Here is a direct link to the Zcode on no less than the author (and HHGTTG copyright holder) Douglas Adams' website. (If this is of dubious legality, sorry - but there IS a java zcode interpreter there on the site so that you can play the game if it is:) )
It's a malicious CGI script which makes you follow up to the article, as anyone just seeing the article (or later on surfing at -1 when we all get modded through the floor) will find out.
Frankly I don't give a damn about karma, but this is just *annoying*.
Lynx has a *very* nice interface IMHO. Show me another web-browser that is;
a) usable over SSH where X is not available;
b) operable with exactly four keys for most normal purposes;
c) can be used where your system is so badly screwed that you can't get X to display locally.
Anyway, there are lynx-alikes (eg w3m, links) which DO have mouse support.
Thus, you lose graphics (which for certain sites is a distinct advantage), and plugins (which are very rarely have anything of interest anyway).
Also, using the keys IS faster; it means you have to learn keystrokes, but I spent most of the summer using Microsoft Word as a secretary (audio/copy typing), and it is radically faster to use hotkeys than to take your hands off the keyboard. Mice are good for lowering the entry barrier to computer use, but they are no panacea.
>> Only to be "reprogrammed" by a Microsoft owned college:)"
Arandir said:
> I hate to burst your bubble, but Microsoft doesn't own any colleges.
It comes very very close in some cases; the university I'm at (Cambridge in the UK) is naming a Computer Science building after William H Gates III, who has donated a/very/ substantial sum of money to this place. I'm pretty sure there are no strings, per se, attached to Gates's donations (ObDisclaimer: I'm not a computer scientist), but I'd be amazed if people didn't look favourably on the company of a serious benefactor - it's only human nature.
To be fair, Redhat's core market is not techies; they have an explicit aim of taking users away from Win32, rather than poaching from other distributions. Thus they are competing mainly with SuSE, whereas Debian and Slackware mop up the hardcore of old-school Linux users.
Therefore, the people who don't know that they can get RedHat free are the people RH are looking for...
>For a final bit of fun, please explain how the >law of conservation of energy is correctly >observed concerning the origins of our universe >if no "external" energy is allowed in or out of >our universe... be it infinite or not.
Easy. Gravity is directly analogous to negative energy. Sum the potential energy with respect to gravity over the universe, noting that this is NEGATIVE energy, and then add on all the energy (from E=m.c^2 or hf) pertaining to matter, radiation etc in the universe.
The total is zero; the universe is on loan.
Quantum Mechanics (or more specifically the probabilistic nature of QM allowing a) local negative energy and b) the spontaneous creation of matter as a result) explains how this is possible.
Of course, this is just a theory, same as any other; this one is popular (I am led to believe) with cosmologists at present. It could be wrong, though it neatly observes the evidence seen. Nothing in science can be proved; scientists are just trying to make models and predict what will happen using these models. If something is not predicted, you can disprove a model; but you can never prove it.
Same with faith; if it explains _your_ experience, then you are likely to believe. Don't flame someone's beliefs, because you can't be them and understand why they believe it.
In the way of IRC clients, if you want the eyecandy, the obvious client to suggest is XChat; in my experience (in its' latest incarnation), it is featureful, stable, and not bad performance wise.
Personally, I find tkIRC to be very useable in X11, and it has the virtue of being usable with ircII scripts (it essentially being a TK front-end to ircII).
There is also Zircon, an irc client written entirely in TCL/TK, but I found it had some annoying misfeatures with respect to nicklengths (ircII hard-limits your personal nick-length at 8 without modifying the source, but Zircon refuses to let you op people through the menus without them having a nick of 8 characters or less).
Also, KVirc is meant to be extremely good; I have never used it, however.
Try http://www.irchelp.org for a list of clients to look at.
> How many c0derZ have similarly wide-ranging > tastes (i.e. not just listening to one style of > music?
Last 10 CDs to go through my player:
Suede: Coming Up Mogwai: Young Team Pixies: Death to the Pixies Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home Blur: 13 Kraftwerk: The Mix Massive Attack: Protection Crowded House: Recurring Dream Boards of Canada: Music has the Right to Children Idlewild: Hope is Important
I recommend them all - but slightly eclectic, yes:)
(that doesn't include the Bowie, Radiohead, Elvis Costello, DJ Shadow, REM I listen to....)
AFAICT, most people here seem to like one "type" of music in particular; most notably they either have a very extensive collection of classical music, or a wide range of "popular", although rarely pure-pop, CDs.
Disclaimer: I'm at an UK uni with a high nerd-density.
I'm a Scot, and you can tell what part of Scotland someone is from by their accent in most cases (the Aberdeen accent is very different from the Edinburgh one, and the Glasow one also). None of these sound like Scouse (Liverpool), or people from the West Country (Bristol etc.). I'm at university in the South, and here accents are noticeably different once again.
For example a Scot would in general pronounce "bury" "buhry", and someone from the South of England would say "berry".
Of course, all of these are gross stereotypes.
None of them sound like Received Pronunciation, which is probably what you think of as English, and even _that_ is nothing like the Hollywood version of the "English" accent.
Interestingly, most people in the UK seem to appreciate the massive variation in accent across Northern America (the US and Canada).
So stating the existence of a "british" accent is somewhat fallacious. However, British English is somewhat different from American English in many grammatical aspects (trivial examples being in spelling, such as colour/color and flavour/flavor). In general, British English seems to have absorbed more in the way of external influences; this probably has more to do with the proximity of other languages and the country's seafaring history than anything else.
On a computing level, the keymap of UK keyboards is somewhat different to American ones, with (for example) the £ (UKP) symbol on shift-3, and ~ and # next to return on the right-hand side. As you can see, therefore, internationalisation is necessary even between dialects of the same language!
Well, quite simply, it affected my buying decision, and that of many people I know at my university (I count at least 3 or 4 extra sales), that NVidia showed *genuine" tnt2 support with its' driver releases.
NVidia had their flak over the obfuscated driver thing - it just shows that we can't afford to immediately jump down companies' necks and annoy them when they make decisions we don't like - but it is perfectly possible to slew them round to our way of thinking
Acronym
"Another dreaded sunny day, So I'll meet you at the cemetery gates..."
Imagine user walking down the street, or sitting in a tube trainm reading email/web/news whatever.
The friendly neighbourhood mugger notes this non-threatening person, in a world of his/her own, wearing very expensive PC hardware, and in no position to escape or fight back.
Can we say "target", ladies and gentlemen? I wouldn't fancy your chances of getting insurance on one of these things!:)
Acronym
Re:What desktops actually need
on
Corel Linux FAQ
·
· Score: 1
Cause it ain't Micro$oft?
Seriously, a lot of people install Linux as an act of rebellion against Bill of Borg personally, and this is entirely the wrong reason.
The right reason is because it suits your needs better. For some tasks, including my own (I'm a physical-sciences student), Linux is ideal. For others, a *BSD is better. For a few, you could probably convincingly argue a Microsoft OS is the best for the job, and ditto BeOS and so forth.
Installing Linux for what it *isn't* is the wrong reason. Installing whatever OS is best for what you need and want to do is inherently The Right Thing, and this is why a monopoly is bad - it restricts the use people can get from their computers.
The way I see it, a typical title for this scene has to have one pun in it, whether good or bad (eg WINE, Pine, and all the rest..)
So how about;
Sorceror.
Obviously, it's a play on source, but it also is analogous to "wizard", as suggested earlier; and sorceror has overtones of creation-of-things rather than destruction, making it more clear what we are on about.
Might be a bit too Tolkienesque, but I'd like to hear what people think!
Certainly in the case of a fission (Hiroshima/Nagasaki type) bomb, the power source comes from an uncontrolled chain reaction; the process being, if I remember correctly, the decay of uranium-238. The chain carriers are neutrons, which can be absorbed by carbon rods (forming carbon-13, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of carbon); thus, the use of carbon control rods can reduce the rate of reaction dramatically, basically giving you a controlled explosion - commonly called a nuclear reactor.
Thus, you are right in saying that the difference between a nuclear FISSION bomb and a conventional fission reactor is one of reaction rate.
However, H-bombs are a very different animal indeed.
Fusion is essentially the reverse of fission - it is sticking two small nuclei together, such as 3-H (tritium) and 2-H(deuterium), to form, in general, 4-He (the naturally occurring isotope of helium). This releases phenomenal amounts of energy, but requires huge amounts to get it going. Now, in the absence of fusion energy to trigger it (the reaction being self-sustaining in the presence of reactants once it has started), we need to stick a lot of energy in somehow to get it going. The only way we have to do this in weapons is by placing a fission weapon beside it and firing it (although a small one); this pumps enough energy in to get fusion going, releasing huge amounts of energy.
Of course, if I am totally wrong, please correct me!
Well, I'm running Gnome on a M2-166 with 40MB of RAM, and it doesn't seem desperately slow to me.
I would guess that the WM you use with it will make a very great difference - something like FVWM or similar is much faster than E, purely because it is more mature and has a slimmer featureset. Yes, Gnome is bigger than other "user environments", although X itself is less than a model of efficiency, so to speak, but;
a) If you want slimness and speed above all else, use wm2. Features will slow your computer down, in the same way running lots of apps at the same time will - there is only so much RAM, and there are only so many clock cycles to go round.
It's a tradeoff - networking built-into the windowing system, as in X, could be regarded as bloat. I regard it as an invaluable feature.
Furthermore;
b) Use whatever suits your needs best. Me, I like the integrated desktop, as I use my Linux box primarily as a personal workstation. It may not be suited to your needs.
As for bugginess, Netscrape wins that award hands down. Crashes are not exactly rare for Netscape, let us remember (and I would be amazed if you do not use it) and Gnome does not crash nearly as much as Windows does. Given it is not designed for use on servers and other such mission-critical boxes, I'd say it's at least tolerably stable, and will get better.
As for idiot-proofing, I will agree that it is desirable, but Linux tends to act as a moron-filter at present - you still need a certain degree of technical ability in order to use it. Thus it is more important, I suspect, for the developers to concentrate on the feature set whilst it is a higl techy audience using it - the handholding can come later.
I'd dispute the trollish nature of this. Speaking as someone (loosely a typical nerd, but definitely not out oof the ordinary in dress or attitude) who attended a state primary school and a fee-paying secondary, I can say that the mentality is the same in both. Sportsmen are venerated; everyone else is nothing. At my secondary, I was the first person ever to get double colours (chess and debating) and not be a prefect. I am also extremely clumsy, and the PE department was very powerful.
It's not hard to draw a link between these.
Also, drugs were rife, and lead to sometimes serious violence (I would estimate that in the schools in the Scottish city I was in, at least 25% of the 6th year had smoked cannabis); bullying (including of me) was rife, by both staff and pupils (although notably it was not generally the sportsmen who were responsible; IME, it was the nearly-good enough who were trying to hide their inadequacies by humiliating others); and the entire mentality of the school was to ignore these things and concentrate on public image.
School was hell. It's OK to resent it, but don't hate the people - hate the system that turns people into bullies and victims. I survived, although it still hurts a lot to have had to deal with it, and am now an undergrad at a leading UK university. You CAN get through this, people. Prove 'em wrong - if someone bullies you for your intelligence, it is only a mark of their jealousy.
a) feel that an established Western brand would give them better brand recognition in most markets;
b) don't have, and due to the parlous state of the Russian economy cannot afford to build, modern fabrication plants of the necessary level of technology (it being a reasonable assumption that we're talking sub 0.25 micron tracks here), in order to produce such a processor themselves.
I feel either or both factors have to be in play here.
ARM own the StrongArm; it was originally designed for the Acorn RiscPC. It's just that Intel have paid ARM for a non-exclusive right to poroduce the StrongArm family of processors.
Slashdot Mirror
Some might say that performance has a value, you know...
You need the latest Eclipse milestone (2.2M4 I think) and a recompiled SWT - then it works fine.
It's not even close. This makes Milkdrop look like a joke; the video's awesome.
If you like the music in the demo video, visit http://www.hiddenmusic.co.uk/ - the website of Redpoint's label.
Here is a direct link to the Zcode on no less than the author (and HHGTTG copyright holder) Douglas Adams' website. (If this is of dubious legality, sorry - but there IS a java zcode interpreter there on the site so that you can play the game if it is :) )
OK; however, the C library is very emphatically part of the OS, given precisely nothing woould work (to a good approximation) without it.
Who's wrong?
OK, this is a troll which I just fell for.
It's a malicious CGI script which makes you follow up to the article, as anyone just seeing the article (or later on surfing at -1 when we all get modded through the floor) will find out.
Frankly I don't give a damn about karma, but this is just *annoying*.
Lynx has a *very* nice interface IMHO. Show me another web-browser that is;
a) usable over SSH where X is not available;
b) operable with exactly four keys for most normal purposes;
c) can be used where your system is so badly screwed that you can't get X to display locally.
Anyway, there are lynx-alikes (eg w3m, links) which DO have mouse support.
Thus, you lose graphics (which for certain sites is a distinct advantage), and plugins (which are very rarely have anything of interest anyway).
Also, using the keys IS faster; it means you have to learn keystrokes, but I spent most of the summer using Microsoft Word as a secretary (audio/copy typing), and it is radically faster to use hotkeys than to take your hands off the keyboard. Mice are good for lowering the entry barrier to computer use, but they are no panacea.
It's not opensourced, and there is the Mesa project, which is already a functionally-equivalent clone; see http://www.mesa3d.org .
>> Only to be "reprogrammed" by a Microsoft owned college :)"
/very/ substantial sum of money to this place. I'm pretty sure there are no strings, per se, attached to Gates's donations (ObDisclaimer: I'm not a computer scientist), but I'd be amazed if people didn't look favourably on the company of a serious benefactor - it's only human nature.
Arandir said:
> I hate to burst your bubble, but Microsoft doesn't own any colleges.
It comes very very close in some cases; the university I'm at (Cambridge in the UK) is naming a Computer Science building after William H Gates III, who has donated a
To be fair, Redhat's core market is not techies; they have an explicit aim of taking users away from Win32, rather than poaching from other distributions. Thus they are competing mainly with SuSE, whereas Debian and Slackware mop up the hardcore of old-school Linux users.
Therefore, the people who don't know that they can get RedHat free are the people RH are looking for...
Stroke of marketing genius in my book!
>For a final bit of fun, please explain how the
>law of conservation of energy is correctly
>observed concerning the origins of our universe
>if no "external" energy is allowed in or out of
>our universe... be it infinite or not.
Easy. Gravity is directly analogous to negative energy. Sum the potential energy with respect to gravity over the universe, noting that this is NEGATIVE energy, and then add on all the energy (from E=m.c^2 or hf) pertaining to matter, radiation etc in the universe.
The total is zero; the universe is on loan.
Quantum Mechanics (or more specifically the probabilistic nature of QM allowing a) local negative energy and b) the spontaneous creation of matter as a result) explains how this is possible.
Of course, this is just a theory, same as any other; this one is popular (I am led to believe) with cosmologists at present. It could be wrong, though it neatly observes the evidence seen. Nothing in science can be proved; scientists are just trying to make models and predict what will happen using these models. If something is not predicted, you can disprove a model; but you can never prove it.
Same with faith; if it explains _your_ experience, then you are likely to believe. Don't flame someone's beliefs, because you can't be them and understand why they believe it.
In the way of IRC clients, if you want the eyecandy, the obvious client to suggest is XChat; in my experience (in its' latest incarnation), it is featureful, stable, and not bad performance wise.
Personally, I find tkIRC to be very useable in X11, and it has the virtue of being usable with ircII scripts (it essentially being a TK front-end to ircII).
There is also Zircon, an irc client written entirely in TCL/TK, but I found it had some annoying misfeatures with respect to nicklengths (ircII hard-limits your personal nick-length at 8 without modifying the source, but Zircon refuses to let you op people through the menus without them having a nick of 8 characters or less).
Also, KVirc is meant to be extremely good; I have never used it, however.
Try http://www.irchelp.org for a list of clients to look at.
Hope this helps.
Acronym
(unrepentant ircII-in-an-eterm user)
David E. Smith wrote:
:)
....)
> How many c0derZ have similarly wide-ranging
> tastes (i.e. not just listening to one style of
> music?
Last 10 CDs to go through my player:
Suede: Coming Up
Mogwai: Young Team
Pixies: Death to the Pixies
Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home
Blur: 13
Kraftwerk: The Mix
Massive Attack: Protection
Crowded House: Recurring Dream
Boards of Canada: Music has the Right to Children
Idlewild: Hope is Important
I recommend them all - but slightly eclectic, yes
(that doesn't include the Bowie, Radiohead, Elvis Costello, DJ Shadow, REM I listen to
AFAICT, most people here seem to like one "type" of music in particular; most notably they either have a very extensive collection of classical music, or a wide range of "popular", although rarely pure-pop, CDs.
Disclaimer: I'm at an UK uni with a high nerd-density.
Acronym
*British* accent?
I'm a Scot, and you can tell what part of Scotland someone is from by their accent in most cases (the Aberdeen accent is very different from the Edinburgh one, and the Glasow one also). None of these sound like Scouse (Liverpool), or people from the West Country (Bristol etc.). I'm at university in the South, and here accents are noticeably different once again.
For example a Scot would in general pronounce "bury" "buhry", and someone from the South of England would say "berry".
Of course, all of these are gross stereotypes.
None of them sound like Received Pronunciation, which is probably what you think of as English, and even _that_ is nothing like the Hollywood version of the "English" accent.
Interestingly, most people in the UK seem to appreciate the massive variation in accent across Northern America (the US and Canada).
So stating the existence of a "british" accent is somewhat fallacious. However, British English is somewhat different from American English in many grammatical aspects (trivial examples being in spelling, such as colour/color and flavour/flavor). In general, British English seems to have absorbed more in the way of external influences; this probably has more to do with the proximity of other languages and the country's seafaring history than anything else.
On a computing level, the keymap of UK keyboards is somewhat different to American ones, with (for example) the £ (UKP) symbol on shift-3, and ~ and # next to return on the right-hand side. As you can see, therefore, internationalisation is necessary even between dialects of the same language!
Well, quite simply, it affected my buying decision, and that of many people I know at my university (I count at least 3 or 4 extra sales), that NVidia showed *genuine" tnt2 support with its' driver releases.
NVidia had their flak over the obfuscated driver thing - it just shows that we can't afford to immediately jump down companies' necks and annoy them when they make decisions we don't like - but it is perfectly possible to slew them round to our way of thinking
Acronym
"Another dreaded sunny day,
So I'll meet you at the cemetery gates..."
More to the point:
:)
Imagine user walking down the street, or sitting in a tube trainm reading email/web/news whatever.
The friendly neighbourhood mugger notes this non-threatening person, in a world of his/her own, wearing very expensive PC hardware, and in no position to escape or fight back.
Can we say "target", ladies and gentlemen? I wouldn't fancy your chances of getting insurance on one of these things!
Acronym
Cause it ain't Micro$oft?
Seriously, a lot of people install Linux as an act of rebellion against Bill of Borg personally, and this is entirely the wrong reason.
The right reason is because it suits your needs better. For some tasks, including my own (I'm a physical-sciences student), Linux is ideal. For others, a *BSD is better. For a few, you could probably convincingly argue a Microsoft OS is the best for the job, and ditto BeOS and so forth.
Installing Linux for what it *isn't* is the wrong reason. Installing whatever OS is best for what you need and want to do is inherently The Right Thing, and this is why a monopoly is bad - it restricts the use people can get from their computers.
Oooo-kay.
The way I see it, a typical title for this scene has to have one pun in it, whether good or bad (eg WINE, Pine, and all the rest..)
So how about;
Sorceror.
Obviously, it's a play on source, but it also is analogous to "wizard", as suggested earlier; and sorceror has overtones of creation-of-things rather than destruction, making it more clear what we are on about.
Might be a bit too Tolkienesque, but I'd like to hear what people think!
Yes and no.
Certainly in the case of a fission (Hiroshima/Nagasaki type) bomb, the power source comes from an uncontrolled chain reaction; the process being, if I remember correctly, the decay of uranium-238. The chain carriers are neutrons, which can be absorbed by carbon rods (forming carbon-13, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of carbon); thus, the use of carbon control rods can reduce the rate of reaction dramatically, basically giving you a controlled explosion - commonly called a nuclear reactor.
Thus, you are right in saying that the difference between a nuclear FISSION bomb and a conventional fission reactor is one of reaction rate.
However, H-bombs are a very different animal indeed.
Fusion is essentially the reverse of fission - it is sticking two small nuclei together, such as 3-H (tritium) and 2-H(deuterium), to form, in general, 4-He (the naturally occurring isotope of helium). This releases phenomenal amounts of energy, but requires huge amounts to get it going. Now, in the absence of fusion energy to trigger it (the reaction being self-sustaining in the presence of reactants once it has started), we need to stick a lot of energy in somehow to get it going. The only way we have to do this in weapons is by placing a fission weapon beside it and firing it (although a small one); this pumps enough energy in to get fusion going, releasing huge amounts of energy.
Of course, if I am totally wrong, please correct me!
Well, I'm running Gnome on a M2-166 with 40MB of RAM, and it doesn't seem desperately slow to me.
I would guess that the WM you use with it will make a very great difference - something like FVWM or similar is much faster than E, purely because it is more mature and has a slimmer featureset. Yes, Gnome is bigger than other "user environments", although X itself is less than a model of efficiency, so to speak, but;
a) If you want slimness and speed above all else, use wm2. Features will slow your computer down, in the same way running lots of apps at the same time will - there is only so much RAM, and there are only so many clock cycles to go round.
It's a tradeoff - networking built-into the windowing system, as in X, could be regarded as bloat. I regard it as an invaluable feature.
Furthermore;
b) Use whatever suits your needs best. Me, I like the integrated desktop, as I use my Linux box primarily as a personal workstation. It may not be suited to your needs.
As for bugginess, Netscrape wins that award hands down. Crashes are not exactly rare for Netscape, let us remember (and I would be amazed if you do not use it) and Gnome does not crash nearly as much as Windows does. Given it is not designed for use on servers and other such mission-critical boxes, I'd say it's at least tolerably stable, and will get better.
As for idiot-proofing, I will agree that it is desirable, but Linux tends to act as a moron-filter at present - you still need a certain degree of technical ability in order to use it. Thus it is more important, I suspect, for the developers to concentrate on the feature set whilst it is a higl techy audience using it - the handholding can come later.
I'd dispute the trollish nature of this. Speaking as someone (loosely a typical nerd, but definitely not out oof the ordinary in dress or attitude) who attended a state primary school and a fee-paying secondary, I can say that the mentality is the same in both. Sportsmen are venerated; everyone else is nothing. At my secondary, I was the first person ever to get double colours (chess and debating) and not be a prefect. I am also extremely clumsy, and the PE department was very powerful.
It's not hard to draw a link between these.
Also, drugs were rife, and lead to sometimes serious violence (I would estimate that in the schools in the Scottish city I was in, at least 25% of the 6th year had smoked cannabis); bullying (including of me) was rife, by both staff and pupils (although notably it was not generally the sportsmen who were responsible; IME, it was the nearly-good enough who were trying to hide their inadequacies by humiliating others); and the entire mentality of the school was to ignore these things and concentrate on public image.
School was hell. It's OK to resent it, but don't hate the people - hate the system that turns people into bullies and victims. I survived, although it still hurts a lot to have had to deal with it, and am now an undergrad at a leading UK university. You CAN get through this, people. Prove 'em wrong - if someone bullies you for your intelligence, it is only a mark of their jealousy.
Stick in there.
Simply, they probably;
a) feel that an established Western brand would give them better brand recognition in most markets;
b) don't have, and due to the parlous state of the Russian economy cannot afford to build, modern fabrication plants of the necessary level of technology (it being a reasonable assumption that we're talking sub 0.25 micron tracks here), in order to produce such a processor themselves.
I feel either or both factors have to be in play here.
However, the ZX Spectrum - which Sengan also mentions - was the training-ground for many, many British nerds / hackers / computer enthusiasts.
/. community.
This makes the article relevant to a significant portion of the
Nope.
ARM own the StrongArm; it was originally designed for the Acorn RiscPC. It's just that Intel have paid ARM for a non-exclusive right to poroduce the StrongArm family of processors.
I live near to some very vocal Acorn advocates.