Back when I first started shopping for a DSL line,
I was amazed by the massive pile of legal
agreements that the Concentric people wanted you
to sign. My particular favorite was this gem:
You must not use the CNC Service to
solicit other members to patronize competing services
Which I gather means that you're not allowed to say
"Concentric sucks" over Concentric's wires.
Another good one is:
You hereby acknowledge that if
CNC is made aware of Content that CNC deems in its sole
discretion to be unacceptable, undesirable, offensive,
indecent, obscene, excessively violent or otherwise
objectionable, CNC has the right, but not the obligation, to
edit, remove or deny access to such Content.
I went shopping around for other DSL services, keeping an
eye on their legal aggreements, and I couldn't find a TOS
that didn't make me want to toss. All of them follow a
similar formulation, like "you get to pay us money, but we
guarantee nothing, you have no rights, and we can do what
ever we want".
This strikes me as being very short sighted in a number of
ways. It seems very unlikely to me that this "we have the
right, but not the obligation" business will survive
forever, and if they have to go one way or the other, they'd
much rather be in the position of never, ever, monitoring
content. That's what being a "common carrier" is about,
as I understand it.
And further, though this seems to be a quaint and
old-fashioned thought in a lot of people's minds,
there really is some value in customer goodwill.
If right out of the gate, a company starts acting
like a jerk, they really can't expect anything like
customer loyalty.
Philip Greenspun claims to have implemented
a one-click shopping system back when he had
to argue with people who thought the shopping
cart must be the way to go because Amazon was
using it.
It's highly unlikely that Amazon was really
first... (and even if they were, there's the
problem of "non-obviousness"...).
As usual, newspaper technical articles are pretty
sketchy on the interesting bits.
For instance, temperature is just one parameter
to look at when you're looking at superconducting
cables. Increasing the current density and/or
the magnetic field will also tend push you out
of the superconducting state. Tc is the temperature
when current and field is zero, and the trouble
with the high Tc superconductors is that you don't
have a lot of clearence between the temperature
of liquid N2 (77K) and Tc. When you try and load the cable with current, what you might call the "effective" critical temperature is going to be lower. The easy form of
BSSCO is only something like 90K -- can't believe
I don't remember more precisely than that, I used
to work on this stuff -- anyway, I refuse to
believe that they've managed to reliably come up
with the 125K form of BSSCO, that's one holy
grail that was looking pretty elusive, at least
as of ten years ago.
A minute with google turns up what looks like
a pretty good technical article about the processing
of BSCCO/Ag tape:
Is Low Cost BSCCO Tape Just Around the Corner?.
(ObGripe: sure would be nice if the slashdot crew
would do a teeny bit of background research on
these stories, instead of just pointing us at
junk news sources). Looks like I might be wrong
about the 125K form of the stuff: they talk about
working with both the 2223 and 2212 compositions
(the numbers there are the main stoichiometries of
the compound, e.g. Bi2 Ba2 Ca2 Cu3 Ox... as I remember
it they don't usually specify the amount of Oxygen in the
mix, because it's a bitch to measure it, and it
tends to vary anyway). But then, they
wouldn't be talking about both forms
if they had the 125K form working really well.
Looks like they've got some decent numbers from direct measurements
of current/area, which makes sense, or they wouldn't
be announcing projects like this.
(By the way: one of the cool things about BSCCO --
I wonder when they made up this "Bisco" business,
that's a new one on me -- but all the components
are relatively non-toxic. At least they're not
using something really evil like Thallium.)
What I would like to see is a combination of both of these. For example when I am browsing around in a file manager, sometimes I want to just rightclick and delete a file or something simple. Other times I want to type in a script name to run on the file.
Hm... well let's see, suppose you're using dired, perhaps inside of emacs, and you cursor down to a file and hit a "!". And then dired let's you enter a shell command that will use this file name as an argument. And as an added feature, it tries to guess what command you might want to run (e.g. if it's a "jpg", it will guess you want something like an xv to view it with, or if it's a "tgz", it will guess you want to uncompress and untar it).
Is that the sort of advanced functionality you're talking about (that has only existed for a few decades or so...)?
Are those who are not familiar with emacs compelled to re-invent it badly?
I tend to work almost inclusively inside of emacs, using dired and sub-shells. You want a file-manager that let's you work without a mouse? Think about dired (it can also be run outside of emacs, though I can't comment on how well). Sometimes I might be typing a command in a shell window and decide to look up a file name: so I split the shell window in half (C-x 2), run dired in one of them (M-d), cursor through the directory listing, select a file name (C-x SPC, C-e), copy it to the clipboard aka 'kill-ring' using the command 'copy-region-as-kill' which I personally have bound to C-z), skip to the shell window (C-x o) and paste the name in place (C-y).
After awhile you get pretty fast at these kind of manipulations, and I much prefer it to dorking around with a mouse...
(On the other hand: I have yet to find any useful method of doing things recursively inside of dired, e.g. cutting a tree. But then, if I cared enough I could write a modification to dired to do this, much in the same way that I've written commands that do things like copy selected files to the directory displayed in another dired window. It'd be nice to get some more people involved with polishing up the emacs way of life... Another thing I'd like: a way of doing an "su" inside of emacs/dired...)
Anyway, in conclusion I want to point out that you really shouldn't get caught up in the CLI vs. GUI dichotomy. It's entirely possible to have a windowing system which is *not* graphical, e.g. emacs.
But think about it: Certain things SHOULD be funded by a socialist
model. The roads, for example. In a "free market" system, you'd have 2
toll roads going between the same 2 points, with the toll takes
competing/colluding for your money. Look at the Cali energy crisis:
public utilities should be severely regulated!
I'm willing to listen to arguments like this, but you really
need to polish yours up. Don't know where you live, but out
here in urban California, the highways are constantly
getting jammed up. Suprise: you provide something for
"free" and all of a sudden the demand for it goes way up.
A greater reliance on toll roads would at least encourage
people to think twice about using the resource, to look
for ways to economize on it's use, and so on.
Having two competing systems going between two points
doesn't sound like such a bad idea, either. Far from being
inefficient, a little redundancy would create a more robust
system (as compared to "take 101, and only 101, and if
there's a crash, you're all screwed").
And the theory of course is that two competing agencies
are encouraged to cut prices and improve service.
Sometimes it even works that way. Look at supermarkets.
Look at long distance phone pricing after the ma bell
breakup. Look at the fall in airline prices and the rise
in airline usage (with no decline in safety).
(And the energy crisis here in California just goes to show
that there are scum out there who will play orwellian
name games using whatever jargon is popular at the moment.
Whatever was really going on out here, it doesn't look much
like real "deregulation" to me.)
Look at the capitalist/commercial media in America. It sucks. It does
not inform, it does not provide a balanced view of things, the
corporations control the elections... the capitalist media does
nothing well, but produce/distribute SPAM.
The socialst media in Canada and England produce some wonderful art
(Imagine Monty Python or The Young Ones being produced in America?).
The only thing like it in America is Public Access TV, or community
radio (like what Pacifica is/was/tries to be) which has a socialist
funding model with a decentralized authority (just like DNS).
I could quibble with some of your examples here, too -- for
example, a popular libertarian line is to claim that cable
television is doing a better job at educational TV than PBS,
with things like the Discover channel and the Nature
channel.
But I find it hard to walk away from the fact that a lot of
the big money media comes up really lousy stuff. The
capitalist argument would be "hey, we're just giving them
what they want, who are you to tell people what they should
like?" But is that the whole story? Are people in general
really so lame that network TV has their number?
I think that if you really want to get some where, you're
going to need a model of reality a little deeper than
"capitalism vs socialism". Okay, maybe you like PBS better
than CBS, NPR better than Rush Limbaugh. What about the New
York Times? Should they be government owned?
And how is "volunteer" actvity like "Pacifica" socialist
in any sense? Pacifica uses very little tax money -- for a
long time they didn't use any at all.
(I can't believe you call yourself a
"Green/Libertarian". WTF? On the other hand, I voted for
Nader this time, and Browne last time, so maybe I'm getting
there too.)
Re: Mixing code and data - complete agreement
on
Mason 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
I have found myself writing a
templating mechanism in perl,
AAARGH! Another one! Another goddamn DIY html
templating mechanism! Have you ever *thought*
about looking on CPAN? Do you know that there
are dozens of different html templating/perl
embedding packages out there already?
Code reuse. It's a good idea. This means you.
Do some research before you start typing.
Personally, I recommend Mason. When in doubt,
always go with the most powerful tool you can
find: so you know the choice won't limit you
later. And yes, it is possible to use Mason
in an organization where the HTML people are
too stupid to be let near perl: I've seen it done.
You just keep the Mason calls simple, and keep
the complexities out of their face.
I've tried to write a review of this book
off and on over the last year, but every
time I get bogged down in sorting out the tremendous
number of inaccuries and snide cheapshots
it's weighted down with.
(Just to pick one: Disch asserts that the Delany
novel "The Madman" is devoted to the thesis that
HIV does not cause AIDS. This is a completely
insane reaction to the novel: nowhere in it is anything
like this thesis stated (many others are however),
and nothing in the events of the story contradict
the HIV hypothesis. When you can get something *this*
far wrong, nothing else you say can be trusted.)
Disch's main take on Science Fiction is that it's
largely based on a worship of Big Ideas, grand
theories about how the world works. From Disch's point
of view, the idea that you can rationally understand
how the world is put together is a ridiculous,
sophomoric notion, hence the idea that Science Fiction
is a branch of children's literature, and so on.
(Here's some more stuff on that subject:
DISCH
)
It's difficult to state the main thesis of this book,
because Disch has a way of backtracking to cover himself,
but roughly he points out that ideas from SF have a way
of leaking out into the real world, in sometimes unsavory
contexts. He keeps stabbing in the direction of saying
that Science Fiction is immoral because it encourages
people to believe in things that turn out to be
destructive ("in dreams begin responsibilities",
is the closing quote).
He is, however, not quite willing to go as far as
to blame Charlie Manson on Robert Heinlein... because
if he did it would be obvious that his thesis is
ridiculous (e.g. why not blame Manson on John Lennon?).
so anyway, I don't think that emusic is going to be doing high-quality mp3s, anytime soon, which will stop me from
subscribing, but other than that, it looks like a pretty excellent service!
This would depend on your definition of "soon"
(and it ain't up to me to do product announcements),
but this is definitely in the works. They're
re-ripping the entire backcatalog of CDs
(and yeah, this time the wavs are being archived).
It sounds an awful lot like you're talking about
something like emusic.
A one-year sub gets you unlimited access to their
collection for something like 10 bucks a month.
A 3-month sub is more like $15, and you can also
just browse around and buy tracks one at a time
for a $1, without subscribing.
I guess the quality of the tracks might not be quite
what you're looking for (quality -> big files ->
long download times, so there's tradeoffs here).
I understand they're working on adding some
fatter files for people with wider pipes.
Ted Nelson's old idea in the Xanadu system was
essentially to have a flat rate per byte, set low
enough that you could mostly ignore it while
say, just reading something. That would take
some of the uncertainty and confusion out of
using a micropayment system, but I'm skeptical
myself.
All bytes are not created equal. If you have
some information that you think is worth more
than the flat rate that the system charges, then
you just won't put it up on that system, and the
hope of having a universal information exchange
medium would never be realized.
(What I'd like to know is if Scott McCloud
has been reading Jakob Nielsen's stuff, why does
he have links that aren't blue underlines?)
(Oh, and if anyone cares, I've got some nitpicks
about "Understanding Comics": CLOUDY.)
I have to say there doesn't seem to be too much here of
substance, but the discussion of tribalism is somewhat
interesting.
Triabalism can be a problem all right. But I'd argue that
you want to keep the different tribes talking to each other,
even if it's only to engage in arguments.
The general trend in real discussion groups like
mailing lists or usenet is to engage in long, drawn out
wars that can either converge on enlightened compromise,
or harden into separate camps, but either way, the
people following the discussion will learn something
about the advantages or disadvantages of the two
approaches under discussion.
(Note: slashdot sucks for this purpose: discussions
die too quickly.)
My person feeling is that people who like to adopt a calm,
"professional" air tend to be kind of tedious and wishy-washy.
They're often so afraid to take a stand that they can barely
say anything useful.
But on the other hand, it might be worth considering the
possibility that both approaches toward discussion
("advocacy" and "objective consideration") may have their
uses, in the same way that different computer languages have
different uses.
There's this clique of "digerati" who keep popping up on its pages and in similar forums/magazines/books, explaining the
future in all its robotic nanotech cybernetic glory. The same names keep appearing over and over, repeating visions of a future
so vague and full of popcorn sci-fi visions that you can't quite pin down anything specific, but can debate about it for weeks.
You may have seen these names before, waving hands and talking about the amazing future - Nicholas Negroponte, Marc
Andreesen (even makes the cover of wired recently, all for having co-written mosaic w/ eric bina), Lanier, Kurzweil, Ted
Nelson, Gelertner, etc. Most or all of these have been "has beens", who never quite produce anything useful, except visions of
the future that are lapped up by journalists and viewed as the gospel.
So you prefer, for example, to read the opinions
of Bill Joy, because he's a sucessful technologist? (Myself, I thought Bill Joy's
cautionary manifesto showed an amazing lack of
forethought... he's had his head in the guts of
the tech for so long, it's only just *now*
occured to him that there may be some serious long term problems with it.)
But the real reason I'm writing is that you've
thrown "Ted Nelson" into the list of people who
are (a) trumpeted by Wired and (b) have never
done anything useful. For one thing, Wired is
if anything hostile to Ted Nelson, and for another
thing, whatever Nelson's failings as a coder
or a manager of coder's he *did* suceed in writing
some fairly influential books. You may not have
read any of them, but Tim Berners-Lee has.
The web might be a better place if more people
understood what Nelson was after with Xanadu:
here's a new Nelson paper on the subject.
I'm as annoyed with Wired-style fluff as anyone
(take a look at the New York Times "Technology News" headlines: it's
all about who-bought-who this week. Technology?).
But there is no simple rule-of-thumb to find
brilliant writing. You can't just refuse to
read anything by someone who's not rated a Master
at advogatro. Is there any reason to care about,
say, Linus Torvald's opinions about, say, globalization, compared to some nameless writer at the
Economist?
And just to see if we can start a little trend here and actually talk about the article: Jaron Lanier is not at all sounding like the re-incarnation of Hugo Gernsback
here. Is there any reason at all you attached this rant to this article, except that you've
heard Jaron Lanier's name in Wired magazine?
Wow, got some reeeal funny moderators around these
days. My "underrated" list got marked "overrated". It'll be interesting to see if the meta moderators catch this one (for once).
Anyway:
Pulp Fiction not influential? Are you insane? At *least* go watch Go (1998 or so), but then remind
yourself of movies like Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead and about any other movie
involving criminals that came out in the years following Pulp Fiction, which were *all* compared to Pulp
Fiction. Hell, To Die For was wrongly and confusingly billed as a 'female Pulp Fiction'.
The point I was trying to make in my oh, so
iconoclastic (clumsy?) way was that only the
superficial elements of the story were influential... the actual theme of the movie
was not, because no one seems to have gotten
the point. E.g. It could very well be that
Fargo wouldn't of happened without
Pulp Fiction, but that doesn't really
mean very much, because Fargo also has nothing of any importance
in common with Pulp Fiction.
I dunno, maybe I didn't put this very well:
Pulp Fiction. Okay, it was really popular, but it couldn't be "influential" because I don't think anyone
understood it. The theme here is everyone's self image is tangled up in stories about themselves that they want
to believe (Brain Pulp Fiction?). There's also the suggestion that the bible may be just more pulp. But as far as I
can tell, everyone got into watching it because bad people are cool and stupid people are funny, and if everyone's
bad and stupid at the same time you got the best of both worlds.
I'm dissapointed it's just a list of bad films (not exactly a hard thing to find, bad film...). I'd have prefered a listing of things that should have been influential, but weren't... which I guess might just be an "underrated" list.
How about: Real Genius A truly excellent movie, really funny, but rooted in reality in a weird way. It went nowhere because it pushed the idea that it's good to be intelligent, and Joe 6 don't like that egghead shit. Nice soundtrack too. Seems profoundly weird to me that most people seem to think more highly of junk like "Revenge of the Nerds".
The Undead. A Roger Corman flick, which is to say it's a quickie with a lower budget than early Doctor Who... but it's a really interesting, strange melange of science fantasy. Main character travels into the past following another persons hypnotic regression link, contends with the devil, etc. Gravedigger goes around singing strange songs, dilly doggerel, but funnier than Shakespere. If people paid any attention to things like this they'd realize high budget effects just aren't necessary -- and might even be counterproductive -- to making good movies.
Pulp Fiction. Okay, it was really popular, but it couldn't be "influential" because I don't think anyone understood it. The theme here is everyone's self image is tangled up in stories about themselves that they want to believe (Brain Pulp Fiction?). There's also the suggestion that the bible may be just more pulp. But as far as I can tell, everyone got into watching it because bad people are cool and stupid people are funny, and if everyone's bad and stupid at the same time you got the best of both worlds.
Why cant you silicon valley people appreciate just how long it takes us to actually get to your beloved san jose from our side of the world and give us just a tiny bit more notice....
Um... San Jose is not "beloved". Tolerated, maybe but not "beloved". Trust me.
(Maybe slashdot needs region codes, so some stories would only be visible inside the "ba"...)
The way to set up the databases in a test is also very crucial for the
performance of the database. The article doesn't mention anything
about this or even with which ODBC driver they used the different
databases. The defaults for MySQL is for a database with moderate load
and it should take very little resources. MySQL also have two ODBC
drivers, one slow with debugging and one fast. It should be very nice
to know how they actually did use MySQL. To get any performance from
Oracle, on has also to tune this a lot; The ODBC driver for Oracle has
also very bad performance; This is a common known fact; No one runs a
critical system with Oracle and ODBC.
I relayed the suggestion that the trouble with
MySQL's performance might be in the ODBC driver to the postgresql development team. They insist that this can not be
the case. I'm going to take the liberty of quoting Thomas Lockhart: "If it were due to the
ODBC driver, then MySQL and PostgreSQL would not have had comparable performance
in the 1-2 user case. The ODBC driver is a per-client interface so would have no role as the
number of users goes up."
They also make the point that the AS3AP test is a read-only test and should have been a piece-of-cake
for MySQL, if you believed MySQL's
slashdot-enhanced reputation as the ultimate in
select-oriented web apps.
(Myself, I find this whole situation imensely amusing. MySQL has been sticking misleading
benchmark results up on their web site for ages,
and now they're whining that someone else has
stolen their trick...)
The reason MySQL was slower was because they used the ODBC drivers. The MySQL
ODBC drivers are known to be significately slower then the native drivers.
I relayed this opinion to the postgresql
development team, and they insist that this
can not be the case. I'm going to take the
liberty of quoting Thomas Lockhart: "If it were due to the ODBC driver, then MySQL and
PostgreSQL would not have had comparable performance in the 1-2 user case. The ODBC driver is a per-client interface so
would have no role as the number of users goes up."
They make the point that AS3AP test is read-only and should have
been a piece-of-cake for MySQL, if you believed
MySQL's slashdot-enhanced reputation as the
ultimate in web automation.
Instead, it's looking as though MySQL is only fast
when it doesn't matter: when there aren't very
many people using it.
The Postgresql people insist that the results of
these benchmarks were completely unexpected... they knew that they'd improved things a lot, but
they'd never made an attempt to measure it before.
It's understandable to suspect that the "independant agency" was watching which side it's
bread was buttered on, but it's also obvious that
Great Bridge really needed to know this information, *someone* had to do these tests,
and who else was going to pay for them?
It's all very well and good to take benchmarks with the proverbial grain of salt, but you can't
just throw out data because you don't like the
result.
You catch more flies with honey, than vinegar. Which group got more done, in the ongoing battles against discrimination and
segregation? Martin Luther King, or the Black Panthers?
It seems like I say this to someone on the net
about once every other day, but here goes again:
The more radical Black leaders had a very important role to play in the Civil Rights
struggle. They made Martin Luther King look
*really* good to white America. The cops aren't
the only people who get to play "good cop/bad cop".
You can try and work inside the system or outside the system, the important thing is the "work"
part, and I personally am a little reluctant to
jump up and say "No, no, you're doing it all
wrong, you should do it *my* way." Maybe you
should do it your way, and he should do it his
way. And if you don't want to be associated
with someone, go ahead and dissociate yourself,
but don't expect them to act just like
you to make things easier for you.
If anyone cares, I personally would not have
handled things the way the kid in the story here
did. For one thing, I think he showed far too
much trust in the police: they easily could have
maimed him for life, and then pulled a "I thought
he had a gun, I thought my life was in danger."
(And anyway, what do you want with all those flies?)
Aside from giving people room to argue about
whether the cops can arrest people for being a
jerk, this seems like a fairly pointless story.
(1) Political demonstrations are certainly interesting to
me, but why is this "news for nerds", as opposed to just
news?
(2) There are stories leaking about some *serious* abuses of
police authority going down in Philadelphia, like severe
beatings before and after arrest, protestors held for
several days without a charge, and so on: http://www.phillyimc.org/ http://www.indymedia.org/
(3) As far as I can tell, these stories are not
making it into the print media. If you're not
on the net, you don't even know that there are
thousands of people protesting, and over 300 people arrested. Oh, wait a minute, I guess
there was this *one* story in a local SF paper, I just
missed it: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ex aminer/archive/2000/08/08/NEWS114 31.dtl
(4) If it makes you all feel any better, a bunch
of the lefty activists I know are running down to
Los Angeles to protest at the Democratic
convention (anyone who's paying any attention
realizes that the Democrats aren't all that much
different from the Republicans these days): http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/45/45nfdnc. html
Microsoft repeatedly turns out mediocre, buggy products that
get kind-of useable by the third version.
> If you want a share of the
> marketplace, then compete by producing better
> software.
Where have you been? If better software was all it took,
Borland would be the giant of the software industry.
> Stop whining.
No, you can't make me!
> In the end, consumers benefit from competition.
(Which end?)
> Expecting consumers to choose your
> inferior product over a superior product to make some
> kind of political statement is lame and repulsive.
(a) They're not my products.
(b) There are many instances where refusing to respect a
boycott is what's really lame and repulsive. ("I always
buy from the Gap, they make great clothes for a great price!
Oh... they're manufactured by asian women conned into
indetured servitude in Saipan by being told they're getting
jobs in the US? Don't bother me with that politcal crap!")
> Case in point: The Mozilla project. If it were not for
> Microsoft, Netscape would have continued sitting on its
> ass, churning the 4.x line, and releasing noteworthy
> enhancements like the "shopping button".
Right, multiple competing companies are better than just one
defacto-monopoly. A Netscape-dominated web could easily
have become a mess of BLINK tags.
> Compete, deliver, or die.
Extend, embrace, extinguish.
> MS is a monopoly, and IE is a tool used illegally to
> further its monopoly. True, but this can be dealt with by
> anti-trust law.
Have you been paying any attention at all? This isn't
being dealt with by anti-trust law... the government is
busy trying to fight Standard Oil all over again.
In any case, my contention is that consumer boycotts are
more effective in many cases than waiting for government
action. Boycotts work faster and are more reliable,
because of the "proportional representation" effect I
mentioned earlier.
> Requiring consumers to choose an inferior
> product to spite MS is like cutting off the nose to spite
> the face.
I think this is incredibly melodramatic. The "inferior"
products just aren't that inferior (and some of them may not
be inferior at all... if Opera were out for Linux I might
give it a try, and Mozilla is certainly getting there).
Anyway, I have no problems with rewarding the best.
Aren't you arguing for rewarding the worst?
Quick responses to a bunch of people, in no particular order:
plunge (cosym@yahoo.com) wrote:
> That's them creating the most important incentive for the
> future of all: the incentive to try to actually produce
> something superior to everything else. Sorry, but that's
> what counts in the end, and that's where things will end
> up when all is said and done.
gargle wrote:
> You're damn right. I'm voting with every click - voting in
> support of a superior product.
Denial of Service wrote:
> I hope you enjoy playing politician while the vast majority
> make choices based upon quality of product.
(1) A lot of techies don't like to believe this, but you are
essentially stuck living in a political world. You're
deluding yourself if you think you can live your life making
"technical" decisions without any political aspect.
(2) Luckily for my side this particular voting process has
proportional representation built-in, so I don't need "the
vast majority". No sane business throws away even 10% of
it's potential market if it can avoid it, so a 90-10 split
between Microsoft and everyone else still leaves room for
standards to win out. At some point -- somewhere above 95%
market share is my guess -- there will be no practical
argument left to shoot down a designer that's itchy to play
with some new toy MS put in the latest IE, and there will be
no pressure left towards standards compliance.
(3) Netscape has far from a perfect record about standards
compliance, but it doesn't matter for this argument, since
I'm not telling you to use Netscape. Lynx, opera, mozilla,
xemacs, whatever. The point is to discourage reliance on
any one single company's proprietary technology (e.g. a
site based on macromedia flash isn't any better than an
IE-only site).
(4) It would be nice to believe that everything boils down
to simple free-market economics, but I've (reluctantly)
become convinced that in the real world, there is no single
simple set of principles that applies universally.
In this particular case, I'm arguing that your conception of
"a quality product" is shallow and short-sighted. When you
buy into a technology, you're getting more than a product,
you're also looking for "services", which means you have to
look to the future and think about everyone's long-term
incentives (as well as look to the past, and think about the
history of the groups involved). In this case, I'm arguing
that the future upgrades you're going to recieve, and the
kind of web you're going to have to deal with will be
compromised by what you're buying into in the present.
Beware of Microsoft bearing gifts. What's hard to
understand about this?
Oh great, another "IE is better than Netscape" dude. This is "Insightful"?
I don't use Windows enough to know if "IE" is better. I have used windows enough to know that Linux is better, and while Netscape is far from perfect, it works well enough on both platforms that I don't understand why anyone would take the trouble to complain (like, yeah, it will crash after a few days of uptime, and yeah, that's mildly annoying, but so what? Generally, any tasks I do with the browser are completed in less than an hour -- and if I want to read a long essay or something, lynx is fine.)
Anyway, there's a really good reason why you shouldn't use "Internet Explorer", no matter how absolutively wounderful it is: you're voting with every mouseclick, leaving trails in the logs of every website you visit, getting us all a little closer to a Microsoft dominated world. When IE on Windows shows up at 95% plus, every dweeb of a web designer is going to insist that there's no point in sticking to any "standards" but Microsoft's.
So, you don't like Netscape, that's fine, go out and find a copy of Opera or something. If you use Internet Explorer, you're being incredibly short-sighted, and you deserve the world you're going to get.
Slashdot Mirror
Another good one is:
I went shopping around for other DSL services, keeping an eye on their legal aggreements, and I couldn't find a TOS that didn't make me want to toss. All of them follow a similar formulation, like "you get to pay us money, but we guarantee nothing, you have no rights, and we can do what ever we want".This strikes me as being very short sighted in a number of ways. It seems very unlikely to me that this "we have the right, but not the obligation" business will survive forever, and if they have to go one way or the other, they'd much rather be in the position of never, ever, monitoring content. That's what being a "common carrier" is about, as I understand it.
And further, though this seems to be a quaint and old-fashioned thought in a lot of people's minds, there really is some value in customer goodwill. If right out of the gate, a company starts acting like a jerk, they really can't expect anything like customer loyalty.
Anyway, if you're really bored, I've archived the whole pile of stuff here: Concentric DSL legal agreements.
Philip Greenspun claims to have implemented
a one-click shopping system back when he had
to argue with people who thought the shopping
cart must be the way to go because Amazon was
using it.
It's highly unlikely that Amazon was really
first... (and even if they were, there's the
problem of "non-obviousness"...).
For instance, temperature is just one parameter to look at when you're looking at superconducting cables. Increasing the current density and/or the magnetic field will also tend push you out of the superconducting state. Tc is the temperature when current and field is zero, and the trouble with the high Tc superconductors is that you don't have a lot of clearence between the temperature of liquid N2 (77K) and Tc. When you try and load the cable with current, what you might call the "effective" critical temperature is going to be lower. The easy form of BSSCO is only something like 90K -- can't believe I don't remember more precisely than that, I used to work on this stuff -- anyway, I refuse to believe that they've managed to reliably come up with the 125K form of BSSCO, that's one holy grail that was looking pretty elusive, at least as of ten years ago.
A minute with google turns up what looks like a pretty good technical article about the processing of BSCCO/Ag tape: Is Low Cost BSCCO Tape Just Around the Corner?. (ObGripe: sure would be nice if the slashdot crew would do a teeny bit of background research on these stories, instead of just pointing us at junk news sources). Looks like I might be wrong about the 125K form of the stuff: they talk about working with both the 2223 and 2212 compositions (the numbers there are the main stoichiometries of the compound, e.g. Bi2 Ba2 Ca2 Cu3 Ox... as I remember it they don't usually specify the amount of Oxygen in the mix, because it's a bitch to measure it, and it tends to vary anyway). But then, they wouldn't be talking about both forms if they had the 125K form working really well.
Looks like they've got some decent numbers from direct measurements of current/area, which makes sense, or they wouldn't be announcing projects like this.
(By the way: one of the cool things about BSCCO -- I wonder when they made up this "Bisco" business, that's a new one on me -- but all the components are relatively non-toxic. At least they're not using something really evil like Thallium.)
Is that the sort of advanced functionality you're talking about (that has only existed for a few decades or so...)?
I tend to work almost inclusively inside of emacs, using dired and sub-shells. You want a file-manager that let's you work without a mouse? Think about dired (it can also be run outside of emacs, though I can't comment on how well). Sometimes I might be typing a command in a shell window and decide to look up a file name: so I split the shell window in half (C-x 2), run dired in one of them (M-d), cursor through the directory listing, select a file name (C-x SPC, C-e), copy it to the clipboard aka 'kill-ring' using the command 'copy-region-as-kill' which I personally have bound to C-z), skip to the shell window (C-x o) and paste the name in place (C-y).
After awhile you get pretty fast at these kind of manipulations, and I much prefer it to dorking around with a mouse...
(On the other hand: I have yet to find any useful method of doing things recursively inside of dired, e.g. cutting a tree. But then, if I cared enough I could write a modification to dired to do this, much in the same way that I've written commands that do things like copy selected files to the directory displayed in another dired window. It'd be nice to get some more people involved with polishing up the emacs way of life... Another thing I'd like: a way of doing an "su" inside of emacs/dired...)
Anyway, in conclusion I want to point out that you really shouldn't get caught up in the CLI vs. GUI dichotomy. It's entirely possible to have a windowing system which is *not* graphical, e.g. emacs.
Having two competing systems going between two points doesn't sound like such a bad idea, either. Far from being inefficient, a little redundancy would create a more robust system (as compared to "take 101, and only 101, and if there's a crash, you're all screwed").
And the theory of course is that two competing agencies are encouraged to cut prices and improve service. Sometimes it even works that way. Look at supermarkets. Look at long distance phone pricing after the ma bell breakup. Look at the fall in airline prices and the rise in airline usage (with no decline in safety).
(And the energy crisis here in California just goes to show that there are scum out there who will play orwellian name games using whatever jargon is popular at the moment. Whatever was really going on out here, it doesn't look much like real "deregulation" to me.)
I could quibble with some of your examples here, too -- for example, a popular libertarian line is to claim that cable television is doing a better job at educational TV than PBS, with things like the Discover channel and the Nature channel.But I find it hard to walk away from the fact that a lot of the big money media comes up really lousy stuff. The capitalist argument would be "hey, we're just giving them what they want, who are you to tell people what they should like?" But is that the whole story? Are people in general really so lame that network TV has their number?
I think that if you really want to get some where, you're going to need a model of reality a little deeper than "capitalism vs socialism". Okay, maybe you like PBS better than CBS, NPR better than Rush Limbaugh. What about the New York Times? Should they be government owned?
And how is "volunteer" actvity like "Pacifica" socialist in any sense? Pacifica uses very little tax money -- for a long time they didn't use any at all.
(I can't believe you call yourself a "Green/Libertarian". WTF? On the other hand, I voted for Nader this time, and Browne last time, so maybe I'm getting there too.)
AAARGH! Another one! Another goddamn DIY html templating mechanism! Have you ever *thought* about looking on CPAN? Do you know that there are dozens of different html templating/perl embedding packages out there already?
Code reuse. It's a good idea. This means you. Do some research before you start typing.
Here's one:
www.perldoc.com - HTML::Template
Here's another:
www.perldoc.com - CGI::FastTemplate
And here's an archived thread of people who know more than we do talking about these things:
templating:html_perl_separation_&_perl_embedding
Personally, I recommend Mason. When in doubt, always go with the most powerful tool you can find: so you know the choice won't limit you later. And yes, it is possible to use Mason in an organization where the HTML people are too stupid to be let near perl: I've seen it done. You just keep the Mason calls simple, and keep the complexities out of their face.
(Just to pick one: Disch asserts that the Delany novel "The Madman" is devoted to the thesis that HIV does not cause AIDS. This is a completely insane reaction to the novel: nowhere in it is anything like this thesis stated (many others are however), and nothing in the events of the story contradict the HIV hypothesis. When you can get something *this* far wrong, nothing else you say can be trusted.)
Disch's main take on Science Fiction is that it's largely based on a worship of Big Ideas, grand theories about how the world works. From Disch's point of view, the idea that you can rationally understand how the world is put together is a ridiculous, sophomoric notion, hence the idea that Science Fiction is a branch of children's literature, and so on. (Here's some more stuff on that subject: DISCH )
It's difficult to state the main thesis of this book, because Disch has a way of backtracking to cover himself, but roughly he points out that ideas from SF have a way of leaking out into the real world, in sometimes unsavory contexts. He keeps stabbing in the direction of saying that Science Fiction is immoral because it encourages people to believe in things that turn out to be destructive ("in dreams begin responsibilities", is the closing quote).
He is, however, not quite willing to go as far as to blame Charlie Manson on Robert Heinlein... because if he did it would be obvious that his thesis is ridiculous (e.g. why not blame Manson on John Lennon?).
A one-year sub gets you unlimited access to their collection for something like 10 bucks a month. A 3-month sub is more like $15, and you can also just browse around and buy tracks one at a time for a $1, without subscribing.
I guess the quality of the tracks might not be quite what you're looking for (quality -> big files -> long download times, so there's tradeoffs here). I understand they're working on adding some fatter files for people with wider pipes.
Full (?) disclosure: I work there these days.
All bytes are not created equal. If you have some information that you think is worth more than the flat rate that the system charges, then you just won't put it up on that system, and the hope of having a universal information exchange medium would never be realized.
(What I'd like to know is if Scott McCloud has been reading Jakob Nielsen's stuff, why does he have links that aren't blue underlines?)
(Oh, and if anyone cares, I've got some nitpicks about "Understanding Comics": CLOUDY.)
substance, but the discussion of tribalism is somewhat
interesting.
Triabalism can be a problem all right. But I'd argue that
you want to keep the different tribes talking to each other,
even if it's only to engage in arguments.
The general trend in real discussion groups like
mailing lists or usenet is to engage in long, drawn out
wars that can either converge on enlightened compromise,
or harden into separate camps, but either way, the
people following the discussion will learn something
about the advantages or disadvantages of the two
approaches under discussion.
(Note: slashdot sucks for this purpose: discussions
die too quickly.)
My person feeling is that people who like to adopt a calm,
"professional" air tend to be kind of tedious and wishy-washy.
They're often so afraid to take a stand that they can barely
say anything useful.
But on the other hand, it might be worth considering the
possibility that both approaches toward discussion
("advocacy" and "objective consideration") may have their
uses, in the same way that different computer languages have
different uses.
It's gets your mind working in different ways...
But the real reason I'm writing is that you've thrown "Ted Nelson" into the list of people who are (a) trumpeted by Wired and (b) have never done anything useful. For one thing, Wired is if anything hostile to Ted Nelson, and for another thing, whatever Nelson's failings as a coder or a manager of coder's he *did* suceed in writing some fairly influential books. You may not have read any of them, but Tim Berners-Lee has. The web might be a better place if more people understood what Nelson was after with Xanadu: here's a new Nelson paper on the subject.
I'm as annoyed with Wired-style fluff as anyone (take a look at the New York Times "Technology News" headlines: it's all about who-bought-who this week. Technology?). But there is no simple rule-of-thumb to find brilliant writing. You can't just refuse to read anything by someone who's not rated a Master at advogatro. Is there any reason to care about, say, Linus Torvald's opinions about, say, globalization, compared to some nameless writer at the Economist?
And just to see if we can start a little trend here and actually talk about the article: Jaron Lanier is not at all sounding like the re-incarnation of Hugo Gernsback here. Is there any reason at all you attached this rant to this article, except that you've heard Jaron Lanier's name in Wired magazine?
Rather than hear a feature list, what I'd really
like to know is how Red Hat's QA proceedures have
changed since the 6.x releases.
Is there any chance of someone describing them
here? (Hint: Bero-rh?).
Anyway:
The point I was trying to make in my oh, so iconoclastic (clumsy?) way was that only the superficial elements of the story were influential... the actual theme of the movie was not, because no one seems to have gotten the point. E.g. It could very well be that Fargo wouldn't of happened without Pulp Fiction, but that doesn't really mean very much, because Fargo also has nothing of any importance in common with Pulp Fiction.I dunno, maybe I didn't put this very well:
How about: Real Genius A truly excellent movie, really funny, but rooted in reality in a weird way. It went nowhere because it pushed the idea that it's good to be intelligent, and Joe 6 don't like that egghead shit. Nice soundtrack too. Seems profoundly weird to me that most people seem to think more highly of junk like "Revenge of the Nerds".
The Undead. A Roger Corman flick, which is to say it's a quickie with a lower budget than early Doctor Who... but it's a really interesting, strange melange of science fantasy. Main character travels into the past following another persons hypnotic regression link, contends with the devil, etc. Gravedigger goes around singing strange songs, dilly doggerel, but funnier than Shakespere. If people paid any attention to things like this they'd realize high budget effects just aren't necessary -- and might even be counterproductive -- to making good movies.
Pulp Fiction. Okay, it was really popular, but it couldn't be "influential" because I don't think anyone understood it. The theme here is everyone's self image is tangled up in stories about themselves that they want to believe (Brain Pulp Fiction?). There's also the suggestion that the bible may be just more pulp. But as far as I can tell, everyone got into watching it because bad people are cool and stupid people are funny, and if everyone's bad and stupid at the same time you got the best of both worlds.
(Maybe slashdot needs region codes, so some stories would only be visible inside the "ba"...)
They also make the point that the AS3AP test is a read-only test and should have been a piece-of-cake for MySQL, if you believed MySQL's slashdot-enhanced reputation as the ultimate in select-oriented web apps.
(Myself, I find this whole situation imensely amusing. MySQL has been sticking misleading benchmark results up on their web site for ages, and now they're whining that someone else has stolen their trick...)
They make the point that AS3AP test is read-only and should have been a piece-of-cake for MySQL, if you believed MySQL's slashdot-enhanced reputation as the ultimate in web automation.
Instead, it's looking as though MySQL is only fast when it doesn't matter: when there aren't very many people using it.
The Postgresql people insist that the results of these benchmarks were completely unexpected... they knew that they'd improved things a lot, but they'd never made an attempt to measure it before. It's understandable to suspect that the "independant agency" was watching which side it's bread was buttered on, but it's also obvious that Great Bridge really needed to know this information, *someone* had to do these tests, and who else was going to pay for them?
It's all very well and good to take benchmarks with the proverbial grain of salt, but you can't just throw out data because you don't like the result.
And, if you're interested in finding that
Tim Berners-Lee book without violating the
Amazon boycot you could try Fatbrain:
Weaving the Web
You can try and work inside the system or outside the system, the important thing is the "work" part, and I personally am a little reluctant to jump up and say "No, no, you're doing it all wrong, you should do it *my* way." Maybe you should do it your way, and he should do it his way. And if you don't want to be associated with someone, go ahead and dissociate yourself, but don't expect them to act just like you to make things easier for you.
If anyone cares, I personally would not have handled things the way the kid in the story here did. For one thing, I think he showed far too much trust in the police: they easily could have maimed him for life, and then pulled a "I thought he had a gun, I thought my life was in danger."
(And anyway, what do you want with all those flies?)
(1) Political demonstrations are certainly interesting to me, but why is this "news for nerds", as opposed to just news?
(2) There are stories leaking about some *serious* abuses of police authority going down in Philadelphia, like severe beatings before and after arrest, protestors held for several days without a charge, and so on:
http://www.phillyimc.org/
http://www.indymedia.org/
(3) As far as I can tell, these stories are not making it into the print media. If you're not on the net, you don't even know that there are thousands of people protesting, and over 300 people arrested. Oh, wait a minute, I guess there was this *one* story in a local SF paper, I just missed it:x aminer/archive/2000/08/08/NEWS114 31.dtl
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/e
(4) If it makes you all feel any better, a bunch of the lefty activists I know are running down to Los Angeles to protest at the Democratic convention (anyone who's paying any attention realizes that the Democrats aren't all that much different from the Republicans these days):
http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/45/45nfdnc. html
gargle wrote:
> MS makes great software.
Microsoft repeatedly turns out mediocre, buggy products that
get kind-of useable by the third version.
> If you want a share of the
> marketplace, then compete by producing better
> software.
Where have you been? If better software was all it took,
Borland would be the giant of the software industry.
> Stop whining.
No, you can't make me!
> In the end, consumers benefit from competition.
(Which end?)
> Expecting consumers to choose your
> inferior product over a superior product to make some
> kind of political statement is lame and repulsive.
(a) They're not my products.
(b) There are many instances where refusing to respect a
boycott is what's really lame and repulsive. ("I always
buy from the Gap, they make great clothes for a great price!
Oh... they're manufactured by asian women conned into
indetured servitude in Saipan by being told they're getting
jobs in the US? Don't bother me with that politcal crap!")
> Case in point: The Mozilla project. If it were not for
> Microsoft, Netscape would have continued sitting on its
> ass, churning the 4.x line, and releasing noteworthy
> enhancements like the "shopping button".
Right, multiple competing companies are better than just one
defacto-monopoly. A Netscape-dominated web could easily
have become a mess of BLINK tags.
> Compete, deliver, or die.
Extend, embrace, extinguish.
> MS is a monopoly, and IE is a tool used illegally to
> further its monopoly. True, but this can be dealt with by
> anti-trust law.
Have you been paying any attention at all? This isn't
being dealt with by anti-trust law... the government is
busy trying to fight Standard Oil all over again.
In any case, my contention is that consumer boycotts are
more effective in many cases than waiting for government
action. Boycotts work faster and are more reliable,
because of the "proportional representation" effect I
mentioned earlier.
> Requiring consumers to choose an inferior
> product to spite MS is like cutting off the nose to spite
> the face.
I think this is incredibly melodramatic. The "inferior"
products just aren't that inferior (and some of them may not
be inferior at all... if Opera were out for Linux I might
give it a try, and Mozilla is certainly getting there).
Anyway, I have no problems with rewarding the best.
Aren't you arguing for rewarding the worst?
Quick responses to a bunch of people, in no particular order:
plunge (cosym@yahoo.com) wrote:
> That's them creating the most important incentive for the
> future of all: the incentive to try to actually produce
> something superior to everything else. Sorry, but that's
> what counts in the end, and that's where things will end
> up when all is said and done.
gargle wrote:
> You're damn right. I'm voting with every click - voting in
> support of a superior product.
Denial of Service wrote:
> I hope you enjoy playing politician while the vast majority
> make choices based upon quality of product.
(1) A lot of techies don't like to believe this, but you are
essentially stuck living in a political world. You're
deluding yourself if you think you can live your life making
"technical" decisions without any political aspect.
(2) Luckily for my side this particular voting process has
proportional representation built-in, so I don't need "the
vast majority". No sane business throws away even 10% of
it's potential market if it can avoid it, so a 90-10 split
between Microsoft and everyone else still leaves room for
standards to win out. At some point -- somewhere above 95%
market share is my guess -- there will be no practical
argument left to shoot down a designer that's itchy to play
with some new toy MS put in the latest IE, and there will be
no pressure left towards standards compliance.
(3) Netscape has far from a perfect record about standards
compliance, but it doesn't matter for this argument, since
I'm not telling you to use Netscape. Lynx, opera, mozilla,
xemacs, whatever. The point is to discourage reliance on
any one single company's proprietary technology (e.g. a
site based on macromedia flash isn't any better than an
IE-only site).
(4) It would be nice to believe that everything boils down
to simple free-market economics, but I've (reluctantly)
become convinced that in the real world, there is no single
simple set of principles that applies universally.
In this particular case, I'm arguing that your conception of
"a quality product" is shallow and short-sighted. When you
buy into a technology, you're getting more than a product,
you're also looking for "services", which means you have to
look to the future and think about everyone's long-term
incentives (as well as look to the past, and think about the
history of the groups involved). In this case, I'm arguing
that the future upgrades you're going to recieve, and the
kind of web you're going to have to deal with will be
compromised by what you're buying into in the present.
Beware of Microsoft bearing gifts. What's hard to
understand about this?
I don't use Windows enough to know if "IE" is better. I have used windows enough to know that Linux is better, and while Netscape is far from perfect, it works well enough on both platforms that I don't understand why anyone would take the trouble to complain (like, yeah, it will crash after a few days of uptime, and yeah, that's mildly annoying, but so what? Generally, any tasks I do with the browser are completed in less than an hour -- and if I want to read a long essay or something, lynx is fine.)
Anyway, there's a really good reason why you shouldn't use "Internet Explorer", no matter how absolutively wounderful it is: you're voting with every mouseclick, leaving trails in the logs of every website you visit, getting us all a little closer to a Microsoft dominated world. When IE on Windows shows up at 95% plus, every dweeb of a web designer is going to insist that there's no point in sticking to any "standards" but Microsoft's.
So, you don't like Netscape, that's fine, go out and find a copy of Opera or something. If you use Internet Explorer, you're being incredibly short-sighted, and you deserve the world you're going to get.