybe they could even put some exploding tricycles on the playing field, that would be cool.
Democracy != Happy End. Pre-Nazi Germany was a Democrarcy, too. It was poorly secured against antidemocratic policies (which is why the Nazis were able to take over the country without a coup), but it was a democracy.
Modern democracies are a great safeguard against fascism, but they dont magically make everything right. In order for a democracy to do that everyone has to be interested and well-informed - badly informed voters are actually more of a liability to a country than an asset. They vote whoever the media tell them to vote - not because they are stupid but because their only sources of information are heavily biased. A working democracy requires active participation from everyone or it starts doing things that are not truly in the interest of the people. The less people are willing to spend time educating themselves about the issues at hand the less representative the government becomes until it finally represents the needs of few.
Don't believe that now suddenly everything is alright again. There still are countless issues to be addressed. Until I see an election where more than 90 percent of the people participate I don't think that your democracy runs well enough to be able to auto-correct things.
It's even more entertaining when you're watching from a safe distance (a different country, that is). However, we still cringe, because you guys happen to set a lot of bad precedents. And with "you guys" I mean "your government and corporations".
No, they'll just remove userspace entirely.
The real question is: If the "absorbent mind" goes from 0 to 12 and the "reasoning mind" starts after that - where does the inquiring minds go? They want to know.
Heh, I prefer extremely blatant product placement used as a stilistic element. Remember Wayne's World?
For example we take a generic two-cops-vs.-the-bad-guys action/comedy movie. The protagonists know they're under surveillance and try to have an innocent-sounding conversation while they look for the bugs/cameras. What comes out is an unnaturally-sounding and utterly fabricated dialog that sounds as if it came straight out of an infomercial. Of course the bad guys are (visible to the audience) wondering what the heck the good guys are doing. Bonus points if the protagonists are even holding up/using the product in question in an infomercial-like way.
There are other ways to play with product placement, as well. For example there could be a movie/series featuring a neurotic character who compulsively turns around items so that the product name is facing the camera. When he is asked why he turns e.g. a cola can around to face (to the characters) an arbitrary direction, he answers: "I... I don't know. I had a feeling that someone was watching us from over there and I thought maybe he was thirsty."
Even better if the asker replies: "If you really think that someone who watches you from a dark corner is interested in your favourite soft drink maybe you should see a different psychatrist."
Tell me again when I can use emacs to play Global Thermonuclear War.
You mean:
;)
1. nano
2. ed
3. sed
4. CmdrTaco's notepad
5. vi
6. EMACS
Note how there are three joke answers at the bottom.
(Come on, there can't be a vi vs. EMACS flamewar without the odd nano user showing up and mocking both sides.)
They were good, but they didn't link to george-harrison.info.
I have. I just don't like the user interface, which of course is just a personal preference. And I love the fox's customizability.