"No, wait, Windows doesn't have a Unix VFS, so you can't attach things to arbitrary points on the filesystem, you have to use drive letters... and you don't even get symlinks to make up for it..."
"... I'd have to pick Java if it was up to me just because of its sheer elegance."
Beg pardon? Java? Elegant? Needlessly verbose, yes. Kludgy, yet strangely popular, yes. Omnipresent, nearly. But elegant? Not hardly. It's got a bunch of interesting hooks into it's own execution environment, sure, but that's some far cry from elegance.
LOL! Needless to say, I disagree; I think that focusing efforts on improving the Unix house of cards is a pointless waste of effort. How anyone can defend (for instance) flattening data to a stream of bytes, the farcical security model, and the reliance on a C api is beyond me. On the gripping hand, plenty of smart people do, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Absolutely. The greatest thing about Vance is his quality of his language; I'd hazard to say that he is the only author science fiction has yet produced with a voice that transcends his genre. He is, in short, our greatest science fiction/writer/.
He'll outlast the hacks, like Heinlein, Stephenson, and Asimov, because he writes great stories that just happen to be set in future cultures. His only genre peers are Gibson and Dick, in my opinion, both of whom will also be read and enjoyed in fifty years.
The big bonus with Ion, though (speaking as a long-time Ion user) is that all the window management functions are available through the keyboard: you never have to take your hands off the keyboard to open a new window, rearrange your desktop, launch new programs, etc. And Ion includes multiple workspaces; I usually have six or seven going at once.
I don't know if I'd say that Ion is the "future" of anything; for me, however, it's made the difference between being able to continue working and hand surgery.
Holy cow. That's the most beautifully crazy thing I think I've yet read.
However, I have to think that the Amiga people are at least comparably loony. And I once had a Mac advocate explain why his black and white Macintosh was "better" than a color one. Truly, a nutball.
Almost totally correct, except for the "nice hardware" bit. Sun kit has been crap for years, and is getting crappier. Underperformant, overpriced garbage. Sure, it's can be more reliable than most x86 stuff (albeit nowhere near as powerful), but that's not saying much when the systems can cost upwards of a half-million dollars, is it?
Sun is getting their nuts squeezed, by the rampaging horde of micros at the bottom and by IBM at the top. As the farcical mistakes mount (no ECC on the US3 caches? Ha ha ha ha ha!), Sun will hopefully slip into irrelevance. Good riddance!
What madness is this? The SoundBlaster Live is a piece of shit, always has been, always will be. Audio quality blows, adherence to hardware standards blows, drivers in Windows blow.
If you need the nifty break-out box, buy a Hercules Game Theater XP; if not, get a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Both are supported under FreeBSD, so I'd imagine that Linux can run 'em; neither resamples all your sounds to 48khz, unlike the Creative garbage.
No comments on the rest of the purchases, even though some (a 5400 rpm drive?) are particularly mindless.
You've completely missed the point. In a competently designed language, equality and assignment wouldn't be so easy to intermingle. For instance, (eq a b) doesn't look very much like (setf a b), does it?
Magic? The omnipresent heavyhanded marketing "magic"? The softshoe blackface minstrel show "magic"? The Pepsi tie-in "magic"? The endless pedantic exposition "magic"?
Lucas is a 100% talent-free hack, the movie was as diverting as reading the fine print on a Taco Bell placemat, and any editing applied to that turgid, craptacular "entertainment" would be greeted with hosannahs of welcome, although, in truth, having lost two damn hours of my summer to Lucas' "vision" (doubtless of the $1000 bills he lights his cigars with), I'm off the teenage hypertrophied wish-fulfillment fascist-allegory space-operas for good. Until, that is, Part II.
> I'd be curious to see how articulate she is speaking off the cuff.
Who knows? What is undeniably true, however, is that she cribbed most of that speech from Steve Albini's "The Problem With Music," originally published in Maximum Rock and Roll in 1994, IIRC.
You're right on the money about Metallica, too. If people actually read what Ulrich said, he makes a lot of intelligent, reasoned points that the pro-Napster crowd just ignores.
It just doesn't get any better than Vance. He's the one true master prose stylist that the genres of science fiction and fantasy have produced;; only Dick comes within spitting distance. Vance's Lyonesse trilogy , for instance, is the equal of the Lord Of The Rings in grandeur, but much less turgid and unpleasant a read.
Much of Vance is out of print, sadly, although there is a project to reprint all of his books in a limited-run collector's edition -- check out http://www.vanceintegral.com
A pleasant surprise, to see a Vance review on Slashdot.
Scheme is much prettier than CL; it's breathtaking in its conceptual purity. And it's the foundation for the best book on programming ever written.
One of the strengths of CL is that it has a large and comprehensive standard library, and tons of clever bits that make a working programmer's life easier.
Slashdot Mirror
"No, wait, Windows doesn't have a Unix VFS, so you can't attach things to arbitrary points on the filesystem, you have to use drive letters... and you don't even get symlinks to make up for it..."
Wrong on both counts.
(jfb)
"... I'd have to pick Java if it was up to me just because of its sheer elegance."
Beg pardon? Java? Elegant? Needlessly verbose, yes. Kludgy, yet strangely popular, yes. Omnipresent, nearly. But elegant? Not hardly. It's got a bunch of interesting hooks into it's own execution environment, sure, but that's some far cry from elegance.
Ick.
(jfb)
LOL! Needless to say, I disagree; I think that focusing efforts on improving the Unix house of cards is a pointless waste of effort. How anyone can defend (for instance) flattening data to a stream of bytes, the farcical security model, and the reliance on a C api is beyond me. On the gripping hand, plenty of smart people do, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Oh well.
Peace,
(jfb)
Who said anything about the shell? I'm including the whole Unix shell concept in the "laughably primitive" category.
Peace,
(jfb)
Absolutely. The greatest thing about Vance is his quality of his language; I'd hazard to say that he is the only author science fiction has yet produced with a voice that transcends his genre. He is, in short, our greatest science fiction /writer/.
He'll outlast the hacks, like Heinlein, Stephenson, and Asimov, because he writes great stories that just happen to be set in future cultures. His only genre peers are Gibson and Dick, in my opinion, both of whom will also be read and enjoyed in fifty years.
Peace,
(jfb)
Spaces are perfectly illegal filename characters -- it's just that the laughably primitive Unix tools aren't smart enough to understand them.
Peace,
(jfb)
Way more powerful, a vastly better development platform, etc., etc., etc. Squashed by "Worse is better."
Peace,
(jfb)
The big bonus with Ion, though (speaking as a long-time Ion user) is that all the window management functions are available through the keyboard: you never have to take your hands off the keyboard to open a new window, rearrange your desktop, launch new programs, etc. And Ion includes multiple workspaces; I usually have six or seven going at once.
I don't know if I'd say that Ion is the "future" of anything; for me, however, it's made the difference between being able to continue working and hand surgery.
Peace,
(jfb)
Holy cow. That's the most beautifully crazy thing I think I've yet read.
However, I have to think that the Amiga people are at least comparably loony. And I once had a Mac advocate explain why his black and white Macintosh was "better" than a color one. Truly, a nutball.
(jfb)
Almost totally correct, except for the "nice hardware" bit. Sun kit has been crap for years, and is getting crappier. Underperformant, overpriced garbage. Sure, it's can be more reliable than most x86 stuff (albeit nowhere near as powerful), but that's not saying much when the systems can cost upwards of a half-million dollars, is it?
Sun is getting their nuts squeezed, by the rampaging horde of micros at the bottom and by IBM at the top. As the farcical mistakes mount (no ECC on the US3 caches? Ha ha ha ha ha!), Sun will hopefully slip into irrelevance. Good riddance!
Peace,
(jfb)
What madness is this? The SoundBlaster Live is a piece of shit, always has been, always will be. Audio quality blows, adherence to hardware standards blows, drivers in Windows blow.
If you need the nifty break-out box, buy a Hercules Game Theater XP; if not, get a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Both are supported under FreeBSD, so I'd imagine that Linux can run 'em; neither resamples all your sounds to 48khz, unlike the Creative garbage.
No comments on the rest of the purchases, even though some (a 5400 rpm drive?) are particularly mindless.
(jfb)
All the more reason to use it, in my mind.
(jfb)
PS: This 20 second wait to post misfeature is laughably stupid.
Get the source, then download the cygwin toolkit and build it for yourself. Works for me.
(jfb)
Yeah, FDR had no qualms about his (admittedly prevalent at the time) anti-Japanese bigotry, even before the war.
(jfb)
You've completely missed the point. In a competently designed language, equality and assignment wouldn't be so easy to intermingle. For instance, (eq a b) doesn't look very much like (setf a b), does it?
(jfb)
Magic? The omnipresent heavyhanded marketing "magic"? The softshoe blackface minstrel show "magic"? The Pepsi tie-in "magic"? The endless pedantic exposition "magic"?
Lucas is a 100% talent-free hack, the movie was as diverting as reading the fine print on a Taco Bell placemat, and any editing applied to that turgid, craptacular "entertainment" would be greeted with hosannahs of welcome, although, in truth, having lost two damn hours of my summer to Lucas' "vision" (doubtless of the $1000 bills he lights his cigars with), I'm off the teenage hypertrophied wish-fulfillment fascist-allegory space-operas for good. Until, that is, Part II.
Peace,
(jfb)
Linkage:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
And it was published in The Baffler, rather than MRR.
HTH,
(jfb)
> I'd be curious to see how articulate she is speaking off the cuff.
Who knows? What is undeniably true, however, is that she cribbed most of that speech from Steve Albini's "The Problem With Music," originally published in Maximum Rock and Roll in 1994, IIRC.
You're right on the money about Metallica, too. If people actually read what Ulrich said, he makes a lot of intelligent, reasoned points that the pro-Napster crowd just ignores.
Peace,
(jfb)
It just doesn't get any better than Vance. He's the one true master prose stylist that the genres of science fiction and fantasy have produced;; only Dick comes within spitting distance. Vance's Lyonesse trilogy , for instance, is the equal of the Lord Of The Rings in grandeur, but much less turgid and unpleasant a read.
Much of Vance is out of print, sadly, although there is a project to reprint all of his books in a limited-run collector's edition -- check out http://www.vanceintegral.com
A pleasant surprise, to see a Vance review on Slashdot.
Peace,
(jfb)
Same way at Chicago when I was there. Taught out of SICP, and man, was it tough.
Peace,
(jfb)
> except for the people who want to know the truth value of the empty list.
Well, *I* thought it was funny.
Peace,
(jfb)
I absolutely agree with you, of course. Different tools for different jobs.
(jfb)
"The Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs," Abelson, Sussman and Sussman.
(jfb)
Scheme is much prettier than CL; it's breathtaking in its conceptual purity. And it's the foundation for the best book on programming ever written.
One of the strengths of CL is that it has a large and comprehensive standard library, and tons of clever bits that make a working programmer's life easier.
In other words, learn them both!
Peace,
(jfb)
One could argue that Unix has set computing back 30 years, as well.
*pulls on flame-retardent underwear*
(jfb)