I'd be surprised too, but not as surprised as I would be if it were really time traveling sabotage agents from the future sent back to keep the experiment that while uncovering the physics that allowed time travel to ultimately be discovered unleashes the hordes of microscopic interdimensional atom-eaters that munch on matter and defecate thermal neutrons. Because these molecule sized creatures (some say they are intelligent) are alive they multiply exponentially but though the early stages of infestation they were hardly noticed. But after some years their presence was obvious and our doom was sealed unless time travel could somehow save the world...
These creatures entered our plane of existance through a wormhole opened at the LHC. The LHC had to be destroyed, or if not destroyed, at least delayed. T-100, a robotic facsimilie of a particle physicist, looking remarkably like Arnold Schwartzenpecker was sent back to throw a wooden clog into the workings of the LHC.
Wikipedia is the frikken encyclopedia galactica. It's what AI will use to become self aware. It's probably the only fragment of humanity that will survive once humans have gone extinct and the robots we made have left earth to live on other worlds.
Why shouldn't an article on Sapporo Japan link to an Anime set in Sapporo Japan article? Or better yet to an Sapporo Japan trivia article the links to an Anime episodes set in Sapporo Japan article? It certainly SHOULD be possible to get from Sapporo Japan to anything that remotely has to do with Sapporo Japan in an ideal world, but it should not be linked directly off the main Sapporo Japan Article.
In real life there will be lots of things having to do with Sapporo Japan that are NOT reachable from the Sapporo Japan article by any combination of clicks, however that is something to be corrected by adding more links to new pages not something to make worse by deleting links outright.
If warhammer were a fiction book instead of a game would you cite sources other than the text of that book when outlining the plot? Probably not. Are other sources needed? Probably not. Plot details are usually objective facts, and the original source that all other sources should site is that piece of work itself. Why delete the article when you could improve it? If you can't or won't improve it, then why are you editing it or considering deleting it? The only real justification for such lazy and summary action is to overcome a flood of spam. Ads and biased propaganda IN FLOODS are legitimate targets of this treatment, not articles intended to provide factual information. Even for an ad, or a piece of propaganda, it is probably better if you have the time and inclination, to improve the article by citing independent sources yourself. For instance, if you see an ad for a real product, why not cite consumer reports, and provide objective information about the product and links to competing products? If a cult posts a biased article about itself, why not improve it listing all the news stories about them and their paedophilia scandals, as well as citing independent sources that may take issue with their viewpoints? Really, I see no problem positing a biased stub article HOPING for others to flesh it out with their own point of view. Firstly, stating your biased point of view probably makes sure that your point of view will be expressed in the final article, and it also begs the question for those with a different point of view to flesh the article out. It's trolling where the winners are everyone who reads wikipedia because the end result is not an argument, but an objective article. Real damaging content would be 9 million automatically created ( or created with cheap labor ) articles with random text and no non-redundant informational content linking to your website designed to boost your websites search engine listing. That is the kind of damaging content that certain provisions in the guidelines are there for. They are to give administrators a nail to hang their hat on when it is truely necessary to act in a lazy and summar fashion.
Well you don't need to delete the whole article. If it's irrelevant, then NOBODY WILL LINK TO IT. Also, if something is too near the top of an article it can be moved down towards the bottom, or into it's own stub article with a link rather than be deleted outright. Deleting it outright means you have to go through the whole history looking for it if you want to read it. Pretty annoying. If you are too lazy to fix the article properly without DELETING information then you really have no business messing with the content. The most you ought to do if you are so lazy is to comment on it in the article discussion politely or just sit on your hands.
All it does is occupy a url harming nobody. If there is something more worthy of being at that url create a disambiguation page.
Wikipedia does what an encyclopedia does and it has 'pedia' in it's name, but it can do so much more without harming it's ability to function as an encyclopedia. It's like deleting the ability of a VCR to play videotapes because it's supposed to be a video cassete RECORDER.
Sewer rejects. Ha! I'm going to plagerize that....
I don't trust Google to put my interests first either.
For that matter there are no companies and very few people who I trust to put my interests first other than me...
I don't think that is even odd. Strange would be being able to trust others to do so. It would make me an ant in an ant colony. Oh I trust the hive to put my interests first because the hives interests ARE my interest.
Naw. I'm not an ant. I'm an Aardvark. Where's my cucumber?
Anyways, I wonder if it's legal to strip out all of Google's Ads etcetera. Oh it's possible, but is it legal? Surely once most of the work is done, some hacker will strip out the ads and spyware and post the result to freenet where anyone can download it. They could even call it the Google is Satan browser. It would be funny.
But if something is top secret then the 'enemy' may not know you know it. That makes it actually interesting because it means you can suprise your 'enemy' by knowing something you shouldn't oughtta.
However uncannily insightful analysis of openly available facts can also suprise the 'enemy' as well.
My cell phone has 'gps' but as far as I can tell it's completely useless.
There is no way, using my cell phone for me to get lattitude, longitude and elevation.
There is a way to 'disable gps except for 911' which I clicked. Presumably this means that if you use your cell to call 911 then they can get your lattitude, longitude and elevation, but I can not. Why would I want other people I call to know my gps? I can't guess. However my wife has a cell phone with a similarly useless GPS feature. I turned on my GPS and called her, and there is apparently no way she could tell what my lattitude, longitude and elevation were either or vice versa. Completely useless!
Maybe they use GPS to automatically adjust the clock on your phone accounting for time zones. Maybe not though. I once saw an 'atomic watch' that did this sold for like $1000 bucks - complete rip off scam.
Anyway FSCK cell phone GPS. I'm going to wrap mine in a piece of grounded tin foil.
Wait a minute.. then how will I get calls?
No, instead I am going to shut off the ringer and duct tape it under the seat of a bus in another city then retrieve it after completing the crime of the century...
This site has a nice diagram of sexual reproduction in ferns. The spores of a fern have an egg and a flagellated SPERM! The sperm needs water to swim to the egg ( also located in the newly germinated spore )
So it would be an error to say that flowering plants reproduce more sexually than non-flowering plants. But non-flowering plants need water to reproduce sexually - that is all
Cool. So flowering plants were around before the asteroid etc. That gives a plausable story for how an asteroid / volcanoes could *cause* an explosion in flowering plants. Basically because flowering plants tend to reproduce more sexually than other plants, then a rapidly changing environment would favor them over other plants that can not adapt as quickly.
Here's a wild ass guess that could explain it, but for which I have no evidence.
Meteor impacts and lava flows alter the earth's climate. In general this favors warm blooded creatures.
It also shakes things up in the plant world perhaps *causing* the explosion in flowering plants ( which actually happened first, meteors and volcano disasters or flowering plants, I don't know, this is just a wild ass guess with no supporting research )
The explosion in flowering plants and their insect symbiotes, also stimulates insect evolution. Sexual reproduction in plants creates a huge new set of insect poisons and insect niches, kicking insect evolution into overdrive as they adapt and change over ( a fairly short ) time. For a time there seemed to be a new disease carrying or food destroying insect evolving every (insert short period of time here).
Relative to Megafauna that typically lives long, insect and plant evolution can happen in a flash. The megafauna ( ie the large dinos ) die. Better able to evolve fast are small dinosaurs and mammals, however the mammals mostly win out because of their warm bloodedness which gives them the edge as temperatures fluxuate wildly because of the volcano eruptions..
I think even today long lived megafauna would adapt more slowly to a rapidly changing environment than small animals like rats and cockroaches. They may go extinct leaving empty niches for the remaining small life forms to evolve ( quickly since they are small and short lived ) to fill.
I don't think reptiles are inherently more primitive or less able to adapt than mammals. Immune systems evolve faster if each generation lives for a shorter timespan. If you are smaller, then your population can be bigger on a given landmass giving you more chances to evolve. That's what did the dinos in. Their size.
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I like to keep my private info. That's why I use Distrust. I can temporarily shut off collection of private info but turn it back on when I've finished looking at porn. And the little eye reminds me when I'm being watched.
Windows are the most natural thing a user of a gui can identify with the concept of a process. Closing a window should be like 'killing that process'.
Most of the processes users start are not windowless daemons. Except for those, the window manager IS and should be the user's task manager of choice. Window managers should provide a way to register your window as a child of some other window so that when that window gets a close event, your window gets a special close message. There needs to be a way for the user by answering ONE dialog message to make it a close-goddammit message that the app should interpret to mean close, and don't do anymore prompting.
I identified multiple desktops with multiple $HOMEs in my earlier post but maybe they would be more like multiple $PWDs Maybe even windowless daemons would be accessible by cd..ing out fromthe top level... Then there would be no need for a seperate task manager at all.... Windowless daemons could be provided with a window that provides some status info a close box, and maybe the option to send them some signals.
As far as macos, I have to back down from all widely used window managers have tabs. I have not used a mac since os 8 days. However, maybe MacOSx should have something like that too.
Looked on wikipedia. Seems they are munging the addressbar so that it will perform google ( or other search engine ) searches if you don't type in a url. Remember, google makes it's money by selling ads based on your search terms, and those ads will still be on the search results page. They don't give a damn if you actually visit their front page.
I like the idea since it means one less 'bar' taking up real estate at the top of my screen.
Also, I always turn tabbed browsing off since the tabs take up screen real estate and don't provide any use beyond what my window manager does. However making the tabs seperate processes is such a good idea that it may make me put up with them in order to have that. It would be better imo, if there were no tabs, in the browser window, ( in other words I can use the tab feature provided by the window manager at the bottom of the screen ) and everything that would be a tab, opens it's own browser window ( again in it's own process ).
Tabs suck. All widely used window managers ( including windows ) provide tabs already which are shared by all programs. Browsers need to let the window manager ( and os ) do what they do since the user would not have installed their window manager if they did not want to use it.
Multiple windows in a bigger window suck. This is because you have to put all the widgets and crap to deal with there being multiple windows within a window in the window shared by the windows contained in it. Keep this shit up and you end up working on a postage stamp sized work area in the middle of the screen.
The idea of having popups scoped to their containing tab sounds appealing. It would be nice to be able to shut down the mother tab/window of all the crap without shutting the whole browser down and all the open windows it may have.
But I don't like the idea of having all my popups in a window because windows containing other windows are stupid. What is needed is a window manager with security like that. The browser ( or other app ) would request that the window manager open a parentless window. As popups are opened, they would be opened as children of that parent window. There would only be one tab at the bottom of the screen ( the equiv of the start menu ) when you click it, all it's children would pop up. If any of those children had children then you should see an arrow to let you select them from the top level tab.
If you open another browser it should be a parentless window with it's own tab. If you open a spreadsheet it should be parentless too. Maybe menu items that are shared between open windows could be added via a shared mechanism to the window manager's tabs. Maybe a special 'menu' selection.
Alt-tab or equivalent functionality is extremely useful as well and should be preserved. Currently all applications windows are connected in an alt-tab ring structure, alt-tab being used to cycle between them.
With lotssa windows there can get to be too many for a ring to work well. Multiple desktops can mitigate this to some extent if each desktop has it's own ring.
Window managers need to be built with security in mind and they must be generically useful so as to prevent applications from thinking they have to create their own windows with their own window managers inside them.
The nice thing about a ring is that it is built automatically. But it can get unwieldy when the ring contains too many items. Rings should be like folders to keep the size of them down. The current level ring would be cycled though using alt-tab, but once the tab navigation interface window appears, other keys could be used to 'cd' into lower level tabs, or cd into upper level tabs, alt-tab being used to cycle through the 'directories' of tabs. Just pressing alt-tab should still take you to the previous window, that's so damn useful it's like 'cd -' some special alt-tab combo should also be equivalent to cd without parameters taking you home.
Why not put three copies of all media with three identical laptops capable of reading said media. That way if one or two or even all three break, it ought to be possible to cobble together at least one working one. Also, it would be better to not use laptops, but desktops because they are in general more amenable to tinkering with.
I would also put a bunch of packets of DO NOT EAT (Silica Gel) in there to absorb any stray moisture.
Why not put a whole computer in there with a cd rom drive etc?
Also, you're storing it fo 25 years. Why mess with the welded capsule etc at all? Just keep a laptop and the cds in your closet and fire it up every couple of years to spread the grease around the bearings etc and recharge any draining capacitors. You might end up replacing a clock battery or five over the years. The labor involved in doing this over 25 years has got to be less than constructing a welded steel capsule, and digging a hole in which to bury it.
And perl 6 is supposed to use Parsing Expression Grammars which are even cooler.
If you think translating a regular expression into hand-coded crap that is probably wrong then you're an idiot. That's why people use things like yacc/bison for writing parsers. That kind of coding is hella tedious and hella error-prone without useful abstractions like regexes.
And all the other languages have regexes now because they are a very useful tool including ( insert your favorite ). Sorry, but when parsing something I'm gonna use them whatever language is foisted on me.
And you can use some simple rules to paste regexes together in ways that make sense. You can translate ( mostly ) the entire URI rfc for instance into regular expressions using the bnf. There's only one funny ambiguity that requires a special rule. The regex is frikken huge, but the small parts it's built of are easily understandable. Try doing that without a tool like regexes in a way that is *CORRECT* and *COMPLETE* allowing you to parse out all the bits in the rfc and you will fail.
Remeber with regexes you can paste them together build them up with (?:) my $parta = '(?:..)'; my $partb = '(?:...)'; my $whole = '(?:' . $parta . '|' . $partb . ')';
Businesses should make their decisions based on technical reasons in order to be the most efficient machine and provide the most, most efficiently ( with least cost ) to their customers while charging their customers what the market will bear. But that is totally not what happens unless the software IS the business. Even then it doesn't always happen.
So software produced by businesses is crappy, badly designed, hard to maintain, and gets moreso the longer the piece of software exists. Eventually, it becomes so inflexible and expensive to maintain that it makes sense to replace it. Switching languages makes it easier to justify replacing the software rather than incrementally changing it. The real reason the software is being replaced is that it is crap, but trash-talking the language it was written in is a good way to sell the idea of replacement with something that will be worse, probably sooner rather than later.
Learn regular expressions. If you don't know them, you suck as a programmer, no matter what your language of choice is. It's like not being able to figure out that pesky if then else thing. For pity's sake!
Either the universe is deterministic, and so people don't have free will ( since they are goverened by the deterministic processes of the universe ) OR, the universe is not deterministic ( subatomic particles do some truely random things in people's brains ) and so, people do not have free will since they are governed by actions of random activities of the subatomic particles in their brains )
Since free will is clearly a falsity, any proof starting from that premise is meaningless.
I think Russia has designs on all the little 2 bit countries between the caspian and black? seas. Georgia is only the first to fall.
Russia wants to monopolize central asian oil. They hate that there is under construction a pipeline through Turkey that bypasses them.
Before all this, Russia offered Russian passports to South Osstians which most accepted. This allows the Russians to claim they are defending Russians.
My crackpot theory is that it was Iranian state sponsored operatives operating in South Osstia ( which is ethnically Iranian ) that provoked Georgia into invading South Osstia in order to give the Russians an excuse to take over Georgia.
Iran wants to befriend Russia since that would provide the necessary protection for them to thumb their nose at the rest of the world in many ways including the development of a nuclear arsenal.
Iran is building an undersea pipeline to India and have other customers besides the West which is unreliable since it frequently imposes sanctions against Iran. The Iranians are probably willing to forego such a low value market as the west and don't mind giving the Russians control to the pipeline route through the transcaucusus, in exchange for the benefit of coming under the Russian umbrella of protection.
Fast forward 5-10 years into the future. Peak oil is upon us.
This protection, and the development of nukes that can destroy Israel riding on missile technology learned from the Russians may embolden the Iranians to take over Iraq as the US withdraws in the coming years. Russia will approve of this oil coming under the control of the Russo-Iranian alliance.
Would we really risk stopping the Iranians from taking over Iraq, especially if the Iraqis ( at least in the south ) largely approved of the takeover, if it would likely mean Israel gets nuked and we anger the Russians into joining the conflict?
When Saudi Arabia ( which would be next ) is attacked, would we fight then?
Maybe Iraq joins the alliance voluntarily and the now economially diversified Iranians supply the weapons which Russia doesn't want to take the heat for doing ( they only supply the expertise to the Iranians who in return helpfully drive oil prices through the roof with their antics keeping Russian coffers filled to the brim ). Who knows.
We gotta pull the rug out from under this sort of crap by developing cheaper alternatives for energy.
Maybe we end up buying the Russo-Iranian ( and annexed arabian ) oil for a while, paying for their military build-up. As oil becomes more expensive than the alternatives, they decide to use their military ( all they have left ) to take other forms of wealth by force.
Jesus Returns.
As the world is fighting, aliens from Tau-Ceti land in flying casserole dishes and start shooting people with disintegrator guns. Jesus is killed by one of the aliens as it exits his spaceKraft, squishing him under the metal door. Ironically, the Tau-Cetians resemble Flying Spaghetti Monsters.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be surprised too, but not as surprised as I would be if it were really time traveling sabotage agents from the future sent back to keep the experiment that while uncovering the physics that allowed time travel to ultimately be discovered unleashes the hordes of microscopic interdimensional atom-eaters that munch on matter and defecate thermal neutrons. Because these molecule sized creatures (some say they are intelligent) are alive they multiply exponentially but though the early stages of infestation they were hardly noticed. But after some years their presence was obvious and our doom was sealed unless time travel could somehow save the world... These creatures entered our plane of existance through a wormhole opened at the LHC. The LHC had to be destroyed, or if not destroyed, at least delayed. T-100, a robotic facsimilie of a particle physicist, looking remarkably like Arnold Schwartzenpecker was sent back to throw a wooden clog into the workings of the LHC.
Wikipedia is the frikken encyclopedia galactica. It's what AI will use to become self aware. It's probably the only fragment of humanity that will survive once humans have gone extinct and the robots we made have left earth to live on other worlds.
Why shouldn't an article on Sapporo Japan link to an Anime set in Sapporo Japan article? Or better yet to an Sapporo Japan trivia article the links to an Anime episodes set in Sapporo Japan article? It certainly SHOULD be possible to get from Sapporo Japan to anything that remotely has to do with Sapporo Japan in an ideal world, but it should not be linked directly off the main Sapporo Japan Article. In real life there will be lots of things having to do with Sapporo Japan that are NOT reachable from the Sapporo Japan article by any combination of clicks, however that is something to be corrected by adding more links to new pages not something to make worse by deleting links outright.
If warhammer were a fiction book instead of a game would you cite sources other than the text of that book when outlining the plot? Probably not. Are other sources needed? Probably not. Plot details are usually objective facts, and the original source that all other sources should site is that piece of work itself.
Why delete the article when you could improve it? If you can't or won't improve it, then why are you editing it or considering deleting it?
The only real justification for such lazy and summary action is to overcome a flood of spam. Ads and biased propaganda IN FLOODS are legitimate targets of this treatment, not articles intended to provide factual information.
Even for an ad, or a piece of propaganda, it is probably better if you have the time and inclination, to improve the article by citing independent sources yourself.
For instance, if you see an ad for a real product, why not cite consumer reports, and provide objective information about the product and links to competing products?
If a cult posts a biased article about itself, why not improve it listing all the news stories about them and their paedophilia scandals, as well as citing independent sources that may take issue with their viewpoints?
Really, I see no problem positing a biased stub article HOPING for others to flesh it out with their own point of view.
Firstly, stating your biased point of view probably makes sure that your point of view will be expressed in the final article, and it also begs the question for those with a different point of view to flesh the article out. It's trolling where the winners are everyone who reads wikipedia because the end result is not an argument, but an objective article.
Real damaging content would be 9 million automatically created ( or created with cheap labor ) articles with random text and no non-redundant informational content linking to your website designed to boost your websites search engine listing.
That is the kind of damaging content that certain provisions in the guidelines are there for. They are to give administrators a nail to hang their hat on when it is truely necessary to act in a lazy and summar fashion.
Yeah, if it's true or at least impartial and not an ad, it should not be deleted.
Well you don't need to delete the whole article. If it's irrelevant, then NOBODY WILL LINK TO IT.
Also, if something is too near the top of an article it can be moved down towards the bottom, or into it's own stub article with a link rather than be deleted outright.
Deleting it outright means you have to go through the whole history looking for it if you want to read it. Pretty annoying.
If you are too lazy to fix the article properly without DELETING information then you really have no business messing with the content. The most you ought to do if you are so lazy is to comment on it in the article discussion politely or just sit on your hands.
All it does is occupy a url harming nobody. If there is something more worthy of being at that url create a disambiguation page.
Wikipedia does what an encyclopedia does and it has 'pedia' in it's name, but it can do so much more without harming it's ability to function as an encyclopedia. It's like deleting the ability of a VCR to play videotapes because it's supposed to be a video cassete RECORDER.
Sewer rejects. Ha! I'm going to plagerize that....
I don't trust Google to put my interests first either.
For that matter there are no companies and very few people who I trust to put my interests first other than me...
I don't think that is even odd. Strange would be being able to trust others to do so. It would make me an ant in an ant colony. Oh I trust the hive to put my interests first because the hives interests ARE my interest.
Naw. I'm not an ant. I'm an Aardvark. Where's my cucumber?
Anyways, I wonder if it's legal to strip out all of Google's Ads etcetera. Oh it's possible, but is it legal? Surely once most of the work is done, some hacker will strip out the ads and spyware and post the result to freenet where anyone can download it. They could even call it the Google is Satan browser. It would be funny.
But if something is top secret then the 'enemy' may not know you know it. That makes it actually interesting because it means you can suprise your 'enemy' by knowing something you shouldn't oughtta.
However uncannily insightful analysis of openly available facts can also suprise the 'enemy' as well.
The boss IS stupid to write it off.
My cell phone has 'gps' but as far as I can tell it's completely useless.
There is no way, using my cell phone for me to get lattitude, longitude and elevation.
There is a way to 'disable gps except for 911' which I clicked. Presumably this means that if you use your cell to call 911 then they can get your lattitude, longitude and elevation, but I can not. Why would I want other people I call to know my gps? I can't guess. However my wife has a cell phone with a similarly useless GPS feature. I turned on my GPS and called her, and there is apparently no way she could tell what my lattitude, longitude and elevation were either or vice versa. Completely useless!
Maybe they use GPS to automatically adjust the clock on your phone accounting for time zones. Maybe not though. I once saw an 'atomic watch' that did this sold for like $1000 bucks - complete rip off scam.
Anyway FSCK cell phone GPS. I'm going to wrap mine in a piece of grounded tin foil.
Wait a minute.. then how will I get calls?
No, instead I am going to shut off the ringer and duct tape it under the seat of a bus in another city then retrieve it after completing the crime of the century...
Frikken A.
This site has a nice diagram of sexual reproduction in ferns. The spores of a fern have an egg and a flagellated SPERM! The sperm needs water to swim to the egg ( also located in the newly germinated spore )
So it would be an error to say that flowering plants reproduce more sexually than non-flowering plants. But non-flowering plants need water to reproduce sexually - that is all
Cool. So flowering plants were around before the asteroid etc. That gives a plausable story for how an asteroid / volcanoes could *cause* an explosion in flowering plants. Basically because flowering plants tend to reproduce more sexually than other plants, then a rapidly changing environment would favor them over other plants that can not adapt as quickly.
Here's a wild ass guess that could explain it, but for which I have no evidence.
Meteor impacts and lava flows alter the earth's climate. In general this favors warm blooded creatures.
It also shakes things up in the plant world perhaps *causing* the explosion in flowering plants ( which actually happened first, meteors and volcano disasters or flowering plants, I don't know, this is just a wild ass guess with no supporting research )
The explosion in flowering plants and their insect symbiotes, also stimulates insect evolution. Sexual reproduction in plants creates a huge new set of insect poisons and insect niches, kicking insect evolution into overdrive as they adapt and change over ( a fairly short ) time. For a time there seemed to be a new disease carrying or food destroying insect evolving every (insert short period of time here).
Relative to Megafauna that typically lives long, insect and plant evolution can happen in a flash. The megafauna ( ie the large dinos ) die. Better able to evolve fast are small dinosaurs and mammals, however the mammals mostly win out because of their warm bloodedness which gives them the edge as temperatures fluxuate wildly because of the volcano eruptions..
I think even today long lived megafauna would adapt more slowly to a rapidly changing environment than small animals like rats and cockroaches. They may go extinct leaving empty niches for the remaining small life forms to evolve ( quickly since they are small and short lived ) to fill.
I don't think reptiles are inherently more primitive or less able to adapt than mammals. Immune systems evolve faster if each generation lives for a shorter timespan. If you are smaller, then your population can be bigger on a given landmass giving you more chances to evolve. That's what did the dinos in. Their size.
I like to keep my private info. That's why I use Distrust. I can temporarily shut off collection of private info but turn it back on when I've finished looking at porn. And the little eye reminds me when I'm being watched.
Windows are the most natural thing a user of a gui can identify with the concept of a process. Closing a window should be like 'killing that process'.
Most of the processes users start are not windowless daemons. Except for those, the window manager IS and should be the user's task manager of choice. Window managers should provide a way to register your window as a child of some other window so that when that window gets a close event, your window gets a special close message. There needs to be a way for the user by answering ONE dialog message to make it a close-goddammit message that the app should interpret to mean close, and don't do anymore prompting.
I identified multiple desktops with multiple $HOMEs in my earlier post but maybe they would be more like multiple $PWDs Maybe even windowless daemons would be accessible by cd..ing out fromthe top level... Then there would be no need for a seperate task manager at all.... Windowless daemons could be provided with a window that provides some status info a close box, and maybe the option to send them some signals.
As far as macos, I have to back down from all widely used window managers have tabs. I have not used a mac since os 8 days. However, maybe MacOSx should have something like that too.
Looked on wikipedia. Seems they are munging the addressbar so that it will perform google ( or other search engine ) searches if you don't type in a url. Remember, google makes it's money by selling ads based on your search terms, and those ads will still be on the search results page. They don't give a damn if you actually visit their front page.
I like the idea since it means one less 'bar' taking up real estate at the top of my screen.
Also, I always turn tabbed browsing off since the tabs take up screen real estate and don't provide any use beyond what my window manager does. However making the tabs seperate processes is such a good idea that it may make me put up with them in order to have that. It would be better imo, if there were no tabs, in the browser window, ( in other words I can use the tab feature provided by the window manager at the bottom of the screen ) and everything that would be a tab, opens it's own browser window ( again in it's own process ).
Tabs suck. All widely used window managers ( including windows ) provide tabs already which are shared by all programs. Browsers need to let the window manager ( and os ) do what they do since the user would not have installed their window manager if they did not want to use it.
Multiple windows in a bigger window suck. This is because you have to put all the widgets and crap to deal with there being multiple windows within a window in the window shared by the windows contained in it. Keep this shit up and you end up working on a postage stamp sized work area in the middle of the screen.
The idea of having popups scoped to their containing tab sounds appealing. It would be nice to be able to shut down the mother tab/window of all the crap without shutting the whole browser down and all the open windows it may have.
But I don't like the idea of having all my popups in a window because windows containing other windows are stupid. What is needed is a window manager with security like that. The browser ( or other app ) would request that the window manager open a parentless window. As popups are opened, they would be opened as children of that parent window. There would only be one tab at the bottom of the screen ( the equiv of the start menu ) when you click it, all it's children would pop up. If any of those children had children then you should see an arrow to let you select them from the top level tab.
If you open another browser it should be a parentless window with it's own tab. If you open a spreadsheet it should be parentless too. Maybe menu items that are shared between open windows could be added via a shared mechanism to the window manager's tabs. Maybe a special 'menu' selection.
Alt-tab or equivalent functionality is extremely useful as well and should be preserved. Currently all applications windows are connected in an alt-tab ring structure, alt-tab being used to cycle between them.
With lotssa windows there can get to be too many for a ring to work well. Multiple desktops can mitigate this to some extent if each desktop has it's own ring.
Window managers need to be built with security in mind and they must be generically useful so as to prevent applications from thinking they have to create their own windows with their own window managers inside them.
The nice thing about a ring is that it is built automatically. But it can get unwieldy when the ring contains too many items. Rings should be like folders to keep the size of them down. The current level ring would be cycled though using alt-tab, but once the tab navigation interface window appears, other keys could be used to 'cd' into lower level tabs, or cd into upper level tabs, alt-tab being used to cycle through the 'directories' of tabs. Just pressing alt-tab should still take you to the previous window, that's so damn useful it's like 'cd -' some special alt-tab combo should also be equivalent to cd without parameters taking you home.
This brings back the multiple desktop thing. It
Why not put three copies of all media with three identical laptops capable of reading said media. That way if one or two or even all three break, it ought to be possible to cobble together at least one working one. Also, it would be better to not use laptops, but desktops because they are in general more amenable to tinkering with.
I would also put a bunch of packets of DO NOT EAT (Silica Gel) in there to absorb any stray moisture.
Why not put a whole computer in there with a cd rom drive etc?
Also, you're storing it fo 25 years. Why mess with the welded capsule etc at all? Just keep a laptop and the cds in your closet and fire it up every couple of years to spread the grease around the bearings etc and recharge any draining capacitors. You might end up replacing a clock battery or five over the years. The labor involved in doing this over 25 years has got to be less than constructing a welded steel capsule, and digging a hole in which to bury it.
If you are that guy, the one everyone is forced to wait on, then you are the problem, the butt of all blame, and you won't last long.
And perl 6 is supposed to use Parsing Expression Grammars which are even cooler. If you think translating a regular expression into hand-coded crap that is probably wrong then you're an idiot. That's why people use things like yacc/bison for writing parsers. That kind of coding is hella tedious and hella error-prone without useful abstractions like regexes. And all the other languages have regexes now because they are a very useful tool including ( insert your favorite ). Sorry, but when parsing something I'm gonna use them whatever language is foisted on me. And you can use some simple rules to paste regexes together in ways that make sense. You can translate ( mostly ) the entire URI rfc for instance into regular expressions using the bnf. There's only one funny ambiguity that requires a special rule. The regex is frikken huge, but the small parts it's built of are easily understandable. Try doing that without a tool like regexes in a way that is *CORRECT* and *COMPLETE* allowing you to parse out all the bits in the rfc and you will fail. Remeber with regexes you can paste them together build them up with (?:) my $parta = '(?:..)'; my $partb = '(?:...)'; my $whole = '(?:' . $parta . '|' . $partb . ')';
Businesses should make their decisions based on technical reasons in order to be the most efficient machine and provide the most, most efficiently ( with least cost ) to their customers while charging their customers what the market will bear. But that is totally not what happens unless the software IS the business. Even then it doesn't always happen.
So software produced by businesses is crappy, badly designed, hard to maintain, and gets moreso the longer the piece of software exists. Eventually, it becomes so inflexible and expensive to maintain that it makes sense to replace it. Switching languages makes it easier to justify replacing the software rather than incrementally changing it. The real reason the software is being replaced is that it is crap, but trash-talking the language it was written in is a good way to sell the idea of replacement with something that will be worse, probably sooner rather than later.
Learn regular expressions. If you don't know them, you suck as a programmer, no matter what your language of choice is. It's like not being able to figure out that pesky if then else thing. For pity's sake!
Either the universe is deterministic, and so people don't have free will ( since they are goverened by the deterministic processes of the universe )
OR, the universe is not deterministic ( subatomic particles do some truely random things in people's brains ) and so, people do not have free will since they are governed by actions of random activities of the subatomic particles in their brains )
Since free will is clearly a falsity, any proof starting from that premise is meaningless.
It's bloatware, the windows registry, bad ui etc etc etc
Drivers for third party hardware is way way down on the list of windows suckitude.
At first glance,this is my theory:
I think Russia has designs on all the little 2 bit countries between the caspian and black? seas. Georgia is only the first to fall.
Russia wants to monopolize central asian oil. They hate that there is under construction a pipeline through Turkey that bypasses them.
Before all this, Russia offered Russian passports to South Osstians which most accepted. This allows the Russians to claim they are defending Russians.
My crackpot theory is that it was Iranian state sponsored operatives operating in South Osstia ( which is ethnically Iranian ) that provoked Georgia into invading South Osstia in order to give the Russians an excuse to take over Georgia.
Iran wants to befriend Russia since that would provide the necessary protection for them to thumb their nose at the rest of the world in many ways including the development of a nuclear arsenal.
Iran is building an undersea pipeline to India and have other customers besides the West which is unreliable since it frequently imposes sanctions against Iran. The Iranians are probably willing to forego such a low value market as the west and don't mind giving the Russians control to the pipeline route through the transcaucusus, in exchange for the benefit of coming under the Russian umbrella of protection.
Fast forward 5-10 years into the future. Peak oil is upon us.
This protection, and the development of nukes that can destroy Israel riding on missile technology learned from the Russians may embolden the Iranians to take over Iraq as the US withdraws in the coming years. Russia will approve of this oil coming under the control of the Russo-Iranian alliance.
Would we really risk stopping the Iranians from taking over Iraq, especially if the Iraqis ( at least in the south ) largely approved of the takeover, if it would likely mean Israel gets nuked and we anger the Russians into joining the conflict?
When Saudi Arabia ( which would be next ) is attacked, would we fight then?
Maybe Iraq joins the alliance voluntarily and the now economially diversified Iranians supply the weapons which Russia doesn't want to take the heat for doing ( they only supply the expertise to the Iranians who in return helpfully drive oil prices through the roof with their antics keeping Russian coffers filled to the brim ). Who knows.
We gotta pull the rug out from under this sort of crap by developing cheaper alternatives for energy.
Maybe we end up buying the Russo-Iranian ( and annexed arabian ) oil for a while, paying for their military build-up. As oil becomes more expensive than the alternatives, they decide to use their military ( all they have left ) to take other forms of wealth by force.
Jesus Returns.
As the world is fighting, aliens from Tau-Ceti land in flying casserole dishes and start shooting people with disintegrator guns. Jesus is killed by one of the aliens as it exits his spaceKraft, squishing him under the metal door. Ironically, the Tau-Cetians resemble Flying Spaghetti Monsters.