This is of course a matter of opinion, and in mine XEmacs is most definitely inferior to GNU Emacs, stability and portability being two of the main reasons.
Yeah, early on xemacs had some advantages in graphical niftiness and integration with x windows, but those were never particularly things that I cared about, myself,
and gnu emacs has largely (if not entirely) caught up on those.
The one advantage of the xemacs project is that they're not fussy about copyright assignment, so they can suck up any elisp code that's
been GPL'd, whereas the Gnu emacs folks need to track down the authors first, and hope they can politely talk them into assigning copyright to the FSF
(Note: the FSF feels they need this in order to have legal standing to defend the code, if you disagree, argue it out with them, but remember they've
got lawyers on staff, and you don't, do you?).
Also, I understand the xemacs guys have a package manager, which has always seemed like an obvious omission on the Gnu emacs side...
but then maybe we're better off not having one more specialized package manager out there, it could be this should be handled on the OS level.
(Note: I'm a Gnu emacs loyalist myself... the minor differences in coding I'd need to do to support both xemacs and emacs with the same.emacs file has always
annoyed me, and I've never had a compelling reason to examine xemacs very closely.)
Hm... thanks for the link. I'm more interested in the safety razors, myself, with "High Stainless Steel" blades. Those could be worth a try:
Safety Razors & Blades.
By the way, "manual transmissions" are certainly far superior to automatics, but if you really want to get into retro-cool, try bicycles: a simple, effective technology; and if you keep it up you won't die at an early age with a massive gasoline-gut. (Not getting run down by an SUV driver on a cell phone is the trick, of course, but it's not as hard as you might think if you read up on the literature on the subject.)
The biggest improvement I got in shaving was when I stopped using shaving cream (while using Mach 3),
rather than getting a razor with more blades. I didn't think it would work, but it did. It felt rough at first, but after a while, as long as your face is wet, the shave is closer, more comfortable, and with far fewer cuts. In fact, I don't think I've cut myself since dropping the shaving cream (~6 months ago).
Yeah, Shaving Cream is a scam. I found the trick a long time ago: you wash your face first to strip off the natural oil, then put another layer of soap on... if you do it that way, I doubt it will ever feel "rough". I just shave with the same bar of soap I clean up with (I'm not sure if it matters, but I use an odd Aloe Vera soap, put out by Grisi, a Mexican company).
There's another small point I figured out recently though: I need to make sure I've rinsed off all of the soap afterwards. I'd thought I was having occasional problems with in-grown hairs under my chin, instead I think I was leaving behind little smears of soap every once-in-awhile.
There was a Saturday Night Live "commercial" back in the seventies - "Track 3 - bacause you'll beleive anything".
Yeah, back in the quaint old days when three blades seemed like an absurdity.
Nit: I think the slogan was "For you.... Because you'll believe anything."
I use single-bladed Bic disposables myself, which are great
except that you have to keep track of how sharp they are and
adjust your shaving style accordingly. Presumably this is
because they're made of intentionally corrosive metal, razor
blades being one of the classic examples of planned obsolescence
in action. I keep wondering if it might be possible to hack my
own razor blades: stainless steel isn't terribly easy to sharpen,
but I bet it would hold an edge forever. I'd prefer some sort
of "saftey" arrangement, rather than the old fashioned
straight-edged razor. Has anyone out there looked into this?
Funny, I just remembered that once I tried a different approach:
it seemed to me that if I stored a disposable razor in oil, I
might be able to prevent it from corroding... I quickly
discovered the obvious problem: if I wanted to use soap for
lubrication, I was going to have to completely clean off all of
the oil before each use. I don't remember if I looked into using
oil as a shaving lubricant, that seems like an obvious thought to
me now, but I might've missed it back then. Why not stash your
razor in olive oil, and wash your face after shaving rather than
before?
Though what would be really nifty is to figure out a way
of using an electrochemical effect to suppress corrosion...
how hard could it be to nickle-plate a "disposable" razor?
Hm.
anytime i reported an issue with our several thousand dollar implimentation, they either already had a patch that fixed it, or had one shortly thereafter.
I've heard things like this from other people also: if you report a bug to Oracle they get a patch to you to fix it very quickly.
What I would say, though, is given the amount of money they charge, they really should have fewer bugs.
In fact, this could easily backfire on Oracle. Red Hat has been laying off on pushing it's own PostgreSQL based Red Hat database.
I was wondering when someone was going to mention Postgresql. Oracle's database is essentially a legacy app -- if you're already using it you wouldn't necessarily plan on dumping it immediately, but there's no way in hell you'd start a new business based on it.
It's actually pretty funny having Larry Ellison telling people they can save money by switching to open source software. ("Oh wait. Not that open source software.")
When they went enterprise-only support after RH9, they shot themselves in the foot because, at the time, people who would have genuinely considered switching to RH (or any other distro for that matter, but RH was THE Linux distro at the time for business)
Yes, that looked like a bad move, but I'd say it a little differently: once upon a time RedHat was nearly synonymous with linux, then they played games to "protect their brand" (Fedora Core? What's that? Not to mention "Pink Tie Linux" and so on.) And now they have virtually zero buzz associated with their name. (These days it seems that Ubuntu has become synonymous with Linux, at least on slashdot... in other circles I would guess people tend to talk Debian itself, or Suse).
Someday, we may accumulate a set of case histories like this, of companies that get hyper about "protecting" their brand and end up destroying it...
Dystopian future: because Unbreakable Linux is built off RHEL (like CentOS is), Red Hat lose (some/half/all) of their support customers to Unbreakable, can't afford to keep producing RHEL, and Oracle base future versions of Unbreakable on what, now?
Something that actually works well?
Of course, that might cut into the support income a bit.
What's preventing me from leaving the country? Patriotism. Who's going to fix the problem
if the only people who can see that there's a problem leave?
It's like that line in the song "My Strange Nation": "I will not change this stance/I will not move to France".
That's by Susan Werner, by the way, and it's highly recommended:
http://www.susanwerner.com/ (warning: flash site... their non-flash alternative is broken).
If you follow the progress in Iraq, which most people don't, you know that Iraqi police and armed forces are on target to be mostly self-sufficient by our 2008 election.
And may I inquire what the source of information is for this astonishing statement? No, wait, let me guess...
The large sucking sound you hear is the irony of your post flying right over your head.
Ooh! He said irony! He wins!
But you lose points for lifting a phrase from an old Ross Perot campaign.
You might give people the impression you're a political flack or something.
Re:For Slashdotters who haven't been paying attent
on
2006 Election Maps Mashups
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No one takes the truthies seriously.
And anyone who thinks the Democrats are going to become fire-breathing
lefties overnight is compeltely insane. They're a bunch of pet rocks -- it's just that at this point
pet rocks would be preferably to people stomping on the gas, driving the country toward a cliff.
Can I ask you, in all seriousness why you're still happy with the Republicans?
I mean, I can understand why you would feel that an attack on this country merits a
strong military response -- but that's not what we're involved in at the moment is it?
We're stomping around in a quagmire for obscure reasons that have nothing to do with the
9/11 attack or Al Qaeda, correct?
Or to take another point, I can understand why a conservative would worry about fiscal
responsibility... but we don't have fiscal responsibility, do we? How about that deficit, eh?
By the way, I've been meaning to ask some Repubican or other... do you think you guys
could return some of the money Enron stole for you? Seriously, how do you feel about
your party recieving stolen goods?
(And what kind of "conservative" has such contempt for the Magna Carta, not to mention the Constitution?
Aren't they time-tested enough? How can you just shrug off what's being done to
central fabric of our country?)
Democrats will take the 435-member House of Representatives back by a likely margin of 5-15 seats. There are almost no serious analysts who disagree on this point.
I wonder why we need to have the election, then?
Well the theory used to be that elections were more accurate than polls. Now I guess it's just a tradition.
If you want to keep an eye on the latest poll results, I recommend Andrew Tanembaum's site:
Electoral Vote
Will Democrats turn out on voting day this time? Or will they be slackers like they have been for the last 6 years??? I have read several articles saying that the real secret weapon of the republicans and Rove is their 'get out the vote' in the final 72hours.
Will the Democrats be able to combat this, this time around? Or will they continue their sorry losing streak?
You hear all sorts of things, but what I hear is that the Democrats may not have actually been losing anything but the offical tallies.
Well, after all this is/. You should be happy that I at least even read part of TFA. Now you expect me to actually go and look up the applications before getting all up in arms?
Not to mention the fact that if you're a software developer, the standard advice is to avoid
knowing anything about the details of software patents. If they can argue you "knowingly infringed" on a patent
you're up for triple damages.
I suspect this is one of those things where the situation is so stupid, no one can believe it's the case -- the patent system is designed to encourage publication of useful technical information, but this triple-damages rule means that no one can read it.
But you don't need Big Daddy Warbucks to "rescue" Mickey Mouse. The Mouse is still on stage.
I think you're missing the point: it's all well and good if Disney is still providing access to the original Mickey Mouse material, the trouble is that they won't let anyone else do variations on that material.
The argument is that something like Mickey Mouse has achieved an iconic status, it's become part of our shared culture, but if, for example, you attempt to publish a political cartoon based on Mickey Mouse, the Disney corporation will come after you.
This is one of the reasons that copyright was supposed to be for a limited period of time: the copyright holder was supposed to have a limited state-granted monopoly that would eventually expire -- instead, Disney has developed to the ability to procure indefinite extensions, undermining the original intent of the system.
No, if you keep an eye on
current polls,
you expect the Democrats to take the House. The Senate is
roughly evenly split, and could go either way.
To address your general sneer: concerns about the validity of the recent elections extend far beyond sour grapes. But you'd actually have to read up on the subject to know something about that, and it is of course much easier to stick with complaining about those whiney democrats.
Dont tell anyone - but US democracy is dead. If the Americans are told, they get mad at you.
Nah, they don't get mad at you. They just sort of shake their heads piteously, and send you off into the corner to hang out with the "9/11 Truth Movement" gang.
In any case: the American Democratic-Republic is certainly in bad shape -- it may be in the worst shape it's ever been -- but it's not clear to me that it's dead. It is possible, for example, that the Republican vote-rigging system can shave 5 points, but might have trouble shaving ten: with a big enough upwelling of disgust, with enough people voting against them, you just might see not only the House, but the Senate shift over to Democrat control.
Given that, it then becomes possible to hold actual investigations into some of nasty tricks the Bush regime has been pulling. I wouldn't hold my breath about an actual impeachment, but some nice long hearings grinding people's noses into the crap, we might
start seeing some actual improvements.
For the first option you have months to find all the exploits you can, and thirty seconds to exploit them. For the second option, you have thirty seconds to find and use the exploits.
It seems to me the second would be more secure.
Hi there. I have a suggestion. Before you decide to volunteer your expert opinion on this subject, do you think you could go and read-up on what's been happening with Diebold machines? You see, quite a few of us are rather familiar with what we get with closed source voting machine software, because you see, that's what we have now, you know? That means there's actual, real world experience that you might like to become familiar with, instead of attempting to reason everything out from first principles.
You might even, just to go above and beyond the call of duty, make some attempt to read the writings of people like Bruce Schneier, because you see, he's spent a lot of time thinking about things like this, and you might hurt his feelings if you figured it all out on your own in just a couple of minutes.
I agree. Unlike machines, people have no bias and would never commit fraud. Those computers though, they're constantly working against us for their own motives.
One more time: the trouble with DRE systems such as Diebold is that it allows wholesale, undetectable fraud. They make it possible for a small group to achieve widespread fraud in a way that is almost undetectable after the fact. If you add a
paper trail to these systems, it makes it possible to do recounts, to audit the process. And the advantage of simple and stupid systems where people mark pieces of paper and other people count them is that because these systems are so labor intensive you need
to corrupt a much larger group of people to throw an election.
I can just see Bush declaring an emergency on polling day which has the side-effect of banning exit polls... oh so convenient... get rid of those pesky exit polls... then no-one knows how the voting is going except those controlling the magic software...
Your paranoia is impressive, but what's actually going to happen with the exit polls is much simpler than this: they won't release them until after they've had a chance to "correct" them so that they'll match the official election results.
Here's a quote from the Freeman and Bleifuss book, Ch. 8, page 199:
Even if exit polls are to be conducted, we may never again
know the unadjusted results. We were only able to uncover the exit-poll
discrepancy in 2004 because a technological glitch prevented NEP from
doing "timely" update of adjusted data. In discussion of "improvements"
for future elections, NEP pollster Warren Mitofsky emphasizes that no
early unadjusted data will be released even to their clients.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, early on xemacs had some advantages in graphical niftiness and integration with x windows, but those were never particularly things that I cared about, myself, and gnu emacs has largely (if not entirely) caught up on those.
The one advantage of the xemacs project is that they're not fussy about copyright assignment, so they can suck up any elisp code that's been GPL'd, whereas the Gnu emacs folks need to track down the authors first, and hope they can politely talk them into assigning copyright to the FSF (Note: the FSF feels they need this in order to have legal standing to defend the code, if you disagree, argue it out with them, but remember they've got lawyers on staff, and you don't, do you?).
Also, I understand the xemacs guys have a package manager, which has always seemed like an obvious omission on the Gnu emacs side... but then maybe we're better off not having one more specialized package manager out there, it could be this should be handled on the OS level.
(Note: I'm a Gnu emacs loyalist myself... the minor differences in coding I'd need to do to support both xemacs and emacs with the same .emacs file has always
annoyed me, and I've never had a compelling reason to examine xemacs very closely.)
But the Taliban are in control of Afganistan.
(Oh my god, this explains it: Bush and Gore are actually the same person!)
By the way, "manual transmissions" are certainly far superior to automatics, but if you really want to get into retro-cool, try bicycles: a simple, effective technology; and if you keep it up you won't die at an early age with a massive gasoline-gut. (Not getting run down by an SUV driver on a cell phone is the trick, of course, but it's not as hard as you might think if you read up on the literature on the subject.)
Yeah, Shaving Cream is a scam. I found the trick a long time ago: you wash your face first to strip off the natural oil, then put another layer of soap on... if you do it that way, I doubt it will ever feel "rough". I just shave with the same bar of soap I clean up with (I'm not sure if it matters, but I use an odd Aloe Vera soap, put out by Grisi, a Mexican company).
There's another small point I figured out recently though: I need to make sure I've rinsed off all of the soap afterwards. I'd thought I was having occasional problems with in-grown hairs under my chin, instead I think I was leaving behind little smears of soap every once-in-awhile.
But perhaps I digress.
Yeah, back in the quaint old days when three blades seemed like an absurdity.
Nit: I think the slogan was "For you.... Because you'll believe anything."
I use single-bladed Bic disposables myself, which are great except that you have to keep track of how sharp they are and adjust your shaving style accordingly. Presumably this is because they're made of intentionally corrosive metal, razor blades being one of the classic examples of planned obsolescence in action. I keep wondering if it might be possible to hack my own razor blades: stainless steel isn't terribly easy to sharpen, but I bet it would hold an edge forever. I'd prefer some sort of "saftey" arrangement, rather than the old fashioned straight-edged razor. Has anyone out there looked into this?
Funny, I just remembered that once I tried a different approach: it seemed to me that if I stored a disposable razor in oil, I might be able to prevent it from corroding... I quickly discovered the obvious problem: if I wanted to use soap for lubrication, I was going to have to completely clean off all of the oil before each use. I don't remember if I looked into using oil as a shaving lubricant, that seems like an obvious thought to me now, but I might've missed it back then. Why not stash your razor in olive oil, and wash your face after shaving rather than before?
Though what would be really nifty is to figure out a way of using an electrochemical effect to suppress corrosion... how hard could it be to nickle-plate a "disposable" razor? Hm.
But anyone who supports Debian would be happy to mail their customers a Debian stable disk so they can pretend that they're a "vendor".
They can even change the name on it, if that makes them feel better.
What I would say, though, is given the amount of money they charge, they really should have fewer bugs.
I was wondering when someone was going to mention Postgresql. Oracle's database is essentially a legacy app -- if you're already using it you wouldn't necessarily plan on dumping it immediately, but there's no way in hell you'd start a new business based on it.
It's actually pretty funny having Larry Ellison telling people they can save money by switching to open source software. ("Oh wait. Not that open source software.")
Yes, that looked like a bad move, but I'd say it a little differently: once upon a time RedHat was nearly synonymous with linux, then they played games to "protect their brand" (Fedora Core? What's that? Not to mention "Pink Tie Linux" and so on.) And now they have virtually zero buzz associated with their name. (These days it seems that Ubuntu has become synonymous with Linux, at least on slashdot... in other circles I would guess people tend to talk Debian itself, or Suse).
Someday, we may accumulate a set of case histories like this, of companies that get hyper about "protecting" their brand and end up destroying it...
Of course, that might cut into the support income a bit.
It's like that line in the song "My Strange Nation": "I will not change this stance/I will not move to France".
That's by Susan Werner, by the way, and it's highly recommended: http://www.susanwerner.com/ (warning: flash site... their non-flash alternative is broken).
But you lose points for lifting a phrase from an old Ross Perot campaign. You might give people the impression you're a political flack or something.
And anyone who thinks the Democrats are going to become fire-breathing lefties overnight is compeltely insane. They're a bunch of pet rocks -- it's just that at this point pet rocks would be preferably to people stomping on the gas, driving the country toward a cliff.
Can I ask you, in all seriousness why you're still happy with the Republicans? I mean, I can understand why you would feel that an attack on this country merits a strong military response -- but that's not what we're involved in at the moment is it? We're stomping around in a quagmire for obscure reasons that have nothing to do with the 9/11 attack or Al Qaeda, correct?
Or to take another point, I can understand why a conservative would worry about fiscal responsibility... but we don't have fiscal responsibility, do we? How about that deficit, eh?
By the way, I've been meaning to ask some Repubican or other... do you think you guys could return some of the money Enron stole for you? Seriously, how do you feel about your party recieving stolen goods?
(And what kind of "conservative" has such contempt for the Magna Carta, not to mention the Constitution? Aren't they time-tested enough? How can you just shrug off what's being done to central fabric of our country?)
If you want to keep an eye on the latest poll results, I recommend Andrew Tanembaum's site: Electoral Vote
arcite wrote:
You hear all sorts of things, but what I hear is that the Democrats may not have actually been losing anything but the offical tallies.
Not to mention the fact that if you're a software developer, the standard advice is to avoid knowing anything about the details of software patents. If they can argue you "knowingly infringed" on a patent you're up for triple damages.
I suspect this is one of those things where the situation is so stupid, no one can believe it's the case -- the patent system is designed to encourage publication of useful technical information, but this triple-damages rule means that no one can read it.
The argument is that something like Mickey Mouse has achieved an iconic status, it's become part of our shared culture, but if, for example, you attempt to publish a political cartoon based on Mickey Mouse, the Disney corporation will come after you.
This is one of the reasons that copyright was supposed to be for a limited period of time: the copyright holder was supposed to have a limited state-granted monopoly that would eventually expire -- instead, Disney has developed to the ability to procure indefinite extensions, undermining the original intent of the system.
To address your general sneer: concerns about the validity of the recent elections extend far beyond sour grapes. But you'd actually have to read up on the subject to know something about that, and it is of course much easier to stick with complaining about those whiney democrats.
In any case: the American Democratic-Republic is certainly in bad shape -- it may be in the worst shape it's ever been -- but it's not clear to me that it's dead. It is possible, for example, that the Republican vote-rigging system can shave 5 points, but might have trouble shaving ten: with a big enough upwelling of disgust, with enough people voting against them, you just might see not only the House, but the Senate shift over to Democrat control.
Given that, it then becomes possible to hold actual investigations into some of nasty tricks the Bush regime has been pulling. I wouldn't hold my breath about an actual impeachment, but some nice long hearings grinding people's noses into the crap, we might start seeing some actual improvements.
Things like the Paper Ballot Act might actually become law...
Remember: "Democracy is coming to the USA"
You might even, just to go above and beyond the call of duty, make some attempt to read the writings of people like Bruce Schneier, because you see, he's spent a lot of time thinking about things like this, and you might hurt his feelings if you figured it all out on your own in just a couple of minutes.
Here's a quote from the Freeman and Bleifuss book, Ch. 8, page 199: