Well, the very first time I burned a CD, it took me way less time to get mkisofs to do what I want and then burn it than it takes me every time I see a new version of Nero.
A well-thought CLI program is often more convenient the first time you use it. In the case of mkisofs, the "synopsis" at the very start of the manpage is enough for the typical use. On the other hand, it's pretty non-obvious to guess what do I need to choose to burn the damn files in a badly-designed thing like Nero.
And this applies to the first-time use. For the subsequent, you can't really beat the CLI.
It's only value is that it includes a comprehensive point&click interface, but even though it's stuffed with features, it can't beat the existing, free tools.
Unless you're a Windows user who wants a program he's familiar with, there is no reason to even look at it. Plus, it's not even free-as-beer, as you need to pay for a full, registered version of Nero for Windows.
New hardware is always insanely expensive. Unless you have really specific needs, it never pays to be an early adopter here. If you need the processing power, just build a cluster of quite-new-but-not-spanking-new boxes. In this case, you don't even get the benefit of improving the performance of single-threaded programs.
Unless you really need the shiny thing to feel like a macho, you can as well wait until they get cheaper.
"Gazeta Wyborcza", it's the Poland's biggest newspaper. Not a tabloid, too. It was a two-page big article, a couple of months or so ago.
I'm afraid I don't have the paper anymore.
I also didn't intend the grandparent post to be a troll, even though it includes a rather extreme view. A typical woman is not interesting in anything other than clothes and the last soap opera, while the typical man cares about nothing but beer and viewing a mindless football/baseball/etc game on the TV.
I'm not interested in your typical person. People I want to talk to share a mindset -- a mindset that's typical to hackers (in the non-tabloid/MS FUD sense of the word), some scientists (most often in physics) and some related groups. People of this mindset often get labelled "geeks" -- and they are around 0.1% (a completely wild estimation) of the male population and 0.00001% of females. This very/. article is related to this proportion.
I'm growing more and more misogynic these days myself. The thing is, it's pretty hard to find a woman who is interested in things other than:
clothes
TV series
spreading rumours
horoscopes (yeah, it's that bad)
This does apply even to women who are nominally intelligent, educated, and so on. I'm not saying that all women are geek-incompatible, just a vast, vast majority is.
I have read an interview with a number of female survivors from the Auschwitz death camp. I was totally shocked: the topics they elaborated on was the looks of the prisoners, the clothes they got (from the non-utilitarian point of view), how devastating the haircuts were...
What I want, is a woman who has her own interests (not necessarily computer-based), and can understand the interests of others.
An example: recently, I've made a half-assed attempt to make chainmail, and failed miserably. A typical geekish man would most likely take a look, throw in some pieces of advice or, most likely, pick on me because of the lameness of my attempts. A typical woman, on the other hand, would chastise me for wasting time then return to watching her soap opera.
Among the women I've met, I would say there is around _10_ specimens who can understand other people's interests, about half of them being acceptable with regards to age, etc.
To make things worse, the best one lives on the opposite side (relative to the axis) of Earth. Dammit.
Putin plays Chess instead of going after terrorists
I'm sorry, but in the Chechnya war, it's Putin who is the main terrorist. It just happens that his opponents belong to a religion with a known strong affinity to terrorism themselves.
While Putin is pretty much a new führer, it was not him who started this strategy. Chechnya was warring against the Russian occupation during the tzars time, and under Stalin's rule, nearly all the population was deported away from their homes! After a thaw roughly half of the population was allowed to return.
Now, show me a nation that would not behave like Chechens do when faced with such treatment.
Kasparov is just fed up with Putin's imperial tendencies, tendencies that tend to go unnoticed by the western world. Russia is gravitating towards Nazi-like dictatorship, and Kasparov belongs to those russians who would prefer democracy.
That's the wimpy way. If I was going to suicide (and I certainly don't), I would at least grab some firearms, going away with a bang, and taking some of the problems with me -- to make the world a better place for the others.
I'm afraid that what I'm talking about won't be of any interest to you. It's a technique to convert high-quality 720k floppies into 1440k ones by drilling a hole in the corner -- just compare a 720k floppy to a 1440k one to know where to drill.
Nowadays,
I doubt your floppies are 720k.
They're obviously bad quality ones unless you bought them earlier than about 15 years ago.
What exactly would you want floppies for?
So, you'll fare better converting them into beer pads, gutting them to make a string of their insides for "decorative" purposes or just hanging them on a wall. Hell, I still have a set of genuine Windows1.0 install disks that were nailed to a wall at my previous workplace.
It sounds exactly like the thing we used to do to 720 floppies back in the days by drilling a hole in the corner. A majority of them worked well -- but some did not.
But well, floppies back in the days used to be made with a decent quality margin over what was needed for their labelled format, and such "upgraded" old ones were a lot more trustworthy than the full-sized floppies you could buy a few years later.
It happened to me once. A friend needed a crack for some pirated software and, knowing better than to browse crack sites from a Windows machine, asked me to find it for him. While browsing those, suddenly, FireFox crashed.
When I restarted it, the standard "open-or-save" dialog popped up, suggesting to run some Windows binary through/usr/bin/wine-safe. This is the default action for those, so it obviously was not an exploit tailored for Linux systems, just a Windows one that almost worked...
Of course, stupid me forgot to store the.mozilla dir for forensics before nuking it away.
Wrong. If a company dies, it's the stockholders who lose, not the management. The managers simply need to find a new job -- and note that even during the company's agony they still get paid in full. Their pay is also orders of magnitude bigger than those of a common employee.
Python and Perl not only differ in syntax, but also aim at completely different niches. You're not really supposed to write big programs in Perl -- Perl is better suited for short tasks, anything that includes heavy string parsing and/or sysadmin chores.
[evil Perl zealot hat on] Python, on the other hand, serves as a poor excuse for a "real" language aimed for apps longer than several screenfuls of code -- but, it loses because of [XXXXX]. It's also likely to give you Cobol fingers.
In the above, [XXXXX] stands for the real arguments against Python. They were censored out to keep this post within the Holy Wars traditions -- meaningful arguments are not allowed.
If I were a Microsoft employee ordered to do this, I would make it look like a purely unintentional bug. This way, even with the source code you would be unable to prove malicious intent.
Sometimes, they can do more evil by adding some feature and just subreceptiously twisting it than by not adding it at all. Just take a look at telnet.exe shipped with Win3.11/95/98. For me, it has the looks of something _intentionally_ broken, to hamper interoperability with Unix systems of that age. Had they not provide any telnet at all, people would just grab one and be happy.
Bullshit. For a guaranteed BSOD, try printing to a network printer attached to a Win98 box. Works for me every single time. Indeed, a random BSOD (or in the most common configuration, a reboot) is much, much less likely than on a 95/98 -- however, lesser problems with explorer.exe are at least as frequent.
On the funnier side, check out my screenshots of a really early BSOD...
I do read "months", then the damn/. article flashes "weeks" before my eyes. It's a plot or sumthing.
But... who says you need to restrict yourself to just a single strip per day? (this is an equivalent of a crack addict asking to enlarge the dose, though)
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, OEM versions are explicitely excluded.
Well, the very first time I burned a CD, it took me way less time to get mkisofs to do what I want and then burn it than it takes me every time I see a new version of Nero.
A well-thought CLI program is often more convenient the first time you use it. In the case of mkisofs, the "synopsis" at the very start of the manpage is enough for the typical use. On the other hand, it's pretty non-obvious to guess what do I need to choose to burn the damn files in a badly-designed thing like Nero.
And this applies to the first-time use. For the subsequent, you can't really beat the CLI.
Now, tell me, what exactly would I want Nero for?
It's only value is that it includes a comprehensive point&click interface, but even though it's stuffed with features, it can't beat the existing, free tools.
Unless you're a Windows user who wants a program he's familiar with, there is no reason to even look at it. Plus, it's not even free-as-beer, as you need to pay for a full, registered version of Nero for Windows.
I really wonder if P. Jackson will take the effort to actually read the books this time...
New hardware is always insanely expensive. Unless you have really specific needs, it never pays to be an early adopter here.
If you need the processing power, just build a cluster of quite-new-but-not-spanking-new boxes. In this case, you don't even get the benefit of improving the performance of single-threaded programs.
Unless you really need the shiny thing to feel like a macho, you can as well wait until they get cheaper.
"Gazeta Wyborcza", it's the Poland's biggest newspaper. Not a tabloid, too.
/. article is related to this proportion.
It was a two-page big article, a couple of months or so ago.
I'm afraid I don't have the paper anymore.
I also didn't intend the grandparent post to be a troll, even though it includes a rather extreme view. A typical woman is not interesting in anything other than clothes and the last soap opera, while the typical man cares about nothing but beer and viewing a mindless football/baseball/etc game on the TV.
I'm not interested in your typical person. People I want to talk to share a mindset -- a mindset that's typical to hackers (in the non-tabloid/MS FUD sense of the word), some scientists (most often in physics) and some related groups. People of this mindset often get labelled "geeks" -- and they are around 0.1% (a completely wild estimation) of the male population and 0.00001% of females. This very
- clothes
- TV series
- spreading rumours
- horoscopes (yeah, it's that bad)
This does apply even to women who are nominally intelligent, educated, and so on. I'm not saying that all women are geek-incompatible, just a vast, vast majority is. I have read an interview with a number of female survivors from the Auschwitz death camp. I was totally shocked: the topics they elaborated on was the looks of the prisoners, the clothes they got (from the non-utilitarian point of view), how devastating the haircuts were...What I want, is a woman who has her own interests (not necessarily computer-based), and can understand the interests of others.
An example: recently, I've made a half-assed attempt to make chainmail, and failed miserably. A typical geekish man would most likely take a look, throw in some pieces of advice or, most likely, pick on me because of the lameness of my attempts. A typical woman, on the other hand, would chastise me for wasting time then return to watching her soap opera.
Among the women I've met, I would say there is around _10_ specimens who can understand other people's interests, about half of them being acceptable with regards to age, etc.
To make things worse, the best one lives on the opposite side (relative to the axis) of Earth. Dammit.
Putin plays Chess instead of going after terrorists
I'm sorry, but in the Chechnya war, it's Putin who is the main terrorist. It just happens that his opponents belong to a religion with a known strong affinity to terrorism themselves.
While Putin is pretty much a new führer, it was not him who started this strategy. Chechnya was warring against the Russian occupation during the tzars time, and under Stalin's rule, nearly all the population was deported away from their homes! After a thaw roughly half of the population was allowed to return.
Now, show me a nation that would not behave like Chechens do when faced with such treatment.
Kasparov is just fed up with Putin's imperial tendencies, tendencies that tend to go unnoticed by the western world. Russia is gravitating towards Nazi-like dictatorship, and Kasparov belongs to those russians who would prefer democracy.
Now, now... how are we supposed to check the other submissions (mirrordot notwithstanding)?
gimp.org did it again -- if you have a page with 252 big pieces of graphics, you need to check the Referrer against slashdot.org...
peaceful, painless, non-messy, quiet ways
That's the wimpy way. If I was going to suicide (and I certainly don't), I would at least grab some firearms, going away with a bang, and taking some of the problems with me -- to make the world a better place for the others.
A .sig I often use contains the word: Die! Die! Die!!
bugfixed, known-to-be-working code
We're not talking about that 0.001% of the code, we mean the rest.
Nowadays,
- I doubt your floppies are 720k.
- They're obviously bad quality ones unless you bought them earlier than about 15 years ago.
- What exactly would you want floppies for?
So, you'll fare better converting them into beer pads, gutting them to make a string of their insides for "decorative" purposes or just hanging them on a wall.Hell, I still have a set of genuine Windows1.0 install disks that were nailed to a wall at my previous workplace.
It sounds exactly like the thing we used to do to 720 floppies back in the days by drilling a hole in the corner. A majority of them worked well -- but some did not.
But well, floppies back in the days used to be made with a decent quality margin over what was needed for their labelled format, and such "upgraded" old ones were a lot more trustworthy than the full-sized floppies you could buy a few years later.
I guess that if you knocked on the first door in a bad part of your town, a helpful soul would help you for a small cut.
It happened to me once. A friend needed a crack for some pirated software and, knowing better than to browse crack sites from a Windows machine, asked me to find it for him. While browsing those, suddenly, FireFox crashed.
/usr/bin/wine-safe. This is the default action for those, so it obviously was not an exploit tailored for Linux systems, just a Windows one that almost worked...
.mozilla dir for forensics before nuking it away.
When I restarted it, the standard "open-or-save" dialog popped up, suggesting to run some Windows binary through
Of course, stupid me forgot to store the
Wrong. If a company dies, it's the stockholders who lose, not the management. The managers simply need to find a new job -- and note that even during the company's agony they still get paid in full. Their pay is also orders of magnitude bigger than those of a common employee.
Well, well... that's a popular business strategy, and often, it works.
I do consider this very law "harmful to minors" as it introduces blatant anti-free speech propaganda.
Python and Perl not only differ in syntax, but also aim at completely different niches.
You're not really supposed to write big programs in Perl -- Perl is better suited for short tasks, anything that includes heavy string parsing and/or sysadmin chores.
[evil Perl zealot hat on] Python, on the other hand, serves as a poor excuse for a "real" language aimed for apps longer than several screenfuls of code -- but, it loses because of [XXXXX]. It's also likely to give you Cobol fingers.
In the above, [XXXXX] stands for the real arguments against Python. They were censored out to keep this post within the Holy Wars traditions -- meaningful arguments are not allowed.
If I were a Microsoft employee ordered to do this, I would make it look like a purely unintentional bug. This way, even with the source code you would be unable to prove malicious intent.
Sometimes, they can do more evil by adding some feature and just subreceptiously twisting it than by not adding it at all. Just take a look at telnet.exe shipped with Win3.11/95/98. For me, it has the looks of something _intentionally_ broken, to hamper interoperability with Unix systems of that age. Had they not provide any telnet at all, people would just grab one and be happy.
Bullshit. For a guaranteed BSOD, try printing to a network printer attached to a Win98 box. Works for me every single time.
Indeed, a random BSOD (or in the most common configuration, a reboot) is much, much less likely than on a 95/98 -- however, lesser problems with explorer.exe are at least as frequent.
On the funnier side, check out my screenshots of a really early BSOD...
58 months, not weeks
/. article flashes "weeks" before my eyes. It's a plot or sumthing.
I do read "months", then the damn
But... who says you need to restrict yourself to just a single strip per day?
(this is an equivalent of a crack addict asking to enlarge the dose, though)
Get the strips going! *cracking the whip*
Schlock Mercenary didn't miss a single update in 58 weeks, and still I rate is as one of two best webcomics (together with UF).
Ah, I stand corrected.
;-)
However... I have more respect for L. Torvalds than for some hippy politician, so IMHO he deserves such a title.