Actually, in my case it's a 4MB Mach64 GT on the mobo, but point taken nonetheless.:)
I might just be dense, but even after R-ing TFM, I still can't figure out what the X server ModeLines actually do, and not being the type to try random numbers in fear of freaking out my monitor, I've just decided to stick with whatever the server detected on its own and live with the space on the edges. (FWIW, the black bars only take up about 3cm of the visible space, and with the lights out it's completely unnoticable.)
For me, 1280x960 is crap. The best my video card and monitor can do at that resolution is 60 Hz. At 1280x1024 I get a decent sync and by fiddling with the sizing the pixels are square too.
I can't use a higher resolution since my video card can't handle it without reducing the color quality (not enough memory), and reducing the resolution to 1024x768 or even 1152x864 just to get a 4:3 ratio would be silly.
Re:First line of the article
on
Inside the PSP
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· Score: 1
I'm never seen a piece of gear that so instantly converted the naysayers.
What, you haven't seen an iPod?
Seriously, I have yet to meet the person who's played with my iPod and hasn't wanted to get one afterward.
Python's object orientation is done in such a way that it won't force you to think OO if you're not trying to write OO. It's just as easy to write a procedural program in Python and not create one single object class, and do pretty much everything you can do in an OO style. It can go both ways.
I'm not quite sure about Java being the best. It is a good language, but it has a lot of complexity. Just take a look at what the most basic program takes: public static void main(String[] args), which has to be in a class that must have the same name as the file that it's saved in. When I took a Java programming class, the first day was focused entirely on explaining how to get a program that didn't even do anything to compile and run.
Python has a much cleaner, syntax, and it's especially good as a first language. It's amazingly easy to understand, and when you're not quite sure how to do something, given a little bit of thought you can (at least I can) usually guess the code and it'll run on the first or second try. Its OO is much easier to get than Java, C++, or any of those languages -- I never really "got" OOP until I learned how to do it with Python. OO in Java might be nice, but it makes my head hurt. There's just too much to remember in order to do something simple.
By the way, to relate all this rambling to TFA, take a quick look at the screenshot: that's Python code there.;) (No, not the text on the left side.)
And how about some other simple improvements? Like CSS?
A List Apart did this a couple years ago, but Slashdot's still the same as it ever was.
I'd have a look at Slashcode and see if I could get it to output valid HTML/CSS like the ALA article, but I'm not sure it'd be worth it seeing as they don't seem to accept patches.
Now, spelling/luz/ as "loose" is a very likely and natural error to make: "lose" is one of only two English words, and the only verb, with/uz/ spelled "ose" (the spelling of possessive "whose" is equally surprising); the very common verb "choose" has/uz/ spelled "oose"; and anyway there's another very common word "loose" already hanging around.
- Language Log
Re:Probably worth mentioning...
on
Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 1
Nautilus does the folder replace thing too. It is a bit annoying, but the way I've grown accustomed to doing it is opening the source folder and dragging all the files into the destination folder.
I think OS X does it this way for the sake of making appfolders easier to handle, although if it's smart enough to treat them differently, one would wonder why it can't also be smart enough to copy them differently as well.
It's also broken XHTML 1.0 served as text/html (thus defeating the point of using XHTML) and has a javascript hack to redirect it to www.start.com/1/ instead of using a server-side Location: header. (Does IIS not have anything similar to mod_rewrite?) I wouldn't be very confident of the quality of the rest of the code based on that.
Autopackage still uses a compiled binary, causing problems for programs using C++ (thanks to GCC's ABI changes from 3.2 to 3.4 -- this is even in big red letters on the site) and it's necessarily dependent on the processor architecture and executable format of the system. Unless autopackage magically decompiles the program and rebuilds it for the system it's running on, it doesn't offer any of that.
Autopackage is just the next version of tarballs. Only easier to use and more compatible.
What I described is a program that you essentially double click, press "build," and it installs itself. How could anything be easier than that? Also, how on earth could a prebuilt binary possibly be more compatible than source code? Besides, you know, introducing a dependence on the system's architecture and maybe using a conflicting ABI.
Autopackage is conceptually interesting, but it's not the answer.
As a programmer, and doing most of my work with a command line, I'd be particularly frustrated in the fact that I could no longer stick 'doskey' into autoexec.bat to get command line history in all my command prompts. So yes, ME's overprotectiveness of the startup files is a very meaningful difference.
Regarding backup files: how is it a good thing that ME fills up the hard drive with files that can't be removed? My dad's hard drive got completely filled up with this junk. Since ME flat-out refused to delete them, my reflex was to do it in Linux... a simple rm -rf/mnt/hd/_restore would do it. I had to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops just to get the system to boot to my Linux floppy disk. And, since there's no obvious indication anywhere in the OS of where these files are coming from, I couldn't find the option to disable it, and sure enough, the hard drive got up to about 90% full again and I had to go through all the same stuff to delete the files.
I added the line deltree/y c:\_restore to autoexec.bat, figuring maybe it would be able to delete all that junk before Windows actually started running. Of course, it helpfully removed the file... grrrr. Eventually, I did find the reason for this (when looking for something entirely different altogether), and the checkbox to disable it is vaguely labeled and buried underneath three settings dialogs.
ME has green hair, 98 has dark blue hair, and 2K is the smart one. The only one that's blonde is Mac OS 9. (Ok, so are Outlook, McAfee, and Trend Micro, but they aren't OSes.)
You missed the biggest differences of all: ME hijacks the startup so you can't boot from a disk, it erases your autoexec.bat and config.sys files on startup, and it copies every file you save into a hidden directory that you can't get to and can't delete.
How about autopackage at the source level?
on
AutoPackaging for Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd like to see a GUI wrapper around./configure && make && make install -- a window with checkboxes for all the different --enable and --with options, a button to change what directories the program is installed to, and a "build" button at the bottom. Do all the configuring in a hidden embedded terminal widget, and have a "details" button for people who really want to look at the stuff scrolling by. It could be written with PyGtk (or whatever else; maybe it could even detect KDE or Gnome and use the appropriate toolkit) so it'd run on any architecture, maybe even have extensions to call apt-get or rpm to automatically resolve dependencies for the major distributions.
This could even be done with a shell script wrapper around a tar.bz2 file (think shar, or the old StarOffice installer), so when it's double clicked in the file manager it would untar itself into a temporary directory and install.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in my case it's a 4MB Mach64 GT on the mobo, but point taken nonetheless. :)
I might just be dense, but even after R-ing TFM, I still can't figure out what the X server ModeLines actually do, and not being the type to try random numbers in fear of freaking out my monitor, I've just decided to stick with whatever the server detected on its own and live with the space on the edges. (FWIW, the black bars only take up about 3cm of the visible space, and with the lights out it's completely unnoticable.)
Why? Will God kill a kitten?
90% of normal users think the monitor is the computer!
That may very well be the case with iMacs, but the other 88% of normal users need to be better educated about what the footrest under their desk does.
For me, 1280x960 is crap. The best my video card and monitor can do at that resolution is 60 Hz. At 1280x1024 I get a decent sync and by fiddling with the sizing the pixels are square too.
I can't use a higher resolution since my video card can't handle it without reducing the color quality (not enough memory), and reducing the resolution to 1024x768 or even 1152x864 just to get a 4:3 ratio would be silly.
I'm never seen a piece of gear that so instantly converted the naysayers.
What, you haven't seen an iPod?
Seriously, I have yet to meet the person who's played with my iPod and hasn't wanted to get one afterward.
So, you're a Microsoft zealot?
No, no... you've just fallen prey to a common and tragic affliction.
Are you a Microsoft employee or something? Half your comments are praising MS products.
At least "illegal" is spelled correctly this time.
Why not?
Python's object orientation is done in such a way that it won't force you to think OO if you're not trying to write OO. It's just as easy to write a procedural program in Python and not create one single object class, and do pretty much everything you can do in an OO style. It can go both ways.
I'm not quite sure about Java being the best. It is a good language, but it has a lot of complexity. Just take a look at what the most basic program takes: public static void main(String[] args), which has to be in a class that must have the same name as the file that it's saved in. When I took a Java programming class, the first day was focused entirely on explaining how to get a program that didn't even do anything to compile and run.
;)
Python has a much cleaner, syntax, and it's especially good as a first language. It's amazingly easy to understand, and when you're not quite sure how to do something, given a little bit of thought you can (at least I can) usually guess the code and it'll run on the first or second try. Its OO is much easier to get than Java, C++, or any of those languages -- I never really "got" OOP until I learned how to do it with Python. OO in Java might be nice, but it makes my head hurt. There's just too much to remember in order to do something simple.
By the way, to relate all this rambling to TFA, take a quick look at the screenshot: that's Python code there.
(No, not the text on the left side.)
And how about some other simple improvements? Like CSS?
A List Apart did this a couple years ago, but Slashdot's still the same as it ever was.
I'd have a look at Slashcode and see if I could get it to output valid HTML/CSS like the ALA article, but I'm not sure it'd be worth it seeing as they don't seem to accept patches.
- Language Log
Nautilus does the folder replace thing too. It is a bit annoying, but the way I've grown accustomed to doing it is opening the source folder and dragging all the files into the destination folder.
I think OS X does it this way for the sake of making appfolders easier to handle, although if it's smart enough to treat them differently, one would wonder why it can't also be smart enough to copy them differently as well.
It's also broken XHTML 1.0 served as text/html (thus defeating the point of using XHTML) and has a javascript hack to redirect it to www.start.com/1/ instead of using a server-side Location: header. (Does IIS not have anything similar to mod_rewrite?) I wouldn't be very confident of the quality of the rest of the code based on that.
Everything you request is in there.
No, it's not.
Autopackage still uses a compiled binary, causing problems for programs using C++ (thanks to GCC's ABI changes from 3.2 to 3.4 -- this is even in big red letters on the site) and it's necessarily dependent on the processor architecture and executable format of the system. Unless autopackage magically decompiles the program and rebuilds it for the system it's running on, it doesn't offer any of that.
Autopackage is just the next version of tarballs. Only easier to use and more compatible.
What I described is a program that you essentially double click, press "build," and it installs itself. How could anything be easier than that? Also, how on earth could a prebuilt binary possibly be more compatible than source code? Besides, you know, introducing a dependence on the system's architecture and maybe using a conflicting ABI.
Autopackage is conceptually interesting, but it's not the answer.
As a programmer, and doing most of my work with a command line, I'd be particularly frustrated in the fact that I could no longer stick 'doskey' into autoexec.bat to get command line history in all my command prompts. So yes, ME's overprotectiveness of the startup files is a very meaningful difference.
/mnt/hd/_restore would do it. I had to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops just to get the system to boot to my Linux floppy disk. And, since there's no obvious indication anywhere in the OS of where these files are coming from, I couldn't find the option to disable it, and sure enough, the hard drive got up to about 90% full again and I had to go through all the same stuff to delete the files.
/y c:\_restore to autoexec.bat, figuring maybe it would be able to delete all that junk before Windows actually started running. Of course, it helpfully removed the file... grrrr. Eventually, I did find the reason for this (when looking for something entirely different altogether), and the checkbox to disable it is vaguely labeled and buried underneath three settings dialogs.
Regarding backup files: how is it a good thing that ME fills up the hard drive with files that can't be removed? My dad's hard drive got completely filled up with this junk. Since ME flat-out refused to delete them, my reflex was to do it in Linux... a simple rm -rf
I added the line deltree
Wow, you got them totally wrong...
ME has green hair, 98 has dark blue hair, and 2K is the smart one. The only one that's blonde is Mac OS 9. (Ok, so are Outlook, McAfee, and Trend Micro, but they aren't OSes.)
(reference)
You missed the biggest differences of all: ME hijacks the startup so you can't boot from a disk, it erases your autoexec.bat and config.sys files on startup, and it copies every file you save into a hidden directory that you can't get to and can't delete.
I'd like to see a GUI wrapper around ./configure && make && make install -- a window with checkboxes for all the different --enable and --with options, a button to change what directories the program is installed to, and a "build" button at the bottom. Do all the configuring in a hidden embedded terminal widget, and have a "details" button for people who really want to look at the stuff scrolling by. It could be written with PyGtk (or whatever else; maybe it could even detect KDE or Gnome and use the appropriate toolkit) so it'd run on any architecture, maybe even have extensions to call apt-get or rpm to automatically resolve dependencies for the major distributions.
This could even be done with a shell script wrapper around a tar.bz2 file (think shar, or the old StarOffice installer), so when it's double clicked in the file manager it would untar itself into a temporary directory and install.
It seems to be holding up pretty well. I looked at every picture there with no trouble.
It's not entirely a Mac thing.
Quite right. Twenty minutes to copy a 17-meg file won't hold a candle to some of Windows' estimates.
I have yet to hear my iPod skip at all, ever, and I ride my bike and run with it in my pocket. It gets shaken most of the time it's on.
It's an article about paging files - of course there's going to be a lot of pages in it.
I wonder if this means Acrobat 8.0 for Windows is coming soon.