Teach them man(1) (including what that funny parens thing means, I guess). Don't berate them to do it, don't imply that they're easy to read, but they are in a pretty consistent style that they'll get used to. Also, teach them on FreeBSD or some linux distro that actually has manpages. Just tried looking up some docs for xargs, and that god damned "read the info documentation for the REAL docs" came up yet again.
1) It's just snake oil, FAST stands for nothing except for the way in which they're making a buck (or euro) by selling this idea to... investors? I really can't think of a single company that goes out of its way to load its browser down with plug-ins, much less leave license control up to the desktop user, and Joe and Jill user could sincerely not care less.
2) IE has a million plug-ins, controls, and toolbars out there. This is just another one no one will bother using.
3) It doesn't take very sophisticated vbscript to query for the existence of a control. Warez sites need merely lock out (or do much worse to) browsers that have e-Denounce installed.
> With any luck, the next thing they'll copy will be anti-aliased text throughout the OS.
That feature was in the Plus pack for Windows 95, the interface for which had UI elements ripped off pixel-for-pixel not from MacOS, but from NeXT. XP has sub-pixel antialiasing for LCD screens throughout the OS. And it doesn't take half the CPU time to do it... how's Quartz workin out for ya?
Next time you hear the "Linux isn't really free" rhetoric, snap back with "How much less than $0 does Linux have to go?".
Right... don't ask them anything like "what do you mean?" or "what is it costing you, quantifiably, over your current platform?" Because they're just FUD-spouting Micro$ith astroturfers, right?
Linux could do a lot better without some of its "friends".
yes, preview is good. What on earth possessed me to think that
meant underline?
It takes literally two lines of javascript to create an instantly updating preview that someone could turn on in preferences, and it would work in IE and mozilla. How about it?
do you think he'd have allowed Travolta to turn one of his novels into one of the worst cinematic turds of all time?
Sure, you only suffer through less than a couple hours worth of the movie. The book is over a thousand pages of utter crap. I'll admit I read through only half of it before I just couldn't take any more. But if you think BE is bad, try Mission: Earth. Ten whole books, every one of them worse than the first, featuring an anti-hero that makes Sancho from
Don Quixote
look like Don Juan. I read the first book, and part of the second, then was told that no, it didn't get any better.
LRH was a genius: it takes talent to write that badly without using only monosyllables.
Re:I just don't get this game.
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 2
You're not required to like the game. Some people who are actually good at it do. Some people like me who still suck at it like it. Move on, it does take all kinds.
You do have to try all kinds of different things. If you keep playing the game the exact same way, you will always die the exact same way.
I don't think anyone finishes the game with the pet they started with. Let it go, move on, feel sad for a moment, then wish for a blessed figurine of an archon, or polymorph your pet with the first polymorph wand you find.
"Mister Asindihopo? Say hi to muffin" "RAARRRR!!!" *MUNCH* "BAD MUFFIN! Oh well, free loot."
I do find myself wanting to hack on the game, but find there's way too much that's hardwired. Want to add extra states besides confused and hallucinating for messages to change, but found that those flags are basically hardwired, the message structures aren't really extensible. Stuff like that. Maybe someone could port nethack to the zangband engine, which is supposedly scriptable in python.
Re:Hurray!
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The interface hasn't changed at all in forever, there aren't really any graphics
Au contraire. http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/nhfeatures.html#SCREEN SHOTS
Yes that is nethack. You can spew all you want about "gameplay is king", but I'm guessing even you don't play chess with scraps of cardboard with letters on them for your pieces. When I go to the symphony, I like to dress nice and see my date dressed nice, even though we're just listening. If you really wanted to cut out all the "irrelevant crap" in life, you'd just get a feeding tube and have your muscles electrically stimulated (something I fear I'll need after playing nethack, yes. I might pick up falcon's eye just for kicks though)
This more then anything else represents the moral decrepitude our nation has into. I find it so sad that people are so willing to abandon all the moral and ethical lessons given to them by their mothers, schools, and churches. Without a sense of right and wrong our country is doomed.
Get some god damned perspective. I volunteer sixteen hours a week seeing people who are losing their homes, coming down with pneumonia, can't pay their utility bills because they've been laid off, have kids who need glasses and can't afford it, and I do my part in helping them out, with the grant monies we get from citizens of this "morally decrepid" country. And hell, that's easy stuff, there's folks down the street who are working with people who are alone and dying of AIDS.
What the fuck do you do aside from sit on your ass and pontificate about operating systems? I'd dismiss you as a troll, but there's just too many people who really think like you. God damned self-righteous loser.
You seem to be operating under the impression that the competent network admin is the entire IT department. It's really easy to crucify the IT department as a bunch of bumbling incompetent fucks, but I can just about guarantee that the techs will want your head after they have to personally service every special request from every user to get this or that item installed. You can sit on your righteous high horse all you like, but once you try to force it into reality, you'll learn real fast that policy decisions have real and unintended consequences.
Admining a couple linux boxes does not make you an IT division.
Thus disabaling the most useful thing about IE, the google toolbar!
Installed it, found it had no keyboard accellerator, uninstalled it. Dragged a google shortcut onto my desktop, bound it to ctrl-alt-g. Now I have a google shortcut without a toolbar I have to aim for (I use mousekeys, having to click on something is a monstrous pain in the ass)
Yunno, simply asserting something over and over doesn't make it magically come true -- even if you hold your breath til you turn blue (hey that rhymes). The world still ran on DOS back then, Windows was a launchpad for DOS, PC-DOS was perfectly compatible and many people ran it, and IBM was the 800 lb gorilla, by dint of the fact that IBM was one of the biggest OEM's out there.
if the tables were turned, the result would be OS2 is the winner.
So if OS/2 were the winner, then the result would be that OS/2 is the winner... Stunning insight.
Sig:All who want games in linux will sign up to Transgaming,All who dont sign up to Transgaming dont want games
Yep, this seems to be the sort of prevailing logical rigor around here...
How about putting 4-5 developers on to the task of making Linux apps act like Linux apps , with the same look, feel, drag and drop, shortcut keys, mime types, etc. Keep the choice, just allow standardized configuration by default.
I believe there is such a project. It's called KDE. And there's another one called GNOME. Oops. Back to the drawing board.
Frankly, get the keyboard accellerators standard and most of cut/paste interoperating, and you'll be fine. It's not like people expect to be able to drop an excel spreadsheet range into a wordperfect doc after all. People will take an 80% solution if they don't really need the missing 20% (hell, look how well linux has done without acl's standard). Themes don't need to be perfectly consistent so long as the metaphors are consistent. Even microsoft isn't obeying that consistency principle itself (WMP 7 looks like nothing else on win9x)
It's not the consistency (people don't expect it these days), it's not the documentation (people don't read it), it's that the average user isn't being offered a value proposition any better than what they're using now. So you have an office suite and a web browser and chat programs... which is precisely what you get with windows as well. Not one end user gives a tinker's damn about the source code. If they did, they wouldn't be end users.
It's things like the outrageous pricing of Office XP that might really give the free alternatives a boost. Too early to tell...
I have a question of this community. I remember back in the days when conversations would be carried out over BBS forums/newsgroups.
The first day I installed FreeBSD and had problems with the bootloader, I went over to #freebsd on efnet and asked for help. The guy who wrote the bootloader helped me out. Perl problems get answered with regularity on #perl. Both of those channels are fairly sick of newbies asking FAQ's, but that attitude was around in the old days too... asking the gurus something that was beneath them was to beg for their forbearance with your ignorance.
There's irc.openprojects.net, which is well-known for being a helpful place that even helps with FAQ's.
Finally, you could do with toning down your lofty rhetoric, it's frankly over the top. The people you want to appeal to are smart folks who don't care for demagoguery and emotional manipulation. This is operating systems, not world peace.
4)FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack was good enough for Microsoft to steal and put in Win2k/XP
And you were doing so well before this. I am going to say the same thing I have been saying over and over and over and over to this bullshit:
PROVE IT
The most evidence anyone has ever offered was BSD copyrights in the DLL's... precisely the same ones that are in the BSD sockets compatibility header files. A header file does not a stack make.
Are you really even interested in the truth though?
Windows Media Player is available on every Windows machine. The Quicktime Player isn't. Quality loses out to quantity.
Let's see, first they release a player that runs as a klunky MDI app, installs to the windows system directory as hidden files, takes over your file associations for everything it can possibly view, without asking, then goes and sues microsoft when their media player goes and takes the associations back.
Their current player on windows is nagware, popping up ads for quicktime pro every few invocations. The marketplace uses what gives them the least hassle, and by and large it is repudiating Apple for that reason.
I really don't give a damn whether Microsoft signed in blood on a contract written by Mephistopheles himself, their player works with a minimum of hassle or nags.
What would actually be wrong with implementing a SQL database as a file system?
Nothing wrong with that. A sqlfs driver that exposes a sql database as a filesystem would be terrific. Unix actually has some relational tools for tabular data, including join, though I'll admit that's not the same.
Implementing a file system as a SQL database on the other hand, is simply ridiculous. Ignoring for the moment the COBOL-esque syntax of sql queries and assuming there'll be a better language to address data in an ad hoc fashion (kinda hard to "cd" in sql), it's still tabular data, and a filesystem is essentially hierarchical data, to say nothing of symbolic links. Try to imagine having to do joins on a join table just to resolve paths. It just doesn't fit the metaphor. Yes, you can force your data into a tabular schema -- and indeed most mainframe apps tend to work like that -- but object-oriented seems to fit current usage better.
Personally I think of the concept of "files" as quaint... it's not a far throw from overlays or regions, it's an implementation detail I shouldn't have to be dinking with. I should have a standard system interface that lets me persist and load C structs, C++ class definitions, or whatever other language runtime speaks to a persistence layer. Then if I want flatfiles, I can implement it in terms of that. Maybe Hans Reiser will bring that to unix... doubt it, so long as it has to be constrained by having to be front-ended by POSIX API's... it's kinda like front-ending an E15k with a vic-20...
Then there's the XBox megakernel where the entire game is the kernel so that you get zero context switches durring gameplay. I think that you even need to statically link all the game libraries. This is completely the oposite approach from microkernels.
It is, however, the standard approach of many embedded systems. ucLinux basically operates this way -- the appearance of separate programs is an illusion, everything's entry points in one single kernel space. Don't even need an MMU then.
I'd just mod this down as OVER-FUCKING-RATED -- insight? It's a rant, at least Chomsky puts forth evidence -- but I feel really compelled to respond.
Terrorism? What kind of social retard are you to compare a ruthless monopoly to murderers. I want you to stand in front of anyone who's lost a loved one and tell them that you're in the same boat because you have to pay a hundred bucks extra on a PC, and that operating systems progress has been held back. I'm not a violent person, so really the tragedy in that might be that you'd end up getting beaten before the realization got beaten into your head that your comparison is full of shit.
Unbelievable.
Re:You are not anal enough either. (IAAL)
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
Apparently the lawyers of every company that has ever gotten notice of GPL violations from the FSF disagree with you.
Name one the FSF has taken to court. Companies bend to threats too, just to avoid the trouble.
I'm not asking you for formal legal advice, just your opinion as a lawyer. Are there any open-source licenses you COULDN'T drive a truck through? (much less a Trident...)
IANAL, but I'm guessing BSD and X11 (same thing these days). Just claims copyright and disclaims warranty, something every EULA by fortune 50 companies does...
I'd agree that while renderers for television fonts may be more sophisticated, the reason for 2 and 3 have a whole lot to do with compensating for the poor contrast of NTSC and the bleed effects on older and cheaper televisions with lousy shadow masks. #1 is a trait that even consumer computer video cards don't have, and #2 is more of a graphic design principle for when you don't control the background -- it'd be nice to get the effect for text over graphic backgrounds, but a grey bar at 25% opacity under the text will usually do decently. It's definitely not an effect you want for black text on white backgrounds.
> Why doesn't anyone use LISP or Scheme when they are clearly the better than Java and C++?
That "study" self-selected lisp programmers among people who had been programming in Lisp longer than Java has even existed. Doesn't give me a lot of reason to give much credence to the rest of it.
Lisp isn't even all that interesting as a language, it lacks almost everything that makes modern functional languages good, from strong typing to polymorphism.
Slashdot Mirror
Teach them man(1) (including what that funny parens thing means, I guess). Don't berate them to do it, don't imply that they're easy to read, but they are in a pretty consistent style that they'll get used to. Also, teach them on FreeBSD or some linux distro that actually has manpages. Just tried looking up some docs for xargs, and that god damned "read the info documentation for the REAL docs" came up yet again.
1) It's just snake oil, FAST stands for nothing except for the way in which they're making a buck (or euro) by selling this idea to ... investors? I really can't think of a single company that goes out of its way to load its browser down with plug-ins, much less leave license control up to the desktop user, and Joe and Jill user could sincerely not care less.
2) IE has a million plug-ins, controls, and toolbars out there. This is just another one no one will bother using.
3) It doesn't take very sophisticated vbscript to query for the existence of a control. Warez sites need merely lock out (or do much worse to) browsers that have e-Denounce installed.
> With any luck, the next thing they'll copy will be anti-aliased text throughout the OS.
... how's Quartz workin out for ya?
That feature was in the Plus pack for Windows 95, the interface for which had UI elements ripped off pixel-for-pixel not from MacOS, but from NeXT. XP has sub-pixel antialiasing for LCD screens throughout the OS. And it doesn't take half the CPU time to do it
Next time you hear the "Linux isn't really free" rhetoric, snap back with "How much less than $0 does Linux have to go?".
... don't ask them anything like "what do you mean?" or "what is it costing you, quantifiably, over your current platform?" Because they're just FUD-spouting Micro$ith astroturfers, right?
Right
Linux could do a lot better without some of its "friends".
meant underline?
It takes literally two lines of javascript to create an instantly updating preview that someone could turn on in preferences, and it would work in IE and mozilla. How about it?
Sure, you only suffer through less than a couple hours worth of the movie. The book is over a thousand pages of utter crap. I'll admit I read through only half of it before I just couldn't take any more. But if you think BE is bad, try Mission: Earth. Ten whole books, every one of them worse than the first, featuring an anti-hero that makes Sancho from
- Don Quixote
look like Don Juan. I read the first book, and part of the second, then was told that no, it didn't get any better.LRH was a genius: it takes talent to write that badly without using only monosyllables.
You're not required to like the game. Some people who are actually good at it do. Some people like me who still suck at it like it. Move on, it does take all kinds.
You do have to try all kinds of different things. If you keep playing the game the exact same way, you will always die the exact same way.
I don't think anyone finishes the game with the pet they started with. Let it go, move on, feel sad for a moment, then wish for a blessed figurine of an archon, or polymorph your pet with the first polymorph wand you find.
"Mister Asindihopo? Say hi to muffin"
"RAARRRR!!!" *MUNCH*
"BAD MUFFIN! Oh well, free loot."
I do find myself wanting to hack on the game, but find there's way too much that's hardwired. Want to add extra states besides confused and hallucinating for messages to change, but found that those flags are basically hardwired, the message structures aren't really extensible. Stuff like that. Maybe someone could port nethack to the zangband engine, which is supposedly scriptable in python.
The interface hasn't changed at all in forever, there aren't really any graphics
N SHOTS
Au contraire. http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/nhfeatures.html#SCREE
Yes that is nethack. You can spew all you want about "gameplay is king", but I'm guessing even you don't play chess with scraps of cardboard with letters on them for your pieces. When I go to the symphony, I like to dress nice and see my date dressed nice, even though we're just listening. If you really wanted to cut out all the "irrelevant crap" in life, you'd just get a feeding tube and have your muscles electrically stimulated (something I fear I'll need after playing nethack, yes. I might pick up falcon's eye just for kicks though)
This more then anything else represents the moral decrepitude our nation has into. I find it so sad that people are so willing to abandon all the moral and ethical lessons given to them by their mothers, schools, and churches. Without a sense of right and wrong our country is doomed.
Get some god damned perspective. I volunteer sixteen hours a week seeing people who are losing their homes, coming down with pneumonia, can't pay their utility bills because they've been laid off, have kids who need glasses and can't afford it, and I do my part in helping them out, with the grant monies we get from citizens of this "morally decrepid" country. And hell, that's easy stuff, there's folks down the street who are working with people who are alone and dying of AIDS.
What the fuck do you do aside from sit on your ass and pontificate about operating systems? I'd dismiss you as a troll, but there's just too many people who really think like you. God damned self-righteous loser.
You seem to be operating under the impression that the competent network admin is the entire IT department. It's really easy to crucify the IT department as a bunch of bumbling incompetent fucks, but I can just about guarantee that the techs will want your head after they have to personally service every special request from every user to get this or that item installed. You can sit on your righteous high horse all you like, but once you try to force it into reality, you'll learn real fast that policy decisions have real and unintended consequences.
Admining a couple linux boxes does not make you an IT division.
Thus disabaling the most useful thing about IE, the google toolbar!
Installed it, found it had no keyboard accellerator, uninstalled it. Dragged a google shortcut onto my desktop, bound it to ctrl-alt-g. Now I have a google shortcut without a toolbar I have to aim for (I use mousekeys, having to click on something is a monstrous pain in the ass)
> "What if" has to be balanced against real and likely dangers
Yeah, no one's ever flown an airplane into a building or anything. What a ridiculous notion.
Yunno, simply asserting something over and over doesn't make it magically come true -- even if you hold your breath til you turn blue (hey that rhymes). The world still ran on DOS back then, Windows was a launchpad for DOS, PC-DOS was perfectly compatible and many people ran it, and IBM was the 800 lb gorilla, by dint of the fact that IBM was one of the biggest OEM's out there.
if the tables were turned, the result would be OS2 is the winner.
So if OS/2 were the winner, then the result would be that OS/2 is the winner... Stunning insight.
Sig:All who want games in linux will sign up to Transgaming,All who dont sign up to Transgaming dont want games
Yep, this seems to be the sort of prevailing logical rigor around here...
How about putting 4-5 developers on to the task of making Linux apps act like Linux apps , with the same look, feel, drag and drop, shortcut keys, mime types, etc. Keep the choice, just allow standardized configuration by default.
... which is precisely what you get with windows as well. Not one end user gives a tinker's damn about the source code. If they did, they wouldn't be end users.
I believe there is such a project. It's called KDE. And there's another one called GNOME. Oops. Back to the drawing board.
Frankly, get the keyboard accellerators standard and most of cut/paste interoperating, and you'll be fine. It's not like people expect to be able to drop an excel spreadsheet range into a wordperfect doc after all. People will take an 80% solution if they don't really need the missing 20% (hell, look how well linux has done without acl's standard). Themes don't need to be perfectly consistent so long as the metaphors are consistent. Even microsoft isn't obeying that consistency principle itself (WMP 7 looks like nothing else on win9x)
It's not the consistency (people don't expect it these days), it's not the documentation (people don't read it), it's that the average user isn't being offered a value proposition any better than what they're using now. So you have an office suite and a web browser and chat programs
It's things like the outrageous pricing of Office XP that might really give the free alternatives a boost. Too early to tell...
I have a question of this community. I remember back in the days when conversations would be carried out over BBS forums/newsgroups.
... asking the gurus something that was beneath them was to beg for their forbearance with your ignorance.
The first day I installed FreeBSD and had problems with the bootloader, I went over to #freebsd on efnet and asked for help. The guy who wrote the bootloader helped me out. Perl problems get answered with regularity on #perl. Both of those channels are fairly sick of newbies asking FAQ's, but that attitude was around in the old days too
There's irc.openprojects.net, which is well-known for being a helpful place that even helps with FAQ's.
Finally, you could do with toning down your lofty rhetoric, it's frankly over the top. The people you want to appeal to are smart folks who don't care for demagoguery and emotional manipulation. This is operating systems, not world peace.
4)FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack was good enough for Microsoft to steal and put in Win2k/XP
... precisely the same ones that are in the BSD sockets compatibility header files. A header file does not a stack make.
And you were doing so well before this. I am going to say the same thing I have been saying over and over and over and over to this bullshit:
PROVE IT
The most evidence anyone has ever offered was BSD copyrights in the DLL's
Are you really even interested in the truth though?
Windows Media Player is available on every Windows machine. The Quicktime Player isn't. Quality loses out to quantity.
Let's see, first they release a player that runs as a klunky MDI app, installs to the windows system directory as hidden files, takes over your file associations for everything it can possibly view, without asking, then goes and sues microsoft when their media player goes and takes the associations back.
Their current player on windows is nagware, popping up ads for quicktime pro every few invocations. The marketplace uses what gives them the least hassle, and by and large it is repudiating Apple for that reason.
I really don't give a damn whether Microsoft signed in blood on a contract written by Mephistopheles himself, their player works with a minimum of hassle or nags.
What would actually be wrong with implementing a SQL database as a file system?
... it's not a far throw from overlays or regions, it's an implementation detail I shouldn't have to be dinking with. I should have a standard system interface that lets me persist and load C structs, C++ class definitions, or whatever other language runtime speaks to a persistence layer. Then if I want flatfiles, I can implement it in terms of that. Maybe Hans Reiser will bring that to unix ... doubt it, so long as it has to be constrained by having to be front-ended by POSIX API's ... it's kinda like front-ending an E15k with a vic-20...
Nothing wrong with that. A sqlfs driver that exposes a sql database as a filesystem would be terrific. Unix actually has some relational tools for tabular data, including join, though I'll admit that's not the same.
Implementing a file system as a SQL database on the other hand, is simply ridiculous. Ignoring for the moment the COBOL-esque syntax of sql queries and assuming there'll be a better language to address data in an ad hoc fashion (kinda hard to "cd" in sql), it's still tabular data, and a filesystem is essentially hierarchical data, to say nothing of symbolic links. Try to imagine having to do joins on a join table just to resolve paths. It just doesn't fit the metaphor. Yes, you can force your data into a tabular schema -- and indeed most mainframe apps tend to work like that -- but object-oriented seems to fit current usage better.
Personally I think of the concept of "files" as quaint
Then there's the XBox megakernel where the entire game is the kernel so that you get zero context switches durring gameplay. I think that you even need to statically link all the game libraries. This is completely the oposite approach from microkernels.
It is, however, the standard approach of many embedded systems. ucLinux basically operates this way -- the appearance of separate programs is an illusion, everything's entry points in one single kernel space. Don't even need an MMU then.
See, if there were people there, then those folks also discovered it. Walked there, if I remember my pre-history correctly...
I'd just mod this down as OVER-FUCKING-RATED -- insight? It's a rant, at least Chomsky puts forth evidence -- but I feel really compelled to respond.
Terrorism? What kind of social retard are you to compare a ruthless monopoly to murderers. I want you to stand in front of anyone who's lost a loved one and tell them that you're in the same boat because you have to pay a hundred bucks extra on a PC, and that operating systems progress has been held back. I'm not a violent person, so really the tragedy in that might be that you'd end up getting beaten before the realization got beaten into your head that your comparison is full of shit.
Unbelievable.
Apparently the lawyers of every company that has ever gotten notice of GPL violations from the FSF disagree with you.
Name one the FSF has taken to court. Companies bend to threats too, just to avoid the trouble.
I'm not asking you for formal legal advice, just your opinion as a lawyer. Are there any open-source licenses you COULDN'T drive a truck through? (much less a Trident...)
IANAL, but I'm guessing BSD and X11 (same thing these days). Just claims copyright and disclaims warranty, something every EULA by fortune 50 companies does...
I'd agree that while renderers for television fonts may be more sophisticated, the reason for 2 and 3 have a whole lot to do with compensating for the poor contrast of NTSC and the bleed effects on older and cheaper televisions with lousy shadow masks. #1 is a trait that even consumer computer video cards don't have, and #2 is more of a graphic design principle for when you don't control the background -- it'd be nice to get the effect for text over graphic backgrounds, but a grey bar at 25% opacity under the text will usually do decently. It's definitely not an effect you want for black text on white backgrounds.
> Why doesn't anyone use LISP or Scheme when they are clearly the better than Java and C++?
That "study" self-selected lisp programmers among people who had been programming in Lisp longer than Java has even existed. Doesn't give me a lot of reason to give much credence to the rest of it.
Lisp isn't even all that interesting as a language, it lacks almost everything that makes modern functional languages good, from strong typing to polymorphism.