Features are being back-ported to older releases, so that you have "feature gaps" in the releases. For instance, a new feature that was introduced in 2.6.5 could be ported to 2.4.20. What that means is that this feature would exist in versions 2.4.20 through 2.4.29, and 2.6.5 through 2.6.11, but not in 2.6.0 through 2.6.4. The current numbering scheme makes this kind of behavior too tempting.
FreeBSD fixed this problem by using build dates for its patchlevels. If Linux used this scheme, you could have a 2.4-20050215 and 2.6-20040605 and you know the 2.4 kernel is more recently modified. Patchlevel numbers by themself are useless.
They also don't go crazy on the STABLE branch with experimental features either, so backports are done for stuff that's actually necessary.
I don't expect Linus to adopt anything sane like that though... he seems too enamored of his current idea of adding even MORE churn to the stable kernels, distancing vendors even more from the original branch. Redhat 2.4 kernels are practically an all-out fork nowadays.
Wasn't it Thomas Edison who tried to prove that Tesla's 3 phase AC power distribution was dangerous by electrocuting frogs with it and showing how they thrash about vioilently before they died?
Not Tesla, Westinghouse. The whole frog twitching thing was a sideshow trick when electricity was first discovered, and could be done with DC. Edison went all the way up to electrocuting horses, and advertised it could be done on people with "Westinghouse's Electric Chair". He thought people would be horrified. In the last bit of irony, several states loved it and actually ordered these things, using them for capital punishment for many decades afterward.
Edison may have been quite an inventor, but he was rather a ruthless man not above gross distortions and character assassination.
That said, you could easily build a device to power all those said gizmos. You'd really need a quite large multi-tap transformer with appropriate ratings, and a set of voltage regulators for the various voltages... 5, 6, 9, 12, 13.8, possibly a couple of adjustable ones for those pesky items that insist on odd voltages.
I believe such devices are called "power supplies". You can get hobby power supplies up to some pretty insane voltages with lots of different output voltages (and you can use voltage regulators and diodes for whatever's merely close). I don't think it's going to be terribly more convient to manage than a bunch of wall warts though.
Me too! From Ultima I learned the virtues of honesty, compassion, valor, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality, and humility. That's why I no longer steal crops or torches.
Yes, but you can always confess and make some small penance, all is forgiven, and you get to keep your loot. Hey, it really does work like the real thing.
Re:Just because you CAN...
on
Effective XML
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· Score: 1
> CDATA sections don't need to nest. If you're trying to nest them, you're doing something wrong. CDATA sections are merely syntax sugar. (Items 9, 14 and 15) You absolutely can include the three character sequence ]]> in XML documents. You just have to escape the greater than sign as >.
You are wrong. Entities do not decode in CDATA, so you do not get a greater-than sign, you get ampersand, g, t, and semicolon. CDATA sections are the only way to get to CDATA mode, whereas the rest of XML is in PCDATA mode (the P stands for "parsed"). You've failed to impress me with the official answer of "don't do that".
The fact is, they could have come up with an escape sequence for just that delimiter, and an escape for that escape. It's not infinite regress -- that's as far as you have to go, and it's not something that has to be special cased any more than that escape sequence has to be in the first place.
Re:Just because you CAN...
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
2. What do you do when the data contains characters you're using as field delimiters?
Both of these are completely solved by XML with no extra effort on your part, and these are hardly the only issues.
CDATA is delimited at the end by ]]>. There is no way to escape this delimiter. If you need to enclose one XML fragment in another using CDATA, you had best base64 encode it, because there simply isn't any way to nest them.
> They can, but Wikipedia's model also makes sure that they can and in fact will be ironed out again pretty quickly.
And put back.
And ironed out again.
And put back.
And ironed out again.
And put back.
Ad infinitum. Until people just give up. For example, I was tracking the article on Arafat for a while right after he died, and tried weeding some of the crap out, but the infantile edit war just kept going. Heck, it probabably still is. I just no longer care, having long since given up.
Wikipedia is worse than useless for anything controversial. But hey, if you need dozens of lavishly detailed articles on each character in Dragonball Z, it's just the ticket.
> What if the door checker is "in on" the scam, too?
The door checker is probably a bonded security guard. Getting caught would cost them a whole pile of money, more than they're likely to make on a scam, not to mention that they'd never work in the field again. Most security guards don't have a lot of other useful skills. Not to say it doesn't happen, but that and the difficulty of getting a conspiracy of three especially when the cashier and guard don't even know each other (working for different companies) make the likelihood low enough that an insurance company would call it a significant risk reduction. There aren't any absolutes.
I go to CompUSA (also has Door Nazis) because they're two blocks away from my house and they have real big rebates (that I always forget to mail in -- I'm the reason for their profits right here). Otherwise I mail order (and CompUSA has mail order). The door nazis don't bug me, but mostly because most of the ones that store are actually friendly.
> Fortunately, AdBlock and Proxomitron (sorry - can't always spell that word) support filters based on REGEXP (Regular Expression)
You got it right. I'm always spelling it Proximitron myself. Anyway, Proxomitron's matching language is not regex (lowercase it, it ain't an acronym), it's actually its own thing that's more specialized for matching tokens, such as operators that collapse whitespace. It's a little hard to learn, but it's not too bad. Personally I'd find perl6 regexes to be perfect, but I'll be waiting a long time for those.
I use proxomitron not to block ads, but to insert large quantities of javascript into a web app I use at work, that among several other things, logs certain forms to the filesystem for later processing, and adds keyboard accellerators to the commonly used buttons and fields on the page. It's a great way to hack on a web app you otherwise aren't allowed to mess with.
As to anyone else using Proxomitron for the first time: you can and probably should turn off the GUI theme. It's kind of a wry joke on the usefulness of themeability.
> Yeah, until they start using random names for the floats.
Then you filter it by its relative position in the body using CSS2 relative selectors. Doesn't matter what it's called, you just care where it is. Of course they can then always make the position of it random, but the arms race will belong to the blockers for the time being.
Thing is, none of 'em can do their "float" trick without javascript. It seems a no-brainer where to hack that, and there's even a UI to configure that sort of block in Firefox. Just add another checkbox for "disallow moving of page elements". It's got to stop being a global setting though, but FF sadly has NO unified system for applying per-domain preferences, and every extension has to reimplement it differently. In this sense, IE's zones, however limited and primitive, are actually more advanced.
Mind you, the natural evolution is simply going to be putting all the selling in the content itself, from recipes to commentary to so-called news. This has been going on for a while, it'll just tend to accellerate.
Irratation on TV works because it grabs your attention, and there isn't much you can do ab--***30-SECOND-SKIP***. Well, ok, but the PVR is not yet completely ubiquitous.
However, I find myself keeping ad banners unblocked on a site... _until_ they start flashing, shaking, and being generally obnoxious. If I can't conveniently scroll it off the screen or it appears on every page, out comes adblock, and that banner spot is gone FOREVER. It doesn't pay to cross the line on the web.
You want to show me "brought to you by", or reserve even half the space on the page for ads, go for it. Just keep it calm. You get in my face like a used car salesman though, I'm gone from your site for the day, and your advertiser is gone from my browser for good.
Long as we're throwing out links, let's bring up my personal favorite, Resin (now licensed under GPL!). The GPL version doesn't have any clustering support, but that's it. You can even get the full source for the commercial version, and that full version is still free-beer for any noncommercial usage.
But aside from the license stuff, it's lean, reasonably featureful for 80% of commonly-used features (if you really need lots of features, stick with jboss), and boy howdy it's fast. It's nice to have not only my jsp's, but all my servlets and even EJBs (though I stopped using EJB long ago) automatically recompiled (with jikes) upon a change.
Not to mention that the recording of this piece includes the various sounds the audience made. That is what defines 4'33"
It's hard to find anything so asinine as articles like this... unless one goes and reads all the "cute" comments. I'm starting to think of making the "Funny" mod worth -1.
> Just curious...a few cents/gal up or down just isn't going to make a difference in my life...
It affects the price of transporting goods. Which is pretty much everything. It neither effects you immediately or individually all that much (unless you're a trucker), but it adds up.
Mind you, I think the effective subsidies we're all paying for gas and roads, to say nothing of the effects of global warming (decreased crop yields) disguise the actual cost of the stuff, so I'm not exactly clamoring for cheap gas. Just saying it's more than what you're paying at the pump.
Some of us do stuff for a living like graph visualization of large data models, protein synthesis, that sort of thing. I agree, the Point Of Sale system on your checkout register at Wal-Mart probably doesn't need all that power, however.
The c64 had 32 colors and a 40 column screen, mmkay? You can find 'em for 30 bucks on ebay, which is a nice way to score a cheap oldskool analog synth in the SID chip.
Oh, IHBT, sorry.
Re:Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause?
on
Troika Games Closes
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· Score: 1
> the QA process for PC games is considerably harder than it is for a closed, proprietary gaming console.
I seriously doubt this is the case. You cannot patch a console game (not on current generations of consoles anyway), so you MUST get it right the first time. The limitations of the hardware (or for the PS2, the strange architecture) force you to make optimizations that range from nasty hacks to intimidatingly complex. DirectX has made the PC more uniform than consoles -- you only need to write for one architecture and API, unlike consoles.
I didn't mean "can e17 put window decorations on any app", I meant, "can this amazing e17 code be used to write other apps besides the WM". I realize that what I said was ambiguous, though I would have hoped that my intent was obvious... I suppose I should try being less snippy and provide more context next time.
> if you really want something on the web to feel like an app, why not make it a Java app that runs in the browser?
Because java's a nasty cumbersome bureacratic language, applets take an age to load, the GUI toolkit isn't nearly as easy to lay out as HTML+CSS, and you can't bookmark your position in an applet. That's just to start.
XMLHTTP is nice, but using a frame lets you preserve history. Which one you use depends on what you need in your application. There's all kinds of other clever ways to do this as well. I used a combination of techniques five years ago to do this sort of dynamic web app stuff, using an embedded applet to open a TCP connection back. Nice interactivity with very low bandwidth utilization. Nowadays I'd just use keepalive and eat the HTTP overhead. Shame I never could get it "to market", so three years ago some other startup went and sold a prodict based on a similar idea. Mine was different enough that it probably wouldn't have run into patent issues, but the company was already in the ashbin and I didn't feel like continuing it.
At no time when developing it did I desire to utter such insipid neologisms as "Weblication", though there were a few cutesy slogans thrown around.
Can e17 run any apps that aren't part of the window manager? Does e17 have a mature widget set with accessability and i18n? Is edje's "theme description language" actually like xaml, or is it devoted to eye-candy?
Re:a solution in search of an application
on
Whereables?
·
· Score: 1
Imagine a restaurant where all the wait staff have glasses. They carry around a small black to "write" on, and as they look each customer in the eye the seating and location of the order is instantly taken down. If the customer assents to the restaurant recording their preferences, the glasses can even flash a customer's name when they walk in with their RFID-restuarant tag.
Minus the never-going-to-fly-with-customers RFID stuff, it sounds just like the order pads the waiters use at some busy North Beach restaurants. Don't need distracting eyegear popups, it just takes a glance down at the pad. Orders are entered and every table's order is displayed on the pad, by number. Any waiter that can't handle learning the table numbers on their first day is not cut out for the job, and no amount of technology can cover for that lack of ability.
Slashdot Mirror
Features are being back-ported to older releases, so that you have "feature gaps" in the releases. For instance, a new feature that was introduced in 2.6.5 could be ported to 2.4.20. What that means is that this feature would exist in versions 2.4.20 through 2.4.29, and 2.6.5 through 2.6.11, but not in 2.6.0 through 2.6.4. The current numbering scheme makes this kind of behavior too tempting.
... he seems too enamored of his current idea of adding even MORE churn to the stable kernels, distancing vendors even more from the original branch. Redhat 2.4 kernels are practically an all-out fork nowadays.
FreeBSD fixed this problem by using build dates for its patchlevels. If Linux used this scheme, you could have a 2.4-20050215 and 2.6-20040605 and you know the 2.4 kernel is more recently modified. Patchlevel numbers by themself are useless.
They also don't go crazy on the STABLE branch with experimental features either, so backports are done for stuff that's actually necessary.
I don't expect Linus to adopt anything sane like that though
Wasn't it Thomas Edison who tried to prove that Tesla's 3 phase AC power distribution was dangerous by electrocuting frogs with it and showing how they thrash about vioilently before they died?
Not Tesla, Westinghouse. The whole frog twitching thing was a sideshow trick when electricity was first discovered, and could be done with DC. Edison went all the way up to electrocuting horses, and advertised it could be done on people with "Westinghouse's Electric Chair". He thought people would be horrified. In the last bit of irony, several states loved it and actually ordered these things, using them for capital punishment for many decades afterward.
Edison may have been quite an inventor, but he was rather a ruthless man not above gross distortions and character assassination.
That said, you could easily build a device to power all those said gizmos. You'd really need a quite large multi-tap transformer with appropriate ratings, and a set of voltage regulators for the various voltages... 5, 6, 9, 12, 13.8, possibly a couple of adjustable ones for those pesky items that insist on odd voltages.
I believe such devices are called "power supplies". You can get hobby power supplies up to some pretty insane voltages with lots of different output voltages (and you can use voltage regulators and diodes for whatever's merely close). I don't think it's going to be terribly more convient to manage than a bunch of wall warts though.
Me too! From Ultima I learned the virtues of honesty, compassion, valor, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality, and humility. That's why I no longer steal crops or torches.
Yes, but you can always confess and make some small penance, all is forgiven, and you get to keep your loot. Hey, it really does work like the real thing.
> CDATA sections don't need to nest. If you're trying to nest them, you're doing something wrong. CDATA sections are merely syntax sugar. (Items 9, 14 and 15) You absolutely can include the three character sequence ]]> in XML documents. You just have to escape the greater than sign as >.
You are wrong. Entities do not decode in CDATA, so you do not get a greater-than sign, you get ampersand, g, t, and semicolon. CDATA sections are the only way to get to CDATA mode, whereas the rest of XML is in PCDATA mode (the P stands for "parsed"). You've failed to impress me with the official answer of "don't do that".
The fact is, they could have come up with an escape sequence for just that delimiter, and an escape for that escape. It's not infinite regress -- that's as far as you have to go, and it's not something that has to be special cased any more than that escape sequence has to be in the first place.
2. What do you do when the data contains characters you're using as field delimiters?
Both of these are completely solved by XML with no extra effort on your part, and these are hardly the only issues.
CDATA is delimited at the end by ]]>. There is no way to escape this delimiter. If you need to enclose one XML fragment in another using CDATA, you had best base64 encode it, because there simply isn't any way to nest them.
This is not what I call "well thought out"
Holy lack of an absence of a missing devoid of quadruple negatives batman!
> Do you honestly think that CmdrTaco actually checks other news sites before posting blatent frauds like this?
Based on the level of duplicates we typically see, he doesn't even check slashdot.
Jeez fellas, you don't even have to get up to newsforge's level, but can't you even take some personal pride in your work?
> They can, but Wikipedia's model also makes sure that they can and in fact will be ironed out again pretty quickly.
And put back.
And ironed out again.
And put back.
And ironed out again.
And put back.
Ad infinitum. Until people just give up. For example, I was tracking the article on Arafat for a while right after he died, and tried weeding some of the crap out, but the infantile edit war just kept going. Heck, it probabably still is. I just no longer care, having long since given up.
Wikipedia is worse than useless for anything controversial. But hey, if you need dozens of lavishly detailed articles on each character in Dragonball Z, it's just the ticket.
> What if the door checker is "in on" the scam, too?
The door checker is probably a bonded security guard. Getting caught would cost them a whole pile of money, more than they're likely to make on a scam, not to mention that they'd never work in the field again. Most security guards don't have a lot of other useful skills. Not to say it doesn't happen, but that and the difficulty of getting a conspiracy of three especially when the cashier and guard don't even know each other (working for different companies) make the likelihood low enough that an insurance company would call it a significant risk reduction. There aren't any absolutes.
I go to CompUSA (also has Door Nazis) because they're two blocks away from my house and they have real big rebates (that I always forget to mail in -- I'm the reason for their profits right here). Otherwise I mail order (and CompUSA has mail order). The door nazis don't bug me, but mostly because most of the ones that store are actually friendly.
My PIN is 4654. What are you going to do, mug me?
> Fortunately, AdBlock and Proxomitron (sorry - can't always spell that word) support filters based on REGEXP (Regular Expression)
You got it right. I'm always spelling it Proximitron myself. Anyway, Proxomitron's matching language is not regex (lowercase it, it ain't an acronym), it's actually its own thing that's more specialized for matching tokens, such as operators that collapse whitespace. It's a little hard to learn, but it's not too bad. Personally I'd find perl6 regexes to be perfect, but I'll be waiting a long time for those.
I use proxomitron not to block ads, but to insert large quantities of javascript into a web app I use at work, that among several other things, logs certain forms to the filesystem for later processing, and adds keyboard accellerators to the commonly used buttons and fields on the page. It's a great way to hack on a web app you otherwise aren't allowed to mess with.
As to anyone else using Proxomitron for the first time: you can and probably should turn off the GUI theme. It's kind of a wry joke on the usefulness of themeability.
> I think theres an extension for Firefox that lets you dismiss elements like this already actually.
It's called "Nuke Anything". It's a dead-simple DOM hack, and it's not persistent though, so AdBlock provides a more long-term solution.
> Yeah, until they start using random names for the floats.
Then you filter it by its relative position in the body using CSS2 relative selectors. Doesn't matter what it's called, you just care where it is. Of course they can then always make the position of it random, but the arms race will belong to the blockers for the time being.
Thing is, none of 'em can do their "float" trick without javascript. It seems a no-brainer where to hack that, and there's even a UI to configure that sort of block in Firefox. Just add another checkbox for "disallow moving of page elements". It's got to stop being a global setting though, but FF sadly has NO unified system for applying per-domain preferences, and every extension has to reimplement it differently. In this sense, IE's zones, however limited and primitive, are actually more advanced.
Mind you, the natural evolution is simply going to be putting all the selling in the content itself, from recipes to commentary to so-called news. This has been going on for a while, it'll just tend to accellerate.
Irratation on TV works because it grabs your attention, and there isn't much you can do ab--***30-SECOND-SKIP***. Well, ok, but the PVR is not yet completely ubiquitous.
... _until_ they start flashing, shaking, and being generally obnoxious. If I can't conveniently scroll it off the screen or it appears on every page, out comes adblock, and that banner spot is gone FOREVER. It doesn't pay to cross the line on the web.
However, I find myself keeping ad banners unblocked on a site
You want to show me "brought to you by", or reserve even half the space on the page for ads, go for it. Just keep it calm. You get in my face like a used car salesman though, I'm gone from your site for the day, and your advertiser is gone from my browser for good.
Long as we're throwing out links, let's bring up my personal favorite, Resin (now licensed under GPL!). The GPL version doesn't have any clustering support, but that's it. You can even get the full source for the commercial version, and that full version is still free-beer for any noncommercial usage.
But aside from the license stuff, it's lean, reasonably featureful for 80% of commonly-used features (if you really need lots of features, stick with jboss), and boy howdy it's fast. It's nice to have not only my jsp's, but all my servlets and even EJBs (though I stopped using EJB long ago) automatically recompiled (with jikes) upon a change.
Not to mention that the recording of this piece includes the various sounds the audience made. That is what defines 4'33"
... unless one goes and reads all the "cute" comments. I'm starting to think of making the "Funny" mod worth -1.
It's hard to find anything so asinine as articles like this
> Just curious...a few cents/gal up or down just isn't going to make a difference in my life...
It affects the price of transporting goods. Which is pretty much everything. It neither effects you immediately or individually all that much (unless you're a trucker), but it adds up.
Mind you, I think the effective subsidies we're all paying for gas and roads, to say nothing of the effects of global warming (decreased crop yields) disguise the actual cost of the stuff, so I'm not exactly clamoring for cheap gas. Just saying it's more than what you're paying at the pump.
Some of us do stuff for a living like graph visualization of large data models, protein synthesis, that sort of thing. I agree, the Point Of Sale system on your checkout register at Wal-Mart probably doesn't need all that power, however.
The c64 had 32 colors and a 40 column screen, mmkay? You can find 'em for 30 bucks on ebay, which is a nice way to score a cheap oldskool analog synth in the SID chip.
Oh, IHBT, sorry.
> the QA process for PC games is considerably harder than it is for a closed, proprietary gaming console.
I seriously doubt this is the case. You cannot patch a console game (not on current generations of consoles anyway), so you MUST get it right the first time. The limitations of the hardware (or for the PS2, the strange architecture) force you to make optimizations that range from nasty hacks to intimidatingly complex. DirectX has made the PC more uniform than consoles -- you only need to write for one architecture and API, unlike consoles.
I didn't mean "can e17 put window decorations on any app", I meant, "can this amazing e17 code be used to write other apps besides the WM". I realize that what I said was ambiguous, though I would have hoped that my intent was obvious ... I suppose I should try being less snippy and provide more context next time.
> if you really want something on the web to feel like an app, why not make it a Java app that runs in the browser?
Because java's a nasty cumbersome bureacratic language, applets take an age to load, the GUI toolkit isn't nearly as easy to lay out as HTML+CSS, and you can't bookmark your position in an applet. That's just to start.
XMLHTTP is nice, but using a frame lets you preserve history. Which one you use depends on what you need in your application. There's all kinds of other clever ways to do this as well. I used a combination of techniques five years ago to do this sort of dynamic web app stuff, using an embedded applet to open a TCP connection back. Nice interactivity with very low bandwidth utilization. Nowadays I'd just use keepalive and eat the HTTP overhead. Shame I never could get it "to market", so three years ago some other startup went and sold a prodict based on a similar idea. Mine was different enough that it probably wouldn't have run into patent issues, but the company was already in the ashbin and I didn't feel like continuing it.
At no time when developing it did I desire to utter such insipid neologisms as "Weblication", though there were a few cutesy slogans thrown around.
Can e17 run any apps that aren't part of the window manager? Does e17 have a mature widget set with accessability and i18n? Is edje's "theme description language" actually like xaml, or is it devoted to eye-candy?
Imagine a restaurant where all the wait staff have glasses. They carry around a small black to "write" on, and as they look each customer in the eye the seating and location of the order is instantly taken down. If the customer assents to the restaurant recording their preferences, the glasses can even flash a customer's name when they walk in with their RFID-restuarant tag.
Minus the never-going-to-fly-with-customers RFID stuff, it sounds just like the order pads the waiters use at some busy North Beach restaurants. Don't need distracting eyegear popups, it just takes a glance down at the pad. Orders are entered and every table's order is displayed on the pad, by number. Any waiter that can't handle learning the table numbers on their first day is not cut out for the job, and no amount of technology can cover for that lack of ability.