"Then it got to the point where every third sentence on Slashdot contained the phrase prior art. ..What the hell happened?"
Cubism?
KFG
One of my treasured possessions. . .
on
'Make' Premier Issue
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
is a 1968 Popular Mechanics DIY encyclopedia. Me mum bought it for me when I were a wee lad. I got lucky on mums. When I started taking everything in the house apart to see how it worked; and if I could put it together again, better, she not only encouraged me, but went so far as convert the living room of our home into a workshop (American urban colonial neighborhood. No garage. I can, literally, shake hands with my neighbor without either one of us leaving our bedrooms).
She didn't even blink when she came home one day to find I had built a formula car in the dining room because there wasn't room for it in the living room workshop. We all just lived in the kitchen for awhile, which is where we spent most of our family time anyway.
More recently she's actually the one who clued me in to the whole dorkbot thingy (I'm a fairly solitary tinkerer, although testing new vehicles does seem to draw something of a crowd at times).
So what the hell happened to PM anyway?
Sounds like I'll have to at least check out Make, but I fear I'll be disappointed in it. ..only coming out quarterly.
My optical mouse started going wonky on me awhile ago. The system would lose it. In Windows this meant a hard lockup and pushing the big red button to get out of it.
In Linux, (assuming I was in a GUI) it simply meant dropping to the command line and possibly reinitiallizing the mouse. No hard boot, no lost work.
There are good reasons for building things in a layered, modular manner (and see the infamous Torvalds-Tannenbaum debate for the arguement that even Linux does not go far enough with this approach), and, at its core, despite some of the claims by MS to the contrary, Windows NT/XP was designed just as layered as Linux. All the tie ins where tacked on at a later date for marketing and "user friendliness" reasons. Thus they're not only tie ins, they're kludgy, workaround tie ins that go against the design philosophy and core architecture of the OS itself.
But then MS is also a company that will apply a workaround patch to the OS to fix a problem with a bug in a commercial application, so what do you expect?
To a certain extent they are constrained to do this by the commercial nature of their enterprise. The developers of Oracle or Starcraft are just as much, or more, the customers of MS as the end user and they need to be kept happy.
With OSes and applications distributed as free source, there is, of course, no need to take this kludgy approach.
. ..might improve the overall situation, e.g. nutrition.
As I also suffer from Celiac disease I am acutely aware of this issue. Trapper John, MD actually covered this one in an episode, where it turns out that a child they thought was "retarded" was actually just an undiagnosed celiac. A change in diet resulted in the child turning out to be exceptionally bright.
This an extreme case though. On the whole there is no more connection between diet and learning ability between the disabled and normally abled.
"I practise Tai Chi and this is my experience."
As do I. I also play a dozen or three musical instruments. The weakest of these at the moment is piano although this is the only one where I have had years of formal training.
Why? Because the question isn't whether you practice Tai Chi, but whether you stop practicing Tai Chi, as I stopped playing piano for some years.
No, of course it doesn't immediately fade away, neither does a body builder's muscle, but it does start fading away immediately (Pablo Casals famously said that he had to start every day relearning where to put his fingers).
The fading is progressive, just as the acquisition is progressive.
AFAIK, psychologists might be the genre of choice when it comes to develop appropriate coping strategies.
Did I not come into this fray in support of that thesis?
You beat me to it. I am dyslexic, dysgraphic and a bit dyspraxic.
Back in the 60s I served as a test subject for psychological research on these. People have actually come up to me and said,"Hey, I was reading a paper on learining disabilities and your name was in it, is that you?" Yeah, it's me, and my stepfather once won an award from the National Optemetric Society for best magazine article of the year on learning disabilities (which I've never read, and my brother is incapable of reading.
After going through years of testing and research and dealing with the issues personally for decades I can't say I can offer much to the questioner. If anyone had found viable means of correcting such disabilities they would already be applying them to your brother, n'est-ce pas?
Learning disabilities are a neurological disability. Like having a severed spinal column, and it's just as idiotic to tell a dyslexic/dysgraphic he should just try harder to spell correctly as it is to tell a parapalegic to just try harder to jog.
And anyone who tries to do so just makes themselves look like the idiot (dyslexics are, statistically, actually above average in intelligence).
As a physical disability you have to think in terms of physical strategies, patterning exercises and such. They help, but they take a lot of time and energy and don't produce anything like a miracle; and what effect they do have is acute, not chronic, like body building. If you don't keep doing it the "muscle" goes away.
So is there technology? Yeah, I suppose, like spell checkers, but. ..don't expect them to grow your brother a new spinal column. It just doesn't work like that. They're crutches, and likely will remain so during your lifetime. ..and beyond.
The best thing you can do is learn to accept the fact that your brother is disabled, learn to cope with that, and hence help him to cope with it too.
now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summmer by this son of york grim visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled brow and now instead of mounting barded steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries he capers nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lacivious pleasing of a lute but I that am not made for sportive trick nor made. ..
Shall I go on?
Or do you prefer the to be or not to be thingy?
Oh, it's the long haired literature that's bugging you? Well how about:
Amy what you gonna do I think I could stay with you for a while
Passphrases are a piece of cake to remember. They're sentences, not digits. That, oddly enough, makes a difference. I can hardly remember my own phone number (I never call it myself you see), but I can memorize a play, all parts, easily enough, and have memorized some hundreds of songs.
For instance, I'll bet if I wrote, "Your post sucks, blow me Sparky!" you'd remember that pretty well tomorrow, even though it's more than three times longer than ten digits.
My only hangup is trying to figure out what the hell the difference between a 40 character passphrase and a 40 character password that makes a phrase is.
He's invented. ..passwords with meaning. Oooooooo!
Of course there are certain reasons a password/phrase shouldn't have meaning, which is where I came in to this movie.
And yet, Microsoft was not found guilty of being a monopoly, but of employing that natural monopoly power in a criminally coercive manner in an attempt to leverage into an unnatural one.
In effect they behave as does orginized crime.
What was it that Argentinian minister said? Oh yes, that they do business like a drug dealer.
Ah, but the point here isn't whether Agilent is doing fine on its own, but rather whether HP is doing fine without them.
Under Fiorina HP was run into the dirt.
Not to mention a few of my friends. I declined to participate as the writing was already pretty clear on the wall when "opportunity" knocked and tried to sell me a Watchtower.
I would tend to agree with you that most of people in general are incompetent idiots, I believe that Slashdot community is a rare exception to this sad rule
What are the new movements going on in the electronic music world that the mainstream has yet to become aware of?
It's called "sounding just like acoustic music."
Much of the "acoustic" music you hear isn't, especially if it's "piano" or "organ." The digital electronic revolution is so ubiquitous you don't even recognize it when you hear it anymore, it doesn't always sound "electronic."
If I had Spybot, I'd run it in the morning I'd run it in the evening, all over this drive I'd Spybot out Gator, I'd Spybot out Bonzi Buddy I'd Spybot out Comet Cursor and Web3000 All over this drive.
With my deepest apologies to Lee, who is no longer here to defend himself against me.
It's the GE main plant that has the zip code 12345. Regular people don't get to use it. It makes it easy to fill out online forms to determine your location though.
Once The City That Lights and Moves the World with the highest per capita popultion density of PhDs, now the cockroach capital of the world (and we're making a bid for number in cracks hos too).
I'm relatively happy though, and Metroland voted my neighborhood best in the capital district.
Pity it's in Schenectady, innit?
Anyway, my post was in reference to Ellison's response to anyone who asks him where his story ideas come from. He tells them he sends away for them to a post office box in Schenectady.
". ..especially the one where he says "Linux is just a competitor. That's all"."
Except, of course, that it isn't, although Red Hat and SUSE are.
Dandelion greens growing in your lawn are not a competitor to the same thing available in your supermarket, they just are; and Linux is simply an option and the extent to which Bill might consider it a competitor is an unintended side effect, not to mention an affect of his particular point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, most people these days who think they're using vi are actually symlinked to vim in vi mode.
KFG
"Then it got to the point where every third sentence on Slashdot contained the phrase prior art. . .What the hell happened?"
Cubism?
KFG
is a 1968 Popular Mechanics DIY encyclopedia. Me mum bought it for me when I were a wee lad. I got lucky on mums. When I started taking everything in the house apart to see how it worked; and if I could put it together again, better, she not only encouraged me, but went so far as convert the living room of our home into a workshop (American urban colonial neighborhood. No garage. I can, literally, shake hands with my neighbor without either one of us leaving our bedrooms).
.only coming out quarterly.
She didn't even blink when she came home one day to find I had built a formula car in the dining room because there wasn't room for it in the living room workshop. We all just lived in the kitchen for awhile, which is where we spent most of our family time anyway.
More recently she's actually the one who clued me in to the whole dorkbot thingy (I'm a fairly solitary tinkerer, although testing new vehicles does seem to draw something of a crowd at times).
So what the hell happened to PM anyway?
Sounds like I'll have to at least check out Make, but I fear I'll be disappointed in it. .
KFG
"It's not uncommon to see young companies have the same type of attitude. . ."
Others have already said it well the long way, so I'll just go for the short and pithy:
Stallman, the GPL and Linux are not companies.
KFG
There are all sorts of tie ins in Windows.
My optical mouse started going wonky on me awhile ago. The system would lose it. In Windows this meant a hard lockup and pushing the big red button to get out of it.
In Linux, (assuming I was in a GUI) it simply meant dropping to the command line and possibly reinitiallizing the mouse. No hard boot, no lost work.
There are good reasons for building things in a layered, modular manner (and see the infamous Torvalds-Tannenbaum debate for the arguement that even Linux does not go far enough with this approach), and, at its core, despite some of the claims by MS to the contrary, Windows NT/XP was designed just as layered as Linux. All the tie ins where tacked on at a later date for marketing and "user friendliness" reasons. Thus they're not only tie ins, they're kludgy, workaround tie ins that go against the design philosophy and core architecture of the OS itself.
But then MS is also a company that will apply a workaround patch to the OS to fix a problem with a bug in a commercial application, so what do you expect?
To a certain extent they are constrained to do this by the commercial nature of their enterprise. The developers of Oracle or Starcraft are just as much, or more, the customers of MS as the end user and they need to be kept happy.
With OSes and applications distributed as free source, there is, of course, no need to take this kludgy approach.
KFG
. . .might improve the overall situation, e.g. nutrition.
As I also suffer from Celiac disease I am acutely aware of this issue. Trapper John, MD actually covered this one in an episode, where it turns out that a child they thought was "retarded" was actually just an undiagnosed celiac. A change in diet resulted in the child turning out to be exceptionally bright.
This an extreme case though. On the whole there is no more connection between diet and learning ability between the disabled and normally abled.
"I practise Tai Chi and this is my experience."
As do I. I also play a dozen or three musical instruments. The weakest of these at the moment is piano although this is the only one where I have had years of formal training.
Why? Because the question isn't whether you practice Tai Chi, but whether you stop practicing Tai Chi, as I stopped playing piano for some years.
No, of course it doesn't immediately fade away, neither does a body builder's muscle, but it does start fading away immediately (Pablo Casals famously said that he had to start every day relearning where to put his fingers).
The fading is progressive, just as the acquisition is progressive.
AFAIK, psychologists might be the genre of choice when it comes to develop appropriate coping strategies.
Did I not come into this fray in support of that thesis?
KFG
"I would have said psychology & friends instead."
.don't expect them to grow your brother a new spinal column. It just doesn't work like that. They're crutches, and likely will remain so during your lifetime. . .and beyond.
You beat me to it. I am dyslexic, dysgraphic and a bit dyspraxic.
Back in the 60s I served as a test subject for psychological research on these. People have actually come up to me and said,"Hey, I was reading a paper on learining disabilities and your name was in it, is that you?" Yeah, it's me, and my stepfather once won an award from the National Optemetric Society for best magazine article of the year on learning disabilities (which I've never read, and my brother is incapable of reading.
After going through years of testing and research and dealing with the issues personally for decades I can't say I can offer much to the questioner. If anyone had found viable means of correcting such disabilities they would already be applying them to your brother, n'est-ce pas?
Learning disabilities are a neurological disability. Like having a severed spinal column, and it's just as idiotic to tell a dyslexic/dysgraphic he should just try harder to spell correctly as it is to tell a parapalegic to just try harder to jog.
And anyone who tries to do so just makes themselves look like the idiot (dyslexics are, statistically, actually above average in intelligence).
As a physical disability you have to think in terms of physical strategies, patterning exercises and such. They help, but they take a lot of time and energy and don't produce anything like a miracle; and what effect they do have is acute, not chronic, like body building. If you don't keep doing it the "muscle" goes away.
So is there technology? Yeah, I suppose, like spell checkers, but. .
The best thing you can do is learn to accept the fact that your brother is disabled, learn to cope with that, and hence help him to cope with it too.
KFG
Good Lord, the FOTD is now Shakespeare's "kill all the lawyers" line. There must be a literary virus loose.
I admit I chose Shakepeare because I didn't think people would recognize the Heller or Stoppard that I know though.
The essential point that people can memorize "phrases" as long as The Illiad seems rather obvious though.
KFG
"Second, it's difficult to remember passphrases!"
.
.passwords with meaning. Oooooooo!
now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summmer by this son of york grim visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled brow and now instead of mounting barded steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries he capers nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lacivious pleasing of a lute but I that am not made for sportive trick nor made. .
Shall I go on?
Or do you prefer the to be or not to be thingy?
Oh, it's the long haired literature that's bugging you? Well how about:
Amy what you gonna do I think I could stay with you for a while
Passphrases are a piece of cake to remember. They're sentences, not digits. That, oddly enough, makes a difference. I can hardly remember my own phone number (I never call it myself you see), but I can memorize a play, all parts, easily enough, and have memorized some hundreds of songs.
For instance, I'll bet if I wrote, "Your post sucks, blow me Sparky!" you'd remember that pretty well tomorrow, even though it's more than three times longer than ten digits.
My only hangup is trying to figure out what the hell the difference between a 40 character passphrase and a 40 character password that makes a phrase is.
He's invented. .
Of course there are certain reasons a password/phrase shouldn't have meaning, which is where I came in to this movie.
I'm going out for popcorn.
KFG
I ride Amtrak. You can say it all you want, but I ain't buyin'.
KFG
Electronic technology fails at sea with remarkable regularity, no matter how much you pay for it. I'll use GPS, but I keep my sextant handy.
KFG
It was Brazilian. . .
Right you are. I thought his Spanish looked funny when I translated his statement.
KFG
How'd that Argentinian minister know how drug dealers do business? :)
He went to Rite-Aid.
KFG
And yet, Microsoft was not found guilty of being a monopoly, but of employing that natural monopoly power in a criminally coercive manner in an attempt to leverage into an unnatural one.
In effect they behave as does orginized crime.
What was it that Argentinian minister said? Oh yes, that they do business like a drug dealer.
KFG
Why so many books cover topics which are described in manuals (I mean man's for linux) ?
Because until you have read a well written book you have no idea what the man pages are trying to say. You need to start with a tutorial.
For further reference you should then read mans.
Well see? You knew the answer yourself all along. The man pages are a reference source once you have had a tutorial.
KFG
The best shoal finder known to man is the bottom of your boat. There's name for anyone who relys on a depth finder to keep them off the rocks:
Castaway.
KFG
Agilent seems to be doing just fine on its own
Ah, but the point here isn't whether Agilent is doing fine on its own, but rather whether HP is doing fine without them.
Under Fiorina HP was run into the dirt.
Not to mention a few of my friends. I declined to participate as the writing was already pretty clear on the wall when "opportunity" knocked and tried to sell me a Watchtower.
KFG
I would tend to agree with you that most of people in general are incompetent idiots, I believe that Slashdot community is a rare exception to this sad rule
I must protest.
KFG
And just how well does that shoal show up on radar anyway?
KFG
What are the new movements going on in the electronic music world that the mainstream has yet to become aware of?
It's called "sounding just like acoustic music."
Much of the "acoustic" music you hear isn't, especially if it's "piano" or "organ." The digital electronic revolution is so ubiquitous you don't even recognize it when you hear it anymore, it doesn't always sound "electronic."
It's come a long way, baby.
KFG
If I had Spybot, I'd run it in the morning
I'd run it in the evening, all over this drive
I'd Spybot out Gator, I'd Spybot out Bonzi Buddy
I'd Spybot out Comet Cursor and Web3000
All over this drive.
With my deepest apologies to Lee, who is no longer here to defend himself against me.
Tastes good though.
KFG
It's the GE main plant that has the zip code 12345. Regular people don't get to use it. It makes it easy to fill out online forms to determine your location though.
Once The City That Lights and Moves the World with the highest per capita popultion density of PhDs, now the cockroach capital of the world (and we're making a bid for number in cracks hos too).
I'm relatively happy though, and Metroland voted my neighborhood best in the capital district.
Pity it's in Schenectady, innit?
Anyway, my post was in reference to Ellison's response to anyone who asks him where his story ideas come from. He tells them he sends away for them to a post office box in Schenectady.
KFG
flowers growing in the garden are indeed a threat.
This is a different statement, and one which I did not directly address, although I did so implicitly.
KFG
". . .especially the one where he says "Linux is just a competitor. That's all"."
Except, of course, that it isn't, although Red Hat and SUSE are.
Dandelion greens growing in your lawn are not a competitor to the same thing available in your supermarket, they just are; and Linux is simply an option and the extent to which Bill might consider it a competitor is an unintended side effect, not to mention an affect of his particular point of view.
KFG
Did anyone else immediately think of SourceForge when they say the acronym SF used?
Nah! I like to read a lot of SF.
KFG