This is kind of a selfish question, but I was wondering if you remember receiving a letter from a little American boy circa 1985? My 4th grade class (I was 8 yrs old) we had a project where we had to a write a letter to an author, and you were one of my favorites (then and now.) I think I was the only one in the class that ever got a reply, but yours was extremely nice and considerate.
Regretfully, I think the letter you sent me got lost over the years (we moved around a lot.) I was wondering if by some strange chance you still have mine.;-)
Go to Cheapbytes to get a legal copy of the latest Redhat for like $3. Redhat is not stopping anyone from copying their CD's regardless of the facial expressions of clueless marketroids a few years back.
The original 1977 Star Wars movie was named "Star Wars: A New Hope" (subtitled Episode IV, you can see that in the crawler text.) There was no "great renumbering". Lucas was planning a prequel trilogy in the 1970's.
Perhaps if you weren't an obnoxious twit you might have known that.
This blows my mind because I am a huge Tolkien fan and I never even considered this. The books of course do not address this AFAIK. Why the hell couldn't a swarm of eagles swoop down suddenly and drop the Ring in Mt Doom? It's not like Gwaihir would want (or could use) the Ring himself... (put it on his leg?)
Yes, you can. Contrary to what someone says above, it's not even that hard.
Compiling debian source pages is stooopid easy. Thus you can run any 'unstable' package on your 'stable' Debian box as long as you can compile from source (so the resulting executable is linked against the proper versions of libaries you have on your stable box.)
Most of this software, especially Xfree86 4.0 and Linux 2.4, will be made availible somewhere somehow in pre-packaged form for stable (potato) Debian systems. Or you can just compile it yourself.
Feel free to contact me directly with any additional questions, or just ask the kind folks in #debian on irc.openprojects.net.
Hehehe, thanks for the suggestion. I just ordered a Palm IIIxe today. It'll be nice n' roomy for all my texts. And I can't wait to play around with all the other software and even write some of my own. (It would be cool to see a stackless Python interpreter on PalmOS...)
I really wanted a Palm when they first came out and were beyond my means. I kind of forgot about them for a while, then I realized I had been wanting one all along when thinking about 'e-books.'
Hopefully this is somewhat on topic. I'm looking for recommendations for a portable electronic book. Something like the rocketebook, though I've heard that particular one is not recommended due to a variety of reasons.
The most important factor to me is support of open standards. can I easily upload content that I've created to my ebook? Can I easily translate postscript or PDF documents to the required ebook format? Conversely, can I translate my open ebooks into postscript format for printing?
The next most important factor is price; I don't want a laptop, I just want a nice, simple and legible screen to read text on. The more lightweight the better.
After that, we're talking content space (how many pages of text can it hold?), battery life, and display quality.
I'm seriously thinking of buying some kind of ebook in the near future, but I want to make sure I don't invest in brain dead technology. My primary concern is open standards and open document exchange.
For some reason, one particular way of doing things has become codified in pyton-land as the "right" way.
I think you're showing your lack of experience in actually working with Python. You seem to base this on the philosophy espoused by the Python.org tutorial, or from one of many articles written by blowhards that don't know anything about actually working Python. It's actually pretty flexible in terms of different approaches to solving problems, or design. There tends to be only one way to express each individual language feature, which to me is a good thing! It's easier for beginners (not "morons" as you call them) to learn, and IMHO doesn't hamper an advanced programmer at all, and does not restrict problem solving flexibility.
Python doesn't even have a goddam for statement.
for i in range(1, big_num):
print i * i
What are you missing?
Oh, and can python do anything like the -e 'code' functionality of perl, where you can do simple tasks without having to pull up a file editor?
I admit that functionality similar to perl -pi would be cool. There's nothing fundamental about the language preventing you from doing that.
I don't need the crutch of whitespace indenting on every line to be able to read a program.
Maybe you don't need it, but why does the interpreter need semicolons to know where a statement ends? Isn't that a crutch? One would think the 'natural' behavior is that the end of a line ends a line of code. Maybe you've just been hacking Perl and C to long to see any other way.
Btw, can python do multi-threading?
Sure, but what's your point? It's actually pretty easy in Python.
Though maybe you're one of those companies who's trying to hire a lot of morons rather than a few skilled people. In that case by all means use python.
Hrm. You're being completely facecious here, though I'll take your statement at face value for a moment. Though there are fewer of them, most dedicated Python hackers I've talked to have been extremely intelligent, thoughtful developers who are interested in maximizing productivty and maintainability. I've also talked to a lot of equally bright Perl developers, but I've also seen a few who resemble the characiture of a bad Perl programmer who uses line-noise identifiers. These are the people who hear the word "object oriented" and weep. In their hands, Perl becomes a blunt object to be wielded as a weapon, whereas Python tries to guide developers away from the worst offences. These bad Perl programmers seem to far outnumber the equivilent in Python-land, but this could be a function of the size of the Perl community. Personally I think it also has something to do with Perl's philosophy and language features.
I guess my point is that knowing a particular language inside and out does not make one an all-around good developer.
Ultimately, language choice is a very personal thing to people, almost like religion in very real ways. Boosting Perl is fine, but it's kind of sad when you feel you have to diminish Python to do it.
Can we please not have every perl advocate on slashdot jump out and shout about how hard a time they have understanding a language where every third character isn't an @, brace, or semicolon? I'm sure perl is a great language, though I have no interest in maintaining any code from such an "expressive" language.
I was using VMware 1.1.? The bug was trying to unload its bridged networking kernel module caused a kernel panic on shutdown on my Debian 2.2 system. Ooops! kernel 2.2.15pre5 seemed to fix it.
Then I installed VMware 2.0 beta and all is well there too...can't wait to abuse W2K with it.
Surely it's a 2.2.15pre(-release) version. I'm running 2.2.15-pre5 because it fixes a bug in vmware networking with 2.2.14. So far, pre5 looks pretty good, I haven't had any major problems.
In effect, people commit suicide to give their "copies" life. On the surface, this is most unsatisfying. To the person involved, how is this any different than simply dying? Is the knowledge that a clone of yourself will continue to persist sufficient?
Well, it seems to me that it would not 'feel' like suicide to the individual involved.
They come into the lab, lay down on a table, and go to sleep (anasthetic or something.) The next thing they know, they are awake, but inside a machine. There would be no percieved discontinuity (other than if, e.g., the procedure required the subject to be unconcious.) Yes, the body on the table died, but to the person inside, it simply feels like they woke up in a different place. Same memories, same identity, and so on.
If we want to track only potato with apt-get upgrade then do we need to change our apt sources list to say 'frozen' instead of 'unstable'? I tried that and I get 404s on the frozen directories.
Lots of people like Deja. Some don't. Life goes on.
I also think the whole interface could use some work. A lot of people also think this. We are aware of it. We are working on it. These things take time. You can't just toss out all of the UI without either a) taking lots of time to rewrite it or b) losing a lot of functionality.
1. We love Linux. The site is run almost exclusively on Linux and all the techies have a KDE or other Linux desktop to do development work.
2. We are well aware that it is possible to spam the rating votes. Thank you for revealing this huge, well guarded secret! We might as well fold up and close the site down due to this amazing detective work. {/sarcasm}
3. We do in fact have robot-vote-scrubbing software, and these votes against Linux will probably be detected as robotic before long and removed from the system. That's just my guess, it's not really my department.
4. If you're using Deja ratings to decide which MP3 player or toaster to buy, great. That's really what they're designed for. If you're using a simple 4-category self-selected numerical vote to determine which NOS to deploy across your enterprise, you need to have your head examined.
5. We may not have many 'Deja only' forums to discuss Linux in, but we certainly carry comp.os.linux.*!
Personally, I think Unreal Tournament is the better game. It runs great on my Debian 2.2 box and is more smooth, and more FUN, than Quake 3. Of course, that's just my personal opinion. I've already sent off for the full version of Unreal Tournament and I can't wait to play it on my Linux box!
Thus why the best and brightest around the world immigrate to the U.S. (I work with a bunch of 'em, Brits, Indians, Chinese, you name it), because we have the least repressive government of all the major countries.
I also work with a lot of foreign nationals in my job here in the US. Most of the ones I know, especially those from places like the UK or India, have not come to the USA because "we have the least repressive gov't" but because of MONEY MONEY MONEY. It's easier to make more of it here. UK and India both have relatively free governments, and from their point of view, the USA is often more restrictive than their home countries due to immigration and tax regulations.
The 'freedom' aspect has been a bit overemphasized (propogandized?) throught the story of immigration to America. For most people throughout history, America has been a place to create wealth. End of story. Of course, it often happens that a free environment is the most conducive to producing wealth, but that is purely a lucky side effect.
It's just a window manager. Gnome is a desktop environment that, to this date, does not include a window manager. Thus, using Gnome on top of Xfce or just about any other window manager will work fine.
My personal favorite WM is IceWM. I've used it for years. I keep trying new versions of KDE and Enlightenment and I always keep going back to IceWM. It's very lightweight, fast, and does everything I need in an intuitive way.
The guys at Source Forge are definetely on the level. They pre-registered my project (Pagecast). I was a bit confused at first so I just dropped them a line at admin@sourceforge.net and I was immediately given admin status on my project.
Apparently they are working on an "Are you the owner of this project?" kind of link to get people in control of their own projects.
I am definetely going to put Source Forge to work. I've been needing a well-connected public CVS server for a while, and complete mailing list, bug tracking, and task list is just frosting.
Apparently there *are* other projects (XNOT) out there, but I had not heard of that until today either! I'm afraid I'm going to go with source forge.
Slashdot Mirror
Regretfully, I think the letter you sent me got lost over the years (we moved around a lot.) I was wondering if by some strange chance you still have mine. ;-)
Thank you again for the letter, DNA!
Cheers,
Preston Landers
pbl at pbl dot cx
Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud, we have an emergency slip in sector 7G.
(sinister laugh)
"Given enough bugs, all eyeballs are shallow."
Perhaps if you weren't an obnoxious twit you might have known that.
Did Tolkien just never consider this?
Compiling debian source pages is stooopid easy. Thus you can run any 'unstable' package on your 'stable' Debian box as long as you can compile from source (so the resulting executable is linked against the proper versions of libaries you have on your stable box.)
Most of this software, especially Xfree86 4.0 and Linux 2.4, will be made availible somewhere somehow in pre-packaged form for stable (potato) Debian systems. Or you can just compile it yourself.
Feel free to contact me directly with any additional questions, or just ask the kind folks in #debian on irc.openprojects.net.
cheers!
I really wanted a Palm when they first came out and were beyond my means. I kind of forgot about them for a while, then I realized I had been wanting one all along when thinking about 'e-books.'
The most important factor to me is support of open standards. can I easily upload content that I've created to my ebook? Can I easily translate postscript or PDF documents to the required ebook format? Conversely, can I translate my open ebooks into postscript format for printing?
The next most important factor is price; I don't want a laptop, I just want a nice, simple and legible screen to read text on. The more lightweight the better.
After that, we're talking content space (how many pages of text can it hold?), battery life, and display quality.
I'm seriously thinking of buying some kind of ebook in the near future, but I want to make sure I don't invest in brain dead technology. My primary concern is open standards and open document exchange.
Thanks in advance!
I think you're showing your lack of experience in actually working with Python. You seem to base this on the philosophy espoused by the Python.org tutorial, or from one of many articles written by blowhards that don't know anything about actually working Python. It's actually pretty flexible in terms of different approaches to solving problems, or design. There tends to be only one way to express each individual language feature, which to me is a good thing! It's easier for beginners (not "morons" as you call them) to learn, and IMHO doesn't hamper an advanced programmer at all, and does not restrict problem solving flexibility.
Python doesn't even have a goddam for statement.
for i in range(1, big_num):
What are you missing?
Oh, and can python do anything like the -e 'code' functionality of perl, where you can do simple tasks without having to pull up a file editor?
$ python -c "import sys, string; print 'Python', string.split(sys.version)[0], 'is keen.'"
I admit that functionality similar to perl -pi would be cool. There's nothing fundamental about the language preventing you from doing that.
I don't need the crutch of whitespace indenting on every line to be able to read a program.
Maybe you don't need it, but why does the interpreter need semicolons to know where a statement ends? Isn't that a crutch? One would think the 'natural' behavior is that the end of a line ends a line of code. Maybe you've just been hacking Perl and C to long to see any other way.
Btw, can python do multi-threading?
Sure, but what's your point? It's actually pretty easy in Python.
Though maybe you're one of those companies who's trying to hire a lot of morons rather than a few skilled people. In that case by all means use python.
Hrm. You're being completely facecious here, though I'll take your statement at face value for a moment. Though there are fewer of them, most dedicated Python hackers I've talked to have been extremely intelligent, thoughtful developers who are interested in maximizing productivty and maintainability. I've also talked to a lot of equally bright Perl developers, but I've also seen a few who resemble the characiture of a bad Perl programmer who uses line-noise identifiers. These are the people who hear the word "object oriented" and weep. In their hands, Perl becomes a blunt object to be wielded as a weapon, whereas Python tries to guide developers away from the worst offences. These bad Perl programmers seem to far outnumber the equivilent in Python-land, but this could be a function of the size of the Perl community. Personally I think it also has something to do with Perl's philosophy and language features.
I guess my point is that knowing a particular language inside and out does not make one an all-around good developer.
Ultimately, language choice is a very personal thing to people, almost like religion in very real ways. Boosting Perl is fine, but it's kind of sad when you feel you have to diminish Python to do it.
Can we please not have every perl advocate on slashdot jump out and shout about how hard a time they have understanding a language where every third character isn't an @, brace, or semicolon? I'm sure perl is a great language, though I have no interest in maintaining any code from such an "expressive" language.
This is not Bruce Perens, but a childish imposter. Slashdot administrators, please disable this account.
Well, my girlfriend thought exactly the same thing until she tried Quake 3 Arena. Now I can barely get my turn in to play!
I'm going to show her Parsec later and see what she thinks...
Excellent troll. Almost believable!
Then I installed VMware 2.0 beta and all is well there too...can't wait to abuse W2K with it.
Surely it's a 2.2.15pre(-release) version. I'm running 2.2.15-pre5 because it fixes a bug in vmware networking with 2.2.14. So far, pre5 looks pretty good, I haven't had any major problems.
Well, it seems to me that it would not 'feel' like suicide to the individual involved.
They come into the lab, lay down on a table, and go to sleep (anasthetic or something.) The next thing they know, they are awake, but inside a machine. There would be no percieved discontinuity (other than if, e.g., the procedure required the subject to be unconcious.) Yes, the body on the table died, but to the person inside, it simply feels like they woke up in a different place. Same memories, same identity, and so on.
If we want to track only potato with apt-get upgrade then do we need to change our apt sources list to say 'frozen' instead of 'unstable'? I tried that and I get 404s on the frozen directories.
Lots of people like Deja. Some don't. Life goes on.
I also think the whole interface could use some work. A lot of people also think this. We are aware of it. We are working on it. These things take time. You can't just toss out all of the UI without either a) taking lots of time to rewrite it or b) losing a lot of functionality.
1. We love Linux. The site is run almost exclusively on Linux and all the techies have a KDE or other Linux desktop to do development work.
2. We are well aware that it is possible to spam the rating votes. Thank you for revealing this huge, well guarded secret! We might as well fold up and close the site down due to this amazing detective work. {/sarcasm}
3. We do in fact have robot-vote-scrubbing software, and these votes against Linux will probably be detected as robotic before long and removed from the system. That's just my guess, it's not really my department.
4. If you're using Deja ratings to decide which MP3 player or toaster to buy, great. That's really what they're designed for. If you're using a simple 4-category self-selected numerical vote to determine which NOS to deploy across your enterprise, you need to have your head examined.
5. We may not have many 'Deja only' forums to discuss Linux in, but we certainly carry comp.os.linux.*!
Personally, I think Unreal Tournament is the better game. It runs great on my Debian 2.2 box and is more smooth, and more FUN, than Quake 3. Of course, that's just my personal opinion. I've already sent off for the full version of Unreal Tournament and I can't wait to play it on my Linux box!
I also work with a lot of foreign nationals in my job here in the US. Most of the ones I know, especially those from places like the UK or India, have not come to the USA because "we have the least repressive gov't" but because of MONEY MONEY MONEY. It's easier to make more of it here. UK and India both have relatively free governments, and from their point of view, the USA is often more restrictive than their home countries due to immigration and tax regulations.
The 'freedom' aspect has been a bit overemphasized (propogandized?) throught the story of immigration to America. For most people throughout history, America has been a place to create wealth. End of story. Of course, it often happens that a free environment is the most conducive to producing wealth, but that is purely a lucky side effect.
My personal favorite WM is IceWM. I've used it for years. I keep trying new versions of KDE and Enlightenment and I always keep going back to IceWM. It's very lightweight, fast, and does everything I need in an intuitive way.
Apparently they are working on an "Are you the owner of this project?" kind of link to get people in control of their own projects.
I am definetely going to put Source Forge to work. I've been needing a well-connected public CVS server for a while, and complete mailing list, bug tracking, and task list is just frosting.
Apparently there *are* other projects (XNOT) out there, but I had not heard of that until today either! I'm afraid I'm going to go with source forge.