Re:If they want to be innovative and supportive...
on
Sun Wants to Make Linux 3D
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For everyone else there is Mplayer, the universial media player!
I was under the impression that video apps like Mplayer (and xine, and...) are universal loaders-of-open-and-proprietary-DLLs-and-.so's, in conjunction with a universally bloated skin managers.
I think the grandparent post is right: there are Open formats and there are Closed formats, and Sun's not going to win over idea-sharers by providing media that's encumbered by idea-hoarding technologies.
The linked page didn't mention that Charles Simonyi is the Hungarian for whom the term, Hungarian Notation is named.
Hungarian Notation is that Microsoft Windows programming naming strategy where the first few characters of a variable name should hint to the reader as to its data type. So hToolbox tips you to understand that it was a HANDLE type, even without scrolling your editor up a couple pages to find out; papszEnvironment would likewise tell a Win32 devotee that it was a Pointer to an Array of Pointers to Zero-terminated Strings.
It's not the first such instance of binding data type and name, and it won't be the last. For example, FORTRAN compilers have long had implicit variables; any variable not otherwise declared that started with I, J, K, L, M, or N would be assumed to be an integer, where most other variables would assume a real (floating-point) type. So FORCE(LAMBDA) directs the code to a real scalar from a real array, given an integer index. Many programmers start a routine with IMPLICIT NONE to disable this assumptive behavior, as mistakes are easy to make when you let the machine decide things for you.
BASIC would use sigils at the end of the variable names (NAME$, COUNT#, and scripting languages like Perl use sigils that precede the name %phones, @log, $count).
For example, during last year's Golden Globe Awards U2's Bono said 'This is really, really f-ing [sic] brilliant.'
Who needs the FCC when people decide that words like 'fucking' needs to be self-censored? If you're going to fucking quote someone, fuck, man, QUOTE THEM. You're caving in against your own fucking thesis.
Long before "Ender's Game," there was Niven and Pournelle's book, "Oath of Fealty." A few rich residents of the arcology Todos Santos could get an implant that would allow two-way communication with the central mainframe MILLIE, sub-vocal and sub-audible.
Oath of Fealty also introduced this soundbite to our Darwin Award culture: Think of it as evolution in action.
Purple fringing (one kind of chromatic aberration) is almost always due to poor optics, not poor electronics. Lens materials refract light differently based on the wavelength; bad optics don't take this into account as much as good optics. Bad optics let the wavelengths fall on the sensor in different places, and good optics judiciously use coatings and additional elements to re-form the multiple waveforms into a coherent image.
Kodak has long dabbled in digital photography, but I would call their efforts to date as being seldom "at the forefront." They glued some chips to a Nikon 8008 body for a few photojournalist concept bodies, then they basically stopped everything but a few mediocre digicam instamatics for ten years. Now they're catching the consumer bug again, but sorry, it's too late. They won't invent the Digital Brownie. Canon wipes the floor with Kodak's marketshare, and Nikon and Sony are both dancing on their grave. Kodak woke up from their film-chemical-induced stupor way too late to save themselves.
We live in a world where a pregnant woman can be convicted of a stoning offense, just because the man decided not to marry her. Nigeria.
We live in a world where people participating in an anti-tyranny march to the capitol will be shot from rooftops by the minions of a guerilla warlord who will "protect" the country from violence. Haiti.
We live in a world where a well-respected and popular female government official is slain by knife while shopping in a department store. Sweden.
We live in a world where bloodshed happens for unjust and unjustifiable reasons... in every country there is, and every country there ever was. Even your country.
The Ring is always "evil" but it's biding its time. The Ring's maker, the Necromancer (aka Sauron), has been attacked and chased back to Mordor, where he begins regaining power. That's what Gandalf is busy with, when he's not actually following the Burglar Bilbo and the Dwarrow Quest. That's also why there seem to be few repercussions for Bilbo to wear the ring occasionally.
It's only when Gollum researches the origins of his Precious, in order to find it again, that the name 'Baggins' is brought to the attention of Sauron. Gollum is caught and then released, whereupon he found and carefully evaded Shelob... both escapes for a price.
The book for "the Lord of the Rings" was titled the Red Book of Westmarch, and was mostly written in the Hobbits' tongue, a branch of "Westron," or the Common Tongue. Bilbo picked up a fair amount of Elvish. While Frodo learned a bit of Elvish, he was not what you would call fluent. Samwise, who edited the whole set of papers afterwards, didn't know very much Elvish at all; most of what he learned would have been after the whole ordeal, perhaps during his terms of office as Mayor.
Now, in actuality, there are photos of some of the original manuscripts for the Silmarillion and "lost tales," and J.R.R. Tolkien really did pen them in Feanorian characters, in the same sort of phonetic English that you see in the trilogy's mastheads. You can read along if you're careful. There are a fair number of ligatures, like S+T, not described in the LotR appendices, but which are pretty easy to figure out.
I did some very rudimentary artwork for two LWE2002 bumper stickers, one of which carries this slogan. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" (Tagline 'If your software doesn't include the source code, switch.') There were press articles mentioning these stickers.
This is just a Volvo concept car, with other ridiculously sexist language in the press releases, and features that will never find a production car. It sounded straight from a Heinlein book, with mixed up mysogyny and girl-worship all wrapped together.
However, if you ever DO see one of these cars, I'd love a photograph of it sporting my Linux sticker. I'll have to make one which says, "My OTHER car's hood isn't welded shut!"
Section. 8.
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
How does this advance Arts or Science? It's a real stretch to say that a list of customer data is a Writing or a Discovery.
And one other reason is the ever-amusing Rule 32;)
Sounds like someone should check OpenOffice.org's Writer to ensure the word-counting function works as lawyers expect, or at least can be configured to do so.
God: Well, it took a few billion years to... oh, never mind, let's call it "seven days".
This is exactly what drives me nuts about the less imaginitive Bible followers. Most seem not to be able to rectify the "Seven Days" thing with evidence.
"With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8b).
My personal interpretation is that the "thousand years" is still just a euphemism to make Man understand things; maybe history should be viewed logarithmically and not linearly. We're still in Day Six, the Creation of Man. Day Seven, the Rest, begins with the long dull period between the beginning and end of Revelation, and covers the rest of the history of the Universe.
10 years down the line, I am sure we will all look back and laugh at RIAA tactics.
Only if we can get the Congress to listen to us, and not to the rich and powerful media interests. Media influence is hard to ignore. "Never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel."
The default setup of the GIMP 2.0 has a "small" theme, which uses tiny fonts and minimizes the deadspace between various control widgets. Use it, and it makes an 800x600 screen almost usable, and a 1600x1200 screen into a polo field.
Everyone and their brother are whining, WHY IS IT ALL IN TWENTY DIFFERENT WINDOWS!? Two things you might want to think about, beyond the new options for arranging and merging the dockable windows.
I have yet to see a Linux graphical desktop that does not have multiple virtual desktops all over the place. Assign one to the GIMP, and use it for nothing else. The clutter problem is solved. If you go to another desktop, all of GIMP disappears as a unit. If you go back to the GIMP desktop, they all reappear where you left them.
Also, if you force a parent frame to contain all these toolboxes, you can't put these toolboxes on your second monitor head. Not everyone has a second screen, but if you do, then the GIMP's free toolbox windows enables a whole different way of working. On your primary monitor: the current image. Maximize it and have nothing in your way. On your secondary monitor: tools, brushes, patterns, layers, options, info, saving, etc. Far less clutter to get in the way of your image window.
Re:Missed one: explain it to someone
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
No, that's a funny thing. I drew that bear icon over ten years ago when I was on the Win3.1 shell team. I didn't even know it still shipped in any MSFT product.
The teddy bear is named Bear, and was the cuddly companion of one of the Windows 3.1 / Windows 95 shell team developers. He'd carry it *EVERYWHERE*. There are quite a few internal APIs called BunnyThis() or BearThat(), usually with generic numbers, because giving it a name would entice application writers to try to call it. (They're useless three-line internal helpers, but that didn't stop conspiratorial book-writers from trying to document them anyway.)
Bear also appears in the Win3.1 credits, where I made portraits of spectacled Bill, bald Steve, and large-schnozzed Brad Silverberg.
Now I don't have any Microsoft products at my house, anymore, except one outdated off-net machine which runs edutainment CD-ROMs for my daughter.
Race Conditions?
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Make It Fail is pretty hard to do when it comes to race conditions. This has got to be the most frustrating kind of bug. Others are referring to the Heisenbug which comes in a variety of flavors.
Sometimes you don't KNOW when there's multiple threads or processes, or when there are other factors involved.
Have you noticed that a new thread is spawned on behalf of your process when you open a Win32 common file dialog? Have you noticed that MSVC++ likes to initialize your memory to values like 0xCDCDCDCD after operator new, but before the constructor is called? It also overwrites memory with 0xDDDDDDDD after the destructors are called. And that it ONLY does these things when using the DEBUG variant build process? Did you know that.obj and.lib can be incompatible if one expects DEBUG and the other expects non-DEBUG memory management?
Someone on perlmonks.org was just asking about a Heisenbug where just the timing of the debugger threw off his network queries. Add the debugger, it works. Take away the debugger, it fails. I've got a serial-port device which comes with proprietary drivers that seem to have the same sort of race condition.
The top 9 rules mentioned here look great. But you could write a whole book on just debugging common race conditions for the modern multi-threaded soup that passes for operating systems, these days.
Not exactly-- Earth2 was just a replacement for the first Earth computer. The Earth we're standing on is the computer which was commissioned by the mice and predicted by Deep Thought to solve the Great Question. The Golgafrinchans crashed into it after boot-up and knocked the computation a bit early on, but the Vogons destroyed Earth (er, wioll haven destroy it*) five minutes before the Question could be retrieved.
Slashdot Mirror
For everyone else there is Mplayer, the universial media player!
I was under the impression that video apps like Mplayer (and xine, and ...) are universal loaders-of-open-and-proprietary-DLLs-and-.so's, in conjunction with a universally bloated skin managers.
I think the grandparent post is right: there are Open formats and there are Closed formats, and Sun's not going to win over idea-sharers by providing media that's encumbered by idea-hoarding technologies.
The linked page didn't mention that Charles Simonyi is the Hungarian for whom the term, Hungarian Notation is named.
Hungarian Notation is that Microsoft Windows programming naming strategy where the first few characters of a variable name should hint to the reader as to its data type. So hToolbox tips you to understand that it was a HANDLE type, even without scrolling your editor up a couple pages to find out; papszEnvironment would likewise tell a Win32 devotee that it was a Pointer to an Array of Pointers to Zero-terminated Strings.
It's not the first such instance of binding data type and name, and it won't be the last. For example, FORTRAN compilers have long had implicit variables; any variable not otherwise declared that started with I, J, K, L, M, or N would be assumed to be an integer, where most other variables would assume a real (floating-point) type. So FORCE(LAMBDA) directs the code to a real scalar from a real array, given an integer index. Many programmers start a routine with IMPLICIT NONE to disable this assumptive behavior, as mistakes are easy to make when you let the machine decide things for you.
BASIC would use sigils at the end of the variable names (NAME$, COUNT#, and scripting languages like Perl use sigils that precede the name %phones, @log, $count).
For example, during last year's Golden Globe Awards U2's Bono said 'This is really, really f-ing [sic] brilliant.'
Who needs the FCC when people decide that words like 'fucking' needs to be self-censored? If you're going to fucking quote someone, fuck, man, QUOTE THEM. You're caving in against your own fucking thesis.
What does checking Outlook email have to do with _Basic_ Input or Output?
I suggest you browse the security alerts for the past five years. I'd say that Outlook has a lot to do with the input and output of Basic.
Sodom and Gommarah starring Ben Affleck with Charlise Theron as Lot's wife.
This is slashdot, dude. Natalie Portman *must* be the actress who is petrified.
I just watched the movie Outbreak again; Dustin Hoffman's character is from USAMRIID. Besides some really sappy histrionics, it's a decent flick.
I don't know about YOUR company, but my company doesn't let any joe random user just install whatever they want on the company-supplied equipment.
Long before "Ender's Game," there was Niven and Pournelle's book, "Oath of Fealty." A few rich residents of the arcology Todos Santos could get an implant that would allow two-way communication with the central mainframe MILLIE, sub-vocal and sub-audible.
Oath of Fealty also introduced this soundbite to our Darwin Award culture: Think of it as evolution in action.
Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
Your question is a case-in-point. Why not ask him about something ELSE?
Purple fringing (one kind of chromatic aberration) is almost always due to poor optics, not poor electronics. Lens materials refract light differently based on the wavelength; bad optics don't take this into account as much as good optics. Bad optics let the wavelengths fall on the sensor in different places, and good optics judiciously use coatings and additional elements to re-form the multiple waveforms into a coherent image.
Kodak has long dabbled in digital photography, but I would call their efforts to date as being seldom "at the forefront." They glued some chips to a Nikon 8008 body for a few photojournalist concept bodies, then they basically stopped everything but a few mediocre digicam instamatics for ten years. Now they're catching the consumer bug again, but sorry, it's too late. They won't invent the Digital Brownie. Canon wipes the floor with Kodak's marketshare, and Nikon and Sony are both dancing on their grave. Kodak woke up from their film-chemical-induced stupor way too late to save themselves.
Okay, twit. I'll bite.
We live in a world where a pregnant woman can be convicted of a stoning offense, just because the man decided not to marry her. Nigeria.
We live in a world where people participating in an anti-tyranny march to the capitol will be shot from rooftops by the minions of a guerilla warlord who will "protect" the country from violence. Haiti.
We live in a world where a well-respected and popular female government official is slain by knife while shopping in a department store. Sweden.
We live in a world where bloodshed happens for unjust and unjustifiable reasons... in every country there is, and every country there ever was. Even your country.
It's only when Gollum researches the origins of his Precious, in order to find it again, that the name 'Baggins' is brought to the attention of Sauron. Gollum is caught and then released, whereupon he found and carefully evaded Shelob... both escapes for a price.
Now, in actuality, there are photos of some of the original manuscripts for the Silmarillion and "lost tales," and J.R.R. Tolkien really did pen them in Feanorian characters, in the same sort of phonetic English that you see in the trilogy's mastheads. You can read along if you're careful. There are a fair number of ligatures, like S+T, not described in the LotR appendices, but which are pretty easy to figure out.
I did some very rudimentary artwork for two LWE2002 bumper stickers, one of which carries this slogan. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" (Tagline 'If your software doesn't include the source code, switch.') There were press articles mentioning these stickers.
This is just a Volvo concept car, with other ridiculously sexist language in the press releases, and features that will never find a production car. It sounded straight from a Heinlein book, with mixed up mysogyny and girl-worship all wrapped together.
However, if you ever DO see one of these cars, I'd love a photograph of it sporting my Linux sticker. I'll have to make one which says, "My OTHER car's hood isn't welded shut!"
Section. 8.
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
How does this advance Arts or Science? It's a real stretch to say that a list of customer data is a Writing or a Discovery.
Sounds like someone should check OpenOffice.org's Writer to ensure the word-counting function works as lawyers expect, or at least can be configured to do so.
God: Well, it took a few billion years to... oh, never mind, let's call it "seven days".
This is exactly what drives me nuts about the less imaginitive Bible followers. Most seem not to be able to rectify the "Seven Days" thing with evidence.
My personal interpretation is that the "thousand years" is still just a euphemism to make Man understand things; maybe history should be viewed logarithmically and not linearly. We're still in Day Six, the Creation of Man. Day Seven, the Rest, begins with the long dull period between the beginning and end of Revelation, and covers the rest of the history of the Universe.
10 years down the line, I am sure we will all look back and laugh at RIAA tactics.
Only if we can get the Congress to listen to us, and not to the rich and powerful media interests. Media influence is hard to ignore. "Never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel."
The default setup of the GIMP 2.0 has a "small" theme, which uses tiny fonts and minimizes the deadspace between various control widgets. Use it, and it makes an 800x600 screen almost usable, and a 1600x1200 screen into a polo field.
Everyone and their brother are whining, WHY IS IT ALL IN TWENTY DIFFERENT WINDOWS!? Two things you might want to think about, beyond the new options for arranging and merging the dockable windows.
I have yet to see a Linux graphical desktop that does not have multiple virtual desktops all over the place. Assign one to the GIMP, and use it for nothing else. The clutter problem is solved. If you go to another desktop, all of GIMP disappears as a unit. If you go back to the GIMP desktop, they all reappear where you left them.
Also, if you force a parent frame to contain all these toolboxes, you can't put these toolboxes on your second monitor head. Not everyone has a second screen, but if you do, then the GIMP's free toolbox windows enables a whole different way of working. On your primary monitor: the current image. Maximize it and have nothing in your way. On your secondary monitor: tools, brushes, patterns, layers, options, info, saving, etc. Far less clutter to get in the way of your image window.
No, that's a funny thing. I drew that bear icon over ten years ago when I was on the Win3.1 shell team. I didn't even know it still shipped in any MSFT product.
The teddy bear is named Bear, and was the cuddly companion of one of the Windows 3.1 / Windows 95 shell team developers. He'd carry it *EVERYWHERE*. There are quite a few internal APIs called BunnyThis() or BearThat(), usually with generic numbers, because giving it a name would entice application writers to try to call it. (They're useless three-line internal helpers, but that didn't stop conspiratorial book-writers from trying to document them anyway.)
Bear also appears in the Win3.1 credits, where I made portraits of spectacled Bill, bald Steve, and large-schnozzed Brad Silverberg.
Now I don't have any Microsoft products at my house, anymore, except one outdated off-net machine which runs edutainment CD-ROMs for my daughter.
Make It Fail is pretty hard to do when it comes to race conditions. This has got to be the most frustrating kind of bug. Others are referring to the Heisenbug which comes in a variety of flavors.
Sometimes you don't KNOW when there's multiple threads or processes, or when there are other factors involved.
Have you noticed that a new thread is spawned on behalf of your process when you open a Win32 common file dialog? Have you noticed that MSVC++ likes to initialize your memory to values like 0xCDCDCDCD after operator new, but before the constructor is called? It also overwrites memory with 0xDDDDDDDD after the destructors are called. And that it ONLY does these things when using the DEBUG variant build process? Did you know that .obj and .lib can be incompatible if one expects DEBUG and the other expects non-DEBUG memory management?
Someone on perlmonks.org was just asking about a Heisenbug where just the timing of the debugger threw off his network queries. Add the debugger, it works. Take away the debugger, it fails. I've got a serial-port device which comes with proprietary drivers that seem to have the same sort of race condition.
The top 9 rules mentioned here look great. But you could write a whole book on just debugging common race conditions for the modern multi-threaded soup that passes for operating systems, these days.
(ref. vis. Dr. Dan Streetmentioner)