265 karma · joined June 11, 2012
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Etom/10701_sp11/
Direct link to the videos is here:
http://cc-web.isri.cmu.edu/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#...
The viewer is sadly Windows-only, but you can use the RSS feed option (in the top-right) with something like gPodder to download .mp4 files directly:
http://cc-web.isri.cmu.edu/Panopto/Podcast/Podcast.ashx?cour...
The interface adds a lot of illusory difficulty, but that's not an issue for people used to reading manuals. On the other hand, when you're not wrestling with the system, there's not much fair challenge. When your underground fortress is filled to the brim with traps and completely self sufficient, no one is ever going to touch you unless you handicap yourself.
Once I had my base built out the way I wanted it, there wasn't much left for me to do. Kind of reminds me of how Minecraft feels once you've built a satisfying shelter, but I think that Minecraft's music and FPS perspective can motivate people to keep playing for the sake of creativity. With DF: sure, it's fun to imagine my fortress and all, but then I might as well move away from the keyboard and just do the whole thing in my imagination.
"Is this the year of the Linux desktop now?"
"No, that's a cliche. But Linux is getting better and Windows is bad as ever."
"Next year will be the year of the Linux desktop!"
nvvp? It works for me on Linux.
But I also don't think that it's unreasonable to say that altering your manner of cognition for a while can cause you to reflect on yourself in a new way and realize something new.
In practice, though, I've never really seen this theory come to fruit. Having acid trips was really fun, but my cognition really was more impaired then altered, and I didn't learn or realize anything.
I agree. This is something that has been bothering me every since Windows XP. I think less about what marketers want and how desperate it may or may not be, and I spend more time feeling offended that someone is presuming to intrude into my personal space in my program on my machine and tell me how I plan to use it. It's like they're misrepresenting me to myself, and it never fails to provoke much scoffing and eyerolling from me. I consider it a major signal of BS in software.
On the other hand, software which uses "your" or no pronouns at all can do almost exactly the same stuff - like creating a default organization of data - and I don't mind. I see it as a respectful suggestion which has my best interest in mind, and I'm more likely to actually incorporate their idea into the way I do things because I'm not immediately on the defensive.
Edit:
This reminds me of when I was staying at one of those tropical beach resorts and one of the souvenir sellers was announcing "shopping time, everybody!" to everyone that passed by. I didn't like that he obviously wanted me to participate in a dishonest exchange, but he was presumptuously "reminding" me that giving giving him money is a natural part of my day, the same way that I have an "eating time" and a "sleeping time".
I hear this platitude all the time and I don't think that it's constructive. Disconnectedness and depression go hand in hand, in my experience. You may be blessed to have many people who love you, but a decent portion of the human population objectively doesn't, and can recognize it. So saying such a thing to a depressed person seems to run a high risk of rubbing their loneliness in their face.
I prefer to store next/prev pointers with the data itself, and to use offsetof/containerof to find a pointer to the data struct which contains a given set of next/prev pointers.
One example of such an scheme is the list used in the Linux kernel:
Maybe people who haven't contributed anything are unhappy to see a good thing go seemingly bad, as a matter of principle. Or, like someone mentioned, they're sad that Ubuntu's remaining community resources (which might not strictly be Mark's to spend) will now be spent in a way that doesn't benefit them and their friends.
Then there are people who might be offended that they were excluded from Ubuntu's audience in the name of "not excluding people from Ubuntu's audience".
I eventually wound up switching off Ubuntu altogether when I realized that I seriously disagreed with its general direction of removing customizability and features for marketing reasons, that I disliked most of its core applications, and that Arch, with its AUR, had a more complete and up-to-date repository of software that I cared about. That particular switch was pretty time consuming, but I learned a decent amount about the modern Linux userspace. I have a nice sleek system now that does what I want it to, and not the other way around.
Have a nice life, Ubuntu. Good luck getting grandma to install you.
About the course: the extent to which we were guided was minimal by design. It wasn't a matter of "here's a skeleton, here are steps A, B, and C to get it working", but rather "here's an API, implement it; here are some general design ideas". I think that this is comparable to what you'd get if you sat down with a book on your own, and so I hope that it might give people a decent idea of the level of difficulty of such a project.
I emphatically agree with your point about the difficulty of a newbie + PCI situation, although a year still seems steep.
I thought I'd offer a more optimistic counterpoint. I think that the 10,000 hours figure is way, way overestimating the amount of time needed in order to create something usable enough to make you satisfied, and which could teach you enough to understand any real operating system at the level of source code.
Although, yeah, if you've got commercial aspirations like OP, then I think you're in for it.
It's not intentional, but it seems like my method has turned into "stare at a wall for an hour, and then write function prototypes."
Sounds like a Voight-Kampff test.
You can get over your hurdle in two ways:
- You can trust that your writing will be exciting for the future you. When I started keeping a journal, it really did seem so forced. But sure enough, when I read it a year later, I was captivated by the forgotten person and experiences on the page.
- You can trust that the activity of writing will help the present you to collect and develop his thoughts. Usually, I start a journal entry by writing about some dream, memory, or recent event. In thinking about my reaction to the event, I wind up making a general observation about one of my own beliefs or characteristics. At that point, I forget the event and just go on a tangent about that general topic. An example would be "Steve was wearing a hat today. I don't like it when people wear hats. I think that hats are [insert thesis here]."
I wind up thinking deliberately about something that I've never paid much attention to before, and the act of constructing a written linear narrative forces me to be thorough and precise in a way that my mental narrative isn't. If the topic is some concept that's unrelated to me, then I'd say this helps me to form actual opinions about the world, and to be a more confident in my decision making. I'd also agree with what the post said about "preoccupations". And if the topic is myself, then I find that it somehow helps my self-esteem to look at myself from a distance. Everybody looks more graceful from the outside.
In trying to collect my thoughts on the original topic, I usually find myself making more claims about other interesting topics - and so I sometimes run out of time to write before I run out of things to write about. An example of this would be the claim that I just made - "everybody looks more graceful ...".
You can define custom translations keysym for some terminal emulators. I've done this in urxvt in order to free up C-j and C-S-[letter] combinations for my own use.
urxvt will allow you to translate the Shift_L keycode into "(" or "()" or "i_love_hacker_news_<3". And it still does it's job as a modifier too. The only problem is that "i_love_hacker_news<3" will be output as soon as the press event is received, so you'll output "(" even when you press shift as part of a chord.
You can write perl scripts in urxvt that can capture X keyboard events, and maybe your script could only output "(" if it detects that no intermediate X event was detected between the press and the release of "(".
I'm not totally sure that you get THAT much info from urxvt, but it's the best approach that I know of. As an alternative, maybe you could write a program to intercept X events before they reach the terminal (and/or any other program).
That's about as far as I care to go right now.
Let me know if you get something working, I'd be interested in using it too.
For me, container_of() is also indispensable. Although maybe it's on the level of 'errno' as being "not really a dirty macro".
Dr. Dobbs did a nice series on C99 features, so I'd recommend that as a supplement to K&R.
http://www.drdobbs.com/the-new-c-compound-literals/184401404
Given that Kernigham and Ritchie were using C to write an OS, it's not surprising that they'd be wary of dynamic allocations.
I just want to emphasize this point, as this is the main advantage in my eyes.
"We're sorry, but something went wrong."