> While Firefox is a memorable name, it seems like a loss not to take advantage of the Mozilla name recognition.
You: Oh yes, Mozilla, of course itself a name pun on Mosaic, when Marc Andreesen couldn't call it Mosaic anymore what with it being connected to UIUC and all, so he started developing a new commercial browser, calling it "Mozilla". Well, of course that didn't make a respectable brand, but if you look in the old Netscape readme files, you'll see "It's spelled N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E but it's pronounced `Mozilla'". (Polishes glasses, looks off to the distance) Ahh, those were the days.
The Public: Mo-who? Is it like that Firefox I saw in The New York Times?
If they stopped stubbornly adhering to that dumb "I'm feeling lucky" default, you wouldn't even need to type "google". I fixed it myself, manually, but of course I have to do so in every profile. I now just type searches into the location bar myself, having long ago given up the pretension that one should only use the interface for its "proper" function. When the interface DWIMs what I type, and I understand the DWIM mechanism so it doesn't surprise me, I'm damn sure going to let it DWIM. (That's "Do What I Mean", BTW)
On the opposite end, my gf still stubbornly prefixes all urls she types into the location bar with "http://" and chides me for doing otherwise. She also types probably five times faster than me though, so it's nothing to her...
> Apple PC business was already in an upswing before the iPod, but it has recieved more noteriatary in the main stream news since the iPod.
Apple has some of the heaviest and most effective marketing to their particular segment you can possibly imagine. When was the last time you actually remembered an HP ad? But I bet you can flash at least three Apple ads through your head right now, iPod or not.
Word-of-mouth Apple most certainly is NOT. They were dying a slow painful death of irrelevance when word of mouth was their primary vehicle, as the evangelists more and more preached to their own choirs. The iMac ushered in a marketing blitz that hasn't stopped to this day (though now it's for the iPod, not the mac)
If your marketing plan relies on "word of mouth", no one will want to touch your company with a bargepole.
Dude, give it a rest. We could care less about this grammar rant, having it's pedantic nitpicking shoved in our faces every time it comes up. It begs the question whether we're really doing it to push you're buttons, no?
Go grab the free LookOut add-in, which adds this. It requires the.NET runtime, but the search functionality on this plugin is well worth it. Google for it, like "lookout search addin"
Microsoft recently acquired LookOut, so now Microsoft LookOut really does exist. This amuses me to no end, really (yeah yeah I know they've probably already renamed it)
Seriously though, who uses custom outlook forms? I've never seen those actually work in practice, whereas in Lotus, I see people commonly slinging around entire custom fully replicated multi-user secure databases... to say nothing of the forms in them.
Almost every single one of the complaints about Notes has been fixed. The hall of shame can't even revise it, because it only exists in archives and mirrors.
The "changing heiroglyphics" thing BTW, is so you recognize the final glyph it lands on and you know you keyed your password correctly. Think of it as a human-readable hash (it's not heiroglyphics now, it's keychains with different doodads on them). This was bloody useful for slow authentication connections, and only recently has current "research" actually caught on to this very old trick. The "three X's" thing instead of one was some sort of security requirement, and not unique to Lotus Notes. It's amazing how much vitriol the author spills over this absurdly trivial item, really.
> Granted, you can declare a class and add members which are accessible using the '.' notation, but I find it cumbersome.
I always liked the way Javascript did it, making the dot mere syntactic sugar. Certainly the dot notation is much nicer than perl5's awful arrow notation, something it borrowed from C++, which itself borrowed from C. The ironic thing about that is that C never even needed that arrow notation, because the usage is never ambiguous (and it is in C++ only in the most extreme corner cases). It only existed because the implementation was hamstrung by exceedingly dumb compilers that weren't aware enough of the types. -> is C's extraneous "sigil", much like perl's $%@.
It looks like perl6 is getting rid of the arrows (yay) and different sigils for the most part (looking somewhat tclish if i dare say so)... it'd sure be nice to have a working perl6 though (yes I know about pug, but it's hardly ready for for anything but experimenting with the idea of perl6 itself, not even toy programs)
BTW, I'd like to thank you for offering one of the few reasonable mature replies I've gotten on perl threads so far. I suppose I really should stop talking about it, since it seems to be just flamebait like python's indentation or lisp's parenthesis.
you mean perl isn't littered with the same problem? hah. one of the touted features of perl is that there's always a zillion ways to do the same thing.
Yes, but they're not a zillion functions with inconsistent conventions all littering the global namespace all doing the same thing.
I don't expect you to recognize all the tricks in perldoc perlbot, but if you can't understand the pre and post forms of if and the precedence of and and or vs && and || (after a little practice for that one), then you are merely incompetent. Stay well away from heavily templated C++ code, and under no circumstances allow yourself to get near functional languages, or you will collapse in sheer incomprehension. There's More Than Perl's Number Of Ways To Do It in those languages.
I say this as someone who likes perl and even defends its readability, but sometimes... Let me rummage for about 10 seconds through some typical perl code I work with.
push @{$category->{$label}}, $p->{id};
I may understand perfectly what this does, but I just can't stand how damn noisy it all is
Why don't you go take a look at Template-Toolkit from CPAN and tell me how unreadable it is. If you can't tell me what it's doing from reading the code, you're probably not competent in any programming language.
Linux is absolutely not ready for the desktop. Until the community settles on a consistent interface and set of UI standards, it will never be ready for the desktop.
On my windows machine, I have:
Windows Media Player 10
Microsoft Works (hey it was free)
RealPlayer
Adobe Reader
Yahoo IM
You want to tell me those are consistent? Users really do NOT care about these differences (though they DO like having "ok" and "cancel" be consistently in the same places, not to point any fingers -- AT GNOME -- or anything)
Occasionally, the browser has trouble resolving a host. Once it has this problem, it can't seem to look up any other hosts either. Pinging the IP address of the host works, but name resolution fails. I know that XP can experience problems with a tainted DNS cache, but flushing the cache does not solve the problem. The only solution to the problem appears to be to switch over to another DNS server (something that XP does not do automatically, it seems.) I'd love to be able to script a solution to this problem, but I don't want to have to put hours into solving a problem with a good, well-defined workaround, even if the workaround is a PITA.
net stop "dns client" net start "dns client"
Put that in a script, like "kickdns.cmd". When you have problems, run it. Put it in a scheduled task if necessary.
Much as I often think of Linus as an arrogant blowhard, I have to imagine he is pointing out pieces of the architecture he personally dislikes, the ones that gave him headaches... but that he wouldn't bother pointing them out if they weren't a disappointment, i.e. that he otherwise likes it. It's a stretch sure... but I imagine he has a litany of nasty things to say about x86 architecture, given his extensive experience with it.
The biggest problem here on slashdot is the astro-mods (astroturfing moderators). They are pro-MS, and moderate down anything that doesn't fit their pre-conceived view of the world.
And guess what, you were modded down. First of all, for whining about moderation, secondly because you failed to provide a single example. Every post has a unique ID, right click on it, copy, paste it for some evidence. Use your journal if you have to.
He has also said that Mach, which is the microkernel OSX is based on, is a "piece of shit". Read "Just for Fun", his autobiography, for full details.
This does not make him an expert on Microkernels. Mach's performance on x86 has always stunk, and its design is pretty lame compared to modern microkernels like L4. I bet Linus doesn't know a thing about L4 or QNX... but to his credit, I haven't heard him mouthing off about microkernels lately, he just says that "monolithic" kernels are underrated, microkernels are overrated, and for the most part, he's right.
What he said in the past was pretty defamatory, sure (he basically accused microkernel researchers of engaging in academic fraud to get research money) but it's water long under the bridge. He just doesn't see any need to redesign Linux under any new architectural principle, given that the layers of emulation that would be needed for compatibility would stovepipe the whole mess into the same function it always served, only even harder to maintain. New designs are for new kernels. So let's just let this whole microkernel "debate" rest if Linus isn't even participating in it now.
You know, it IS possible for you to take my statement about the controllers as subjective rather than as some revalation of the truth of some platonic perfect controller, that must be rebutted with another assertion of perfect objective truth. Sometimes I slip and don't personally qualify everything with "IMHO", but I assumed perhaps wrongly that the reader might ascertain that my judgement was a matter of personal opinion, and that others would not jump up and take immediate umbrage at such a personal affront.
I personally like the PS2 controller, you personally do not. There. Jesus, was that so damn hard?
I'm aware the top buttons are analog. The d-pad and the shoulder buttons (R1/R2/L1/L2) are not. Those are what I mean by triggers. The xbox triggers are analog.
Actually, I rather suspect that Sony has the layout of their controls patented, which is why no other system has a controller layout exactly like that. If so, then yes it's somewhat sleazy (though in truth a really innovative design *is* something that is really deserving of a patent) but the whole industry sort of drips with these sort of lock-ins, so it's down to choosing quality. I couldn't imaging playing Prince of Persia without the sticks just the way they are... and of course there's simply no other way to play Katamari Damacy:)
If you do need to support exotic environments, or think you might someday, then autoconf is your friend. Automake used to be friendly before they went overboard with it, now it's just bloated and broken; use Make extensions instead. Libtool has never been anybody's friend; more time has been put into making and debugging and debugging and debugging libtool than has ever been recouped by its wrappers -- use ELF binary format and be done with it.
I think that's the best description of autotools I've yet heard. My advice for makefiles: don't be afraid of using "include". It's portable, really it is. Automake avoids doing any includes, which is one reason it inserts so much godawful boilerplate, to say nothing of its excreble dependency generation scheme -- can you even see what's compiling in all that garbage that automake-generated makefiles spit onto stdout? Just use gcc -MM if you need to regenerate deps -- it won't require gcc for the user, it's purely for the convenience of the makefile maintainer.
Even better, use SCons. Calculates dependencies automatically. Obviously, SCons is not for everyone and every purpose, and god knows some of its darker corners have never seen documentation, but when it is useful, it's a freakin godsend, given that it will portably compile and link exes and libraries, static and shared, on unix and windows, with the same simple file. And it can even output MSVC project files now.
> If you use tabs, you can only accomplish this if the desired indenting level is an exact multiple of your tab stop setting.
Only if your editor eagerly replaces space with tabs. That indent on the second line should be comprised of exactly as many tabs as the first line, followed by spaces underneath all the text to force it to line up. That way when you change your tab width, it remains lined up.
I just stopped caring about the tab religion some coding-standards nazis kept flogging and just set emacs to tabify on load and untabify on save for all files under a certain directory. Made everyone happy.
Slashdot Mirror
> While Firefox is a memorable name, it seems like a loss not to take advantage of the Mozilla name recognition.
You: Oh yes, Mozilla, of course itself a name pun on Mosaic, when Marc Andreesen couldn't call it Mosaic anymore what with it being connected to UIUC and all, so he started developing a new commercial browser, calling it "Mozilla". Well, of course that didn't make a respectable brand, but if you look in the old Netscape readme files, you'll see "It's spelled N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E but it's pronounced `Mozilla'". (Polishes glasses, looks off to the distance) Ahh, those were the days.
The Public: Mo-who? Is it like that Firefox I saw in The New York Times?
my god, that was pure poetry. :p
Or blue-green algae making it possible to have an atmosphere that Linus could survive in!
Or the big bang, for, uh, happening.
If they stopped stubbornly adhering to that dumb "I'm feeling lucky" default, you wouldn't even need to type "google". I fixed it myself, manually, but of course I have to do so in every profile. I now just type searches into the location bar myself, having long ago given up the pretension that one should only use the interface for its "proper" function. When the interface DWIMs what I type, and I understand the DWIM mechanism so it doesn't surprise me, I'm damn sure going to let it DWIM. (That's "Do What I Mean", BTW)
On the opposite end, my gf still stubbornly prefixes all urls she types into the location bar with "http://" and chides me for doing otherwise. She also types probably five times faster than me though, so it's nothing to her...
Absorbant licensing fees can hold more money from the developers you soak, I guess...
> Apple PC business was already in an upswing before the iPod, but it has recieved more noteriatary in the main stream news since the iPod.
Apple has some of the heaviest and most effective marketing to their particular segment you can possibly imagine. When was the last time you actually remembered an HP ad? But I bet you can flash at least three Apple ads through your head right now, iPod or not.
Word-of-mouth Apple most certainly is NOT. They were dying a slow painful death of irrelevance when word of mouth was their primary vehicle, as the evangelists more and more preached to their own choirs. The iMac ushered in a marketing blitz that hasn't stopped to this day (though now it's for the iPod, not the mac)
If your marketing plan relies on "word of mouth", no one will want to touch your company with a bargepole.
Dude, give it a rest. We could care less about this grammar rant, having it's pedantic nitpicking shoved in our faces every time it comes up. It begs the question whether we're really doing it to push you're buttons, no?
> Outlook doesn't have built in full text search
.NET runtime, but the search functionality on this plugin is well worth it. Google for it, like "lookout search addin"
... to say nothing of the forms in them.
Go grab the free LookOut add-in, which adds this. It requires the
Microsoft recently acquired LookOut, so now Microsoft LookOut really does exist. This amuses me to no end, really (yeah yeah I know they've probably already renamed it)
Seriously though, who uses custom outlook forms? I've never seen those actually work in practice, whereas in Lotus, I see people commonly slinging around entire custom fully replicated multi-user secure databases
Almost every single one of the complaints about Notes has been fixed. The hall of shame can't even revise it, because it only exists in archives and mirrors.
The "changing heiroglyphics" thing BTW, is so you recognize the final glyph it lands on and you know you keyed your password correctly. Think of it as a human-readable hash (it's not heiroglyphics now, it's keychains with different doodads on them). This was bloody useful for slow authentication connections, and only recently has current "research" actually caught on to this very old trick. The "three X's" thing instead of one was some sort of security requirement, and not unique to Lotus Notes. It's amazing how much vitriol the author spills over this absurdly trivial item, really.
> Stop saying "Bush regime."
I usually refer to it as "The Rove Administration". "The Rove Regime" rolls off the tongue better, but it's too much hyperbole, too little subtlety.
> Granted, you can declare a class and add members which are accessible using the '.' notation, but I find it cumbersome.
... it'd sure be nice to have a working perl6 though (yes I know about pug, but it's hardly ready for for anything but experimenting with the idea of perl6 itself, not even toy programs)
I always liked the way Javascript did it, making the dot mere syntactic sugar. Certainly the dot notation is much nicer than perl5's awful arrow notation, something it borrowed from C++, which itself borrowed from C. The ironic thing about that is that C never even needed that arrow notation, because the usage is never ambiguous (and it is in C++ only in the most extreme corner cases). It only existed because the implementation was hamstrung by exceedingly dumb compilers that weren't aware enough of the types. -> is C's extraneous "sigil", much like perl's $%@.
It looks like perl6 is getting rid of the arrows (yay) and different sigils for the most part (looking somewhat tclish if i dare say so)
BTW, I'd like to thank you for offering one of the few reasonable mature replies I've gotten on perl threads so far. I suppose I really should stop talking about it, since it seems to be just flamebait like python's indentation or lisp's parenthesis.
you mean perl isn't littered with the same problem? hah. one of the touted features of perl is that there's always a zillion ways to do the same thing.
Yes, but they're not a zillion functions with inconsistent conventions all littering the global namespace all doing the same thing.
I don't expect you to recognize all the tricks in perldoc perlbot, but if you can't understand the pre and post forms of if and the precedence of and and or vs && and || (after a little practice for that one), then you are merely incompetent. Stay well away from heavily templated C++ code, and under no circumstances allow yourself to get near functional languages, or you will collapse in sheer incomprehension. There's More Than Perl's Number Of Ways To Do It in those languages.
Why don't you go take a look at Template-Toolkit from CPAN and tell me how unreadable it is. If you can't tell me what it's doing from reading the code, you're probably not competent in any programming language.
On my windows machine, I have:
Windows Media Player 10
Microsoft Works (hey it was free)
RealPlayer
Adobe Reader
Yahoo IM
You want to tell me those are consistent? Users really do NOT care about these differences (though they DO like having "ok" and "cancel" be consistently in the same places, not to point any fingers -- AT GNOME -- or anything)
Occasionally, the browser has trouble resolving a host. Once it has this problem, it can't seem to look up any other hosts either. Pinging the IP address of the host works, but name resolution fails. I know that XP can experience problems with a tainted DNS cache, but flushing the cache does not solve the problem. The only solution to the problem appears to be to switch over to another DNS server (something that XP does not do automatically, it seems.) I'd love to be able to script a solution to this problem, but I don't want to have to put hours into solving a problem with a good, well-defined workaround, even if the workaround is a PITA.
net stop "dns client"
net start "dns client"
Put that in a script, like "kickdns.cmd". When you have problems, run it. Put it in a scheduled task if necessary.
> I wonder if IBM donated teh mac to him?
Psst -- I hear IBM makes their own hardware.
Much as I often think of Linus as an arrogant blowhard, I have to imagine he is pointing out pieces of the architecture he personally dislikes, the ones that gave him headaches ... but that he wouldn't bother pointing them out if they weren't a disappointment, i.e. that he otherwise likes it. It's a stretch sure ... but I imagine he has a litany of nasty things to say about x86 architecture, given his extensive experience with it.
The biggest problem here on slashdot is the astro-mods (astroturfing moderators). They are pro-MS, and moderate down anything that doesn't fit their pre-conceived view of the world.
And guess what, you were modded down. First of all, for whining about moderation, secondly because you failed to provide a single example. Every post has a unique ID, right click on it, copy, paste it for some evidence. Use your journal if you have to.
Otherwise I just call bullshit.
He has also said that Mach, which is the microkernel OSX is based on, is a "piece of shit". Read "Just for Fun", his autobiography, for full details.
... but to his credit, I haven't heard him mouthing off about microkernels lately, he just says that "monolithic" kernels are underrated, microkernels are overrated, and for the most part, he's right.
This does not make him an expert on Microkernels. Mach's performance on x86 has always stunk, and its design is pretty lame compared to modern microkernels like L4. I bet Linus doesn't know a thing about L4 or QNX
What he said in the past was pretty defamatory, sure (he basically accused microkernel researchers of engaging in academic fraud to get research money) but it's water long under the bridge. He just doesn't see any need to redesign Linux under any new architectural principle, given that the layers of emulation that would be needed for compatibility would stovepipe the whole mess into the same function it always served, only even harder to maintain. New designs are for new kernels. So let's just let this whole microkernel "debate" rest if Linus isn't even participating in it now.
You know, it IS possible for you to take my statement about the controllers as subjective rather than as some revalation of the truth of some platonic perfect controller, that must be rebutted with another assertion of perfect objective truth. Sometimes I slip and don't personally qualify everything with "IMHO", but I assumed perhaps wrongly that the reader might ascertain that my judgement was a matter of personal opinion, and that others would not jump up and take immediate umbrage at such a personal affront.
I personally like the PS2 controller, you personally do not. There. Jesus, was that so damn hard?
I'm aware the top buttons are analog. The d-pad and the shoulder buttons (R1/R2/L1/L2) are not. Those are what I mean by triggers. The xbox triggers are analog.
Actually, I rather suspect that Sony has the layout of their controls patented, which is why no other system has a controller layout exactly like that. If so, then yes it's somewhat sleazy (though in truth a really innovative design *is* something that is really deserving of a patent) but the whole industry sort of drips with these sort of lock-ins, so it's down to choosing quality. I couldn't imaging playing Prince of Persia without the sticks just the way they are ... and of course there's simply no other way to play Katamari Damacy :)
If you do need to support exotic environments, or think you might someday, then autoconf is your friend. Automake used to be friendly before they went overboard with it, now it's just bloated and broken; use Make extensions instead. Libtool has never been anybody's friend; more time has been put into making and debugging and debugging and debugging libtool than has ever been recouped by its wrappers -- use ELF binary format and be done with it.
I think that's the best description of autotools I've yet heard. My advice for makefiles: don't be afraid of using "include". It's portable, really it is. Automake avoids doing any includes, which is one reason it inserts so much godawful boilerplate, to say nothing of its excreble dependency generation scheme -- can you even see what's compiling in all that garbage that automake-generated makefiles spit onto stdout? Just use gcc -MM if you need to regenerate deps -- it won't require gcc for the user, it's purely for the convenience of the makefile maintainer.
Even better, use SCons. Calculates dependencies automatically. Obviously, SCons is not for everyone and every purpose, and god knows some of its darker corners have never seen documentation, but when it is useful, it's a freakin godsend, given that it will portably compile and link exes and libraries, static and shared, on unix and windows, with the same simple file. And it can even output MSVC project files now.
> If you use tabs, you can only accomplish this if the desired indenting level is an exact multiple of your tab stop setting.
Only if your editor eagerly replaces space with tabs. That indent on the second line should be comprised of exactly as many tabs as the first line, followed by spaces underneath all the text to force it to line up. That way when you change your tab width, it remains lined up.
I just stopped caring about the tab religion some coding-standards nazis kept flogging and just set emacs to tabify on load and untabify on save for all files under a certain directory. Made everyone happy.