Somebody needs to mod this parent up; he's right on the money in pretty much all accounts. I've screwed around with a lot of the HTPC stuff in the past and I have to agree that it's a huge pain in the ass. It appears simple until you start hitting all the crappy corner cases.
Oh yeah, I also agree that the PS3's browser is like Sony's sadistic joke. It teases you with the possibility that something on the internet not designed 20 years *may* actually work.
I don't use Microsoft products. Why in the hell should I pay for the standard idiot who can't help but click on the "super-awesome-porn.exe" attachment in Outlook? This isn't like the medical industry at all. You can't prevent a lot of the things that happen to you healthwise, whereas a computer "infection" is 100% preventable. This is just another case of punishing the intelligent. This is also a classic example of a shitty corporation (Microsoft) trying to redirect their monetary responsibility of making quality software onto the general public. Complete bullshit is what this is.
That is exactly what the company I work for does. For that matter, that is what the last 2 companies I worked for did. The current is a very large business, the previous a small company. Maybe some smaller companies on XP will bump to Win 7, but the "lumbering behemoths" are still at least a year or two out and you know for sure there will be many a boxen replaced in that time. This could also end up lighting a fire under the big shops to make the plunge to Win 7.
Hehehe, oh, I'm well aware of "other" sources of said information (<cough>ebookshare.net<cough>), but it doesn't mean that I don't occasionally want to support the book publishers.
One thing that I've definitely noted in searching the B&N ebook store is a complete and total lack of any computer/technical books. Here is a search for "programming" in B&N's ebook store, where I should see something about Perl, Java, Python, etc., but instead it's Glenn Beck???:
I can't be the only one on slashdot with shelves containing hundreds of pounds of technical reference material... I've been thinking about getting an e-reader to replace the mountain of paper with something that I can slip in my laptop bag and take with me, and I was leaning towards the nook. However, B&N's complete lack of technical tomes in ebook form means that I'll probably go the kindle route since Amazon has a plethora of books from O'Reilly, Wrox, Apress, etc.
I know the e-readers are definitely marketed outside the bounds of us gadget loving nerds, but I would have to imagine that there is at least a significant percentage of us that either have and e-reader or are looking to buy one. I can't believe that B&N seems to be dropping the ball on this market segment. I know it's early in the life of the nook, or the B&N app for the iphone, but it really feels like B&N is missing out by leaving us high and dry.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't music videos basically just promotional tools used to sell albums? Maybe things have changed since the early MTV days, which also probably the last time I watched a music video, but I've always been under the impression that the reason these were made in the first place was simply a way to sell an album (or song, nowadays). I mean, really, do people actually *buy* music videos (and I'm not talking about extended length live performance videos, just the old school MTV stuff).
Maybe things have changed in this arena in recent years, but I can't really see this as anything except another stark example of a music industry dinosaur that just wants to stay locked in it's old anti-digital model. That and, of course, the fact that they want to squeeze anyone they can to try and extort as much money as they can before they finally die off because they refuse to accept change.
To say that the failing of the "Big 3" is strictly due to the UAW is absolutely ridiculous. I don't see Toyota and Honda going under here (albeit, they are not doing so hot right now, but who is?), and they pay the same wages, if not higher, and offer the same benefits to their US assembly workers that are offered to the UAW workers. Huh, how could this be? Oh yeah, Toyota and Honda have been making QUALITY automobiles for the US markets for 30+ years while the Big 3 continue to make SHIT and shout "Buy American!" from the rooftops as they move their assembly plants to Mexico and lay off American workers. Meanwhile Toyota and Honda build plants in the US and higher American workers and pay them good wages and supplement that with good benefits packages (see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5062797 for one example).
The main point here is that trying to blame the failure of the "Big 3" on the union is just plain ignorant as there are far more factors to it than that. For one example, gas prices have skyrocketed in the past years and so people have flocked more than ever to more fuel efficient cars (i.e. Toyota, Honda and others) and moved away from gas guzzling tanks being pushed by the "Big 3". While Toyota and Honda have had hybrids on the market for years, it has taken the Big 3 until basically now to finally come out with one. They've spent the last 30+ years trailing behind in real categories like fuel efficiency and reliability. Instead they tout the "Buy American" and "Bigger is Better" (the small dick compensation philosophy) while they've lost more and more market share to the car companies that actually produced quality products. Before foreign car companies started selling cars here, people thought it was perfectly normal for your car to be trash in 70,000 miles. Then, lo and behold, actual competitors hit the market and their cars keep running for 200,000-300,000 miles, and sometimes more. Suddenly the US car companies HAD to get off their asses and put a product that wasn't complete SHIT since people were starting to see that crap cars weren't just "how things are". Amazing what a little *actual* competition does.
The reason that the Big 3 are failing is pure capitalism. They have sat back on their haunches and trailed far behind the demands of the consumer while others moved in and produced what people really wanted, instead of what the people were told they wanted (see dick compensation philosophy above), and now they are dying because of it. The failures of the "Big 3" have almost nothing to do with the UAW since the kinds of decisions that were made, or not made, as the case may be, were all made by non-union employees who were all taking home a whole lot more pay than any of the union workers.
Python has a simple mechanism to get around that though. You simply put an "r" in front of the string and the only thing you have to escape is your string delimiter (" or '). Ex.:
Does anyone know of a good, semi-recently written book on PostgreSQL? Everything I find is from at least 3 years ago. Is it that PostgreSQL hasn't changed much, barring this release, in the past few years?
Or like anyone ever uses older computers any more. Try running a modern KDE on a computer that has 96 megs of ram or less.
Ok, anyone trying to do that is just stupid. Really, the KDE devs make no bones about the fact that it is a larger, more "lumbering" behemoth of desktop environment. If you want a desktop running on an ancient computer, don't use KDE. Use ICE or fluxbox. To complain that something is bloated because it's not "snappy" on a 15 year old computer is just ridiculous. If you want to run modern applications, use at least semi-modern hardware.
I will however agree that Firefox is rapidly moving towards nearly unusable monster at this point. I do agree that a browser should not be chewing up 250MB of RAM to display 10 or so web pages.
No doubt about that. I personally cringe whenever I have to use it in any way shape or form.
I have a very large music collection and tried letting iTunes on my mini at home manage that collection once. Bad Idea! It's in the range of somewhere over 80,000 songs now and iTunes was unusable after that. I since set up a mt-daapd server on my linux box which actually has all the music on it, and that works ok since it stores all the music info in a real database rather than what iTunes uses for it's "database"; an XML file.
Fscking Apple had better release a version of iTunes for Linux if they are going to pull this BS. I'm glad my rev 1 nano works excellently with Amarok (I love that player).
Huh, maybe it was a previous version or something, but I use that type of thing all the time as well. I actually just tested it in a file and it worked fine. Here's what I used for the test:
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.0 (2006 May 7, compiled Feb 26 2007 15:23:35)
Included patches: 1-174
Modified by Gentoo-7.0.174
There isnt a 64bit native version, and the 36bit version is...
Wait a sec, I didn't realize there was a 36 bit version! I'll finally be able to play music on my "Non Existent Computer"!
iTunes is ok if you don't have a lot of music. I have over 400GB of mp3s and it's completely and utterly unusable if you try and use it's built in library functionality. Incidentally, I think I figured out why this is, it seems to store all the library info in an XML file.
On the contrary, I use Amarok on my linux boxes because I, as well, like features and functionality. Using sqlite as the backend, I can access anything in less than a second with no real performance hit (at the time). Try having iTunes search through 80,000+ songs. Good fscking luck.
I'm just curious, what *exactly* are the commands you are using to break VIM. I use both classic vi (on Freebsd) and vim (on linux) all the time and I can't say that i've really run into any of the problems you seem to have. And yes, I use marks, named buffers and other things all the time without any problems on either one.
Fluxbox: tons of functionality, easy to configure and a small footprint. I know there are smaller out there, but if you consider the functionality/size ratio, it kicks ass.
Uh, actually, the reason you have to import things like Regular Expressions (and no, you don't have to import the string library, at least not anymore) in Python is to avoid language bloat. The idea, and Perl does a decent job of this as well, is to keep the base language as lean as possible and only import what you need, when you need it. In that way Python is actually leaner than Perl since, if you aren't going to need regular expressions (or command-line args, etc.) for whatever task you are doing, you don't load them. That's the idea behind *not* having a bloated language.
I used to work for a local ISP a while back and after I started there, I was told a great story of previous tragedy.
One of my coworkers was with our electrician that we normally *used* and they were working on the electrical in the data center. I don't remember at this point the exact reason why he did what he did, but for some reason he needed to kill the power main to the data center to work on something. Well, my coworker asked him if he was sure about this, to which he was reassured that everything would be fine since it would fail to the UPSs and he wouldn't need to keep the power off for more than a couple of minutes. One thing to note, the company he worked for was the same company to install the UPS systems. So, having been reassured that this would be OK, my coworker told the electrician to "pull the plug". Well, he reached for the big handle of the main power switch and pulled it...at which point the entire data center went dark. It took 3 solid days to get mostly everything nursed back to a running state. Many of the machines in that room hadn't even been rebooted in years, much less ever shut off. From what I understand, that electrician didn't escape with his job and barely escaped with his life.
I went and saw SuperSize me last Saturday. Fantastic documentary, I highly recommend it. Just seeing the guy launch his supersized double quarter pounder meal out the window of his car makes it worth seeing.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody needs to mod this parent up; he's right on the money in pretty much all accounts. I've screwed around with a lot of the HTPC stuff in the past and I have to agree that it's a huge pain in the ass. It appears simple until you start hitting all the crappy corner cases.
Oh yeah, I also agree that the PS3's browser is like Sony's sadistic joke. It teases you with the possibility that something on the internet not designed 20 years *may* actually work.
I don't use Microsoft products. Why in the hell should I pay for the standard idiot who can't help but click on the "super-awesome-porn.exe" attachment in Outlook? This isn't like the medical industry at all. You can't prevent a lot of the things that happen to you healthwise, whereas a computer "infection" is 100% preventable. This is just another case of punishing the intelligent. This is also a classic example of a shitty corporation (Microsoft) trying to redirect their monetary responsibility of making quality software onto the general public. Complete bullshit is what this is.
That is exactly what the company I work for does. For that matter, that is what the last 2 companies I worked for did. The current is a very large business, the previous a small company. Maybe some smaller companies on XP will bump to Win 7, but the "lumbering behemoths" are still at least a year or two out and you know for sure there will be many a boxen replaced in that time. This could also end up lighting a fire under the big shops to make the plunge to Win 7.
Hehehe, oh, I'm well aware of "other" sources of said information (<cough>ebookshare.net<cough>), but it doesn't mean that I don't occasionally want to support the book publishers.
One thing that I've definitely noted in searching the B&N ebook store is a complete and total lack of any computer/technical books. Here is a search for "programming" in B&N's ebook store, where I should see something about Perl, Java, Python, etc., but instead it's Glenn Beck???:
http://books.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?store=EBOOK&WRD=programming&box=programming&pos=-1
I can't be the only one on slashdot with shelves containing hundreds of pounds of technical reference material... I've been thinking about getting an e-reader to replace the mountain of paper with something that I can slip in my laptop bag and take with me, and I was leaning towards the nook. However, B&N's complete lack of technical tomes in ebook form means that I'll probably go the kindle route since Amazon has a plethora of books from O'Reilly, Wrox, Apress, etc.
I know the e-readers are definitely marketed outside the bounds of us gadget loving nerds, but I would have to imagine that there is at least a significant percentage of us that either have and e-reader or are looking to buy one. I can't believe that B&N seems to be dropping the ball on this market segment. I know it's early in the life of the nook, or the B&N app for the iphone, but it really feels like B&N is missing out by leaving us high and dry.
mount the dvd
vobcopy -m -o .
Instant VIDEO_TS folder (well, maybe not "instant").
Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't music videos basically just promotional tools used to sell albums? Maybe things have changed since the early MTV days, which also probably the last time I watched a music video, but I've always been under the impression that the reason these were made in the first place was simply a way to sell an album (or song, nowadays). I mean, really, do people actually *buy* music videos (and I'm not talking about extended length live performance videos, just the old school MTV stuff).
Maybe things have changed in this arena in recent years, but I can't really see this as anything except another stark example of a music industry dinosaur that just wants to stay locked in it's old anti-digital model. That and, of course, the fact that they want to squeeze anyone they can to try and extort as much money as they can before they finally die off because they refuse to accept change.
To say that the failing of the "Big 3" is strictly due to the UAW is absolutely ridiculous. I don't see Toyota and Honda going under here (albeit, they are not doing so hot right now, but who is?), and they pay the same wages, if not higher, and offer the same benefits to their US assembly workers that are offered to the UAW workers. Huh, how could this be? Oh yeah, Toyota and Honda have been making QUALITY automobiles for the US markets for 30+ years while the Big 3 continue to make SHIT and shout "Buy American!" from the rooftops as they move their assembly plants to Mexico and lay off American workers. Meanwhile Toyota and Honda build plants in the US and higher American workers and pay them good wages and supplement that with good benefits packages (see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5062797 for one example).
The main point here is that trying to blame the failure of the "Big 3" on the union is just plain ignorant as there are far more factors to it than that. For one example, gas prices have skyrocketed in the past years and so people have flocked more than ever to more fuel efficient cars (i.e. Toyota, Honda and others) and moved away from gas guzzling tanks being pushed by the "Big 3". While Toyota and Honda have had hybrids on the market for years, it has taken the Big 3 until basically now to finally come out with one. They've spent the last 30+ years trailing behind in real categories like fuel efficiency and reliability. Instead they tout the "Buy American" and "Bigger is Better" (the small dick compensation philosophy) while they've lost more and more market share to the car companies that actually produced quality products. Before foreign car companies started selling cars here, people thought it was perfectly normal for your car to be trash in 70,000 miles. Then, lo and behold, actual competitors hit the market and their cars keep running for 200,000-300,000 miles, and sometimes more. Suddenly the US car companies HAD to get off their asses and put a product that wasn't complete SHIT since people were starting to see that crap cars weren't just "how things are". Amazing what a little *actual* competition does.
The reason that the Big 3 are failing is pure capitalism. They have sat back on their haunches and trailed far behind the demands of the consumer while others moved in and produced what people really wanted, instead of what the people were told they wanted (see dick compensation philosophy above), and now they are dying because of it. The failures of the "Big 3" have almost nothing to do with the UAW since the kinds of decisions that were made, or not made, as the case may be, were all made by non-union employees who were all taking home a whole lot more pay than any of the union workers.
Python has a simple mechanism to get around that though. You simply put an "r" in front of the string and the only thing you have to escape is your string delimiter (" or '). Ex.:
reg = r'^finding this at it\'s beginning'
Does anyone know of a good, semi-recently written book on PostgreSQL? Everything I find is from at least 3 years ago. Is it that PostgreSQL hasn't changed much, barring this release, in the past few years?
Ok, anyone trying to do that is just stupid. Really, the KDE devs make no bones about the fact that it is a larger, more "lumbering" behemoth of desktop environment. If you want a desktop running on an ancient computer, don't use KDE. Use ICE or fluxbox. To complain that something is bloated because it's not "snappy" on a 15 year old computer is just ridiculous. If you want to run modern applications, use at least semi-modern hardware.
I will however agree that Firefox is rapidly moving towards nearly unusable monster at this point. I do agree that a browser should not be chewing up 250MB of RAM to display 10 or so web pages.
No doubt about that. I personally cringe whenever I have to use it in any way shape or form. I have a very large music collection and tried letting iTunes on my mini at home manage that collection once. Bad Idea! It's in the range of somewhere over 80,000 songs now and iTunes was unusable after that. I since set up a mt-daapd server on my linux box which actually has all the music on it, and that works ok since it stores all the music info in a real database rather than what iTunes uses for it's "database"; an XML file.
Fscking Apple had better release a version of iTunes for Linux if they are going to pull this BS. I'm glad my rev 1 nano works excellently with Amarok (I love that player).
Huh, maybe it was a previous version or something, but I use that type of thing all the time as well. I actually just tested it in a file and it worked fine. Here's what I used for the test: VIM - Vi IMproved 7.0 (2006 May 7, compiled Feb 26 2007 15:23:35) Included patches: 1-174 Modified by Gentoo-7.0.174
There isnt a 64bit native version, and the 36bit version is... Wait a sec, I didn't realize there was a 36 bit version! I'll finally be able to play music on my "Non Existent Computer"!
iTunes is ok if you don't have a lot of music. I have over 400GB of mp3s and it's completely and utterly unusable if you try and use it's built in library functionality. Incidentally, I think I figured out why this is, it seems to store all the library info in an XML file. On the contrary, I use Amarok on my linux boxes because I, as well, like features and functionality. Using sqlite as the backend, I can access anything in less than a second with no real performance hit (at the time). Try having iTunes search through 80,000+ songs. Good fscking luck.
I'm just curious, what *exactly* are the commands you are using to break VIM. I use both classic vi (on Freebsd) and vim (on linux) all the time and I can't say that i've really run into any of the problems you seem to have. And yes, I use marks, named buffers and other things all the time without any problems on either one.
Fluxbox: tons of functionality, easy to configure and a small footprint. I know there are smaller out there, but if you consider the functionality/size ratio, it kicks ass.
Uh, actually, the reason you have to import things like Regular Expressions (and no, you don't have to import the string library, at least not anymore) in Python is to avoid language bloat. The idea, and Perl does a decent job of this as well, is to keep the base language as lean as possible and only import what you need, when you need it. In that way Python is actually leaner than Perl since, if you aren't going to need regular expressions (or command-line args, etc.) for whatever task you are doing, you don't load them. That's the idea behind *not* having a bloated language.
I used to work for a local ISP a while back and after I started there, I was told a great story of previous tragedy.
One of my coworkers was with our electrician that we normally *used* and they were working on the electrical in the data center. I don't remember at this point the exact reason why he did what he did, but for some reason he needed to kill the power main to the data center to work on something. Well, my coworker asked him if he was sure about this, to which he was reassured that everything would be fine since it would fail to the UPSs and he wouldn't need to keep the power off for more than a couple of minutes. One thing to note, the company he worked for was the same company to install the UPS systems. So, having been reassured that this would be OK, my coworker told the electrician to "pull the plug". Well, he reached for the big handle of the main power switch and pulled it...at which point the entire data center went dark. It took 3 solid days to get mostly everything nursed back to a running state. Many of the machines in that room hadn't even been rebooted in years, much less ever shut off. From what I understand, that electrician didn't escape with his job and barely escaped with his life.
Another mirror: http://janus.visi.com/Es3b-en.pdf
Hell, I'm going to patent patenting, make billions of dollars and live on a beach drinking pina coladas and laughing hysterically!
Here you go: http://www.hi-vel.com/Catalog__17/Armor_Piercing_A mmunition/armor_piercing_ammunition.html
Slap some armor-piercing 7.62x39 in your AK-47 or SKS (which will go through most body armor anyway, even if it isn't armor-piercing) and go out and have a good ol' time. Kevlar doesn't stand a chance.
I went and saw SuperSize me last Saturday. Fantastic documentary, I highly recommend it. Just seeing the guy launch his supersized double quarter pounder meal out the window of his car makes it worth seeing.