Using Mozilla, and I love it. There's only one small problem. I really miss being able to click my mouse wheel and move the mouse up and down to scroll through the page faster.
There's the aforementioned patches, and it does work in K-Meleon out of the box. I take back all my badmouthing of K-Meleon -- it was worth the wait (it is still a hell of an insular cathedral of a development group though)
Ultima IX, what a tragedy. Beautiful wonderful music, second only to Total Annihilation's bombastic score. That's where anything good I could say about it stops.
While Ultima has never been great at the continuity thing (it always starts with you the Avatar in the mundane world, goofing off at your computer or watching TV because that's a better place to be than immortal in a place where you wield awesome power and are worshipped as the savior of the land, but hey each to his own) Ultima IX completely destroyed what had been a seamless timeline with the Guardian Saga. It would have been simple, just don't have the damn avatar go home.
Lord British sends you off on your quest to save britannia from the ultimate evil that threatens its very existence like he was asking you to go fetch him a sixpack and some funyuns from the 7-11. The voice acting is wretchedly bad bad bad.
So once you get it onto a computer that will actually deign to run it, the game itself is awful. Tip: to speed through this lame game, cast the circle zero "stone" spell over and over, and just mow down machine-gun-style every monster that gets in your way.
Actually Hunt the Wumpus could be done well in a graphical format. Imagine a level with an atmosphere like Doom III, with some eldritch horror so terrifying you simply cannot face it head-on. You run from room to room, terrified, and low on ammunition for your Grenade Launcher Of Almighty Power that you occasionally fire off into adjacent rooms. Your only clue as to its location in this maze of tunnels is the sounds of its unholy gibbering and its wretched stench...
The same people who would have these forests clear-cut 20 years ago are still running these companies and writing policy for the administration. Why the hell should we trust these greedy lying venal sons of bitches to not completely rape the environment until we're left with parking lots and strip malls coast to coast? Fox guarding the goddam henhouse indeed...
That's precisely what they want. It's called cognitive dissonance. People who are under its effects do one of two things: reconcile the differences by finding out the truth or at least the most palatable choice, or in the vast majority of cases, stop listening and accept what they're told.
One simply needs to point to axioms like "sex is immoral if you're not married" or "drugs are bad" with no further explication whatsoever, simply assert every time that they're axioms and beyond question.
there's an old joke about crooks who burn their fingerprints off: the cops say "pick up the guy with no fingerprints".
you have to seriously disfigure your finger to "fool" the system, and you know what? you just redo it with your burned fingers. bigger problem if you have a band-aid on your finger, actually. personally i haven't used my actual safeway card since i got it -- i just enter my phone number.
i wouldn't have a problem with biometric authentication -- if it were something like my credit card and i wanted to switch off all the other forms of authentication (god knows CC companies don't want you to be able to do that though). but i don't see how it's convenient to give up a token that i can give to my family and not have to deal with flakey slow readers with dirty screens.
rant mode: screw it, i'll spend a few extra bucks to shop at andronicos or something, guess that's the expense of not getting tagged and cataloged like an animal in the 21st century.
> The occasional solicitor can be found amongst the hordes.
Any lawyer that gives legal advice over ask slashdot is a lawyer with a short career. There's doctors on slashdot too, but we don't see "Ask Slashdot: What's this pain in my crotch all about?"
Excellent. When AC2 tanks, no game company will ever touch passport authentication again. I was afraid that they'd embed it into something with no real competition that would force people to use it and get used to it...
Cue Cards, which sadly are no more, also managed to escape from Bob. Very nice help interface that showed you the steps to take to get something done without forcing you through some sort of wizard. I'm told they were such a bear to write that that's why they weren't maintained.
The agent is actually a damn cool API, unifies all sorts of helpful interface events and services into one place with a consistent feel to the user and the programmer. it's just the little animated characters that are annoying.
Gee, and all this time I thought that it was gross misbehavior or not doing your job effectively that would justify firing someone (as opposed to downsizing them, yes).
What a moron I am. Apparently trying to do your job by carrying your password around (required: at least 8 characters, with one uppercase, one lowercase, one nonalpha, and at least one ancient hebrew or easter island character) should be grounds for planting your foot in their ass Mr Dithers style (well come to think of it he rarely fired dagwood).
You are a system administrator. Let HR do their damn job, you do yours.
Drag and drop, bad. But I don't know about the GUI being so inherently bad. I mean look at the current awful mess, where you have to write descriptors and access methods and implement interfaces all over the place, put this xml file here, package it up there, and so on. So what does one do to get away from this mess? They usually use something fairly pointy-clicky to build their EJB's instead, and/or they use an XML editor that's also fairly visual.
I like to think I'm a quick learner, but the massive amount of crap one has to do by hand to do anything worthwhile in J2EE makes me feel just completely overwhelmed and stupid. I'd rather write code than spend all my time with the bloody scaffolding that an application server is supposed to be doing its damn self. Hot deployment and autocompilation are making servlets as easy as CGI now, but EJB and CMP have a long way to go before I want to stop throwing up my hands and write a solution from scratch in perl in less time and with about 1/100th of the code.
Choose not the dark side of the fiber, for dark fiber leads to constipation, and constipation leads to *ZWONNNG* *GLITCH* (sound of a muppet getting its head lightsabered off)
> (for instance that the task manager wouldn't kill "with extreme prejudice"
There have been command line kills for NT for quite some time. I found some of these will kill *anything*. Including SERVICES.EXE. My, does windows complain mightily when you do that. Forced reboot. I'm very fond of pskill from sysinternals, it's like killall (pkill on solaris) and you can use it to whack processes on remote machines (yes, you have to be authenticated). Of course there's ssh on unix, but it doesn't tie in to the system auth scheme. Methinks rsh needs to be raised from its scorned place and put back in a prominent position for system administration -- it can after all work with PAM.
Come to think of it, remote administration is the thing I really love and hate about NT.
It'd be nice if I could unload IE from the memory when I'm not using it (all the time)--then Phoenix would run circles around it.
I don't see iexplore.exe, shvdoc.dll, or urlmon.dll running at all when I start my system up and when I kill all the IE processes. The bottleneck is XUL.
Second browser option: "Check for Internet Explorer Updates". Amazing what one sees when they take 10 seconds to look. And out of the box, mozilla does check for updates.
DBC: It has preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants. Am I missing anything astonishingly revolutionary here?
It has multiple inheritance... How about a meta-object protocol? Or multimethods at least?
I do hear the FFI to C is supposed to be nice... to the point of just importing the DLL and calling C functions like they were in eiffel. How's the C++ FFI?
Is there anything in Eiffel that makes it just plain feel better to use? God knows the ISE platform turned me off to Eiffel within about 15 minutes of trying to use it...
The M is fine, the V I have no problem with. It's the "C". Frankly I haven't seen a decent tutorial treatment of the awful mess that is the "controller". Is it business rules? Is it input events? Is it update events? Is it a mediator? Is it just everything that doesn't seem to fit in the other two categories? Everywhere I look to read up on MVC, I see a lot of handwaving about how it's God's Own Architecture, but aside from basic "duh factor" things like "decouple the view of the data from its underlying representation", I really have yet to see anything that gives a clean design for this mysterious "controller".
Doesn't help that MVC for widget sets has been abandoned for Morphic in Smalltalk, at least the research variant of it that Smalltalk's founders still follow.
Check out the mycroft project at mozdev [mozdev.org]. Goes waay beyond the Google toolbar. If you really want the GOogle toolbar, get it from here [mozdev.org].
I don't see how. No keyboard shortcut I can seeno button to toggle term hilighting or skip to the next term, no buttons to flip between searches. In fact its own documentation makes it look like nothing more than a bunch of search engines that can be plugged in to mozilla's already sub-par search from the address bar feature (which is still broken if you hit CR before selecting the search option, then select the search option).
Wouldn't it be even easier to have a standardized registration process that the browser could interact with on it's own?
There is already the ability to negotiate image formats, languages and authentication schemes. Adding in registration shouldn't be a problem.
And then you could call it Passport. Passport is an API. It works on more than one browser on more than one machine. But frankly, until it's tied to a physical token you can put on your keyring, I don't give single-sign on much chance of escaping into the net at large.
I am kind of like on of those emacs freaks, but with Squeak. I use Squeak basically as my computing environment, using the Squeak web browser, email client, irc client and xterm/telnet client for the bulk of my computing activities.
Gaaaah. How do you stand it? I couldn't go ten minutes in squeak without wondering how to access some really basic functions. Then I found The Menu That Ate Cleveland, which gave me too much to deal with. Then I end up dismembering most applications with the amazing feature of being able to rip widgets out of running apps, and like humpty, couldn't get them back together again. I felt like every minute I went I was breaking things a little more each time. Don't get me started on the disaster that is halos, or the total unusability from the keyboard.
I mean it's impressively malleable, but what can I really *do* with it?
> Your base. You are still based on objects with nouns that have the abilities. Reverse it where you have abilities or qualities and depending on what you throw at it, they get evaluated differently.
Now it's polymorphism and multiple dispatch. I recognize that every language is basically just syntactic sugar for either turing machines or lambda calculus, but I'm just failing to see what's revolutionary here and isn't a well-trod concept with a shiny new label on it.
Maybe that's what FP needs is a shiny new label, who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're in a car that's going at the speed of light, what happens when you turn on the headlights?
Duuuude, you like are the headlights!
Using Mozilla, and I love it. There's only one small problem. I really miss being able to click my mouse wheel and move the mouse up and down to scroll through the page faster.
There's the aforementioned patches, and it does work in K-Meleon out of the box. I take back all my badmouthing of K-Meleon -- it was worth the wait (it is still a hell of an insular cathedral of a development group though)
Ultima IX, what a tragedy. Beautiful wonderful music, second only to Total Annihilation's bombastic score. That's where anything good I could say about it stops.
While Ultima has never been great at the continuity thing (it always starts with you the Avatar in the mundane world, goofing off at your computer or watching TV because that's a better place to be than immortal in a place where you wield awesome power and are worshipped as the savior of the land, but hey each to his own) Ultima IX completely destroyed what had been a seamless timeline with the Guardian Saga. It would have been simple, just don't have the damn avatar go home.
Lord British sends you off on your quest to save britannia from the ultimate evil that threatens its very existence like he was asking you to go fetch him a sixpack and some funyuns from the 7-11. The voice acting is wretchedly bad bad bad.
So once you get it onto a computer that will actually deign to run it, the game itself is awful. Tip: to speed through this lame game, cast the circle zero "stone" spell over and over, and just mow down machine-gun-style every monster that gets in your way.
Loki is in Chapter 11, which means they're "mostly dead". Chapter 7 means all the way dead.
Actually Hunt the Wumpus could be done well in a graphical format. Imagine a level with an atmosphere like Doom III, with some eldritch horror so terrifying you simply cannot face it head-on. You run from room to room, terrified, and low on ammunition for your Grenade Launcher Of Almighty Power that you occasionally fire off into adjacent rooms. Your only clue as to its location in this maze of tunnels is the sounds of its unholy gibbering and its wretched stench ...
Wumpthulhu. It could be done.
The same people who would have these forests clear-cut 20 years ago are still running these companies and writing policy for the administration. Why the hell should we trust these greedy lying venal sons of bitches to not completely rape the environment until we're left with parking lots and strip malls coast to coast? Fox guarding the goddam henhouse indeed...
That's precisely what they want. It's called cognitive dissonance. People who are under its effects do one of two things: reconcile the differences by finding out the truth or at least the most palatable choice, or in the vast majority of cases, stop listening and accept what they're told.
One simply needs to point to axioms like "sex is immoral if you're not married" or "drugs are bad" with no further explication whatsoever, simply assert every time that they're axioms and beyond question.
People are sheep.
there's an old joke about crooks who burn their fingerprints off: the cops say "pick up the guy with no fingerprints".
you have to seriously disfigure your finger to "fool" the system, and you know what? you just redo it with your burned fingers. bigger problem if you have a band-aid on your finger, actually. personally i haven't used my actual safeway card since i got it -- i just enter my phone number.
i wouldn't have a problem with biometric authentication -- if it were something like my credit card and i wanted to switch off all the other forms of authentication (god knows CC companies don't want you to be able to do that though). but i don't see how it's convenient to give up a token that i can give to my family and not have to deal with flakey slow readers with dirty screens.
rant mode: screw it, i'll spend a few extra bucks to shop at andronicos or something, guess that's the expense of not getting tagged and cataloged like an animal in the 21st century.
> The occasional solicitor can be found amongst the hordes.
Any lawyer that gives legal advice over ask slashdot is a lawyer with a short career. There's doctors on slashdot too, but we don't see "Ask Slashdot: What's this pain in my crotch all about?"
Excellent. When AC2 tanks, no game company will ever touch passport authentication again. I was afraid that they'd embed it into something with no real competition that would force people to use it and get used to it...
Cue Cards, which sadly are no more, also managed to escape from Bob. Very nice help interface that showed you the steps to take to get something done without forcing you through some sort of wizard. I'm told they were such a bear to write that that's why they weren't maintained.
The agent is actually a damn cool API, unifies all sorts of helpful interface events and services into one place with a consistent feel to the user and the programmer. it's just the little animated characters that are annoying.
Gee, and all this time I thought that it was gross misbehavior or not doing your job effectively that would justify firing someone (as opposed to downsizing them, yes).
What a moron I am. Apparently trying to do your job by carrying your password around (required: at least 8 characters, with one uppercase, one lowercase, one nonalpha, and at least one ancient hebrew or easter island character) should be grounds for planting your foot in their ass Mr Dithers style (well come to think of it he rarely fired dagwood).
You are a system administrator. Let HR do their damn job, you do yours.
Drag and drop, bad. But I don't know about the GUI being so inherently bad. I mean look at the current awful mess, where you have to write descriptors and access methods and implement interfaces all over the place, put this xml file here, package it up there, and so on. So what does one do to get away from this mess? They usually use something fairly pointy-clicky to build their EJB's instead, and/or they use an XML editor that's also fairly visual.
I like to think I'm a quick learner, but the massive amount of crap one has to do by hand to do anything worthwhile in J2EE makes me feel just completely overwhelmed and stupid. I'd rather write code than spend all my time with the bloody scaffolding that an application server is supposed to be doing its damn self. Hot deployment and autocompilation are making servlets as easy as CGI now, but EJB and CMP have a long way to go before I want to stop throwing up my hands and write a solution from scratch in perl in less time and with about 1/100th of the code.
Choose not the dark side of the fiber, for dark fiber leads to constipation, and constipation leads to *ZWONNNG* *GLITCH* (sound of a muppet getting its head lightsabered off)
> (for instance that the task manager wouldn't kill "with extreme prejudice"
There have been command line kills for NT for quite some time. I found some of these will kill *anything*. Including SERVICES.EXE. My, does windows complain mightily when you do that. Forced reboot. I'm very fond of pskill from sysinternals, it's like killall (pkill on solaris) and you can use it to whack processes on remote machines (yes, you have to be authenticated). Of course there's ssh on unix, but it doesn't tie in to the system auth scheme. Methinks rsh needs to be raised from its scorned place and put back in a prominent position for system administration -- it can after all work with PAM.
Come to think of it, remote administration is the thing I really love and hate about NT.
> Please don't. Operator overloading is one of those cool features that tend to create write-only software.
No, this is write-only software.
a = BigInt(xyz);
b = BigInt(pdq);
a.add(b.div(3))
It'd be nice if I could unload IE from the memory when I'm not using it (all the time)--then Phoenix would run circles around it.
I don't see iexplore.exe, shvdoc.dll, or urlmon.dll running at all when I start my system up and when I kill all the IE processes. The bottleneck is XUL.
Tools/Options/Advanced
Second browser option: "Check for Internet Explorer Updates". Amazing what one sees when they take 10 seconds to look. And out of the box, mozilla does check for updates.
DBC: It has preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants. Am I missing anything astonishingly revolutionary here?
... How about a meta-object protocol? Or multimethods at least?
... to the point of just importing the DLL and calling C functions like they were in eiffel. How's the C++ FFI?
It has multiple inheritance
I do hear the FFI to C is supposed to be nice
Is there anything in Eiffel that makes it just plain feel better to use? God knows the ISE platform turned me off to Eiffel within about 15 minutes of trying to use it...
Red Hat's IPO was at $14, now it sits at $5.97.
In this economy, that's what we call "Blue Chip".
> MVC is about projects that work well.
The M is fine, the V I have no problem with. It's the "C". Frankly I haven't seen a decent tutorial treatment of the awful mess that is the "controller". Is it business rules? Is it input events? Is it update events? Is it a mediator? Is it just everything that doesn't seem to fit in the other two categories? Everywhere I look to read up on MVC, I see a lot of handwaving about how it's God's Own Architecture, but aside from basic "duh factor" things like "decouple the view of the data from its underlying representation", I really have yet to see anything that gives a clean design for this mysterious "controller".
Doesn't help that MVC for widget sets has been abandoned for Morphic in Smalltalk, at least the research variant of it that Smalltalk's founders still follow.
Check out the mycroft project at mozdev [mozdev.org]. Goes waay beyond the Google toolbar. If you really want the GOogle toolbar, get it from here [mozdev.org].
I don't see how. No keyboard shortcut I can seeno button to toggle term hilighting or skip to the next term, no buttons to flip between searches. In fact its own documentation makes it look like nothing more than a bunch of search engines that can be plugged in to mozilla's already sub-par search from the address bar feature (which is still broken if you hit CR before selecting the search option, then select the search option).
Wouldn't it be even easier to have a standardized registration process that the browser could interact with on it's own?
There is already the ability to negotiate image formats, languages and authentication schemes. Adding in registration shouldn't be a problem.
And then you could call it Passport. Passport is an API. It works on more than one browser on more than one machine. But frankly, until it's tied to a physical token you can put on your keyring, I don't give single-sign on much chance of escaping into the net at large.
I am kind of like on of those emacs freaks, but with Squeak. I use Squeak basically as my computing environment, using the Squeak web browser, email client, irc client and xterm/telnet client for the bulk of my computing activities.
Gaaaah. How do you stand it? I couldn't go ten minutes in squeak without wondering how to access some really basic functions. Then I found The Menu That Ate Cleveland, which gave me too much to deal with. Then I end up dismembering most applications with the amazing feature of being able to rip widgets out of running apps, and like humpty, couldn't get them back together again. I felt like every minute I went I was breaking things a little more each time. Don't get me started on the disaster that is halos, or the total unusability from the keyboard.
I mean it's impressively malleable, but what can I really *do* with it?
> Your base. You are still based on objects with nouns that have the abilities. Reverse it where you have abilities or qualities and depending on what you throw at it, they get evaluated differently.
Now it's polymorphism and multiple dispatch. I recognize that every language is basically just syntactic sugar for either turing machines or lambda calculus, but I'm just failing to see what's revolutionary here and isn't a well-trod concept with a shiny new label on it.
Maybe that's what FP needs is a shiny new label, who knows.