> I also feel that rude and obscene parodies are not good, and could hurt the real Dilbert.
That is often the POINT of a parody. If you find something banal or offensive to your sensibilities, a parody is an excellent way to express your dislike. It can be offensive, sick, stupid and annoying. It does NOT have to be "funny".
> I like the way the folks at the site seem to be taking this very well.
I disagree. The right to parody is not a small thing. Just one more step taken against ALL of our freedoms. Taking down OLGA and the lyric servers were also small steps. Making cddb proprietory was another small step.
Here I thought that I was extremely productive when I scrapped a 1,000+ line program written by a predecessor and rewrote it in under 100 lines. I guess programmers who reuse code are less productive than then brute-force coders.
> By withholding a commodity (money, sex, opinions...) to induce a certain response, you have forced compliance.
Whoa! Hold on... You're saying that if I pay someone for a candy bar, that I am "forcing" them to give me the candy bar???
So we don't have a "volunteer" army because we "pay" the soldiers.
The RMS definition of "freedom" means being able to do stuff without any attempt to stop you with the force of law or the barrel of a gun. Most people would agree that "freedom" means being able to advocate whatever you want so long as you do not impose your will with a lawyer or a gun.
You can't say RMS is a hypocrite because he he says he supports "freedom" but violates YOUR definition of "freedom" and "force".
If you really wanna play that game, then you are also a hypocrite. After all, I read your opinion and I had to think about it (ie I was FORCED to think about it).
I think that some people don't understand that Open Source and Freedom include the freedom to bicker in public. If people think that this will spell the end of Open Source, then they are sadly mistaken. Even MicroSoft has engaged in public disputes or, worse, private disputes that were made public.
Public debates are our strength, even if they are sometimes childish. If we are afraid of letting others know how we feel, then we'd best shutdown/. now.
Gnu is an acronym for Gnu's Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns ("Unix" is trademarked by AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't.
RMS has not once "forced" anyone to call it GNU/Linux. He may scream, shout, yell, and refuse to talk to you if you don't, but those are all freedoms themselves.
The day RMS hires a lawyer and starts to impose his will with some type of power will be the day he is a hypocrite. Until then, he's free to act as he likes.
The real disservice going on here is the notion that telling someone your opinion is in some way related to force.
You are free to put things like "Please don't use this software to do things I don't like" and it could still be free software. But if it says "This license forbids you to do the things I don't like," it is no longer free.
I don't think it's an "ego" thing. RMS is an idealist, and his major ideal is freedom. He wants people to call it GNU/Linux because he wants people to be thinking about Freedom. He hasn't proposed RMS/Linux. It's important not because he wants the world to think he's a great guy but because he wants the world to *believe* in Free software.
First, I remember an article on/. that advocated the BSD thing. I didn't think anyone really took it seriously and, as far as I know, no one has bothered to actually do any of that. What a waste of time it would be. Anyone that wasted years doing that would be, IMO, far more irrational than Stallman at his worst. I mean, when RMS rewrote everything, it was to make it Free and Better. This BSD thing would be 5 years of effort just so you could spit in RMS's face. And I don't think he'd even care.
Second, egcs stands for Experimental GNU Compiler System, so you'll have to do better than that to purge GNU.
Third, the Perl thing has nothing to do with the GNU/Linux debate. The motivation is to stop relying on system commands in perl scripts, so you don't have to worry if something is in/usr/bin or/bin or/usr/local/bin or whatever. This is a worthy goal in and of itself, in that it will make perl code more portable. Tcl, for example, already does this.
Finally, even if you could purge your system of all GNU tools, you'd still owe everything you have to GNU for making it possible in the first place.
This is discussed in RFC2555 (y'know, the topic of this whole discussion):
We did, however, start to put online some of the early RFCs, including RFC 1. We weren't sure whether we were going to try to make them look as close to the typewritten originals as possible, or to make a few adjustments and format them according to the latest RFC style. Those of you who still have your copies of RFC 1 will note the concessions we made to NROFF the online version. The hand-drawn diagrams of the early RFCs also present interesting challenges for conversion into ASCII format.
I've liked all of the mod improvements, until this. I clicked on a couple a folks with a default greater than 1 and found the majority of their recent comments (prior to this change) right at 1. And, for the most part, they were typical comments. Nothing amazing, but not off topic or rude or "first" or anything. With the newest changes, high-rated & nested comments spill out. This means someone else thought that the *comment* was really something people should look at (and I mostly agreed). But now it's the poster that will stick out, regardless of what he says now. It's a step backwards.
If you really MUST base something on reputation, make it separate and parallel from the comment ratings. I can then set my preferences for posters ranked at 5 to spill out and comments at 3 to spill. I could sort by poster, comment, date, etc.
My only other question is... what about AC? Does his reputation remain at 0, or will he eventually be knocked down to -1? Doesn't seem fair to knock AC down since it's not one person, and it seems even worse to knock identified posters have anything lower than AC.
Again, kudos to all the other great changes, but please consider this one a bit more...
First, it sounds like you were still using Tcl 7, not Tcl 8 (which no longer thinks the whole world is a string).
Second, there seems to be a great deal of evidence that Tcl/Tk can handle its own in the real world. Scriptics ( www.scriptics.com) maintains a collection of success stories.
Tcl's main advantage is the ability to prototype extremely quickly. It was originally designed as a "glue" language, but has been far more useful than just that. If you find some aspect that is too slow, you can recode that module into C or C++ (or even java for cross-platform purposes) and link it in.
Tcl is also widely used in QA test automation. Many web sites use it as a back end. NBC presented a paper at the Tcl/Tk conference detailing how they use Tcl/Tk to deliver satellite feeds to affiliates (they originally planned to just do the prototype in Tcl and recode later, but found that they only had to replace a small number of modules).
I took a tutorial from McClennan at last years Tcl/Tk conference that covered client/server apps in Tcl. It was the single most useful aspect of that whole conference. The tutorial was designed around the client/server chapter of the book and I bought the book as a result. The best Tcl/Tk book I've seen.
McClennan (author of [incr Tcl], founder of Tcl Consortium) was one of the most highly motivated and driven people I met at the conference. He ran more tutorials (one for each session) than anyone else there, ran the "Game Show" (including writing the software for it), and was also a conference co-chair.
He nows his stuff and, just as important, he know how to explain it.
The question is NOT whether Dvorak is a superior key layout at all. The article in question is about market failure and economic effeciency. It merely points out that simply because Dvorak didn't take off does not imply that the market is broken. The relative benefits of Dvorak vs. the costs of transitioning are questionable. Dvorak, although probably superior, is not the second coming of Christ and is not in the interest of the vast majority of ecomomic players to convert to. It may well be a good idea for individuals to cutover, but it is not an imperative.
I disagree with the authors unrelated assertion that MicroSoft is not a monopolist (or, more accurately, that they do not violate the anti-trust laws by using their position to lock out competition). The MicroSoft/QWERTY analogy is simply a bogus one. MicroSoft was not the "first", but rather became entrenched because, at one time, they offered a superior product at a better price. It wasn't an original idea, and it wasn't the best implementation, but it worked on the prevailing architecture at a reasonable price. The problem with MicroSoft is not that they can't be displaced because they were there first, but because they engage in unfair practices vis a vis their relationships with OEMs and by leveraging their current product.
In the case of QWERTY, there is no mega-corp forcing that all computers must pay the QWERTY corp for their keyboards (even if not being used); QWERTY does not go around buying out competitors; QWERTY has not expanded its market share by tying the keyboard to a 2-button mouse. The only assertion is that QWERTY won because it was there first and can't be displaced. I say that it's not a valid argument. It won its place in the market in the first case, and has simply not shown to be worth more than the cost to replace it.
*If* the only advantage of Linux were that it stayed up 1 day longer than NT and only costs a few dollars more, would it be worth it to replace NT? Surely no. Linux is vastly superior to NT in both quality and cost. On the desktop, Linux is still evolving (Dvorak is not). There is still a transitioning cost, and that must be paid out over time. The difference between Linux and Dvorak is that Linux actually IS making headway into the NT market, and most people are pretty sure that in the next few years it will do the same on the desktop. But we do still have to fear MicroSoft, not because they were "there first," but because of the lines of attack outlined in the Halloween memos (which unfairly discounts FUD as a valid MS tactic).
The argument is that QWERTY won because it was there first... just like Beta.
Free Market Principles and The Economist
on
The Myth of QWERTY
·
· Score: 1
Note that Beta was first, unlike Dvorak. The supposed "market failure" of Beta, if it was indeed a failure, was not the same implied by the Dvorak failure.
But none of this makes the putative superiority of the Dvorak layout a fable or myth!
The superiority is NOT the myth in question. The fable that Liebowitz and Margolis refute is that the acceptance of QWERTY is a market failure.
In all, it's actually a pretty dry topic outside of economics, but the hacker aspects of Dvorak seems to have really incensed passions.
I would gladly wager that, if better studies are performed, the Dvorak layout will be found objectively better for anyone who touch-types regularly.
Well, I wouldn't take that wager. Dvorak might easily win such a contest. But *until* it does, it doesn't make economic sense for it to be adopted as a new standard.
Further, even if it were superior, the real question is HOW MUCH more superior is it, and HOW MUCH it will cost to convert.
Evidence already exists to suggest that the improvements simply won't be too great over the entire population. QWERTY gained early acceptance while there were plenty of opportunities to produce a "better" system before it became standard, and so it is questionable just how much better Dvorak could be.
Changes in language, the original article argues, are fairly common and do not impose high costs. But changing the definition of an inch could be extremely expensive. To do so, all for marginal and unproven gains, are not economically effecient.
But when you switched, you were training for speed. Of course you can type faster... you trained yourself to. The real question is what your speed would have been like if you started on Dvorak. If you had retrained to almost any new keyboard, you probably could have beaten your original speed. In fact, I'd bet a four-week refresher course on QWERTY would benefit just about everyone...
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> I also feel that rude and obscene parodies are not good, and could hurt the real Dilbert.
That is often the POINT of a parody. If you find something banal or offensive to your sensibilities, a parody is an excellent way to express your dislike. It can be offensive, sick, stupid and annoying. It does NOT have to be "funny".
> I like the way the folks at the site seem to be taking this very well.
I disagree. The right to parody is not a small thing. Just one more step taken against ALL of our freedoms. Taking down OLGA and the lyric servers were also small steps. Making cddb proprietory was another small step.
How many small steps make a big one?
> That dilbert hole was nothing but a racist/homophobic 15 year old ...
Yeah! Free speech is only for people that agree with me!
Here I thought that I was extremely productive when I scrapped a 1,000+ line program written by a predecessor and rewrote it in under 100 lines. I guess programmers who reuse code are less productive than then brute-force coders.
vgetty can do this. Just add you your voice.conf:
/usr/local/bin/dtmf.sh
dtmf_program
/usr/local/bin/dtmf.sh will get called with all the numbers you typed.
> By withholding a commodity (money, sex, opinions...) to induce a certain response, you have forced compliance.
Whoa! Hold on... You're saying that if I pay someone for a candy bar, that I am "forcing" them to give me the candy bar???
So we don't have a "volunteer" army because we "pay" the soldiers.
The RMS definition of "freedom" means being able to do stuff without any attempt to stop you with the force of law or the barrel of a gun. Most people would agree that "freedom" means being able to advocate whatever you want so long as you do not impose your will with a lawyer or a gun.
You can't say RMS is a hypocrite because he he says he supports "freedom" but violates YOUR definition of "freedom" and "force".
If you really wanna play that game, then you are also a hypocrite. After all, I read your opinion and I had to think about it (ie I was FORCED to think about it).
Public debates are our strength, even if they are sometimes childish. If we are afraid of letting others know how we feel, then we'd best shutdown /. now.
Gnu is an acronym for Gnu's Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns ("Unix" is trademarked by AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't.
RMS has not once "forced" anyone to call it GNU/Linux. He may scream, shout, yell, and refuse to talk to you if you don't, but those are all freedoms themselves.
The day RMS hires a lawyer and starts to impose his will with some type of power will be the day he is a hypocrite. Until then, he's free to act as he likes.
The real disservice going on here is the notion that telling someone your opinion is in some way related to force.
You are free to put things like "Please don't use this software to do things I don't like" and it could still be free software. But if it says "This license forbids you to do the things I don't like," it is no longer free.
I don't think it's an "ego" thing. RMS is an idealist, and his major ideal is freedom. He wants people to call it GNU/Linux because he wants people to be thinking about Freedom. He hasn't proposed RMS/Linux. It's important not because he wants the world to think he's a great guy but because he wants the world to *believe* in Free software.
First, I remember an article on /. that advocated the BSD thing. I didn't think anyone really took it seriously and, as far as I know, no one has bothered to actually do any of that. What a waste of time it would be. Anyone that wasted years doing that would be, IMO, far more irrational than Stallman at his worst. I mean, when RMS rewrote everything, it was to make it Free and Better. This BSD thing would be 5 years of effort just so you could spit in RMS's face. And I don't think he'd even care.
/usr/bin or /bin or /usr/local/bin or whatever. This is a worthy goal in and of itself, in that it will make perl code more portable. Tcl, for example, already does this.
Second, egcs stands for Experimental GNU Compiler System, so you'll have to do better than that to purge GNU.
Third, the Perl thing has nothing to do with the GNU/Linux debate. The motivation is to stop relying on system commands in perl scripts, so you don't have to worry if something is in
Finally, even if you could purge your system of all GNU tools, you'd still owe everything you have to GNU for making it possible in the first place.
We did, however, start to put online some of the early RFCs, including RFC 1. We weren't sure whether we were going to try to make them look as close to the typewritten originals as possible, or to make a few adjustments and format them according to the latest RFC style. Those of you who still have your copies of RFC 1 will note the concessions we made to NROFF the online version. The hand-drawn diagrams of the early RFCs also present interesting challenges for conversion into ASCII format.
Not a GNU/Linux fan since '84, just Linux!
Compared to the ZDNet article, Al Gore doesn't look so bad after all...
I heard that when he met Courtney Love, he told her he really liked her band, Hole. She asked him to name one song. He couldn't.
I've liked all of the mod improvements, until this. I clicked on a couple a folks with a default greater than 1 and found the majority of their recent comments (prior to this change) right at 1. And, for the most part, they were typical comments. Nothing amazing, but not off topic or rude or "first" or anything. With the newest changes, high-rated & nested comments spill out. This means someone else thought that the *comment* was really something people should look at (and I mostly agreed). But now it's the poster that will stick out, regardless of what he says now. It's a step backwards.
If you really MUST base something on reputation, make it separate and parallel from the comment ratings. I can then set my preferences for posters ranked at 5 to spill out and comments at 3 to spill. I could sort by poster, comment, date, etc.
My only other question is... what about AC? Does his reputation remain at 0, or will he eventually be knocked down to -1? Doesn't seem fair to knock AC down since it's not one person, and it seems even worse to knock identified posters have anything lower than AC.
Again, kudos to all the other great changes, but please consider this one a bit more...
Alpha??? It's in production, v.1.2 already.
Second, there seems to be a great deal of evidence that Tcl/Tk can handle its own in the real world. Scriptics ( www.scriptics.com) maintains a collection of success stories.
Tcl's main advantage is the ability to prototype extremely quickly. It was originally designed as a "glue" language, but has been far more useful than just that. If you find some aspect that is too slow, you can recode that module into C or C++ (or even java for cross-platform purposes) and link it in.
Tcl is also widely used in QA test automation. Many web sites use it as a back end. NBC presented a paper at the Tcl/Tk conference detailing how they use Tcl/Tk to deliver satellite feeds to affiliates (they originally planned to just do the prototype in Tcl and recode later, but found that they only had to replace a small number of modules).
I took a tutorial from McClennan at last years Tcl/Tk conference that covered client/server apps in Tcl. It was the single most useful aspect of that whole conference. The tutorial was designed around the client/server chapter of the book and I bought the book as a result. The best Tcl/Tk book I've seen.
McClennan (author of [incr Tcl], founder of Tcl Consortium) was one of the most highly motivated and driven people I met at the conference. He ran more tutorials (one for each session) than anyone else there, ran the "Game Show" (including writing the software for it), and was also a conference co-chair.
He nows his stuff and, just as important, he know how to explain it.
The question is NOT whether Dvorak is a superior key layout at all. The article in question is about market failure and economic effeciency. It merely points out that simply because Dvorak didn't take off does not imply that the market is broken. The relative benefits of Dvorak vs. the costs of transitioning are questionable. Dvorak, although probably superior, is not the second coming of Christ and is not in the interest of the vast majority of ecomomic players to convert to. It may well be a good idea for individuals to cutover, but it is not an imperative.
I disagree with the authors unrelated assertion that MicroSoft is not a monopolist (or, more accurately, that they do not violate the anti-trust laws by using their position to lock out competition). The MicroSoft/QWERTY analogy is simply a bogus one. MicroSoft was not the "first", but rather became entrenched because, at one time, they offered a superior product at a better price. It wasn't an original idea, and it wasn't the best implementation, but it worked on the prevailing architecture at a reasonable price. The problem with MicroSoft is not that they can't be displaced because they were there first, but because they engage in unfair practices vis a vis their relationships with OEMs and by leveraging their current product.
In the case of QWERTY, there is no mega-corp forcing that all computers must pay the QWERTY corp for their keyboards (even if not being used); QWERTY does not go around buying out competitors; QWERTY has not expanded its market share by tying the keyboard to a 2-button mouse. The only assertion is that QWERTY won because it was there first and can't be displaced. I say that it's not a valid argument. It won its place in the market in the first case, and has simply not shown to be worth more than the cost to replace it.
*If* the only advantage of Linux were that it stayed up 1 day longer than NT and only costs a few dollars more, would it be worth it to replace NT? Surely no. Linux is vastly superior to NT in both quality and cost. On the desktop, Linux is still evolving (Dvorak is not). There is still a transitioning cost, and that must be paid out over time. The difference between Linux and Dvorak is that Linux actually IS making headway into the NT market, and most people are pretty sure that in the next few years it will do the same on the desktop. But we do still have to fear MicroSoft, not because they were "there first," but because of the lines of attack outlined in the Halloween memos (which unfairly discounts FUD as a valid MS tactic).
So what you're basically saying is that you didn't read even one word of the article...
> "The benefit of Dvorak does not justify retraining of staffs", which is exactly a standard lock-in.
They make a distinction. If the benefit exceeded the costs and they *still* failed to switch, it would be an example of "lock-in" and market failure.
The argument is that QWERTY won because it was there first... just like Beta.
Note that Beta was first, unlike Dvorak. The supposed "market failure" of Beta, if it was indeed a failure, was not the same implied by the Dvorak failure.
The superiority is NOT the myth in question. The fable that Liebowitz and Margolis refute is that the acceptance of QWERTY is a market failure.
In all, it's actually a pretty dry topic outside of economics, but the hacker aspects of Dvorak seems to have really incensed passions.
I would gladly wager that, if better studies are performed, the Dvorak layout will be found objectively better for anyone who touch-types regularly.
Well, I wouldn't take that wager. Dvorak might easily win such a contest. But *until* it does, it doesn't make economic sense for it to be adopted as a new standard.
Further, even if it were superior, the real question is HOW MUCH more superior is it, and HOW MUCH it will cost to convert.
Evidence already exists to suggest that the improvements simply won't be too great over the entire population. QWERTY gained early acceptance while there were plenty of opportunities to produce a "better" system before it became standard, and so it is questionable just how much better Dvorak could be.
Changes in language, the original article argues, are fairly common and do not impose high costs. But changing the definition of an inch could be extremely expensive. To do so, all for marginal and unproven gains, are not economically effecient.
> it does not present any new facts, or any direct evidence that QWERTY is better or even as good as Dvorak.
...ignores the ergonomic benefits that many claim for Dvorak.
Well, they go even further than that. They argue that even if Dvorak is superior, it's still not effecient to convert to in the ABSENCE of proof.
>
The paper DOES address these (more recent) claims. It finds no evidence one way or the other. You don't assume something to be true without evidence.
> In the absence of conclusive scientific evidence, try the Dvorak layout yourself or talk to people who have.
And you will certainly find that the people who TRAINED for speed found they could type faster...
But when you switched, you were training for speed. Of course you can type faster... you trained yourself to. The real question is what your speed would have been like if you started on Dvorak. If you had retrained to almost any new keyboard, you probably could have beaten your original speed. In fact, I'd bet a four-week refresher course on QWERTY would benefit just about everyone...