But again, the problem is the problems are not being found in the
first place. Look for example, at Sendmail. It's 25 years old,
but is *still* a buggy, buggy app. It STILL isn't secure
and bug-free.
Sendmail probably isn't really that great an
example. The eyeballs that have looked at it
with an eye toward security, or to anything else,
have tended to respond "Runaway!". If you want
a secure mail server, you use postfix, which was
designed with that in mind (honorable mention to
exim, and before postfix you might've given
qmail a try).
Similarly, if you care about security, you
probably wouldn't run RedHat, you'd run Debian
Stable, or possibly OpenBSD: open source software
with a security team trying to keep a lid on
problems.
No, there's nothing magic about open source
that automatically fixes the problems, but it
at least makes it possible to fix the problems.
It's closed source security that's a myth.
crmartin wrote:
Norman Spinrad has been predicting the end of civilization
as we know it, and/or the collapse of the US into fascism,
for thirty years that I remember.
Bruce Sterling has been pushing the end of US innovation and
the collapse of the economy for most of that time.
I know most of those people, more or less, and while I love
much of their fiction, I can't think of any one of them that
I would consider other than a negative predictor.
Oh... so you mean the United States isn't rapidly sliding
into fascism, technological decline, and cultural
irrelvance? Well, that's reassuring.
No, it isn't. Sorry to pop your bubble.
You've got problems with tenses here, there's a difference
between "is happening" and "has happened".
First, get you definitions straight so you know what the
heck you're talking about. Fascism is an economic system
whereby the state nationalizes all industry.
Well, those definitions certainly are important. For
instance, there's a huge difference between not being
allowed to own anything, and owning stuff but being told
exactly what you can do with it.
(Norman Spinrad, by the way, almost always uses a much more
colloquial definition of fascism, being the old sixties boy
that he is. But it would be terrible to keep using his
definition just because we're commenting on his remarks.)
Your wishes vis a vis Microsoft notwithstanding we are
nowhere near this and are not heading in this
direction. We're heading more in a socialist direction.
Ah yes. George W. Bush, socialist.
Technological decline: Show me where technology is getting
harder and harder to obtain. That's technological
decline. North Korea is in technological decline (they can't
even provide consistent electricity to the capital). The
U.S. is not in technological decline.
Try this thesis: the United States is in the business of
technological leadership. Nearly any form of commodity
manufacture is being outsourced to other countries
(preferably un-democratic ones without either government
labor regulations or much free-market competition in the
local labor market). In order to maintain anything like
it's present standards of living the US needs to keep inventing
new stuff, it has to be the place where the smart people are
doing smart things. Meanwhile, programming jobs are now
also being outsourced...
Sure, you can buy gadgets if you've got the cash. That's
good... but where's the new, technical advance?
(I guess it must be biotech. That's been the technology of
the future for a few decades now.)
Cultural irrelevance? Good grief. American culture is
everywhere around the world. Movies, fashion, foods, etc.
Movies: Japanese Anime. Hong kong action (e.g. "Hero").
Fashion: American fashion is sloppy T-shirts and baggy shorts,
over increasingly obese bodies (thanks to the it's "foods").
No one outside of the States wants to look like someone from
the States.
Food: America does indeed have some great foods. We just call
it "Mexican", "Thai", "Japanese", "Italian", "Greek",
"African"...
But wait a minute, I forgot Britney Spears!
We can rest easy about American cultural dominence.
Annnnd...? Don't take this the wrong way, but so what? They write fiction for a living.
And you write slashdot postings for free, and yet
I read your remarks for some reason. What are your credentials anyway? Do I have any reason to
accept your compentence at judging the general
competence of the average science fiction writer?
Anyway, Alfred Bester once remarked something to the effect that it seemed to him that Science Fiction was one of the few avenues of endeavor open to present day "rennaissance men". In an age
of specialist, the generalists get stuck doing things like writing science fiction.
Bruce Sterling himself frequently makes the point that science fiction writers have "the freedom
to scratch ourselves in public". Which is to say
that they can make speculative leaps that the more
sober "responsible" professionals would have to
keep quiet about for fear of their reputations.
(And the actual problem with this article is not
that the gang have comments that seem whacky and
unsupportable, but that they're kind of dull and relatively conventional, and none of them had the room to
expand on their point of view to the point that they might have gotten to something interesting.)
Norman Spinrad has been predicting the end of civilization as we know it, and/or the collapse of the US into fascism, for thirty years that I remember.
Bruce Sterling has been pushing the end of US innovation and the collapse of the economy for most of that time.
I know most of those people, more or less, and while I love much of their fiction, I can't think of any one of them that I would consider other than a negative predictor.
Oh... so you mean the United States isn't rapidly sliding into fascism, technological decline, and cultural irrelvance? Well, that's reassuring.
conner_bw wrote:
Does anyone know of a right wing science fiction writer? (Ron Hubbard
notwithstanding)
At first I was wondering what "Science Fiction" had to do with
politics.slashdot.org but after reading that article... If this is a
plausible sample of the group as a whole then the world of science
fiction is no doubt fiercely leaning towards the political left.
(a) Sure there are relatively conservative SF writers around.
Gregory Benford. Jerry Pournelle. John Shirley
is fairly left wing, and he selected people he respects
to talk to.
(b) It is probably true that there's a "left wing"
bias among SF writers, but then, there's a similar bias among
the population of people who are literate and well-educated.
Point (b) there is nothing to be particularly smug
about, of course -- if we tried hard we could
probably come up with examples of intelligent
and well meaning people screwing things up, and
we could also find examples (not necessarily the
same ones) of people who regard themselves as
really smart, but on closer examination seem to
have an inflated opinion...
But there does indeed seem to be a correlation
between the dumbing down of the United States and the
the swing to the right. Take your choice: Cause, effect, or coincidence.
I don't know if Vesta is much of a contender. It looks like it's hard to adopt for projects that are not totally prepared to buy into its way of doing everything.
Well, you could be right that that will make too many people reluctant to try it, but on the other hand "make" is almost as creaky and problematic
as CVS (we're just -- mostly -- used to dancing around make's problems). Replacing both make and cvs in one-shot, with a mature, well-tested code base has it's appeals.
You may find
yourself around a campfire someday with people from many different
parts of the country/world, and a couple of guitars. What are you
going to do, play your favorite local band's stuff or Billy Joel?
If you have any brains, you'll play some Beatles songs.
It is not inevitable that popular music is crap,
it just seems like it these days. The people in
the culture business are destroying the culture,
hence, shortly they will be out of business.
Try getting around a bit more... a few web
searches will show you some of the common CVS
criticisms. Before using any new tool, I do
seaches on the phrases "___ sucks" and "___ considered harmful".
(And if you don't get any hits on those, then the
code is obviously too new to be relied on.)
There are a bunch of competitors to the CVS
throne. Prominent names that come to mind:
subversion
Gnu Arch
Vesta
There's also the now venerable but proprietary
perforce, and the proprietary bitkeeper (which is
gratis, but only under some circumstances).
I hereby suggest for your consideration
Henry Spencer, only in part for the open source
code that he's written -- he was the author of
a popular regular expression library, for
example.
The really massive contribution that Henry Spencer
has made, in my opinion is *informed commentary*.
He's spent decades hanging around in the C
programming newsgroups (not to mention the sci.space.* tree)
answering questions intelligently.
This is the kind of contribution that I think gets
ignored far too often... yes great coders
deserve to be honored, but people willing to
educate and to do it for free on a volunteer
basis, and *do a good job of it* are if anything
even rarer.
Well, it's nice to be right about something for once.
It looks an awful lot like one of my predictions is
coming true, and roughly on schedule, see this
usenet post from January 1, 2001:
Well excuse the tangent, but this reminds me of something
I've been thinking about lately. It strikes me that the
really compulsive cell phone people seem to be just
nervously checking each other's movements. E.g. "I'm on the
train, no it isn't late, I'll be there in 20 minutes." (I
paraphrase... actually it seems to take them about 5 minutes
of repetitious back-and-forth to get out a simple message
like that.)
I predict that within five years, you will see people
voluntarily wearing location transponders, so that people
can take out their palm computers, and quickly identify the
locations of all members of their virtual tribe. "Oh,
look, Jason, Chelsea and Talbot are all over at the Roaring
Sushi Dome. Let's go join them there."
Then you get into the evolution of customs for things like
initiation into the tribe, rules of etiquette for when
you're allowed to have your transponder on or off,
quasi-legal proceedings for ejection and shunning, and so
on.
And I guess this is somewhat reminscent of some stuff from
the middle novels of Benford's "Galaxy" series
(e.g. "Flushed down the Toilet of the Gods", or whatever
it was called).
Why hello Anonymous. It seems like I was arguing with you
just yesterday.
Doom none of these points mean that PHP sucks, many of them aren ot
present intentionally.
You obviously haven't done your research
Hm... what led you to that conclusion? It couldn't be
because I said I hadn't done any research, could it?
and have very little real world experience.
I have enough experience to know better than to jump on the
latest fads in new languages. Life is too short.
And by the way, if you really care about code reuse, maybe
you should actually reuse code, e.g. from CPAN.
I'd say Perl sucks much more, it is inconsistent,
Try following the link to that article, and come back again
if you think that perl's inconsistencies are worse than PHPs.
code written in perl is nearly impossible to maintain,
Yet strangely enough there are people who do indeed manage
to pull off this impossible trick.
there are too many ways to do something poorly,
Are you supposed to be defending a straight-jacket language
like Java? I thought you were a PHP advocate.
PHP evidentally has neither lexical or dynamic namespaces.
I repeat: it has *no* namespaces. And you're trying to tell
me it's easier to maintain PHP code than perl?
I work at a fortune 500 company and it is banned from
any of our tools and is also banned at most our partners sites.
Yes indeed. Many companies seem to prefer hiring 10 Java
programmers to 1 perl guy. They'll learn better at some point.
Our average engineer has a masters degree and over 15 years
experience, these aren't people who can't learn languages
they are people who have come to the conclusion perl is the
wrong tool.
And yet they *like* PHP?
Perl is without doubt the most inconcistent language I've
ever seen
I'm tempted to say something about the consistency of your
spelling. But that would be wrong.
and it is breaking backwards compatability almost
completely with Perl 6
Pfft: (a)
perl 5 remains under active development.
(b) By design, you will be able to run perl 5 code
under perl 6. No one is forcing anyone to change syntax. Try doing some research.
so while you are learning a
new syntax my PHP 4 scripts will be happily running under
PHP5.
Have you ever tried to use a *big* PHP app? Like say, the
Horde web application framework? I have not looked under
the hood, and I have no doubt there's room for finger
pointing in many directions there, but using Horde and the
IMP webmail program has been a grossly painful experience. (My prediction is that you're not going to be maintaining your PHP scripts when perl6 comes out, you're going to throw them away and do re-writes in another language.)
When you get a bit older and have some real world
experience and can come up with some of your own examples
instead of things that are claimed to be features come
back and we'll talk.
When you understand what namespaces are for, I might be
willing to listen to you.
(By the way... do you understand anything about how slash
ids work? Oh, never mind.)
PHP suckage, silliness of the LAMP terminology
on
PHP Not Moving To The GPL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
treat (84622) wrote:
PHP is a terrible language. It is horribly inconsistant. It has no
namespaces. It encourages mixing design and presentation.
This has a well-reasoned explanation as to why PHP sucks, and some
links:
Hm, thanks that's an interesting article. I've had the
vauge impression that PHP sucks, but didn't really have a
lot of ammunition on the subject (I've avoided learning much
about it).
To be fair to PHP though, it does have
(had?) the advantage of a smaller memory footprint, and I
gather that a lot of ISPs feel more comfortable about
letting random users loose with it rather than giving them
access to mod_perl.
ObOnTopic: I'm mildly annoyed at the author of the article
proudly proclaiming that PHP is the "P" in LAMP. That "P"
has a number of interpretations.
Though in general LAMP is a really lousy piece of
terminology. People use it to mean "free/open source web
technology" when it's far too specific about software names.
Someone who uses FreeBSD and a Postgresql database
evidentally doesn't qualify... but if Postgresql would
change it's name to MostGreatSql, then all of a sudden it
would be allowed in the club...
Date/Darwin/Pascal propose that you codify what you don't know (so to
speak). Read their proposed solution here:
Well, I read it and essentially what they're saying is that
instead of having a single NULL that means "we don't have
the info and we don't know why", they recommend having lots
of single column tables pointing at the missing values, one
table for each reason/excuse. So instead of having NULLs in
the salary field, you've got tables that explain "No salary
because the guy is on commision", "No salary because the guy
is unemployed", "No salary because it is regarded as
confidential", and so on.
What strikes me about this notion (outside of it's general
clunkiness) is that it seems to assume that you will always
know why you don't know. In reality, I think systems like
this would sprout lots of tables called "unknown_value_for_unknown_reasons".
Of course caps lock is necessary. It's necessary for whenever you want
to type in all-caps without holding shift the whole time. I can think
of dozens of examples of this.
And just think of all the tech support people who would be
put out of work if they couldn't respond to "I can't
log-in!" with "Have you tried turning the Caps-Lock key off?"
Re:Swap caps lock and control
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
jesup wrote:
Ah. A vi user. If you're an Emacs user, having the capslock key mapped
to control is the ONLY way to fly. As others have said, that's the One
True Position for the control key.
That's the traditional position, I agree -- and I've never
understood what the moron's were thinking who moved the
standard control key location under the shift. But I'm an
emacs user who's also using one of the kinesis contoured-model,
programmable keyboards, and the Control and Alt keys are
already very accessible under the thumbs (my
numb-pinky-syndrome went away when I switched to the
kinesis, I highly recommend them for heavy emacs abusers).
There are a few really big flaws in the kinesis layout
though, one is the damn Caps Lock next to the A, the other
is a tiny chicklet Escape key way up in left field. But the
Kinesis layout is easy to re-program, so I tried a few
different re-arrangements and evenutally settled on making
the key next to A another Escape, just like mister Vim-User
recommends.
You're right--I was just being a wiki tease. Point is, more folks need
to be vectored there to appreciate the full-on blast of righteousness
that is emacs.
The more you use it, the more you use it.
Out of the box, it might not do much of anything you want, but few
problems you can envision haven't been solved.
Okay, this is *somewhat* informative, but not terribly.
First of all, try labeling your html links with something,
that might, you know, *tell someone something about where
the link is going*:
EmacsWiki: CategoryKeys
Secondly, there's an awful lot of information there, and
what's strictly relevant to the question at hand is getting
C-c and C-v to do copy and paste:
CopyAndPaste.
Note that this discusses cua.el, a package written by Kim
Storm (also, by the way, the original author of the
excellent usenet newsreader "nn") to get emacs cut-and-paste
to behave more like the way a windows user would expect.
The Emacs Way of doing these things can be taken as yet
another paradigm, by the way. Unlike the old windows and
mac "clipboards", the emacs "clipboard" can have multiple
things clipped to it... it's called the "kill-ring", and
it's essentially a stack that you push things on to.
Select a region, "kill" (aka "cut") that region, it ends
up on the kill-ring. Do that again, and that entry is
pushed down one, and the new selection ends up on the
kill-ring. Move somewhere else, and you can "yank"
the last thing killed off of the kill-ring, and if it wasn't
what you wanted, you can do a "yank-pop", and start rotating through
the stuff on the ring until you find what you were looking for.
Now (with Gnu Emacs 21, at least) the "PRIMARY" selection
in X is associated with the top element on the "kill-ring".
Do a "kill" in emacs, move to an X app, do a middle-click,
and you should get the item that was just killed. Highlight
something in the X app with the mouse, switch to emacs, do
a "yank" command, and you'll get the item that was
highlighted.
This, of course, just scratches the surface of emacs
capabilities in this area... I've become a big fan of
the "registers", i.e. the ability to store something
in register "a", and something else in register "b",
and something else in "c" and so on, and to be able to
insert them by name. For example, when writing a bunch
of slashdot postings, the "b" register tends to have
the BLOCKQUOTE html tag stashed in it.
Besides, why is what the windows user expects more important than what
the vi user expects? Is good design based on the vagaries of fasion,
or is it derived from principles?
But if you cared about principles you'd probably be using
emacs.
The nuclear danger has been overstated, and I'm sure is willingly fed
by the oil and coal industries.
I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next man,
but if you look into it, I think you'll find that it's all
the same people, more or less. The utility that runs a
nuke is also a utility that runs some coal/oil/gas plants.
As far as they're concerned they're in the "energy industry".
The effect that this has though, is that the strongest
arguments for nuclear power have very little voice. That
utility isn't going to point out that nuclear is cleaner
than coal, because they'd be shooting themselves in the
foot.
Reprocessing has been a non-starter due to environmentalist
opposition, expense, additional waste generation, and worries about
having purified plutonium around.
Which isn't unreasonable if you read about what went on at Hanford or
Fernauld. It's not that nuclear fission is inherently dangerous. It's
that a lot of the work involved means having people handle dangerous
stuff, and people by nature don't appear to be careful enough.
The pro-nuke case, is of course, that people are more
careful with radioactives than they are with chemicals,
and that it's easier to be more careful with them, because
you don't need to use as much of them (the difference in
quantities per killowatt for both fuel and waste for a nuke plant
vs a coal plant is really striking, by any measure you want
to pick (volume or weight) and including a factor to adjust
for the toxicity of different things doesn't help much.
But anyway, what I wanted to point out is that different
organizations have had radically different safety records
with handling radioactives. As someone else mentioned, the
Navy's safety record has been really impressive, and as you
point out, the Army has been much less so. This appears to
be largely a difference in cultures: the Navy has a
tradition of stowing away things carefully, securing the
cannons, swabbing the decks, etc. The Army has a tradition
of getting dirty to get the job done, crawling through the
mud if need be.
The point is that "human error" is not some implacable,
irreducible force. It really is manageable, and there are
people who know how to manage it.
I think this is perhaps the key disagrement between us, you
seem to be suggesting that because a tool can be used to
create "bad" content that is a function of the tool, and my
position is that that is a function of the user of the tool.
You're just restating the disagreement. Yeah, that's right
that's pretty much what it is.
Issues like this come up *every* time someone comes up with
a glitzy "innovation" in computers. Great, all of a sudden
you can easily use all sorts of fonts in a document, and
then you get the people who can't resist playing with the
toy even though they don't have anything like a feel for
what they're doing and often they forget about the original
purpose of the document they were working on.
For that matter, you can go back before computers. The
"A/V" revolution was supposed to be the great hope of
education, but in practice it turns out you need a genius of
the medium (e.g. Frank Capra, "Hemo the Great", "The Strange
Case of the Cosmic Ray") to produce a short educational film
that actually educates and doesn't just bore to death.
My take: "Hm... maybe the geezer-with-blackboard method has
some advantages"; your take: "We need more visual geniuses!"
For example it leads to the conclusion that you don't solve
the problem by changing the tool, you solve the problem by
changing the user.
The point that I'm trying to make is that to a large extent
you've got to regard human nature as fixed. The tools you
can change, the human beings you're stuck with (in the short
term):
"Boy alot of our customers keep slicing their legs open
with our circluar saw product. Huh, you want to add a mechanical
safety interlock to shield the blade? What a waste! Those
idiots just need to wake up."
"Gee, lots of people have accidents while driving when
drunk. I guess they need better training at how to drive
while drunk. That kind of thing would never happen to me,
I'm a *great* drunk driver."
I accept your argument that macromedia is in control of the
standard, but that doesn't stop it from being a standard
none the less.
You have a funny notion of what consitutes a standard.
Part of the problem with standards bodies like the w3.org is
that by their very nature they are slow and bureaucratic.
That's a point.
I don't know if you recall the whole browser wars experience
firsthand (obviously I mean the first browser wars here IE
vs Netscape, not any of the current peacekeeping actions),
but part of the problem was that the w3.org took forever
defining the next standard
Feh. I would deny that that was *anything* like the real
problem. The problem is when things are moving that fast no
one has a clue about what the right thing to do is. Netscape
and Microsoft would go crazy on this or that "feature" on
the theory that it might help them compete, but mostly that
was all wasted energy -- and we're lucky they didn't destroy
the web as a byproduct of their crazy in-fighting.
For more failings of the slowness of standards bodies have
a look at the take up of SVG format, and compare and
contrast with betamax VHS.
I would be very interested in a knowledgeable take on what
was going on with SVG. Whizzy graphics features are not
exactly an area of interest of mine, and I will admit to not
being up on what went down with that.
(Why do you guys incessantly bring up Betamax? Who really
cares? Okay, it was better than VHS, but only marginally.
A better question would be why people bought Microsoft
instead of, say, Borland.)
... the net was taking a quantum leap, it stopped being
purely an academic tool
Well, it was never a purely academic tool, it was however
largely only used by people with some sort of academic
connection.
Occasionally, but not exclusively. My browsing needs are met by a number of applications and programming libraries depending on what is needed. There is no best browser. Certainly, I believe that images (lacking in lynx) are massively useful in portraying certain types of web content.
It is, of course, unlikely to impress the flash-weenies, but all of the anti-flash rants I posted last night were done in lynx. Lynx is fine
for a lot of stuff... I've got a small "xlynx" script that spins off a URL into a lynx in a new
terminal window, which can be useful for looking at a URL I come across in emacs (MH-E, gnus) without using w3.el (which I generally only use
when composing html that I want to keep pre-viewing).
I've also got a "slash" alias, that opens up a terminal window with slashdot in lynx. I've got
my slashdot preferences set for light/minimal whatever they call it, which cuts down on some of the fugliness that might be (even more) irritating in lynx.
But the main reason I started rambling about this,
is that I thought I'd mention that lynx and image
browsing are not mutally exclusive. I think the key is adding a
verbose_images=on
to your.lynxrc, and maybe you'll need to tweak
your systems lynx.cfg file so you've got an image
viewer defined:
XLOADIMAGE_COMMAND:xv %s
(I think what I do is leave it defined as xv,
and use an alias to have calls to xv run whatever
I feel like using, e.g. ee.)
Anyway... Once you're configured like this
you always have the *option* of looking at an image. You select it the way you would select any
link, and it opens it in an external image viewer.
Selecting the right image can take a little practice, however (many sites are a forest of stupid little images of bullets and bars, and they
*still* like to be skimpy on the ALT text).
As with many other tools, the virtues of lynx are intimately bound up in it's limitations. Looking at a site that insists on subdividing your screen into little boxes? Lynx will tend to linearize those, you'll see one thing after another.
Does the site tend to inflict itty bitty fonts
on you? In mozilla you may have to keep hitting
Control plus and minus to adjust font size after every click, but in lynx, all text is displayed in the same uniform way that you've choosen.
Is the site completely incomprehensible when viewed without all the graphical doodads? Well you know, maybe that means it's not worth looking
at anyway...
And of course, lynx will *never* bug you to install a flash plug-in...
Any similar tips if I don't have root? I'm using
Moz 1.0.2 on IRIX, and I hate having "you need a plugin" boxes popping up all over the place.
That's a good question, but I don't really know the
answer. It could be that there's some way for you to set up a dummy "libnullplugin.so" and get your
mozilla to find it rather than the "real" one.
I dunno.
You might be better off just asking the sysadmin
about it. There might be some beauracratic reason
they can't delete it for you, but they'll probably
be impressed with how super-cool you are and invite you out for a beer.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, if you care about security, you probably wouldn't run RedHat, you'd run Debian Stable, or possibly OpenBSD: open source software with a security team trying to keep a lid on problems.
No, there's nothing magic about open source that automatically fixes the problems, but it at least makes it possible to fix the problems. It's closed source security that's a myth.
(Norman Spinrad, by the way, almost always uses a much more colloquial definition of fascism, being the old sixties boy that he is. But it would be terrible to keep using his definition just because we're commenting on his remarks.)
Ah yes. George W. Bush, socialist. Try this thesis: the United States is in the business of technological leadership. Nearly any form of commodity manufacture is being outsourced to other countries (preferably un-democratic ones without either government labor regulations or much free-market competition in the local labor market). In order to maintain anything like it's present standards of living the US needs to keep inventing new stuff, it has to be the place where the smart people are doing smart things. Meanwhile, programming jobs are now also being outsourced...Sure, you can buy gadgets if you've got the cash. That's good... but where's the new, technical advance?
(I guess it must be biotech. That's been the technology of the future for a few decades now.)
Movies: Japanese Anime. Hong kong action (e.g. "Hero"). Fashion: American fashion is sloppy T-shirts and baggy shorts, over increasingly obese bodies (thanks to the it's "foods"). No one outside of the States wants to look like someone from the States. Food: America does indeed have some great foods. We just call it "Mexican", "Thai", "Japanese", "Italian", "Greek", "African"... But wait a minute, I forgot Britney Spears! We can rest easy about American cultural dominence.Anyway, Alfred Bester once remarked something to the effect that it seemed to him that Science Fiction was one of the few avenues of endeavor open to present day "rennaissance men". In an age of specialist, the generalists get stuck doing things like writing science fiction.
Bruce Sterling himself frequently makes the point that science fiction writers have "the freedom to scratch ourselves in public". Which is to say that they can make speculative leaps that the more sober "responsible" professionals would have to keep quiet about for fear of their reputations.
(And the actual problem with this article is not that the gang have comments that seem whacky and unsupportable, but that they're kind of dull and relatively conventional, and none of them had the room to expand on their point of view to the point that they might have gotten to something interesting.)
(b) It is probably true that there's a "left wing" bias among SF writers, but then, there's a similar bias among the population of people who are literate and well-educated.
Point (b) there is nothing to be particularly smug about, of course -- if we tried hard we could probably come up with examples of intelligent and well meaning people screwing things up, and we could also find examples (not necessarily the same ones) of people who regard themselves as really smart, but on closer examination seem to have an inflated opinion...
But there does indeed seem to be a correlation between the dumbing down of the United States and the the swing to the right. Take your choice: Cause, effect, or coincidence.
It is not inevitable that popular music is crap, it just seems like it these days. The people in the culture business are destroying the culture, hence, shortly they will be out of business.
There are a bunch of competitors to the CVS throne. Prominent names that come to mind:
- subversion
- Gnu Arch
- Vesta
There's also the now venerable but proprietary perforce, and the proprietary bitkeeper (which is gratis, but only under some circumstances).I hereby suggest for your consideration Henry Spencer, only in part for the open source code that he's written -- he was the author of a popular regular expression library, for example. The really massive contribution that Henry Spencer has made, in my opinion is *informed commentary*. He's spent decades hanging around in the C programming newsgroups (not to mention the sci.space.* tree) answering questions intelligently. This is the kind of contribution that I think gets ignored far too often... yes great coders deserve to be honored, but people willing to educate and to do it for free on a volunteer basis, and *do a good job of it* are if anything even rarer.
PHP evidentally has neither lexical or dynamic namespaces. I repeat: it has *no* namespaces. And you're trying to tell me it's easier to maintain PHP code than perl?
Yes indeed. Many companies seem to prefer hiring 10 Java programmers to 1 perl guy. They'll learn better at some point. And yet they *like* PHP? I'm tempted to say something about the consistency of your spelling. But that would be wrong. Pfft: (a) perl 5 remains under active development. (b) By design, you will be able to run perl 5 code under perl 6. No one is forcing anyone to change syntax. Try doing some research. Have you ever tried to use a *big* PHP app? Like say, the Horde web application framework? I have not looked under the hood, and I have no doubt there's room for finger pointing in many directions there, but using Horde and the IMP webmail program has been a grossly painful experience. (My prediction is that you're not going to be maintaining your PHP scripts when perl6 comes out, you're going to throw them away and do re-writes in another language.) When you understand what namespaces are for, I might be willing to listen to you.(By the way... do you understand anything about how slash ids work? Oh, never mind.)
To be fair to PHP though, it does have (had?) the advantage of a smaller memory footprint, and I gather that a lot of ISPs feel more comfortable about letting random users loose with it rather than giving them access to mod_perl.
ObOnTopic: I'm mildly annoyed at the author of the article proudly proclaiming that PHP is the "P" in LAMP. That "P" has a number of interpretations.
Though in general LAMP is a really lousy piece of terminology. People use it to mean "free/open source web technology" when it's far too specific about software names. Someone who uses FreeBSD and a Postgresql database evidentally doesn't qualify... but if Postgresql would change it's name to MostGreatSql, then all of a sudden it would be allowed in the club...
What strikes me about this notion (outside of it's general clunkiness) is that it seems to assume that you will always know why you don't know. In reality, I think systems like this would sprout lots of tables called "unknown_value_for_unknown_reasons".
There are a few really big flaws in the kinesis layout though, one is the damn Caps Lock next to the A, the other is a tiny chicklet Escape key way up in left field. But the Kinesis layout is easy to re-program, so I tried a few different re-arrangements and evenutally settled on making the key next to A another Escape, just like mister Vim-User recommends.
Secondly, there's an awful lot of information there, and what's strictly relevant to the question at hand is getting C-c and C-v to do copy and paste: CopyAndPaste. Note that this discusses cua.el, a package written by Kim Storm (also, by the way, the original author of the excellent usenet newsreader "nn") to get emacs cut-and-paste to behave more like the way a windows user would expect.
The Emacs Way of doing these things can be taken as yet another paradigm, by the way. Unlike the old windows and mac "clipboards", the emacs "clipboard" can have multiple things clipped to it... it's called the "kill-ring", and it's essentially a stack that you push things on to. Select a region, "kill" (aka "cut") that region, it ends up on the kill-ring. Do that again, and that entry is pushed down one, and the new selection ends up on the kill-ring. Move somewhere else, and you can "yank" the last thing killed off of the kill-ring, and if it wasn't what you wanted, you can do a "yank-pop", and start rotating through the stuff on the ring until you find what you were looking for.
Now (with Gnu Emacs 21, at least) the "PRIMARY" selection in X is associated with the top element on the "kill-ring". Do a "kill" in emacs, move to an X app, do a middle-click, and you should get the item that was just killed. Highlight something in the X app with the mouse, switch to emacs, do a "yank" command, and you'll get the item that was highlighted.
This, of course, just scratches the surface of emacs capabilities in this area... I've become a big fan of the "registers", i.e. the ability to store something in register "a", and something else in register "b", and something else in "c" and so on, and to be able to insert them by name. For example, when writing a bunch of slashdot postings, the "b" register tends to have the BLOCKQUOTE html tag stashed in it.
The effect that this has though, is that the strongest arguments for nuclear power have very little voice. That utility isn't going to point out that nuclear is cleaner than coal, because they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.
But anyway, what I wanted to point out is that different organizations have had radically different safety records with handling radioactives. As someone else mentioned, the Navy's safety record has been really impressive, and as you point out, the Army has been much less so. This appears to be largely a difference in cultures: the Navy has a tradition of stowing away things carefully, securing the cannons, swabbing the decks, etc. The Army has a tradition of getting dirty to get the job done, crawling through the mud if need be.
The point is that "human error" is not some implacable, irreducible force. It really is manageable, and there are people who know how to manage it.
You're just restating the disagreement. Yeah, that's right that's pretty much what it is.
Issues like this come up *every* time someone comes up with a glitzy "innovation" in computers. Great, all of a sudden you can easily use all sorts of fonts in a document, and then you get the people who can't resist playing with the toy even though they don't have anything like a feel for what they're doing and often they forget about the original purpose of the document they were working on.
For that matter, you can go back before computers. The "A/V" revolution was supposed to be the great hope of education, but in practice it turns out you need a genius of the medium (e.g. Frank Capra, "Hemo the Great", "The Strange Case of the Cosmic Ray") to produce a short educational film that actually educates and doesn't just bore to death. My take: "Hm... maybe the geezer-with-blackboard method has some advantages"; your take: "We need more visual geniuses!"
The point that I'm trying to make is that to a large extent you've got to regard human nature as fixed. The tools you can change, the human beings you're stuck with (in the short term):
You have a funny notion of what consitutes a standard.
That's a point.
Feh. I would deny that that was *anything* like the real problem. The problem is when things are moving that fast no one has a clue about what the right thing to do is. Netscape and Microsoft would go crazy on this or that "feature" on the theory that it might help them compete, but mostly that was all wasted energy -- and we're lucky they didn't destroy the web as a byproduct of their crazy in-fighting.
I would be very interested in a knowledgeable take on what was going on with SVG. Whizzy graphics features are not exactly an area of interest of mine, and I will admit to not being up on what went down with that.
(Why do you guys incessantly bring up Betamax? Who really cares? Okay, it was better than VHS, but only marginally. A better question would be why people bought Microsoft instead of, say, Borland.)
Well, it was never a purely academic tool, it was however largely only used by people with some sort of academic connection.
I've also got a "slash" alias, that opens up a terminal window with slashdot in lynx. I've got my slashdot preferences set for light/minimal whatever they call it, which cuts down on some of the fugliness that might be (even more) irritating in lynx.
But the main reason I started rambling about this, is that I thought I'd mention that lynx and image browsing are not mutally exclusive. I think the key is adding a
to yourAnyway... Once you're configured like this you always have the *option* of looking at an image. You select it the way you would select any link, and it opens it in an external image viewer.
Selecting the right image can take a little practice, however (many sites are a forest of stupid little images of bullets and bars, and they *still* like to be skimpy on the ALT text).
As with many other tools, the virtues of lynx are intimately bound up in it's limitations. Looking at a site that insists on subdividing your screen into little boxes? Lynx will tend to linearize those, you'll see one thing after another. Does the site tend to inflict itty bitty fonts on you? In mozilla you may have to keep hitting Control plus and minus to adjust font size after every click, but in lynx, all text is displayed in the same uniform way that you've choosen. Is the site completely incomprehensible when viewed without all the graphical doodads? Well you know, maybe that means it's not worth looking at anyway...
And of course, lynx will *never* bug you to install a flash plug-in...
You might be better off just asking the sysadmin about it. There might be some beauracratic reason they can't delete it for you, but they'll probably be impressed with how super-cool you are and invite you out for a beer.
Maybe it's because this one actually suggests a course of action: