Realize this: Joe sixpack doesn't care much about this. He only uses his computer to check his e-mail and surf the web occasionally. He doesn't make backups. He's never had a drive fail. He probably keeps every file he's ever downloaded or created in "My Documents" because he doesn't know about subdirectories. He doesn't understand the practical disasters that this "technology" will create.
He won't complain when every hard-drive at Comp-USA is encumbered. He'll just say, "give me the one with the most geebee's, and here's my $50 installation fee."
To Joe, hackers are kind of cool but probably dangerous. The DMCA is probably inconvenient, at worst, in his mind.
My point is that you can't rely on Joe Sixpack to scream if this happens. You've got to act yourself. You understand why this is an outrage. You have to stand up and speak, lest you be silenced. You have to fight this fight, not just stand on the sidelines.
How do you do that? You've got a job, your own life to lead. You don't have time to follow all of the legal challenges and industry struggles that will shape the landscape of freedoms in the digital age.
There are two ways you can help protect your freedoms:
1. Write or call your government representatives to comment on issues that matter.
2. Donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
If you care about the freedoms you're losing, giving to the EFF is the _least_ you can do. They're fighting the good fight to protect your right to access and use the information that you've bought and paid for in the way that you choose. They're fighting against the slide towards a pay-per-use culture.
So how about it? If we all just divert a _fraction_ of what we slashdotters spend on fun gadgets to the EFF we can ensure that there will still _be_ fun gadgets to hack tomorrow. Maybe we can still prevent hacking from becoming a crime.
Forget about MP3s, all I want is the correct handling of CDs! Does anybody have or know of a DVD _changer_ that has a decent shuffle-play feature? The definition of decent shall be as follows:
1. Does not repeat songs that have already been played.
2. Interleaves songs from all discs. (i.e. _not_ all the songs on disc 1 in random order, then all the songs on disc 2 in random order, etc...)
3. Does not repeat songs that have already been played.
4. Does not repeat songs that have already been played.
I bought last year's Pioneer 3-disc changer but returned it because (you guessed it) it repeated songs that had already been played. My el-cheapo bookshelf stereo in my office is smart enough not to do this, so it's not such a revolutionary feature. There's nothing worse than loading 3 hours of music only to have to hit "skip" every 5 minutes.
Now Pioneer's got a 5-disc model. Anybody got it? Does it have the same problem? Any other brands/models that meet these highly demanding criteria?
Please, no PC/MP3 solutions. MP3s sound like someone put crumbs in my speakers.
Yes, I know I should buy a DVD player and a CD changer separately, but I don't have the shelf space and I object on philosophical grounds.
Oh yeah, the stuff about it having excellent DVD video quality goes without saying.
Don't worry about video quality. I used a RealMagic Hollywood+ decoder card for a while (until the computer moved to a different room than the TV) and it was awesome. You don't have to take my word for it, though. The professional reviewers that checked the thing out mistook it for an ultra-highend standalone player in double-blind tests. I don't remember the source, but that's what google is for!
Plus the drivers are always being worked on so you get new features all the time. Case in point: support for DTS wasn't originally available, but they hacked the drivers and, voilla. Now if they'd just let _us_ hack the drivers...
You don't need to install anything except NEdit to use NEdit. It's a statically linked binary on any system (like Linux) that doesn't come with Motif preinstalled. Heck, you don't even really have to 'install' nedit, just download the binary and run it from wherever it lands. This is really nice when you don't have root on a system.
Motif requirement? It's a statically linked binary. There is no Motif requirement. You download it and you run it. You don't even have to compile or install it. Super cool for systems where you don't have root.
Oh, and as others have pointed out Lesstif or Open Motif are free and available if you really want to go the dynamic linking route.
First, let me say that I have used NEdit every day for several years and it has never, let me repeat that, never, crashed on me unless I was using a beta version.
This is not to say that it never crashes for anybody, but most every issue that has come up with NEdit has turned out to be a bug in Lesstif. If you use the statically linked version or get the Open Motif libraries you should have no stability problems whatsoever.
NEdit has its issues, but stability is _really_ not one of them.
How many programs besides Emacs require the user to type C-x C-c to exit? Is it reasonable to require any new editor to adhere to an interface designed before there were any such things as interface standards?
Ah, but what about all the people who already know the ins and outs of Emacs? As the number of Linux users grows, the percentage of users who will tolerate typing C-x C-f to open a file in one program, unlike the rest of the programs they use which ask for C-o, will diminish. To put it simply, NEdit was designed for those who desire a consistent, *modern* interface, not to win over those who have memorized the arcana of vi or Emacs.
As for RSI and avoiding the mouse, NEdit was the first program that convinced me that a GUI doesn't equate to forcing the user to use the mouse. Having lurked on the NEdit developer mailing list for quite some time I can tell you that keyboard usability is one of the central forces that influences design decisions in NEdit.
Have you tried to find a usable (vi does not qualify), cross-platform (flavors of *NIX, at least), lightweight, easily customizable (oops, there goes Emacs) text editor lately? There aren't so many out there.
That happens when you have the Num-Lock or Scroll-Lock key turned on. It's a problem with the way Motif treats modifiers (Num-Lock + Key != Key). It's in the FAQ. There's a patch for it in the mailing list archives.
Incidentally, I went the other way -- I had to find a Windows editor that was comparable to NEdit. UltraEdit is the closest I got, but I'm afraid that with the power that NEdit has under the hood with the macro language, the customizability of the auto-indentation engine, the flexible syntax hilighting, etc, UltraEdit came up severely lacking.
JEdit is pretty nice. I considered switching from NEdit because of some of the sweeter features that JEdit offers. Unfortunately JEdit is hobbled by the Java curse -- it hemmhorages memory. I like a full-featured editor. I don't like giving it 20 megs of RAM. I should be able to edit more than one file on a 64 MB machine. In the end I went back to NEdit. It's small, quick, fully customizable, and effective.
Call me a newbie/dork/lamer/whatever, but the sound of a programming language named after a potentially deadly snake is appealing to me.
Actually, Guido named Python after Monty Python's Flying Circus, which is infinitely cooler than naming it after a snake. You would know that if you weren't such a newbie/dork/lamer. (Just kidding!) Seriously, though, check out the language -- it rocks balls. It's like Perl without all that !@#$!@% shit.
Stupid question time: anybody know what Python 3000 is?
Python 3000 is the next major version of Python (although at least one more minor version is going to be released). It will be backwards incompatible and clear up many of the outstanding warts in Python's design. At this point it's not much more than a twinkle in Guido's eye.
Check out NEdit. It's an open-source, highly customizable editor with the best mouse integration of any editor anywhere. Control-drag to make rectangular selections that can be dragged anywhere in the document. It has programmable smart indent for placing lines in the proper column. It doesn't highlight expressions when brackets are missing, but it automatically highlights matching brackets, so if one is missing it's pretty easy to tell. All this and it takes up a lot less memory than XEmacs. Run it in client/server mode and you'll only have one NEdit process in memory for all of your documents.
The only downside is that it's not available for Windows and I've become spoiled for all other editors.
Actually, I've discovered a real, rational, and feasible solution to virtually all the world's major problems. And it doesn't involve killing anybody. It's actually rather brilliant. Just thought you'd like to know.
Nope, I already thought of that. That wouldn't work.
That is, employees of Caltech (facility and staff members) assign their rights as is normal for any employer, including not-for-profit organizations and others. Students assign their rights only in those circumstances where the rights clearly shoudl belong to Caltech--such as they were performing research for a research group or as part of classwork where the student used Caltech equipment and performed the work under Caltech guidance.
In fact, I believe you are understating the strength of the rights that Caltech gives to their students. The general catalog makes a point of stating clearly that even inventions developed using Caltech facilities are the property of the student, provided they weren't developed in the course of a student's classwork or research duties as an R.A. Try getting Microsoft to agree to those terms! The original poster can argue about how these policies play out in practice, but the plain truth is that Caltech's stated IP policy is very generous to the student.
I'll be starting my Ph.D. at Caltech in three weeks (summer session) and one of the reasons I chose to go there was that many of the school's policies place the student's needs first. I was surprised to find that so many of the policies (e.g. the honor code) were designed to remove administrative obstacles and trivialities from the student's path rather than protect the institution from his presumed idiocy or malice. Compare this to almost any other institution, public or private, and I think you'll find that Caltech is a pretty enlightened place to be.
The first thing to do is to burn disc three. That version is an abomination.
I hope you aren't serious, because if so you're completely missing the point. Disc three and the commentary that accompanies it form a vivid object lesson in the power of editing, and how it can be abused. It's a powerful example of the way a director's work can be warped, through omission of dialog and other, more subtle manipulation, to present the exact opposite vision from what he intended. Everybody who is concerned about the integrity of artistry in a capitalist society should watch it and learn.
Slashdot Mirror
Realize this: Joe sixpack doesn't care much about this. He only uses his computer to check his e-mail and surf the web occasionally. He doesn't make backups. He's never had a drive fail. He probably keeps every file he's ever downloaded or created in "My Documents" because he doesn't know about subdirectories. He doesn't understand the practical disasters that this "technology" will create.
He won't complain when every hard-drive at Comp-USA is encumbered. He'll just say, "give me the one with the most geebee's, and here's my $50 installation fee."
To Joe, hackers are kind of cool but probably dangerous. The DMCA is probably inconvenient, at worst, in his mind.
My point is that you can't rely on Joe Sixpack to scream if this happens. You've got to act yourself. You understand why this is an outrage. You have to stand up and speak, lest you be silenced. You have to fight this fight, not just stand on the sidelines.
How do you do that? You've got a job, your own life to lead. You don't have time to follow all of the legal challenges and industry struggles that will shape the landscape of freedoms in the digital age.
There are two ways you can help protect your freedoms:
1. Write or call your government representatives to comment on issues that matter.
2. Donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
If you care about the freedoms you're losing, giving to the EFF is the _least_ you can do. They're fighting the good fight to protect your right to access and use the information that you've bought and paid for in the way that you choose. They're fighting against the slide towards a pay-per-use culture.
So how about it? If we all just divert a _fraction_ of what we slashdotters spend on fun gadgets to the EFF we can ensure that there will still _be_ fun gadgets to hack tomorrow. Maybe we can still prevent hacking from becoming a crime.
Devil's Avocado
Here's a related question:
Forget about MP3s, all I want is the correct handling of CDs! Does anybody have or know of a DVD _changer_ that has a decent shuffle-play feature? The definition of decent shall be as follows:
1. Does not repeat songs that have already been played.
2. Interleaves songs from all discs. (i.e. _not_ all the songs on disc 1 in random order, then all the songs on disc 2 in random order, etc...)
3. Does not repeat songs that have already been played.
4. Does not repeat songs that have already been played.
I bought last year's Pioneer 3-disc changer but returned it because (you guessed it) it repeated songs that had already been played. My el-cheapo bookshelf stereo in my office is smart enough not to do this, so it's not such a revolutionary feature. There's nothing worse than loading 3 hours of music only to have to hit "skip" every 5 minutes.
Now Pioneer's got a 5-disc model. Anybody got it? Does it have the same problem? Any other brands/models that meet these highly demanding criteria?
Please, no PC/MP3 solutions. MP3s sound like someone put crumbs in my speakers.
Yes, I know I should buy a DVD player and a CD changer separately, but I don't have the shelf space and I object on philosophical grounds.
Oh yeah, the stuff about it having excellent DVD video quality goes without saying.
-DA
Don't worry about video quality. I used a RealMagic Hollywood+ decoder card for a while (until the computer moved to a different room than the TV) and it was awesome. You don't have to take my word for it, though. The professional reviewers that checked the thing out mistook it for an ultra-highend standalone player in double-blind tests. I don't remember the source, but that's what google is for!
Plus the drivers are always being worked on so you get new features all the time. Case in point: support for DTS wasn't originally available, but they hacked the drivers and, voilla. Now if they'd just let _us_ hack the drivers...
-DA
What an opportunity! I can finally ask you the question that's been eating at my brain like a larval wasp!
Be honest, guys -- was the only purpose of "Self Called Nowhere" to let you do the Boston accent?
I'm sitting in the caah,
by the empty pahking lat,
By the store
where they let me play the ahgan.
Was it by desighn, or just a happy discovery that your lyrics fit that accent so well?
-DA
> yes... but it's KDE!
and?
You don't need to install anything except NEdit to use NEdit. It's a statically linked binary on any system (like Linux) that doesn't come with Motif preinstalled. Heck, you don't even really have to 'install' nedit, just download the binary and run it from wherever it lands. This is really nice when you don't have root on a system.
Motif requirement? It's a statically linked binary. There is no Motif requirement. You download it and you run it. You don't even have to compile or install it. Super cool for systems where you don't have root.
Oh, and as others have pointed out Lesstif or Open Motif are free and available if you really want to go the dynamic linking route.
First, let me say that I have used NEdit every day for several years and it has never, let me repeat that, never, crashed on me unless I was using a beta version.
This is not to say that it never crashes for anybody, but most every issue that has come up with NEdit has turned out to be a bug in Lesstif. If you use the statically linked version or get the Open Motif libraries you should have no stability problems whatsoever.
NEdit has its issues, but stability is _really_ not one of them.
How many programs besides Emacs require the user to type C-x C-c to exit? Is it reasonable to require any new editor to adhere to an interface designed before there were any such things as interface standards?
Ah, but what about all the people who already know the ins and outs of Emacs? As the number of Linux users grows, the percentage of users who will tolerate typing C-x C-f to open a file in one program, unlike the rest of the programs they use which ask for C-o, will diminish. To put it simply, NEdit was designed for those who desire a consistent, *modern* interface, not to win over those who have memorized the arcana of vi or Emacs.
As for RSI and avoiding the mouse, NEdit was the first program that convinced me that a GUI doesn't equate to forcing the user to use the mouse. Having lurked on the NEdit developer mailing list for quite some time I can tell you that keyboard usability is one of the central forces that influences design decisions in NEdit.
NEdit == The Wheel
Have you tried to find a usable (vi does not qualify), cross-platform (flavors of *NIX, at least), lightweight, easily customizable (oops, there goes Emacs) text editor lately? There aren't so many out there.
That happens when you have the Num-Lock or Scroll-Lock key turned on. It's a problem with the way Motif treats modifiers (Num-Lock + Key != Key). It's in the FAQ. There's a patch for it in the mailing list archives. Incidentally, I went the other way -- I had to find a Windows editor that was comparable to NEdit. UltraEdit is the closest I got, but I'm afraid that with the power that NEdit has under the hood with the macro language, the customizability of the auto-indentation engine, the flexible syntax hilighting, etc, UltraEdit came up severely lacking.
JEdit is pretty nice. I considered switching from NEdit because of some of the sweeter features that JEdit offers. Unfortunately JEdit is hobbled by the Java curse -- it hemmhorages memory. I like a full-featured editor. I don't like giving it 20 megs of RAM. I should be able to edit more than one file on a 64 MB machine. In the end I went back to NEdit. It's small, quick, fully customizable, and effective.
Call me a newbie/dork/lamer/whatever, but the sound of a programming language named after a potentially deadly snake is appealing to me.
Actually, Guido named Python after Monty Python's Flying Circus, which is infinitely cooler than naming it after a snake. You would know that if you weren't such a newbie/dork/lamer. (Just kidding!) Seriously, though, check out the language -- it rocks balls. It's like Perl without all that !@#$!@% shit.
Stupid question time: anybody know what Python 3000 is?
Python 3000 is the next major version of Python (although at least one more minor version is going to be released). It will be backwards incompatible and clear up many of the outstanding warts in Python's design. At this point it's not much more than a twinkle in Guido's eye.
-DA
Check out NEdit. It's an open-source, highly customizable editor with the best mouse integration of any editor anywhere. Control-drag to make rectangular selections that can be dragged anywhere in the document. It has programmable smart indent for placing lines in the proper column. It doesn't highlight expressions when brackets are missing, but it automatically highlights matching brackets, so if one is missing it's pretty easy to tell. All this and it takes up a lot less memory than XEmacs. Run it in client/server mode and you'll only have one NEdit process in memory for all of your documents.
The only downside is that it's not available for Windows and I've become spoiled for all other editors.
-DA
Actually, I've discovered a real, rational, and feasible solution to virtually all the world's major problems. And it doesn't involve killing anybody. It's actually rather brilliant.
Nope, I already thought of that. That wouldn't work.Just thought you'd like to know.
That is, employees of Caltech (facility and staff members) assign their rights as is normal for any employer, including not-for-profit organizations and others. Students assign their rights only in those circumstances where the rights clearly shoudl belong to Caltech--such as they were performing research for a research group or as part of classwork where the student used Caltech equipment and performed the work under Caltech guidance.
In fact, I believe you are understating the strength of the rights that Caltech gives to their students. The general catalog makes a point of stating clearly that even inventions developed using Caltech facilities are the property of the student, provided they weren't developed in the course of a student's classwork or research duties as an R.A. Try getting Microsoft to agree to those terms! The original poster can argue about how these policies play out in practice, but the plain truth is that Caltech's stated IP policy is very generous to the student.
I'll be starting my Ph.D. at Caltech in three weeks (summer session) and one of the reasons I chose to go there was that many of the school's policies place the student's needs first. I was surprised to find that so many of the policies (e.g. the honor code) were designed to remove administrative obstacles and trivialities from the student's path rather than protect the institution from his presumed idiocy or malice. Compare this to almost any other institution, public or private, and I think you'll find that Caltech is a pretty enlightened place to be.
--DAOn top of that they pick Python, which is probably the only language they could pick that I have absolutely no knowledge of :-)
So take an afternoon and learn it. www.python.org
Seriously, if you've programmed in any other language you'll pick up Python in no time. Plus, you'll be glad you did.
The first thing to do is to burn disc three. That version is an abomination.
I hope you aren't serious, because if so you're completely missing the point. Disc three and the commentary that accompanies it form a vivid object lesson in the power of editing, and how it can be abused. It's a powerful example of the way a director's work can be warped, through omission of dialog and other, more subtle manipulation, to present the exact opposite vision from what he intended. Everybody who is concerned about the integrity of artistry in a capitalist society should watch it and learn.