I hereby define a new technical term, wanklage, to refer to any language whose primary raison d'etre is to allow its fans to pretend superiority over users of actually-useful languages. Of course the canonical computer wanklage is LISP; among human languages, what? Academy French? Medieval Latin?
Now that they're talking about US$5/carat (that's $25/g) for diamond, there are all sorts of things to do with diamond nobody ever did before. Diamond-bottom frying pans (passivated with, what, nitrogen?, for that non-stick surface), diamond teeth (pace Terry Pratchett), diamond bicycle chains, diamond lock tumblers, diamond arrows, diamond eyeglasses (frame included?), diamond ice-skate blades, diamond piston rings, cylinder sleeves, valve seats, valve lifters, bearing races, clutch plates & brake discs, diamond glue-on fingernails, diamond watch crystals, diamond mechanical watches (gears & all), diamond electric-range tops, free-standing diamond pellet-stoves, diamond kitchen knives, flatware & plates, diamond floor tiles, diamond plate-glass windows, diamond camera lenses, diamond scalpels & disposable razors, diamond scissors, diamond optical fiber, diamond rope, diamond wool, diamond lamé. Heaven forfend somebody patents all this obvious stuff. Where can we send a list like this to make sure that doesn't happen?
Lightning took out my (until now wonderful!) pair of Corinex "AV Ethernet-Phoneline Bridge" boxes, my mother-in-law's Tulip card connected to one of them (!), and both her wireless phone base and its wall-wart power supply. We actually had an arc through the air in the house, with a loud "snap". My dad says tying a simple, tight knot in the power cord is enough to protect against ("most") lightning surges. I wonder how to test the idea...
I just figured out why Google calls their web-ad program "Add-cents": my pages earned all of 61 cents in their first week. (Probably half of that was from my own experimentation. Nobody tell Google!)
It shouldn't be hard to get enormous compression for something like GMail -- imagine how many copies of the same virus, and of the same stupid .jpeg of an adorable kitten, they have stored as attachments. My brother-in-law insists they aren't doing it, though, for reliability or something.
I have worked on two laptops, now, where an ACPI suspend-to-RAM and resume fails to restore all of hardware-backed Xv's color settings. My old Compaq (mach64) loses its color saturation, and my brother's spanking new Toshiba (i915) loses its contrast setting. My own googling doesn't find anybody else mentioning the problem. Has nobody else seen this? I had to add an "xvattr" command to the resume script. xvattr doesn't have a "save all" and "reload all" option, so it would be hard to fix this across the board; maybe I should send a patch. Furthermore, too much tinkering in gxvattr crashes the X server.
In fooling with the two machines, I noticed that the color obtainable on a Toshiba M45's screen is much poorer than on my old Compaq E500. (Both were running at 16 bits/pixel.) Is the i915 driver bad at mapping between color spaces?
My brother runs up-to-the-minute (OK, "-last-week") Ubuntu Dapper. He called Sunday asking why the desktop panel was hopping from one screen-edge to the next, following the mouse around on the desktop like a puppydog. I had no answer. I have a question of my own, though: does gnome-panel have an upstream maintainer?
I just discovered Schlock Mercenary and had to spend several days reading it through, starting from 2001. A bound book is due next month.
shlomif: Do you know about ":wq"? Or "ZZ"?