"To start with, "man" is an awful command to access the help system with. Even if you know you want to access the manual, man is a poor choice of command name - why not manual? Why not help?"
Why not manual because a 9600 baud terminal is slow. man is faster than manual anyday, and it's not that hard to remember. Plus it's not a help system, it's the system manual!
"Look at the start of the man entry for rm:"
I did, Troll, this is it: NAME
rm - remove files or directories
How is that for concise? The stuff you quote is a few sections down in DESCRIPTION. Complaining that it's too verbose is like complaining that the dictionary defines too many words. It's supposed to be verbose and DESCRIBE the entire program.
I'm sure for that 0.1 percent of the time when something unuxpected happens, the extra verbosity will help you out.
If you don't need it, don't read it -- datamining is a skill every student I know has. It's important when you need to digest a few chapters for an assignment or project. The same applies to the work world: if a manager plops a book on your desk and expects you to know a certain thing described in the book, you'd better be good at reading and comprehending.
Task-oriented is a code-word for "doesn't want to do work, just wants the results and glory."
"The SEC called off its investigation in exchange for Microsoft's promise that it will not break the rules in the future,"
Compare: Ok, Mr Dalhmer, we'll not look into the funny smell if you promise not to kill and eat anymore people, while keeping other parts of them for sexual "funning."
See, in the country I live in, we usually prosecute entities (people, companies) when they break the law. We don't just say, "well, don't do it again."
If you have enough disks to make 600GB with the 100% overhead of RAID1, I hate to think howmuch space you're wasting that you'd have free if you used something smarter like RAID5.
RAID5's overhead is a fraction of RAID1's overhead, and as long as you don't have a lot of drives fail at once (which is rare, and RAID isn't a replacement for backups anyways), you're much better doing anyways.
In Canada, a DVD of a certain movie could be about 14.99$.
In the US, that same region 1 DVD is 14.99$.
However, Canadian dollars cost less than US dollars. This is why US people should import all DVDs from Canada and never pay for them in the US, because the MPAA is just trying to segment Canada/US (which, considering NAFTA, shouldn't happen) for greater profits.
This is also why any Canadians that do online shopping will be boned hard if they don't go to the ONE Canadian DVD site online that exists: cnl.com. They have great, Canadian prices and will ship titles to the US too.
If you have a lot of programs trying to display data, MDI makes a lot of sense. It allows you to have logical groups of windows, rather than just a collapsed "every instance of that hwnd" in the taskbar. I have one Mozilla window for work research, one for gaming, one for reading news, etc. Each has its own entry in my Gnome tasklist applet, and each has its family of tabs inside. This also makes it easy to move my "webwork" windows(s) to another desktop, allowing me to make the next logical extension to MDI: multiple virtual desktops, each one focused on a specific goal.
However, I think it'll be a few years before you see that on the MacOS/Win32 side. MS frobbed with MDI, which is a good idea that their guidelines and API were poorly written for (thus leading to bad app design). The "collapsing taskbar" entry thing is a band-aid (TM) over not having virtual desktops and smart MDI.
However, until we see people who have computers that are on and have work open in many different areas for months at a time, I don't think MS will know much about the "UI scalabitily" issue to actually do something useful about it.
Of course, that doesn't bother me because I use these features *now* in Gnome with IceWM and Mozilla:)
Mozilla lets you turn off stuff in JS. I turned off pretty much everything they let you turn off. What remains is enough for "legit" Javascript use (things like client-side entry validation and "auto" goto popdowns which have no "go" button, such as on penny-arcade.com), and you don't ever have to deal with the abuses of auto-popups, Javascripts which document.write everything, or pretty much any other waste of time on the web.
Because it has the "sane" defaults that help Mac/Win users migrate from Windows/Mac to Linux.
So why Metacity? IceWM is older, has the features that some people here crow for, and also has sane defaults. When I migratet to Linux from OS/2, I found that IceWM did a nice job of replicating the OS/2 PM/Win32 WM keyboard accelerators (which is very important, not just because it helps you use the computer faster, but because you have muscle memory for that action).
Did Sun even consider IceWM? It's fully Gnome compliant; I've used it since forever with Gnome.
"How many people use thier Xbox as their only DVD player, CD player, MP3 player, etc? I'd wager not many (and those that do are cheap ass college students.. I know I would)."
I do. Why? It's easier to have one box in the front room that does that. I have 6 consoles plus VCR hooked up to my receiver. I used to use a PC in the frontroom for DVD/etc. I still use it for etc (in terms of music from my main raid server, and videos that are entirely digital), but it's handy to have the Xbox do DVD with its nice remote. It's also handy to pop a CD in and rip it to the HD of the Xbox because it's much faster to turn on and go than any PC. Plus I don't have to worry about Windows (since I had to use Windows on the PC to get things like the vivo features on my video card working), which has caused trouble on more than a few occasions.
So, given that the Xbox is reliable, fast to turn on and off, has great games (Jet Set Radio Future!), can rip music for play whenever (which is also a feature some games, like Amped, can use in place of the stock BGM), and can do everything else I want with full 5.1 support, why should I use several things which are less suited to the purpose or more problematic because of maintenance and costs?
I'd figure you've never actually sat down with an Xbox in your house and used one. Because that's the only way you'd be so dead-set against its handy features.
"Now, you'll need to download patches onto the XBox hard drive in order to play games, a concept that was familiar only to PCs in the past and something that, IMHO, console gamers never wanted to deal with."
This assumes two things. First, that patches will be required. Second, that the patches can't be handled in a seamless way which doesn't affect people.
You're wrong on both counts. I doubt the console will require patches, as it's mostly hard-wired. The ROM stores the base kernel, etc. Second, any potential updates to things like network components will probably be handled the way AOL does it: "updating ART...." and no need to find any files or run or reboot. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.
Which is why SNES RPGs and other replayable games still sell for a fair bit of change, while every pawnshop and used game place in town has a few walls of Genesis and "grab bags" of old sports games, right?
That's sure a great bit of "winning" -- when everyone no longer wants to enjoy you or play any of your games. I still play my SNES.
This article mentions the "great AT&T problem" of 1989. But it doesn't mention the corporate witch-hunt for "hackers" which was known as Operation Sundevil. Everyone at AT&T was so hopped up on their own hubris, they assumed that the telecom problem that shut down exchanges in NYC and elsewhere had to be cause be (malicious) human hands.
Lucas always said he filmed the middle trilogy because it was the most action packed one. Now that he's rich, he can do the other two trilogies.
Of course, we know he considers then inferioir to the middle one, so obviously no one is going to be as happy about them as with the ESB, the best movie of the best trilogy of the Star Wars epic.
"Non-repetitive gameplay: See "plot", above. What are you looking for, final fantasy?"
If you're looking for "Final Fantasy," you're looking in the wrong place. I've played through "Final Fantasy" 3 times now; it seems very repetitive to me.
"As consoles are sold at a loss anyway,..." a common myth. No consoles are sold at a loss past the first few months if the company doesn't want to lose millions (look at the Saturn: Sega learned that one the hardway as the Saturn supporters didn't help them at all). Any company that doesn't recoup costs of the hardware can't be competitve on pricing of the base unit or licencing to 3rd parties.
Sony has been making money on the PS2 systems since 2-3 months after they were released. They're just dropping their markup right now. Nintendo's probably only making a few percentage points on the Gamecube right now, and it uses much newer and more proprietary components than the PS2. And it doesn't have 2 years of components being refined and made cheaper yet.
MS is probably not losing any more on the Xbox because of price drops in supplies of things like the P3.
Think about normal consumer goods: everything you see probably has a 3-5x markup. A shirt that is 100$ on the rack cost 20$ tops. A 20$ shirt on the rack cost the original supplier maybe 4$. That's why they can stay in business with low sales. But consoles need high sales at first, which is why they are at a loss or break-even for the first little while. Then manufacturing advances or supplier changes modify the base costs. This allows a company to change its strategy. With Sony, it was "make money" -- with MS it's "increase penetration." Once MS has more consoles out there, they can reap the benefits of more money from 3rd parties, which is where the real money is to be made.
There will be tons of boring dialog consiting of wooden actors and tons of soul-less computer generated aliens used to replicate the puppet mastery of 70s.
No. The first bit with the Amidala landing and explosion (which is 10 seconds into the movie; don't worry;)) had a brief exchange which seemed wooden. Past that the movie was so good I didn't notice any more bad dialog.
The love between the princess and anakin will be completely fabricated and unrealistic. Probably using the tired forbidden love motif we have all seen before.
Not exactly. It's a bit rough at first, but it becomes believable. And it's a subplot, not some sort of stupid thing shoved in your face (Anakin's pod race in #1).
Jar-Jar's role is much less lighthearted here.
There will be another unbelievable car chase scene to prove that anakin is a greatest starfighter pilot ever. ho-hum.
There is a cool-looking scene where there is a car chase. It's a few minutes -- not too long, not too short. And it's not bad.
There will be another intense lightsaber duel with a gimmic like the dual bladed light saber seen in episode one.
Actually, no. While Lucas does do the "this is here in the movie because I can do this" thing like he did in 1 (making a pod race, jar jar, battle scene, and sabre scene being the 4 corner stones of a 1hr plot), it's not too gimmicky. He's learning to not stretch it. It's not perfect, but it's not grating.
We will learn more about yoda demistifing the character making him/her/it less interesting IMHO.
Nope. Yoda's still Yoda. The digital version of him looks fine. Fluid like Jar-Jar. I'm not going to spoil anything about it.
Will leave most hardcore fans secretly disappointed but unphased since they will see episode 3.
If a hardcore fan is disapointed, I'll be surprised. I'm not a Star Wars fan, but I know what I don't hate. And I didn't hate ep 2 -- I enjoyed it.
If you're so set on forming an opinion before it's opened in theatres, go get the VCD. Or come to my house and you can watch it on my setup (I'll even lend you the VCDs if you want).
Well, if you're that pressed for time, it's understandable. 2 hours is not a nice amount of time in which to prepare for the "make or break" of your honour thesis(es). Why did he only have 2 hours?
"Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?
Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S.
Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S. --Tips for Writer's "
Actually, pure water isn't that electrically conductive. H2O happens to be one of those really stable and self-happy molecules, which is why it forms that nice skin you've noticed when you fill your water glass too much.
Most of the reason why tap water wrecks electronics is because it contains a lot of free ions. Copper piping is erroded by the water, adding lots of little Cu+s to the water. Those are happy to take in an electron and potentially short-circuit your board. I use pure distilled water to clean electronics with no problem.
Certain types of petroleum-based fluids are also very non-conductive, but very greedy about absorbing heat. Given the proper heat exchanger it's a very good solution to cooling.
Plus, the right materials for the tubing must exist. When was the last time your brake fluid line burst?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Taco didn't see any such movie (from Film88) because the italicized and quoted text is what the story submitter wrote, not the /. editor.
"To start with, "man" is an awful command to access the help system with. Even if you know you want to access the manual, man is a poor choice of command name - why not manual? Why not help?"
Why not manual because a 9600 baud terminal is slow. man is faster than manual anyday, and it's not that hard to remember. Plus it's not a help system, it's the system manual!
"Look at the start of the man entry for rm:"
I did, Troll, this is it:
NAME
rm - remove files or directories
How is that for concise? The stuff you quote is a few sections down in DESCRIPTION. Complaining that it's too verbose is like complaining that the dictionary defines too many words. It's supposed to be verbose and DESCRIBE the entire program.
I'm sure for that 0.1 percent of the time when something unuxpected happens, the extra verbosity will help you out.
If you don't need it, don't read it -- datamining is a skill every student I know has. It's important when you need to digest a few chapters for an assignment or project. The same applies to the work world: if a manager plops a book on your desk and expects you to know a certain thing described in the book, you'd better be good at reading and comprehending.
Task-oriented is a code-word for "doesn't want to do work, just wants the results and glory."
"The SEC called off its investigation in exchange for Microsoft's promise that it will not break the rules in the future,"
Compare: Ok, Mr Dalhmer, we'll not look into the funny smell if you promise not to kill and eat anymore people, while keeping other parts of them for sexual "funning."
See, in the country I live in, we usually prosecute entities (people, companies) when they break the law. We don't just say, "well, don't do it again."
"read protect made the upgrade effectively invisible."
I know I love buying new hardware, sticking it in my machine, and never hearing from it again.
If you have enough disks to make 600GB with the 100% overhead of RAID1, I hate to think howmuch space you're wasting that you'd have free if you used something smarter like RAID5.
RAID5's overhead is a fraction of RAID1's overhead, and as long as you don't have a lot of drives fail at once (which is rare, and RAID isn't a replacement for backups anyways), you're much better doing anyways.
Actually, it's as simple as a regex if you use the new Privoxy for Windows or UNIX.
Go check it out.
But it already comes with a few regexes for killing popups, so all you'd have to "write" is a one-line change in a CFG.
In Canada, a DVD of a certain movie could be about 14.99$.
In the US, that same region 1 DVD is 14.99$.
However, Canadian dollars cost less than US dollars. This is why US people should import all DVDs from Canada and never pay for them in the US, because the MPAA is just trying to segment Canada/US (which, considering NAFTA, shouldn't happen) for greater profits.
This is also why any Canadians that do online shopping will be boned hard if they don't go to the ONE Canadian DVD site online that exists: cnl.com. They have great, Canadian prices and will ship titles to the US too.
Or write something yourself, yeesh. There are solutions. Life is not a conspiracy theory.
Quake3's storyline is "a guy who likes to smoke cigars was teleported into a dimension of fighting" ;)
That, and a little old-fashioned imagination will get you something that feels like Mortal Combat in 3D. Quake3 is the MK of the series.
"And it helped develop 'hand-eye' coordination. Of course, then again, so does masturbation..."
Usually I'm looking at porn or something else such that I don't have time to stare at my penis, but if it gets you off....
If you have a lot of programs trying to display data, MDI makes a lot of sense. It allows you to have logical groups of windows, rather than just a collapsed "every instance of that hwnd" in the taskbar. I have one Mozilla window for work research, one for gaming, one for reading news, etc. Each has its own entry in my Gnome tasklist applet, and each has its family of tabs inside. This also makes it easy to move my "webwork" windows(s) to another desktop, allowing me to make the next logical extension to MDI: multiple virtual desktops, each one focused on a specific goal.
:)
However, I think it'll be a few years before you see that on the MacOS/Win32 side. MS frobbed with MDI, which is a good idea that their guidelines and API were poorly written for (thus leading to bad app design). The "collapsing taskbar" entry thing is a band-aid (TM) over not having virtual desktops and smart MDI.
However, until we see people who have computers that are on and have work open in many different areas for months at a time, I don't think MS will know much about the "UI scalabitily" issue to actually do something useful about it.
Of course, that doesn't bother me because I use these features *now* in Gnome with IceWM and Mozilla
Mozilla lets you turn off stuff in JS. I turned off pretty much everything they let you turn off. What remains is enough for "legit" Javascript use (things like client-side entry validation and "auto" goto popdowns which have no "go" button, such as on penny-arcade.com), and you don't ever have to deal with the abuses of auto-popups, Javascripts which document.write everything, or pretty much any other waste of time on the web.
Because it has the "sane" defaults that help Mac/Win users migrate from Windows/Mac to Linux.
So why Metacity? IceWM is older, has the features that some people here crow for, and also has sane defaults. When I migratet to Linux from OS/2, I found that IceWM did a nice job of replicating the OS/2 PM/Win32 WM keyboard accelerators (which is very important, not just because it helps you use the computer faster, but because you have muscle memory for that action).
Did Sun even consider IceWM? It's fully Gnome compliant; I've used it since forever with Gnome.
"How many people use thier Xbox as their only DVD player, CD player, MP3 player, etc? I'd wager not many (and those that do are cheap ass college students.. I know I would)."
I do. Why? It's easier to have one box in the front room that does that. I have 6 consoles plus VCR hooked up to my receiver. I used to use a PC in the frontroom for DVD/etc. I still use it for etc (in terms of music from my main raid server, and videos that are entirely digital), but it's handy to have the Xbox do DVD with its nice remote. It's also handy to pop a CD in and rip it to the HD of the Xbox because it's much faster to turn on and go than any PC. Plus I don't have to worry about Windows (since I had to use Windows on the PC to get things like the vivo features on my video card working), which has caused trouble on more than a few occasions.
So, given that the Xbox is reliable, fast to turn on and off, has great games (Jet Set Radio Future!), can rip music for play whenever (which is also a feature some games, like Amped, can use in place of the stock BGM), and can do everything else I want with full 5.1 support, why should I use several things which are less suited to the purpose or more problematic because of maintenance and costs?
I'd figure you've never actually sat down with an Xbox in your house and used one. Because that's the only way you'd be so dead-set against its handy features.
"Now, you'll need to download patches onto the XBox hard drive in order to play games, a concept that was familiar only to PCs in the past and something that, IMHO, console gamers never wanted to deal with."
This assumes two things. First, that patches will be required. Second, that the patches can't be handled in a seamless way which doesn't affect people.
You're wrong on both counts. I doubt the console will require patches, as it's mostly hard-wired. The ROM stores the base kernel, etc. Second, any potential updates to things like network components will probably be handled the way AOL does it: "updating ART...." and no need to find any files or run or reboot. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.
"The SNES eventually failed to the Genisis,"
Which is why SNES RPGs and other replayable games still sell for a fair bit of change, while every pawnshop and used game place in town has a few walls of Genesis and "grab bags" of old sports games, right?
That's sure a great bit of "winning" -- when everyone no longer wants to enjoy you or play any of your games. I still play my SNES.
" I'll be able to voice chat with my friends while gaming. It's just like Roger Wilco on PC. No console has ever done that."
Bzzt, wrong. Go look at a copy of "Alien Front Online" for your Dreamcast. It's not the best, but it did it before now. I'm sure others have too.
This article mentions the "great AT&T problem" of 1989. But it doesn't mention the corporate witch-hunt for "hackers" which was known as Operation Sundevil. Everyone at AT&T was so hopped up on their own hubris, they assumed that the telecom problem that shut down exchanges in NYC and elsewhere had to be cause be (malicious) human hands.
The complete details are set out in Bruce Sterling's book "The Hacker Crackdown." Operation Sundevil also lead to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Lucas always said he filmed the middle trilogy because it was the most action packed one. Now that he's rich, he can do the other two trilogies.
Of course, we know he considers then inferioir to the middle one, so obviously no one is going to be as happy about them as with the ESB, the best movie of the best trilogy of the Star Wars epic.
"Non-repetitive gameplay: See "plot", above. What are you looking for, final fantasy?"
If you're looking for "Final Fantasy," you're looking in the wrong place. I've played through "Final Fantasy" 3 times now; it seems very repetitive to me.
"As consoles are sold at a loss anyway, ..." a common myth. No consoles are sold at a loss past the first few months if the company doesn't want to lose millions (look at the Saturn: Sega learned that one the hardway as the Saturn supporters didn't help them at all). Any company that doesn't recoup costs of the hardware can't be competitve on pricing of the base unit or licencing to 3rd parties.
Sony has been making money on the PS2 systems since 2-3 months after they were released. They're just dropping their markup right now. Nintendo's probably only making a few percentage points on the Gamecube right now, and it uses much newer and more proprietary components than the PS2. And it doesn't have 2 years of components being refined and made cheaper yet.
MS is probably not losing any more on the Xbox because of price drops in supplies of things like the P3.
Think about normal consumer goods: everything you see probably has a 3-5x markup. A shirt that is 100$ on the rack cost 20$ tops. A 20$ shirt on the rack cost the original supplier maybe 4$. That's why they can stay in business with low sales. But consoles need high sales at first, which is why they are at a loss or break-even for the first little while. Then manufacturing advances or supplier changes modify the base costs. This allows a company to change its strategy. With Sony, it was "make money" -- with MS it's "increase penetration." Once MS has more consoles out there, they can reap the benefits of more money from 3rd parties, which is where the real money is to be made.
There will be tons of boring dialog consiting of wooden actors and tons of soul-less computer generated aliens used to replicate the puppet mastery of 70s.
;)) had a brief exchange which seemed wooden. Past that the movie was so good I didn't notice any more bad dialog.
No. The first bit with the Amidala landing and explosion (which is 10 seconds into the movie; don't worry
The love between the princess and anakin will be completely fabricated and unrealistic. Probably using the tired forbidden love motif we have all seen before.
Not exactly. It's a bit rough at first, but it becomes believable. And it's a subplot, not some sort of stupid thing shoved in your face (Anakin's pod race in #1).
Jar-Jar's role is much less lighthearted here.
There will be another unbelievable car chase scene to prove that anakin is a greatest starfighter pilot ever. ho-hum.
There is a cool-looking scene where there is a car chase. It's a few minutes -- not too long, not too short. And it's not bad.
There will be another intense lightsaber duel with a gimmic like the dual bladed light saber seen in episode one.
Actually, no. While Lucas does do the "this is here in the movie because I can do this" thing like he did in 1 (making a pod race, jar jar, battle scene, and sabre scene being the 4 corner stones of a 1hr plot), it's not too gimmicky. He's learning to not stretch it. It's not perfect, but it's not grating.
We will learn more about yoda demistifing the character making him/her/it less interesting IMHO.
Nope. Yoda's still Yoda. The digital version of him looks fine. Fluid like Jar-Jar. I'm not going to spoil anything about it.
Will leave most hardcore fans secretly disappointed but unphased since they will see episode 3.
If a hardcore fan is disapointed, I'll be surprised. I'm not a Star Wars fan, but I know what I don't hate. And I didn't hate ep 2 -- I enjoyed it.
If you're so set on forming an opinion before it's opened in theatres, go get the VCD. Or come to my house and you can watch it on my setup (I'll even lend you the VCDs if you want).
Well, if you're that pressed for time, it's understandable. 2 hours is not a nice amount of time in which to prepare for the "make or break" of your honour thesis(es). Why did he only have 2 hours?
If you're going to be presenting a thesis, it is pretty hard to see how you'd mess up its grammar like that.
I know I take advantage of the peer-review presented by English students, as well as applying my own knowledge of English grammar to papers.
Why do so many people have trouble with possesive notation and contractions?
I think Dave Barry said it best:
"Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?
Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S.
Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
--Tips for Writer's "
Actually, pure water isn't that electrically conductive. H2O happens to be one of those really stable and self-happy molecules, which is why it forms that nice skin you've noticed when you fill your water glass too much.
:)
Most of the reason why tap water wrecks electronics is because it contains a lot of free ions. Copper piping is erroded by the water, adding lots of little Cu+s to the water. Those are happy to take in an electron and potentially short-circuit your board. I use pure distilled water to clean electronics with no problem.
Certain types of petroleum-based fluids are also very non-conductive, but very greedy about absorbing heat. Given the proper heat exchanger it's a very good solution to cooling.
Plus, the right materials for the tubing must exist. When was the last time your brake fluid line burst?