I use joe, too. I can't begin to tell you how glad I was to see this announcement! Yes, I grew up on Wordstar-based editors - the Borland environments, mostly (including the later GUI's which still supported the Wordstar commands). When I got into Linux it seemed natural for me to use joe as my preferred editor and I've never looked back. emacs is a goddamned nightmare - it was pioneering pointless bloat back before Microsoft Office was anything more than a glint in Bill Gates's eye.
Yes, vi is everywhere, and I can muddle through in vi, but it's just downright retarded to open a text editor and not be able to just start typing. Yes, I "get" modes, and yes, vi is obscenely powerful when you get past the learning curve, but since I deal exclusively with systems I administer myself, having joe available is always an option and I've never seen the need to make the switch to vi.
I don't know about that. Back in the day I used to drive around with a handheld radio scanner listening to cordless phones. 99.8% of what I heard was pretty mundane and uninteresting. It got boring fast.
I have a mod chip in my Xbox. Do I use it to steal games? No. I don't own a single illegal copy of a game. Fact is, I use the mod chip to run Xbox Media Player so I can listen to my MP3's on my stereo and play my downloaded pr0n on my big-screen TV. Now, if you want to talk about the pr0n industry's lost revenues...
This proves it - there is a God! I've got a beef with the Catholic church these days. They stole my girlfriend, goddammit. Seriously. I was dating this great woman (bisexual, ex-stripper, rabidly anti-religion, thought for herself) who had a little problem with depression and phobia and found that prayer was the only thing that helped. So she turned back to the Catholic religion in which she was raised and kicked my ass to the curb! So I did the only sensible thing I could - blamed the Catholic church. First the Inquisition, then Galileo, then this business of protecting paedophile priests and now they freakin' steal my girlfriend! Bastards! This Passion of Christ movie has gotten entirely too much publicity lately and it's about time someone countered with an accurate portrayal of the life of Jesus Harold Christ. Amen!
My mom's pretty clever, and she listens to what I tell her when I talk about computers. So, in addition to using AdAware, AVG Anti-Virus, Zone Alarm and Mozilla (web and mail), she knows enough to install all the WinXP updates ASAP and never, ever believe anything that arrives in her inbox. Thank god my father rarely touches that machine... Oh, and I have VNC installed there, too, for when I need to do some remote administration from 1100 miles away.
I know that everything I'm about to say has probably already been said by others, but I feel compelled to respond to this anyway.
What a load of crap-for-crap. I'd like to point out that I'm going to turn 32 this month, I have a house, a car, and don't have any problem getting dates. I don't have a family only because I don't want kids. I earn a good salary coding software for a company I'm part owner of. Yet I still believe wholeheartedly in open source and free software and hope to soon be making significant contributions to it myself.
Everyone does something with their free time - why piss in this kid's Wheaties because he chooses to spend some of it doing good work for the benefit of others rather than sitting in front of the TV or drinking down at the local bar? I don't know exactly what this kid said to Mr. Jacknuts here, but even if he did come across as a starry-eyed idealist, so what? I find it hard to condemn someone for believing that the world can be a better place and working toward that end. It's abundantly clear to me that the twin goals of supporting oneself in a capitalist society and creating free software are far from mutually exclusive. Why is that so hard for some people to understand?
Yes, Captain Obvious, we all have to find ways of supporting ourselves financially. But we geeks as a whole are a pretty clever bunch, and I'm sure that's why we so often find ways to support ourselves without compromising our ideals. If you can't see the inherent good in open source software and the people who dedicate the resources to create it, I truly feel sorry for you.
Woo-hoo! At least we're the world leader in something. I was gettin' pretty sick of reading about all those foreigners who were kicking our collective ass in math and science.
Yeah, I see these things eventually ending up in the same box of junk as the NewsCatcher I bought back in 1996 or 1997. For those of you who don't remember, these were a flash-in-the-pan whiz-bang pyramid-shaped device that plugged into a free serial port and received little news bits over a nationwide pager network. The software would then pop up little news items from time to time so you could feel like you were plugged into the pulse of the world. For some reason I was obsessed with owning one of these back then and spent $99 on one. What the hell was I thinking?
So, are they using UDP as a transport yet? I doubt it. I know, I know, the Icecast people just build a server for the Shoutcast protocol, but dammit, it's always bugged me that the designers of Shoutcast decided to use TCP as the underlying transport. UDP makes metric assloads more sense for a time-sensitive application like realtime audio delivery, where the consequences of losing a packet or two are nothing more than a momentary audio glitch. One thing that caused me to give up on internet radio was the phenomenon where a little packet loss would cause the connection to hang indefinitely, requiring a stop and restart to get it going again. UDP would eliminate this sort of nonsense entirely.
I'm with you, man! I've never seen a LiveJournal that wasn't just a bunch of egocentric attention whoring. And if I could find the person who coined the word "blog," I'd carve it into their forehead with a hunting knife.
I only said AIM is for kids because that's my own personal experience - my last girlfriend's teenage kids all used it, but nobody I talk to uses it. Like I said, I use ICQ mostly because it was the only game in town when I started using IM's. As for Trillian, I don't use it, but I know people who swear by it. Whether it's a piece of crap or not is debatable, but it's definitely not bloated. ICQ typically takes 8+ megs of RAM, Yahoo Messenger can take 12-16. Trillian handles all major IM protocols and takes about 2M.
It may have to do with age, too. I'm 31, and everyone I know has been around long enough that they use ICQ. Back in the day ICQ was the only IM around, and that's what we all used. And we all still use it in some form or another - many of my friends use Trillian, for example, as the "official" ICQ client has gone completely to hell. I used Miranda for a while. But nobody I know over the age of 20 uses AIM - it's for kids, as far as I'm concerned. And I've never met anyone who uses MSN. I'm really surprised it's as popular as it is in certain circles.
Another complaint I've heard about the IC-R3 is that it doesn't demodulate FM video across its entire receive range (or maybe not at all). A lot of "interesting" video is FM modulated, not AM (like broadcast TV, amateur TV, etc.) That alone would keep me from buying it, but throw in the poor sensitivity and I just don't see the point. Besides, I'm lucky enough to have an AOR AR-5000+3, so I can just add one of these and a cheap video monitor or video capture card to it and get the same functionality, albeit with less portability.
My teachers started complaining about this same tendency in me when I was in first grade. I'm now 31 years old and it shows no sign of abating. I'm just lucky enough to have found jobs that have been pretty tolerant of it. But I don't ever expect it to go away.
Kennedy Space Center sucks for geeks
on
Lulu Tech Circus
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· Score: 2, Informative
I made the mistake once of driving 3 hours across Florida to go to Kennedy Space Center. What a disappointment! Anything the public gets access to is run by a lame amusement park company and the whole thing is set up more for 8-year-old boys obsessed with rockets than geeks. The only particularly cool aspect of the place was the actual Saturn V rocket hanging, disassembled, in an enormous hangar-like building. Other than that, though, it pretty much sucked.
The answer to this question seems fairly obvious to me. Content has been free in the past (paid for by banner ads, insane quantities of venture capital money, etc.) When you try to take that away from people, they feel like they're getting ripped off. I know I feel that way (Salon Premium can kiss my hairy white ass). It just doesn't make sense to the end users when the same thing that was free yesterday costs money today. The product hasn't changed, but suddenly we're supposed to pay for it. I think if access to all (or most) commercially-developed web content had cost money from the beginning that we'd all be a lot happier. It's only when something's free, then not, that people get all bent out of shape over it.
This doesn't apply to all content, mind you. There are situations where people just don't feel the content is worth the money ($15 CD's vs. free MP3's, for example). Or, they feel ripped off by the Evil Corporations (RIAA, Microsoft, etc.) With all the mega-mergers happening, many people feel that content is being too centrally controlled. They can't do anything about that, but hey, they can "steal" (which isn't really stealing - more on that later) the content, so that's how they strike back. It's a whole class of people who fancy themselves micro-Robin Hoods. Right or wrong, that seems to be how they feel.
Yet another motivation is the "it's not stealing" argument. Say, for example, that I rip an MP3 copy of a CD that I never would have paid $15 for. Who's losing money? Nobody. I never would have paid for it. So, is it stealing? No! It's unauthorized use, which is a very different thing. I'm not taking money out of anyone's pocket, I'm just not putting any in. Many people would have you believe that what I'm doing is stealing - it's not. It's unauthorized use.
Maybe part of the reason for such attitudes is what I'll call the "working-man's resentment." Most people have to continuously produce useful work to get paid. "Intellectual property" holders get to create something once and get paid for it indefinitely. Again, right or wrong, some people resent that. Of course, some people also resent these huge mega-corps, for whom a million dollars is like $10 to the average American, having the balls to charge us for the self-serving crap they call "content." It's all a matter of perspective.
I'm not proporting to agree or disagree about any of this, I'm just stating it the way I see it. Let's not get too wrapped up in our world-views that we can't see things from someone else's perspective from time to time (and yes, that means from the RIAA/Microsoft/AOL-Time-Warner perspective as well as the "information wants to be free" crowd's perspective). An open mind is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's not a moon, that's a space station."
I use joe, too. I can't begin to tell you how glad I was to see this announcement! Yes, I grew up on Wordstar-based editors - the Borland environments, mostly (including the later GUI's which still supported the Wordstar commands). When I got into Linux it seemed natural for me to use joe as my preferred editor and I've never looked back. emacs is a goddamned nightmare - it was pioneering pointless bloat back before Microsoft Office was anything more than a glint in Bill Gates's eye.
Yes, vi is everywhere, and I can muddle through in vi, but it's just downright retarded to open a text editor and not be able to just start typing. Yes, I "get" modes, and yes, vi is obscenely powerful when you get past the learning curve, but since I deal exclusively with systems I administer myself, having joe available is always an option and I've never seen the need to make the switch to vi.
I don't know about that. Back in the day I used to drive around with a handheld radio scanner listening to cordless phones. 99.8% of what I heard was pretty mundane and uninteresting. It got boring fast.
Encryption.
I have a mod chip in my Xbox. Do I use it to steal games? No. I don't own a single illegal copy of a game. Fact is, I use the mod chip to run Xbox Media Player so I can listen to my MP3's on my stereo and play my downloaded pr0n on my big-screen TV. Now, if you want to talk about the pr0n industry's lost revenues...
This proves it - there is a God! I've got a beef with the Catholic church these days. They stole my girlfriend, goddammit. Seriously. I was dating this great woman (bisexual, ex-stripper, rabidly anti-religion, thought for herself) who had a little problem with depression and phobia and found that prayer was the only thing that helped. So she turned back to the Catholic religion in which she was raised and kicked my ass to the curb! So I did the only sensible thing I could - blamed the Catholic church. First the Inquisition, then Galileo, then this business of protecting paedophile priests and now they freakin' steal my girlfriend! Bastards! This Passion of Christ movie has gotten entirely too much publicity lately and it's about time someone countered with an accurate portrayal of the life of Jesus Harold Christ. Amen!
My mom's pretty clever, and she listens to what I tell her when I talk about computers. So, in addition to using AdAware, AVG Anti-Virus, Zone Alarm and Mozilla (web and mail), she knows enough to install all the WinXP updates ASAP and never, ever believe anything that arrives in her inbox. Thank god my father rarely touches that machine... Oh, and I have VNC installed there, too, for when I need to do some remote administration from 1100 miles away.
No, it's much more like reviewing the state of music without touching on...
I know that everything I'm about to say has probably already been said by others, but I feel compelled to respond to this anyway.
What a load of crap-for-crap. I'd like to point out that I'm going to turn 32 this month, I have a house, a car, and don't have any problem getting dates. I don't have a family only because I don't want kids. I earn a good salary coding software for a company I'm part owner of. Yet I still believe wholeheartedly in open source and free software and hope to soon be making significant contributions to it myself.
Everyone does something with their free time - why piss in this kid's Wheaties because he chooses to spend some of it doing good work for the benefit of others rather than sitting in front of the TV or drinking down at the local bar? I don't know exactly what this kid said to Mr. Jacknuts here, but even if he did come across as a starry-eyed idealist, so what? I find it hard to condemn someone for believing that the world can be a better place and working toward that end. It's abundantly clear to me that the twin goals of supporting oneself in a capitalist society and creating free software are far from mutually exclusive. Why is that so hard for some people to understand?
Yes, Captain Obvious, we all have to find ways of supporting ourselves financially. But we geeks as a whole are a pretty clever bunch, and I'm sure that's why we so often find ways to support ourselves without compromising our ideals. If you can't see the inherent good in open source software and the people who dedicate the resources to create it, I truly feel sorry for you.
Now if only someone can find a way to keep the internet from disrupting my productivity at work...
Woo-hoo! At least we're the world leader in something. I was gettin' pretty sick of reading about all those foreigners who were kicking our collective ass in math and science.
Another very good service of this sort is DialABC.com.
Yeah, I see these things eventually ending up in the same box of junk as the NewsCatcher I bought back in 1996 or 1997. For those of you who don't remember, these were a flash-in-the-pan whiz-bang pyramid-shaped device that plugged into a free serial port and received little news bits over a nationwide pager network. The software would then pop up little news items from time to time so you could feel like you were plugged into the pulse of the world. For some reason I was obsessed with owning one of these back then and spent $99 on one. What the hell was I thinking?
So, are they using UDP as a transport yet? I doubt it. I know, I know, the Icecast people just build a server for the Shoutcast protocol, but dammit, it's always bugged me that the designers of Shoutcast decided to use TCP as the underlying transport. UDP makes metric assloads more sense for a time-sensitive application like realtime audio delivery, where the consequences of losing a packet or two are nothing more than a momentary audio glitch. One thing that caused me to give up on internet radio was the phenomenon where a little packet loss would cause the connection to hang indefinitely, requiring a stop and restart to get it going again. UDP would eliminate this sort of nonsense entirely.
I'm with you, man! I've never seen a LiveJournal that wasn't just a bunch of egocentric attention whoring. And if I could find the person who coined the word "blog," I'd carve it into their forehead with a hunting knife.
I only said AIM is for kids because that's my own personal experience - my last girlfriend's teenage kids all used it, but nobody I talk to uses it. Like I said, I use ICQ mostly because it was the only game in town when I started using IM's. As for Trillian, I don't use it, but I know people who swear by it. Whether it's a piece of crap or not is debatable, but it's definitely not bloated. ICQ typically takes 8+ megs of RAM, Yahoo Messenger can take 12-16. Trillian handles all major IM protocols and takes about 2M.
It may have to do with age, too. I'm 31, and everyone I know has been around long enough that they use ICQ. Back in the day ICQ was the only IM around, and that's what we all used. And we all still use it in some form or another - many of my friends use Trillian, for example, as the "official" ICQ client has gone completely to hell. I used Miranda for a while. But nobody I know over the age of 20 uses AIM - it's for kids, as far as I'm concerned. And I've never met anyone who uses MSN. I'm really surprised it's as popular as it is in certain circles.
Another complaint I've heard about the IC-R3 is that it doesn't demodulate FM video across its entire receive range (or maybe not at all). A lot of "interesting" video is FM modulated, not AM (like broadcast TV, amateur TV, etc.) That alone would keep me from buying it, but throw in the poor sensitivity and I just don't see the point. Besides, I'm lucky enough to have an AOR AR-5000+3, so I can just add one of these and a cheap video monitor or video capture card to it and get the same functionality, albeit with less portability.
No, of course louder isn't better. What rock 'n' roll music clearly needs is more cowbell.
I'm sure the French are thinking, "Oh, great! Yet another way for our country to be invaded!"
CLS? That's easy.
My teachers started complaining about this same tendency in me when I was in first grade. I'm now 31 years old and it shows no sign of abating. I'm just lucky enough to have found jobs that have been pretty tolerant of it. But I don't ever expect it to go away.
What the bejesus is QVGA?
I made the mistake once of driving 3 hours across Florida to go to Kennedy Space Center. What a disappointment! Anything the public gets access to is run by a lame amusement park company and the whole thing is set up more for 8-year-old boys obsessed with rockets than geeks. The only particularly cool aspect of the place was the actual Saturn V rocket hanging, disassembled, in an enormous hangar-like building. Other than that, though, it pretty much sucked.
This doesn't apply to all content, mind you. There are situations where people just don't feel the content is worth the money ($15 CD's vs. free MP3's, for example). Or, they feel ripped off by the Evil Corporations (RIAA, Microsoft, etc.) With all the mega-mergers happening, many people feel that content is being too centrally controlled. They can't do anything about that, but hey, they can "steal" (which isn't really stealing - more on that later) the content, so that's how they strike back. It's a whole class of people who fancy themselves micro-Robin Hoods. Right or wrong, that seems to be how they feel.
Yet another motivation is the "it's not stealing" argument. Say, for example, that I rip an MP3 copy of a CD that I never would have paid $15 for. Who's losing money? Nobody. I never would have paid for it. So, is it stealing? No! It's unauthorized use, which is a very different thing. I'm not taking money out of anyone's pocket, I'm just not putting any in. Many people would have you believe that what I'm doing is stealing - it's not. It's unauthorized use.
Maybe part of the reason for such attitudes is what I'll call the "working-man's resentment." Most people have to continuously produce useful work to get paid. "Intellectual property" holders get to create something once and get paid for it indefinitely. Again, right or wrong, some people resent that. Of course, some people also resent these huge mega-corps, for whom a million dollars is like $10 to the average American, having the balls to charge us for the self-serving crap they call "content." It's all a matter of perspective.
I'm not proporting to agree or disagree about any of this, I'm just stating it the way I see it. Let's not get too wrapped up in our world-views that we can't see things from someone else's perspective from time to time (and yes, that means from the RIAA/Microsoft/AOL-Time-Warner perspective as well as the "information wants to be free" crowd's perspective). An open mind is a good thing.