One final note - just because you feel evolution has made you an omnivore (which is a very debatable point...)
Sorry, it's not a debatable point. No reputable biologist would agree with you there. For instance: open your mouth -- what kind of teeth do you have? How about the mouth to anus length of the digestive tract? We have a relatively simple digestion -- not as simple as a dog, much more like a bear, nothing at all like that of a cow or rabbit.
We could all probably stand to eat less meat (we're omnivores, after all, not true carnivores), but there's no debate that nature designed us to be scavengers. Certainly there are legitimate moral reasons not to eat meat, to say nothing of the health benefits that can accrue from vegetarianism, but to try and pretend that we're not physiologically omnivores is intellectually dishonest, and just plain wrong.
Or my Newton, actually. I think that there's a great abundance of interesting systems stuff in the Newton OS that was unfortunately lost due to a Jobsian ego-storm.
I'd love to have a desktop OS that recycled some of those Newton ideas.
Mozilla/Netscape isn't going to be a perfectly good browser unless it conforms, to a certain degree, to the expectations of the user community. These expectations are different on different platforms, needless to say.
Netscape PR1/Mozilla M* is a hideous rancid sack of garbage on the Mac -- and there's no relief in sight. It doesn't act right, it doesn't look right, and it doesn't work right, no matter how many elite internet standard buzzwords it implements 110%.
Given that the state of the release is pre-pre-pre-alpha, one could live with the crashes, and the lockups, and the weird misbehaviors; it's the complete and/willful/ failure to act like any other application in the known Mac universe that spells doom for Mozilla as a mainstream product.
It's not as simple as saying, "oh those pig-ignorant bigots on the Mac; they're just too unsophisticated to truly comprehend the majesty of Mozilla." The interface is the content, and the Mozilla interface is a disaster. And the other disaster? That there's no roadmap for improving the things that are so profoundly broken in Mozilla, and more people are going to turn their back on an Open Source project for the vastly superior product from MICROS~1.
But Linux isn't the comparison that the original poster made: the X Box isn't competing with Linux (or any other desktop system). It's intended to compete with the consoles, which operate in a fundamentally different manner.
And it's why the X Box is doomed to fail. Why should/anyone/ want to use SomeDesktopOS on a box that has to operate functionally identically as my N64 -- meaning, no patches, no upgrades, no no no nothing; just turn it on and play.
Much as I hate to admit it, Internet Explorer is the browser to beat, largely because of M$'s [illegal?] bundling of it with the OS
Funny, IE for the Mac is a/totally/ superior product to Navigator, and there's no OS bundling going on there. Microsoft has (finally?) produced a quality product, in IE 4.5 for the Mac, and this should be the baseline for Mozilla to shoot at.
I build a new Mozilla out of CVS every couple of days on my Linux box at work, and it's getting very much better than it used to be. Soon it will surpass the (wretchedly bad) Navigator 4.x in functionality, and I can switch over for my daily work. The Mozilla team is to be commended for producing a workable, complex piece of software.
That said, it's still unusable for me -- I can't abide by the software crashing every 10 minutes or so. And it sadly looks like the Mozilla team is shooting at doing nothing better than replacing the state of the art from two years ago.
Why is are precious tuits being spent on replicating the worst parts of the comically inept Communicator? Why is there a mail/news client? Why is there a html editor? Neither of those two components address the true problem with the Free Software universe (at least as regards to web parity with the non-Free platforms): web browsing.
In addition, it'd be nice to see the adaptability of iCab, in particular, the excellent support for cookie management and content filtering. A free browser that did NOTHING BUT BROWSE would be huge huge winnage.
I think that the warning on the openssh.com page is a little out of line:
NOTE: If you reached this web site via www.OpenSSH.ORG, please realize that OpenSSH.COM is the correct address, and that OpenSSH.ORG is owned by a domain squatter (Alex de Joode of Zedz.net) who allocated the domain after he saw us first use the name, and
probably collects information about those who visit the page before forwarding it to here. Also,please do not mail to us at openssh.ORG, since he also receives that mail.
(Emphasis mine) Don't know much (or care much) about the situation, but that's a pretty fair accusation of one of the nastiest hot-button issues around. I'd call it harsh.
Funny, I had to cut and paste that quote... Cut and paste in X works better then in any other system I have used just because all you have to do is block, and middle click, no keyboard shortcuts needed, no menus.
To me, this is a weakness; what if you want to paste over a selection? Whoops, there goes my previous selection. What if you don't want to move your fingers off the keyboard? Tough. That's bad design.
But the problem is more fundamental; on a Mac (circa 1984!), I can copy anything to the clipboard and paste it into any other application that understands that data type. This is the cut and paste capability that X based GUIs lack.
Who cares about colorspace management? I dont. Color displays correctly, thats all I care about.
Fair enough; but there are plenty of applications that will never end up on Linux because color doesn't display correctly. A modern GUI ought to include this, but as was noted below, it is a political and not a technical issue.
Yeah, where is it? I dont see that anywhere else either, is it really important? It isnt to me...
Next has been implemented on DPS since day one. Maybe you like bitmaps. That's still no excuse not to use a modern architecture for your drawing engine.
Thats something else X does better then Windows or MacOS, it allows you to use different font engine servers, over a network even.
And those fonts are still 1 bit deep. Where's the antialiasing?
Its called PostScript....
And you're using it where? Which X server on Linux is implemented on DPS? No, no: don't be bashful. Speak up!
They seem quite usable to me and many other people, who are you to say they aren't?
Ok, yes, that was a cheap shot. And I use Sawmill at work -- because I need to open remote terminals. But the Linux-centric obsession with themes is indicative of the problem: focus neuroticaly on the surface of the problem, ignore the remainder. There's nothing against themes per se, as long as the GUI itself is properly implemented.
You're missing the point: what he's saying is that Mac OS X marries the best of two worlds; the user interface research at Apple (although this is currently a topic of some debate) and the power of a modern Unix.
The reason it would take off is that it wouldn't be shackled by X; that it has a functional and useful user interface.
Unix goes nowhere on the desktop until X goes away.
The fatal flaw in your argument is that X, in itself, is the user interface. Of course you are quite wrong.
This is the standard X apologist's canard, and it's nonsense. The problems with the X based GUI are/fundamental/ to the current implementation of X, and no window manager that you chose to run on it will overcome those, no matter how flash the "skins" are.
Where's the cut and paste? Where's the colorspace management? Where's the font handling? Where's the vectorized graphics engine? Where's the unified print/display model? This stuff isn't mysterious; it's been available for years.
X does one thing well: open terminals on remote machines. That the GNOME/KDE folks have built something that implements about 10% of a modern GUI is commendable. Themable window managers, however, are not a replacement for usable ones.
You can stop dreaming, it'll never happen.
You're right about Mac OS X for Intel, though, which is a shame; the current DP runs like a champ and shows what a modern Unix can do when connected to a/real/ user interface.
$x->{'y'} versus x.y -- and let's not forget about x.__class__=mypackage.MyClass. Can you even do the latter in perl?
Yeah, use bless. But your point is well taken. Perl's OO stuff is pretty much roll-your-own, which is great except when it sucks. I love Perl, but at times it's so crufty that I immediately revert to Scheme.
I admit that perhaps I'm not the swiftest perl programmer ever, but it is certainly not that easy to make a data structure which is a list of strings, hashes of strings and lists, and lists of lists in perl
The syntax is fairly clean, I think (although it does look much nicer when properly indented and formatted), although accessing it can be uglier:
$bar = $x->[ 2 ]->{ e }->[ 1 ]; # yields 'g'
One striking thing about Perl that I haven't seen in other language communities is the ease with which experienced programmers almost unconciously create personal dialects of the language. This is great for writing code, much less great for, say, fixing it. There are so many weird tricks possible, such a rich idiom, that it's natural to recycle exceptionally clever bits, sometimes (often?) to the detriment of readibility
In any event, both languages are fun to code in, and can certainly peacefully co-exist.
Modern facsism as a coherent ideology is the aggressive opposition to civil liberties combined with a blind adherence to corporatist ideology. A twenty-first century fascist is someone who will unhesitatingly put the profits of Bayer^WNews Corp before the expressed desires of the civic corpus. Those who will gladly suborn the expressed will of their citizens in favor of the desires of anti-democratic multinational organizations. Those who, say, happily lick the boots of the barbarian Chinese or Indonesian governments whilst simultaneously sheparding through their supposedly representative legislatures police-state laws designed to eliminate the voices of any and all opposition.
Blair fits/this/ bill nicely. Whether there can be corporatists who concern themselves with civil liberties is a question for another forum (I belive that there can't be, but I'd love to be proven wrong.)
Blair is terrifying. He's what Milosevic would be if he had an advanced industrial democracy to sell down the river. Or for that matter, what Gore or Bush would do, given one half the chance.
Yeah, it's always impressive to watch the PMQ from Westminister or Ottawa (thanks, C/SPAN).
As much as I dislike Blair (truly a fascist, one who's looking to sign rights away to the highest bidder -- much scarier than President Bubba) or Chretien, their ability to spar with the opposition, extemporaneously, is impressive.
I wish that we'd adopt a parlimentary system here in the US of A; sure, it'd be more representative and better able to adapt to the ridiculous nature of the American populace; mostly, however, I'd love to see our miserable shitbag have to answer to the Loyal Opposition sans pollsters and cue cards.
Let's not forget that what's happening here is normal pre-trial discovery, in the NWA suit against the flight attendants' union, accused of organizing "sick outs."
This isn't jackbooted stormtroopers kicking down people's doors to rip computers out of the hands of hapless NWA employees; it's/no different/ than the court collecting other forms of evidence, such as notebooks and whatnot. It's worth noting that the union lawyers did not object to this discovery, or attempt to have it stopped.
This is less of a privacy problem than perhaps most people realize. Of course, IANAL, and would love to hear what a lawyer might think about this. The spectre of a business doing this outside of the discovery process is far more frightening than this relatively harmless episode.
I found the Virtual Light trilogy quite enjoyable; he's definitely matured as a writer (even if he'll never be a Phil Dick), and the ideas are interesting.
Still, Gibson isn't much of a stylist, and I can certainly see why people aren't hot on him. I think that his vision of modern life is strong enough to carry the books past a certain (dreadfully?) predictability, but YMMV.
Try "Virtual Light," "Idoru" and "All Tomorrow's Parties" as a more facile expression of Gibson's abilities. People whose judgement I trust recommend "The Difference Engine" to me, but I detest the writing of Sterling and haven't had much motivation to check it out.
As far as SF goes, I'll take Vance or Silverberg over anyone writing today (or yesterday, or the day before...) And that of course says nothing about other fictions --- Poe and Borges both wrote what could be considered SF. But I digress.
Don't know what a cluth is, but if the driver lets off the clutch, he's an incompetent, as the trucks fitted with the big barbed hooks are almost all double clutched.
I used to be kind of down on Gibson, but I've learned to appreciate him, over the course of his last trilogy.
If you like the way Gibson writes, I highly recommend Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, two other writers who wrote fiction about their here and now.
The best thing about Gibson, of course, is that he lives in the best city in Northern America.
Not true. Well, one can't perhaps use the stock OT tools, but the Open Transport Advanced Tuner works just fine.
Whether this functionality ought to be bundled in the "Advanced" user setting in the TCP/IP controls or not (it should, of course) is another issue entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Merge
Touch & Go
Dischord
Jade Tree
... most all punk rock ('cause that's what I listen to.)
(jfb)
One final note - just because you feel evolution has made you an omnivore (which is a very debatable point ...)
Sorry, it's not a debatable point. No reputable biologist would agree with you there. For instance: open your mouth -- what kind of teeth do you have? How about the mouth to anus length of the digestive tract? We have a relatively simple digestion -- not as simple as a dog, much more like a bear, nothing at all like that of a cow or rabbit.
We could all probably stand to eat less meat (we're omnivores, after all, not true carnivores), but there's no debate that nature designed us to be scavengers. Certainly there are legitimate moral reasons not to eat meat, to say nothing of the health benefits that can accrue from vegetarianism, but to try and pretend that we're not physiologically omnivores is intellectually dishonest, and just plain wrong.
Best,
(jfb)
Whoa. Where'd you get a S1867? I'm dying for one of these bad boys ...
Curious,
(jfb)
Seems like there's a pretty clear clause there regarding the separation church and state; which is also to say nothing of 200 years of precedent.
Regards,
(jfb)
He's a hack, and worse, he waters down his liquor.
(jfb)
Or my Newton, actually. I think that there's a great abundance of interesting systems stuff in the Newton OS that was unfortunately lost due to a Jobsian ego-storm.
I'd love to have a desktop OS that recycled some of those Newton ideas.
Best,
(jfb)
Except of course that radio stations pay per song royalties back to the publishers.
Ta,
(jfb)
Like it's possible to eat too much cheese.
(jfb)
Mozilla/Netscape isn't going to be a perfectly good browser unless it conforms, to a certain degree, to the expectations of the user community. These expectations are different on different platforms, needless to say.
/willful/ failure to act like any other application in the known Mac universe that spells doom for Mozilla as a mainstream product.
Netscape PR1/Mozilla M* is a hideous rancid sack of garbage on the Mac -- and there's no relief in sight. It doesn't act right, it doesn't look right, and it doesn't work right, no matter how many elite internet standard buzzwords it implements 110%.
Given that the state of the release is pre-pre-pre-alpha, one could live with the crashes, and the lockups, and the weird misbehaviors; it's the complete and
It's not as simple as saying, "oh those pig-ignorant bigots on the Mac; they're just too unsophisticated to truly comprehend the majesty of Mozilla." The interface is the content, and the Mozilla interface is a disaster. And the other disaster? That there's no roadmap for improving the things that are so profoundly broken in Mozilla, and more people are going to turn their back on an Open Source project for the vastly superior product from MICROS~1.
(jfb)
But Linux isn't the comparison that the original poster made: the X Box isn't competing with Linux (or any other desktop system). It's intended to compete with the consoles, which operate in a fundamentally different manner.
/anyone/ want to use SomeDesktopOS on a box that has to operate functionally identically as my N64 -- meaning, no patches, no upgrades, no no no nothing; just turn it on and play.
And it's why the X Box is doomed to fail. Why should
(jfb)
Much as I hate to admit it, Internet Explorer is the browser to beat, largely because of M$'s [illegal?] bundling of it with the OS
/totally/ superior product to Navigator, and there's no OS bundling going on there. Microsoft has (finally?) produced a quality product, in IE 4.5 for the Mac, and this should be the baseline for Mozilla to shoot at.
.02$.
Funny, IE for the Mac is a
I build a new Mozilla out of CVS every couple of days on my Linux box at work, and it's getting very much better than it used to be. Soon it will surpass the (wretchedly bad) Navigator 4.x in functionality, and I can switch over for my daily work. The Mozilla team is to be commended for producing a workable, complex piece of software.
That said, it's still unusable for me -- I can't abide by the software crashing every 10 minutes or so. And it sadly looks like the Mozilla team is shooting at doing nothing better than replacing the state of the art from two years ago.
Why is are precious tuits being spent on replicating the worst parts of the comically inept Communicator? Why is there a mail/news client? Why is there a html editor? Neither of those two components address the true problem with the Free Software universe (at least as regards to web parity with the non-Free platforms): web browsing.
In addition, it'd be nice to see the adaptability of iCab, in particular, the excellent support for cookie management and content filtering. A free browser that did NOTHING BUT BROWSE would be huge huge winnage.
Just my
(jfb)
I think that the warning on the openssh.com page is a little out of line:
(Emphasis mine) Don't know much (or care much) about the situation, but that's a pretty fair accusation of one of the nastiest hot-button issues around. I'd call it harsh.
(jfb)
It doesn't and it oughtn't. It runs Tru64.
(jfb)
Funny, I had to cut and paste that quote... Cut and paste in X works better then in any other system I have used just because all you have to do is block, and middle click, no keyboard shortcuts needed, no menus.
To me, this is a weakness; what if you want to paste over a selection? Whoops, there goes my previous selection. What if you don't want to move your fingers off the keyboard? Tough. That's bad design.
But the problem is more fundamental; on a Mac (circa 1984!), I can copy anything to the clipboard and paste it into any other application that understands that data type. This is the cut and paste capability that X based GUIs lack.
Who cares about colorspace management? I dont. Color displays correctly, thats all I care about.
Fair enough; but there are plenty of applications that will never end up on Linux because color doesn't display correctly. A modern GUI ought to include this, but as was noted below, it is a political and not a technical issue.
Yeah, where is it? I dont see that anywhere else either, is it really important? It isnt to me...
Next has been implemented on DPS since day one. Maybe you like bitmaps. That's still no excuse not to use a modern architecture for your drawing engine.
Thats something else X does better then Windows or MacOS, it allows you to use different font engine servers, over a
network even.
And those fonts are still 1 bit deep. Where's the antialiasing?
Its called PostScript....
And you're using it where? Which X server on Linux is implemented on DPS? No, no: don't be bashful. Speak up!
They seem quite usable to me and many other people, who are you to say they aren't?
Ok, yes, that was a cheap shot. And I use Sawmill at work -- because I need to open remote terminals. But the Linux-centric obsession with themes is indicative of the problem: focus neuroticaly on the surface of the problem, ignore the remainder. There's nothing against themes per se, as long as the GUI itself is properly implemented.
(jfb)
You're missing the point: what he's saying is that Mac OS X marries the best of two worlds; the user interface research at Apple (although this is currently a topic of some debate) and the power of a modern Unix.
The reason it would take off is that it wouldn't be shackled by X; that it has a functional and useful user interface.
Unix goes nowhere on the desktop until X goes away.
(jfb)
The fatal flaw in your argument is that X, in itself, is the user interface. Of course you are quite wrong.
/fundamental/ to the current implementation of X, and no window manager that you chose to run on it will overcome those, no matter how flash the "skins" are.
/real/ user interface.
This is the standard X apologist's canard, and it's nonsense. The problems with the X based GUI are
Where's the cut and paste? Where's the colorspace management? Where's the font handling? Where's the vectorized graphics engine? Where's the unified print/display model? This stuff isn't mysterious; it's been available for years.
X does one thing well: open terminals on remote machines. That the GNOME/KDE folks have built something that implements about 10% of a modern GUI is commendable. Themable window managers, however, are not a replacement for usable ones.
You can stop dreaming, it'll never happen.
You're right about Mac OS X for Intel, though, which is a shame; the current DP runs like a champ and shows what a modern Unix can do when connected to a
(jfb)
Yeah, use bless. But your point is well taken. Perl's OO stuff is pretty much roll-your-own, which is great except when it sucks. I love Perl, but at times it's so crufty that I immediately revert to Scheme.
Well, actually, it's pretty straightforward:
The syntax is fairly clean, I think (although it does look much nicer when properly indented and formatted), although accessing it can be uglier:
One striking thing about Perl that I haven't seen in other language communities is the ease with which experienced programmers almost unconciously create personal dialects of the language. This is great for writing code, much less great for, say, fixing it. There are so many weird tricks possible, such a rich idiom, that it's natural to recycle exceptionally clever bits, sometimes (often?) to the detriment of readibility
In any event, both languages are fun to code in, and can certainly peacefully co-exist.
Cheers,
(jfb)Yes, he is.
/this/ bill nicely. Whether there can be corporatists who concern themselves with civil liberties is a question for another forum (I belive that there can't be, but I'd love to be proven wrong.)
Modern facsism as a coherent ideology is the aggressive opposition to civil liberties combined with a blind adherence to corporatist ideology. A twenty-first century fascist is someone who will unhesitatingly put the profits of Bayer^WNews Corp before the expressed desires of the civic corpus. Those who will gladly suborn the expressed will of their citizens in favor of the desires of anti-democratic multinational organizations. Those who, say, happily lick the boots of the barbarian Chinese or Indonesian governments whilst simultaneously sheparding through their supposedly representative legislatures police-state laws designed to eliminate the voices of any and all opposition.
Blair fits
Blair is terrifying. He's what Milosevic would be if he had an advanced industrial democracy to sell down the river. Or for that matter, what Gore or Bush would do, given one half the chance.
Living in fear,
(jfb)
Yeah, it's always impressive to watch the PMQ from Westminister or Ottawa (thanks, C/SPAN).
As much as I dislike Blair (truly a fascist, one who's looking to sign rights away to the highest bidder -- much scarier than President Bubba) or Chretien, their ability to spar with the opposition, extemporaneously, is impressive.
I wish that we'd adopt a parlimentary system here in the US of A; sure, it'd be more representative and better able to adapt to the ridiculous nature of the American populace; mostly, however, I'd love to see our miserable shitbag have to answer to the Loyal Opposition sans pollsters and cue cards.
(jfb)
Let's not forget that what's happening here is normal pre-trial discovery, in the NWA suit against the flight attendants' union, accused of organizing "sick outs."
/no different/ than the court collecting other forms of evidence, such as notebooks and whatnot. It's worth noting that the union lawyers did not object to this discovery, or attempt to have it stopped.
This isn't jackbooted stormtroopers kicking down people's doors to rip computers out of the hands of hapless NWA employees; it's
This is less of a privacy problem than perhaps most people realize. Of course, IANAL, and would love to hear what a lawyer might think about this. The spectre of a business doing this outside of the discovery process is far more frightening than this relatively harmless episode.
Best,
(jfb)
I found the Virtual Light trilogy quite enjoyable; he's definitely matured as a writer (even if he'll never be a Phil Dick), and the ideas are interesting.
...) And that of course says nothing about other fictions --- Poe and Borges both wrote what could be considered SF. But I digress.
Still, Gibson isn't much of a stylist, and I can certainly see why people aren't hot on him. I think that his vision of modern life is strong enough to carry the books past a certain (dreadfully?) predictability, but YMMV.
Try "Virtual Light," "Idoru" and "All Tomorrow's Parties" as a more facile expression of Gibson's abilities. People whose judgement I trust recommend "The Difference Engine" to me, but I detest the writing of Sterling and haven't had much motivation to check it out.
As far as SF goes, I'll take Vance or Silverberg over anyone writing today (or yesterday, or the day before
Best,
(jfb)
Don't know what a cluth is, but if the driver lets off the clutch, he's an incompetent, as the trucks fitted with the big barbed hooks are almost all double clutched.
Right?
(jfb)
I used to be kind of down on Gibson, but I've learned to appreciate him, over the course of his last trilogy.
If you like the way Gibson writes, I highly recommend Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, two other writers who wrote fiction about their here and now.
The best thing about Gibson, of course, is that he lives in the best city in Northern America.
Best,
(jfb)
Not true. Well, one can't perhaps use the stock OT tools, but the Open Transport Advanced Tuner works just fine.
Whether this functionality ought to be bundled in the "Advanced" user setting in the TCP/IP controls or not (it should, of course) is another issue entirely.
Best,
(jfb)
In particular, "Lyonesse," which I read and adored as a 13-yr old. Actually, anything Jack Vance writes is bound to be good.
Also recommended:
The Squares of the City -- John Brunner
The Anubis Gates -- Tim Powers
and the short stories of HP Lovecraft.
Many other excellent suggestions here, including some that I'd forgotten.
(jfb)