What's with all these so-called interviews which are basically a handful of random questions asked by an interviewer who seems to be doing his junior-high homework assignment? OSNews is bad enough... can't they ask anything interesting, or actually engage in a conversation about the subject? Linus has lots of interesting things to say, but unfortunately these folks can't think of what to ask.
The interviews in ACM Queue, particular the one with Jim Gray interviewed by David Patterson, was much much more intriguing.
There once was a system called VMS, Of cycles by no means abstemious.
It's chock full of hacks
And runs on a VAX And makes my poor stomach all squeamious.
It's a shame they didn't review Kanguru's
MicroDrive+. I don't know about speed, but it includes a SD slot (or CF slot on another model), so it doubles as a USB SD card reader.
The industry already has a patent on the power of suggestion.
"You are getting sleepier... you will believe dancing cleanroom guy when he says 2x GHz == 2x speed increase..."
Re:Looking forward... mostly
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 3, Interesting
And forgot my favorite Cryptonomicon goof: after is laptop is fried by the EMP gun, Randy takes out the hard drive and later uses it in another computer. Umm, Neal, hard drives have logic boards with chips... and swapping those doesn't usually work, either.
Looking forward... mostly
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I enjoyed Cryptonomicon quite a bit, but the historical gaffes in Snow Crash make me a little hesitant about Stephenson diving back into anything before current events. His descriptions of Sumerian myths, and of the book of Deuteronomy being all about kings, still make me cringe.
Let's hope his research was better this time around.
Re:Table of Contents...
on
Mac OS X Hints
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You'd think. But lots of stuff doesn't have a manpage, and many of the others seem to be straight from BSD and thus don't correspond perfectly to the MacOS X versions.
I really wish they had the same committment to manpages as, say, the FreeBSD project. Mac Help just doesn't cut it! And the Apple Developer site is hopelessly cumbersome.
Gordon Bell and Jim Gray are not just "a pair of Microsoft researchers". They are two of the biggest names in high-performance computing. Gordon Bell awards, anyone?
Yes, but if you don't actually want the whole album, you can just get what you want. That's cheaper than buying a $20 CD for one or two songs, which is what most people want.
Even better - the Tilt-Sensor Palm
on
Airborne Mouse
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Several years ago, Till Harbaum added a tilt sensor to his Palm Pilot. Then he wrote Mulg, which is kinda like Marble Madness; if you have the sensor, you can play by tilting the Palm to roll the marble around.
This is STILL the all-time best Palm HW hack I've ever seen.
"It's incredible to me that Microsoft would turn its back on Word 97 users," said Woody Leonhard, who has written books on Microsoft's Word and Office software. "They bought the package with full faith in Microsoft and its ability to protect them from this kind of exploit."
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "Bill says, 'I refuse to fix bugs, for patches deny faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "
I only had time to skim the article, and anyway it would take anyone a while to absorb all that code. Here's the short summary:
Regex's in Perl have accumulated too much cruft to be called regular expressions anymore. So now they're full grammers.
That's right. Now you can pattern match with a very readable grammer syntax that is easily decorated with Perl code to do parsing. YACC for Perl. You can find packages for this on CPAN, but this is integrated with the language.
No whining about the bad old days of Perl regex syntax for me... now I'm actually excited by the prospect of needing to buy a new llama book.
"0% - Mac PDA or tablet
Our sources tell us Steve Jobs constantly complains about how bad the user experience is for Mac users using PDAs. From one source: "'Why is it so complicated?', Jobs has often said." Apple is working on something, that's for sure."
I wonder if the user experience with PDAs wouldn't have been so bad if Jobs hadn't killed the Newton. I love my Palm, but I can't count how many times I wished it was a 4oz Newton!
Actually, SGI was there first quite a few years back, with the Espressigo. There's a picture at http://reality.sgiweb.org/eile/espressigo/espressi go1.jpg It's essentially an espresso machine in an SGI Indigo case.
There are different stories behind it, but the most often heard was that it was a promo giveaway by SGI.
I'm still of the mindset that parallel is better than serial, particularly where high bandwidth is concerned.
FYI, current IDE chaining is actually worse than serial. Masters and slaves fight over the bus, and certain drives can't even work together at all. Anyone who uses IDE and is trying for high performance leaves one drive per channel currently.
If you just wanted to go to Slashdot, why not just type the hostname in your browser navbar?
There is a big difference in navigational searching ("Take me to Slashdot") and informational searching ("I want to learn everything there is to know about Slashdot"). And it'a really hard to figure out which you want from a single query term. But you'll note that the Teoma results are much more on the "informational" slant.
The Phantom has been around for years now, so waiting for the price to come down any further is probably futile. And somehow I don't think Pong is going to unleash massive pent-up demand sufficient to change the production costs that much.
"(A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, the width of about 10 atoms lined up shoulder-to-shoulder. The head of a pin, by comparison, is about one million nanometers in diameter)."
I didn't know atoms had shoulders. About how many Libraries of Congress can that hold?
Slashdot Mirror
What's with all these so-called interviews which are basically a handful of random questions asked by an interviewer who seems to be doing his junior-high homework assignment? OSNews is bad enough... can't they ask anything interesting, or actually engage in a conversation about the subject? Linus has lots of interesting things to say, but unfortunately these folks can't think of what to ask.
The interviews in ACM Queue, particular the one with Jim Gray interviewed by David Patterson, was much much more intriguing.
> enjoy game
This is family entertainment, not a video nasty.
(courtesy of Guy Steele and the Jargon File...)
There once was a system called VMS,
Of cycles by no means abstemious.
It's chock full of hacks
And runs on a VAX
And makes my poor stomach all squeamious.
It's a shame they didn't review Kanguru's MicroDrive+. I don't know about speed, but it includes a SD slot (or CF slot on another model), so it doubles as a USB SD card reader.
It just might work... but veeeeeeery slowly, if Bochs is underneath it.
Favorite editor: Emacs
Favorite email client: Emacs
Favorite web browser: Emacs
Favorite office suite: Emacs
Favorite IDE: Emacs
Favorite programming language: Emacs Lisp
Favorite IM client: Emacs
Favorite source browser: Emacs
Favorite FTP client: Emacs
Favorite filesystem browser: Emacs
Favorite shell: Emacs
Favorite psychotherapist: Emacs
Favorite HTML editor: Emacs
Favorite windowing system: Emacs
Favorite newsreader: Emacs
Favorite calendaring tool: Emacs
Favority blog tool: Emacs
Favorite graphics tool: Em...er...Gimp!
The industry already has a patent on the power of suggestion.
"You are getting sleepier... you will believe dancing cleanroom guy when he says 2x GHz == 2x speed increase..."
And forgot my favorite Cryptonomicon goof: after is laptop is fried by the EMP gun, Randy takes out the hard drive and later uses it in another computer. Umm, Neal, hard drives have logic boards with chips... and swapping those doesn't usually work, either.
I enjoyed Cryptonomicon quite a bit, but the historical gaffes in Snow Crash make me a little hesitant about Stephenson diving back into anything before current events. His descriptions of Sumerian myths, and of the book of Deuteronomy being all about kings, still make me cringe.
Let's hope his research was better this time around.
You'd think. But lots of stuff doesn't have a manpage, and many of the others seem to be straight from BSD and thus don't correspond perfectly to the MacOS X versions.
I really wish they had the same committment to manpages as, say, the FreeBSD project. Mac Help just doesn't cut it! And the Apple Developer site is hopelessly cumbersome.
Gordon Bell and Jim Gray are not just "a pair of Microsoft researchers". They are two of the biggest names in high-performance computing. Gordon Bell awards, anyone?
Yes, but if you don't actually want the whole album, you can just get what you want. That's cheaper than buying a $20 CD for one or two songs, which is what most people want.
Because libraries of congress are too big?
Several years ago, Till Harbaum added a tilt sensor to his Palm Pilot. Then he wrote Mulg, which is kinda like Marble Madness; if you have the sensor, you can play by tilting the Palm to roll the marble around.
This is STILL the all-time best Palm HW hack I've ever seen.
I loved this one:
"It's incredible to me that Microsoft would turn its back on Word 97 users," said Woody Leonhard, who has written books on Microsoft's Word and Office software. "They bought the package with full faith in Microsoft and its ability to protect them from this kind of exploit."
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "Bill says, 'I refuse to fix bugs, for patches deny faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "
I plugged my modem into the wall, and all I got was this lousy dialtone!
I only had time to skim the article, and anyway it would take anyone a while to absorb all that code. Here's the short summary:
Regex's in Perl have accumulated too much cruft to be called regular expressions anymore. So now they're full grammers.
That's right. Now you can pattern match with a very readable grammer syntax that is easily decorated with Perl code to do parsing. YACC for Perl. You can find packages for this on CPAN, but this is integrated with the language.
No whining about the bad old days of Perl regex syntax for me... now I'm actually excited by the prospect of needing to buy a new llama book.
Actually, SGI was there first quite a few years back, with the Espressigo. There's a picture at http://reality.sgiweb.org/eile/espressigo/espressi go1.jpg
It's essentially an espresso machine in an SGI Indigo case.
There are different stories behind it, but the most often heard was that it was a promo giveaway by SGI.
Here's a spoiler for you... in the third movie, they destroy the ring.
If you just wanted to go to Slashdot, why not just type the hostname in your browser navbar?
There is a big difference in navigational searching ("Take me to Slashdot") and informational searching ("I want to learn everything there is to know about Slashdot"). And it'a really hard to figure out which you want from a single query term. But you'll note that the Teoma results are much more on the "informational" slant.
The Phantom has been around for years now, so waiting for the price to come down any further is probably futile. And somehow I don't think Pong is going to unleash massive pent-up demand sufficient to change the production costs that much.
I didn't know atoms had shoulders. About how many Libraries of Congress can that hold?
Some other useful customizations can be found at http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html
, 1000);
For example, this is also good vs popups:
user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay"