"checking for the existence of things like strcpy()"
What autoconf does is check for a representative function in the library, just as a sanity check in case there's some other, unrelated library with the same name on the system. The only problem with that is probably that it shouldn't print it out and annoy people that don't realize what it's doing.
Re:Autotools do not need a book
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 1
"For projects that "fit" automake, it's actually a wonderful tool,..."
You're absolutely right, and it seems to save a huge amount of headaches when you can use it. Note though that I'm adapting an existing codebase, that needs a certain structure to be buildable using non-unix tools and systems. While I can get a more or less buildable version using Automake there's enough oddities to deal with that adapting the previous hand-rolled makefile seems preferable.
Re:Autotools do not need a book
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 1
"In case you didn't notice, the article you linked to was written by the same guy who wrote the book being reviewed, John Calcote."
Ah, you're right. Time to buy that book, then.
Re:Autotools do not need a book
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've just recently been in the situation of selecting a build system for a project with an existing codebase. I looked at the obvious alternatives, including cmake.
In the end, I chose autotools.
When you're doing a non-trivial project, cmake doesn't become any less complicated than autoconf and automake anymore - if your build is complex, you have to deal with that complexity somewhere after all. And there's a lot more and better resources for using autotools than cmake around, for figuring out odd corner cases. If you have a somewhat odd build requirement, chances are somebody else has already solved it using autotools already.
From my experience so far, most of what people dislike about using autotools come from Automake. But Automake is of course completely optional to use, and Autoconf - which provides most of the benefits - was made to be standalone. If you have a system with existing makefiles, it makes a lot of sense to simply use Autoconf to configure the app and the makefiles and leave Automake alone.
"Why people moan that the kindle is not expandable I'll never understand. Aside from a wikipedia dump, who needs two gigs of text on the go!"
My Zotero archive of research papers for my current project is around 700Mb right now. For a longer, larger project, or if I kept the papers for earlier projects I would break that 2Gb limit without even trying.
This is why no current e-book reader appeals to me. My main motivation for getting one would be to bring all my relevant literature with me, and having it easily indexed and searchable on the device. I really want e-ink (hate reading PDF's on LCD screens), but unless I can actually find the stuff I look for it's useless to me.
My ideal device would be E-ink or equivalent, about the size and weight of the Amazon or Sony's readers and have a Zotero-compatible indexing system, with note taking and all, that could easily sync with my laptop. We're not even close yet.
"Everything from doors to driving are aimed at prominence being in the right hand."
No.
Right-hand drive cars have the gear stick, radio and so on on the left, simply because it needs to be in the center, and other controls are not laid out with handedness as a consideration. Doors come both left and right-moving, depending on the floor layout, with no consideration of the handedness of their users, with handles that make no difference for handedness.
So, excellent examples of how common objects are not optimized for handedness.
"Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies."
Most places explicitly allow backups and format shifting, in addition to excerpting and other fair use exceptions. All of which now become possible where it was not before. No stealing or anything immoral involved.
"Is Nokia's Symbian devices every actually used outside of Europe/Asia?"
Europe and Asia's population is around 4.6 billion people, or 70% of the worlds population. Anything used in "only" those areas of the world is pretty damn close to ubiquitous, whether it reaches every corner of the world or not.
Yes, but if you never do anything the hard way because the problems are "already solved" how exactly is one supposed to learn anything at all?
You aren't supposed to, when you're on the job. You're supposed to get the product done, on time and under budget if at all possible. Learning stuff is time spent not working on the main goal, and should happen only if there is no other alternative.
Now, in practice I doubt there's many places that take it that far. But learning new stuff for a project _is_ an expensive way (in time) to get results - hence the lure of consultants that presumably already know. Allowing people to spend time learning new stuff that's not connected to the work is very much an indulgence and something to be grateful for rather than expect as a matter of course. Kind of like allowing employees to spend time with a game console or having a reading room with newspapers and fiction.
Say that there's a group of people connected to some country that is opposed to US and its interests. There's a fair amount of resentment towards the US and its culture, and the country isn't exactly known as peace-loving and dovish. These people could be semi-official (non-legal spies from their embassies), or they could be private people working for this country.
US intelligence people find out about these people, try to track them, see what they're up to. Unfortunately, a lot of their communication is going over heavily encrypted links, provided by a private company that also sells these devices in the US.
Now, would anybody be surprised or particularly upset if the US demanded access to encrypted communications from that private company or threaten to lose the US market if they don't comply?
"I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged?"
Should you get outraged if your evaluation is printed in a major daily newspaper as an example? Without a reporter even as much as contacting you for a chance at filling in your side of the story?
"And on a quite global scale, enabling unprecended level of direct interboundary (interocean even) communication"
Not as much as many native English speakers seem to want to think. Most people here in Japan, including academics and other well-educated professionals, never visit non-Japanese language websites - or if they do (some social websites or similar), only the subset that is in Japanese. And this is generally true even when their English proficiency is quite good. I saw similar behavior (though to a lesser extent) in my native Sweden some years ago.
"Language globalization" or not, the vast majority of people around the world are most comfortable communicating in their own language, with people largely sharing their own culture. We don't really have one internet as much as a number of separate, semi-permeable internets, each with their own language, culture, trends and memes but with some high-profile stuff "leaking" between them. We may superficially seem as we're sharing the same online culture, but for every runaway meme shared by the world, you have tens, hundreds that never go beyond the particular internet where it was born.
No. That's the whole point of slang - you use it to show that you belong in a specific subgroup. If everyone is "up to speed" on some slang it no longer works as slang. Everyone who wants to show subgroup membership (and that's everybody, pretty much) will start using other new words and expressions instead.
Swype is very overrated. Works fine for 90% of what you write (if you're using a well supported language), and makes the remaining 10% a pain to use. If you use more than one language, or want to use uncommon or non-standard vocabulary that 90% drops to something like 60% or worse.
Besides, swype doesn't need multitouch. I agree with the OP; it's a nice gimmick but not particularly useful.
You have to apply in person, and there's apparently some form of biometric data as well that is checked when you try to use the card (I don't smoke so I've never checked the details). I doubt many underage smokers would bother; it's probably easier to buy your smokes from some sleepy convenience store clerk who doesn't care if you're underage or not.
And as far as I've heard, only a fraction of smokers have bothered with the cards at all. Again, as there's a convenience store nearby almost wherever you are, it's just easier to buy it there.
!? But if you never remove it from that bay all you've done is, rather circuitously, installed a really slow hard drive in your case.
And that logic is valid whether it's in the bay or sitting on the floor or desk next to it. Which means a networked drive is probably not a very high-priority peripheral if your household has only one computer.
If you do have several computers, however, a networked drive is really useful. It lets you do backups from all of them, and have a local shared data space without having to have one computer constantly up and running. Less power, less noise. And for those benefits it doesn't matter where the drive physically sits.
That's stupid. What if your computer gets stolen. Backup goes too?
As opposed to when the thing sits on the floor a meter or two away from the computer? It's meant to protect from drive failure and user error ("damn, I didn't mean to delete that"), not from rare events like theft.
How about a small fridge unit, enough to cool a few cans of beer? I'm sure ThinkGeek could come up with something that'd fit right into two bays, with a separate spring-loaded bay for each can.
Use the space as a shelf and place your external networked backup drive inside. Just because it's logically separate doesn't mean it has to clutter up some corner of the room all by itself. Or your wifi station, though you'll need to let the antenna stick out of course.
Because a phone isn't a desktop, and things that work well on one does not on the other. Microsoft is learning this the hard way (the lesson seems to have a hard time sinking in, still).
"I almost never played COD4 multiplayer, but I almost always like playing puzzle/adventure games (like Monkey Island or Space Quest or what have you) with someone else."
Yep. Me and a friend went through the first three Monkey Island games and Grim Fandango together; way more fun to sit and bounce ideas off each other and argue what to do next than to sit and beat the game alone. Of course, that was at university, when I actually had time to sit and play a game all night long. Today, a game pretty much has to let me play it in 10-15 minute chunks over the course of weeks or I just can't do it. And finding somebody else to share those same fragments of time is well nigh impossible. Which is why I play a lot less than I used to I guess.
"My cousin (a total noob at any kind of gaming... or PCs) was like one of those target dummies in Oblivion, and my brother and I chased him all over the map blowing him up, mowing him down and generally turning him into dog food. Fun!"
"Fred Phelps and his followers should be dragged out behind the barn, and put out of everyone's misery."
No. They should be held up to public ridicule. And they should be exposed as self-declared exponents of christianity, forcing more mainstream christians to take a clear stand against the vile, hateful dogma Phelps is spouting, or be lumped right in with these hateful clowns.
Slashdot Mirror
"checking for the existence of things like strcpy()"
What autoconf does is check for a representative function in the library, just as a sanity check in case there's some other, unrelated library with the same name on the system. The only problem with that is probably that it shouldn't print it out and annoy people that don't realize what it's doing.
"For projects that "fit" automake, it's actually a wonderful tool, ..."
You're absolutely right, and it seems to save a huge amount of headaches when you can use it. Note though that I'm adapting an existing codebase, that needs a certain structure to be buildable using non-unix tools and systems. While I can get a more or less buildable version using Automake there's enough oddities to deal with that adapting the previous hand-rolled makefile seems preferable.
"In case you didn't notice, the article you linked to was written by the same guy who wrote the book being reviewed, John Calcote."
Ah, you're right. Time to buy that book, then.
I've just recently been in the situation of selecting a build system for a project with an existing codebase. I looked at the obvious alternatives, including cmake.
In the end, I chose autotools.
When you're doing a non-trivial project, cmake doesn't become any less complicated than autoconf and automake anymore - if your build is complex, you have to deal with that complexity somewhere after all. And there's a lot more and better resources for using autotools than cmake around, for figuring out odd corner cases. If you have a somewhat odd build requirement, chances are somebody else has already solved it using autotools already.
From my experience so far, most of what people dislike about using autotools come from Automake. But Automake is of course completely optional to use, and Autoconf - which provides most of the benefits - was made to be standalone. If you have a system with existing makefiles, it makes a lot of sense to simply use Autoconf to configure the app and the makefiles and leave Automake alone.
This is a lengthy but really illuminating document on using the autotools, that specifically goes through using autoconf alone and on how to adapt an existing project: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/books/agaal/brief_introduction_to_gnu_autotools/
"Why people moan that the kindle is not expandable I'll never understand. Aside from a wikipedia dump, who needs two gigs of text on the go!"
My Zotero archive of research papers for my current project is around 700Mb right now. For a longer, larger project, or if I kept the papers for earlier projects I would break that 2Gb limit without even trying.
This is why no current e-book reader appeals to me. My main motivation for getting one would be to bring all my relevant literature with me, and having it easily indexed and searchable on the device. I really want e-ink (hate reading PDF's on LCD screens), but unless I can actually find the stuff I look for it's useless to me.
My ideal device would be E-ink or equivalent, about the size and weight of the Amazon or Sony's readers and have a Zotero-compatible indexing system, with note taking and all, that could easily sync with my laptop. We're not even close yet.
"but does it have USB?"
Through a dongle, apparently - and annoyingly.
"Can I install an operating system of my choosing?"
It has been rooted already, so in principle yes. Somebody would need to actually port the OS to the device of course.
"Does it run nmap and aircrack-ng? "
You can build and run console apps on a normal Android device - it's linux after all.
"Can I conveniently SSH into an 8 core SMP server with Maple and MATLAB when I need a little extra oomph?"
Just download an ssh client and off you go. No X forwarding though, as it doesn't run X.
"How usable is the onscreen keyboard?"
Tim Bray has been using one for a few days: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/09/10/Galaxy-Tab-in-my-Pocket
He really likes the keyboard. He also seems to find the battery life to be rather better than those quoted seven hours would imply.
"Everything from doors to driving are aimed at prominence being in the right hand."
No.
Right-hand drive cars have the gear stick, radio and so on on the left, simply because it needs to be in the center, and other controls are not laid out with handedness as a consideration. Doors come both left and right-moving, depending on the floor layout, with no consideration of the handedness of their users, with handles that make no difference for handedness.
So, excellent examples of how common objects are not optimized for handedness.
"Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies."
Most places explicitly allow backups and format shifting, in addition to excerpting and other fair use exceptions. All of which now become possible where it was not before. No stealing or anything immoral involved.
"Is Nokia's Symbian devices every actually used outside of Europe/Asia?"
Europe and Asia's population is around 4.6 billion people, or 70% of the worlds population. Anything used in "only" those areas of the world is pretty damn close to ubiquitous, whether it reaches every corner of the world or not.
You aren't supposed to, when you're on the job. You're supposed to get the product done, on time and under budget if at all possible. Learning stuff is time spent not working on the main goal, and should happen only if there is no other alternative.
Now, in practice I doubt there's many places that take it that far. But learning new stuff for a project _is_ an expensive way (in time) to get results - hence the lure of consultants that presumably already know. Allowing people to spend time learning new stuff that's not connected to the work is very much an indulgence and something to be grateful for rather than expect as a matter of course. Kind of like allowing employees to spend time with a game console or having a reading room with newspapers and fiction.
Say that there's a group of people connected to some country that is opposed to US and its interests. There's a fair amount of resentment towards the US and its culture, and the country isn't exactly known as peace-loving and dovish. These people could be semi-official (non-legal spies from their embassies), or they could be private people working for this country.
US intelligence people find out about these people, try to track them, see what they're up to. Unfortunately, a lot of their communication is going over heavily encrypted links, provided by a private company that also sells these devices in the US.
Now, would anybody be surprised or particularly upset if the US demanded access to encrypted communications from that private company or threaten to lose the US market if they don't comply?
"I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged?"
Should you get outraged if your evaluation is printed in a major daily newspaper as an example? Without a reporter even as much as contacting you for a chance at filling in your side of the story?
"And on a quite global scale, enabling unprecended level of direct interboundary (interocean even) communication"
Not as much as many native English speakers seem to want to think. Most people here in Japan, including academics and other well-educated professionals, never visit non-Japanese language websites - or if they do (some social websites or similar), only the subset that is in Japanese. And this is generally true even when their English proficiency is quite good. I saw similar behavior (though to a lesser extent) in my native Sweden some years ago.
"Language globalization" or not, the vast majority of people around the world are most comfortable communicating in their own language, with people largely sharing their own culture. We don't really have one internet as much as a number of separate, semi-permeable internets, each with their own language, culture, trends and memes but with some high-profile stuff "leaking" between them. We may superficially seem as we're sharing the same online culture, but for every runaway meme shared by the world, you have tens, hundreds that never go beyond the particular internet where it was born.
"[...] is everyone up to speed?"
No. That's the whole point of slang - you use it to show that you belong in a specific subgroup. If everyone is "up to speed" on some slang it no longer works as slang. Everyone who wants to show subgroup membership (and that's everybody, pretty much) will start using other new words and expressions instead.
Swype is very overrated. Works fine for 90% of what you write (if you're using a well supported language), and makes the remaining 10% a pain to use. If you use more than one language, or want to use uncommon or non-standard vocabulary that 90% drops to something like 60% or worse.
Besides, swype doesn't need multitouch. I agree with the OP; it's a nice gimmick but not particularly useful.
You have to apply in person, and there's apparently some form of biometric data as well that is checked when you try to use the card (I don't smoke so I've never checked the details). I doubt many underage smokers would bother; it's probably easier to buy your smokes from some sleepy convenience store clerk who doesn't care if you're underage or not.
And as far as I've heard, only a fraction of smokers have bothered with the cards at all. Again, as there's a convenience store nearby almost wherever you are, it's just easier to buy it there.
And that logic is valid whether it's in the bay or sitting on the floor or desk next to it. Which means a networked drive is probably not a very high-priority peripheral if your household has only one computer.
If you do have several computers, however, a networked drive is really useful. It lets you do backups from all of them, and have a local shared data space without having to have one computer constantly up and running. Less power, less noise. And for those benefits it doesn't matter where the drive physically sits.
As opposed to when the thing sits on the floor a meter or two away from the computer? It's meant to protect from drive failure and user error ("damn, I didn't mean to delete that"), not from rare events like theft.
How about a small fridge unit, enough to cool a few cans of beer? I'm sure ThinkGeek could come up with something that'd fit right into two bays, with a separate spring-loaded bay for each can.
Use the space as a shelf and place your external networked backup drive inside. Just because it's logically separate doesn't mean it has to clutter up some corner of the room all by itself. Or your wifi station, though you'll need to let the antenna stick out of course.
Because a phone isn't a desktop, and things that work well on one does not on the other. Microsoft is learning this the hard way (the lesson seems to have a hard time sinking in, still).
"I almost never played COD4 multiplayer, but I almost always like playing puzzle/adventure games (like Monkey Island or Space Quest or what have you) with someone else."
Yep. Me and a friend went through the first three Monkey Island games and Grim Fandango together; way more fun to sit and bounce ideas off each other and argue what to do next than to sit and beat the game alone. Of course, that was at university, when I actually had time to sit and play a game all night long. Today, a game pretty much has to let me play it in 10-15 minute chunks over the course of weeks or I just can't do it. And finding somebody else to share those same fragments of time is well nigh impossible. Which is why I play a lot less than I used to I guess.
"My cousin (a total noob at any kind of gaming ... or PCs) was like one of those target dummies in Oblivion, and my brother and I chased him all over the map blowing him up, mowing him down and generally turning him into dog food. Fun!"
How much fun did your cousin have?
"Fred Phelps and his followers should be dragged out behind the barn, and put out of everyone's misery."
No. They should be held up to public ridicule. And they should be exposed as self-declared exponents of christianity, forcing more mainstream christians to take a clear stand against the vile, hateful dogma Phelps is spouting, or be lumped right in with these hateful clowns.
"Long story short this product is doomed with a 97% confidence of certain doomage."
Well, perhaps avoid doom if it gets rooted, then people can load Android on it. Make it a good phone.