So vi has a keystroke recorder now, and the keys can be rebound. That's nice, and it sounds like an improvement [1], but it doesn't sound like a full scripting language to me.
[1] One of my peeves about the vi/emacs wars is that for years if you told the vi guys about some cool emacs feature they'd respond "You don't need that!". Now that they've all switched to vim, they respond "We can do that now!"... but I thought you didn't *need* to gang?
Typically you do an "ESC $" in emacs to run the spell checker.
Here's a thought: anyone out there remember Wordstar? In many ways it was a traditional program using lots of odd keystroke commands to get things done. You could do a lot with it (for a program on an 8bit CPM machine with preciously little memory or disk to speak of). The keystrokes certainly weren't "intuitive" right off the bat, but they did their best to make it easy for new users to pick up on them by *putting the cheat sheet on the screen*. The program was configurable with "beginner" and "expert" modes, and in the "beginner"'s mode half of the screen (14 lines that is) was taken up with a description of common keyboard commands. A very slick touch was that this menu was context sensitive. For example the "Block" commands (used to do stuff like cut and paste text) were all two keystroke commands beginning with Control-K. When you did the first Control-K, the menu would change immediately to show all of the Block commands.
There were other things that were cool about Wordstar's command set, as well... for example, the cursor controls were an embedded "star" pattern (C-s, C-d for forward and back, C-e, C-x for up and down), with other motion keys logically grouped around the star, e.g. C-f takes you forward a a word, because it's next to C-d that takes you forward a character. And the delete keys were all grouped together as well C-t, C-g and C-y. This sounds crazy at first, but it turns to be really easy to get into once you've used it for just a little while.
So the point is you want software with some depth to it, which in all likelyhood means some complexity, but you want to be able to ease a new user into it gradually. This is a concept that was lost in the post-Macintosh scramble to make a computer "as easy to use as a telephone".
This a pretty simple question about web design: what is it about white backgrounds? Why does everyone seem to think that the best color scheme for a web page is to match a bleached slice of a dead tree with carbon particles stuck to it?
My point is simple: computer screens aren't really much like paper, and white backgrounds emit an awful lot of light that makes the display much more annoying to look at than an old-fashioned terminal used to be.
I agree with nearly everything you say about web design in "Philip and Alex's" guide, except for this one point. The need for high contrast I can understand, but what's wrong with achieving this with a light-on-dark scheme? There's at least one place where you sneer at "trendy" web sites with black backgrounds, but you don't explain why.
If we're going to make recommendations for web site design, how about this one single chapter from Philp Greenspun's "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing": Learn to Program HTML in 21 Minutes
Also note that Greenspun walks the walk. A nice, simple layout, wrapped around some nifty photos presented in an easily digestable thumb-nail format. My only complaint is that he uses white backgrounds as a default. (I will never understand why people do this... It's a computer, it doesn't *have* to look like paper, and having a CRT shining it's high beams in your face does not make for a pleasant reading experience).
Re:I Feel it is My Duty to Clarify this Nonsense
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I'm not sure what FAQ you're referring two, on which of the two sites.
I was just reading through it all again, And here's some highlights, in my opinion:
An Intel VP confessed on the stand to a more serious infraction of Oregon's computer crime law. And the Washington County D.A.'s office, which so eagerly talked tough when facing the powerless Randal, has observed a demure silence on this topic.
* No evidence that Intel disapproved of Randal's behavior exists, except as remembered after the decision was made to prosecute him. Not so much as a hand-written note indicates anyone had a problem with Randal beforehand.
* In other contexts, Intel had previously authorized Randal to commit both the acts allegedly unauthorized in this instance: cracking passwords and building a gateway to the Internet.
The prosecutor: "I don't represent Intel." The judge: "Not yet."
The Associated Press: "Intel Corp. is handing the local police $100,000 to have two detectives concentrate their computer theft efforts at the company."
Re:I Feel it is My Duty to Clarify this Nonsense
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And for those of you too lazy to follow that link, allow me to summarize and editorialize a bit:
Randal Schwartz was working as a contractor at Intel, and ran into a situation where he cracked some passwords as a matter of expediency. He reported the bad passwords to Intel (this is how he was "caught"). This was somewhat embarrassing to a certain VP of Intel, who was using the password "vicepresident". Intel then engaged in one of the ugliest, most pointless, displays of corporate muscle flexing I've ever heard of: they prosecuted Randal using some very screwy laws peculiar to Oregon.
Lessons to be learned:
Don't piss off wintel if you live in the Northwest.
Yes, I concur that the Kinesis Classic is probably the best keyboard out there for the serious emacs abuser. Almost all of the keys you need to use really heavily are moved to two clusters under your thumbs: CTRL, ALT, BS, DEL, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, Enter, Space. The one problem is that the ESC key is a small chicklet up in Alaska. This is easily fixible if you've got one of the programmable models (the Classic or higher, don't get the stripped down model without any internal memory). There are some stupid keys that are close to home that can be redefined to whatever you want without pain (CAPSLOCK, Insert).
And for mousage, I've got a Cirque touchpad glued to the middle of the keyboard. Arguably, this sucks, but my philosophy is to avoid mousing anyway.
But, despite the fact that the Kinesis contoured models are clearly the best, they are also clearly not perfect. They're rather thick: I put mine in my lap, and I'd still rather have it a little lower. They've got a bit of a hump, but it's not quite as high as something like an MS Natural, and it probably should be. Also, the keyboard pockets seem a tad close together to me. (One of these days I'm going to try sawing one in half, so I can dangle my hands at my side, ala the infamous Fourteen Dollar Keyboard hack.).
They also take some re-training time of course, but what the hell, if you're an Emacs adept you can handle it.
I agree that this is a problem. The SGML tools that you need to use to write a HOWTO may actually be no big deal, but I do know that the need to learn them is the thing that made me go "maybe I'll get to this later".
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that they'll take "Mini-Howtos" written in HTML. So maybe I should've just called my stuff a "mini" and sent it in? Yeah, here's the policy from the HOWTO-HOWTO:
Also note that all HOWTO submissions must be in SGML format (currently using the LinuxDoc DTD). The mini-HOWTO submissions may be made in either SGML or HTML formats, but only SGML-formatted submissions will be included in printed versions of the HOWTOs.
It could be that this is the key development that will "lower the bar": Also from the HOWTO-HOWTO:
Programs like LyX (right now my LinuxDoc editor of choice) allow you to write in TeX format, then export it as SGML and render from SGML to whatever you chose.
Having your device nodes on the root filesystem means that you can't operate properly with a read-only root filesystem. This is because you want to change ownerships and protections of tty devices. Existing practice prevents you using a CD-ROM as your root filesystem for a *real* system. Sure, you can boot off a CD-ROM, but you can't change tty ownerships, so it's only good for installing.
It strikes me that a completly read-only boot system would be a nice anti-cracker trick. But there are a lot of different points here... read it to see if something clicks with you.
In general, using devfs sounds like it does some things a bit more cleanly than the traditional/dev, but it does a *lot* of things more cleanly. Sounds like a win.
We've heard it a thousand times, X is better than Y. If it's not emacs is better than vi, it's C vs C++ or it's Linux vs Microsoft. I like this book because it's very programming language and operating system agnostic. TPP does have examples in different languages but it goes far beyond choosing a side, it has a more practical view of "right tool, for the right job".
This is a really easy line to take, and you'll go far in the corporate world if you go around calling yourself "pragmatic", but there are a few things about this that bother me.
Time is limited. Yes, learning stuff is great, "growing" is great, but learning everything is literally impossible. You can't be a master of every language, every OS, every software library. How do you make your choices? How are you going to decide what to learn next?
You need some intellectual shortcuts to make these decisions, you've got to evaluate reputations, based on things like other people's attempts at evangelism and your own attitudes, your previous experiences and the things that your familiar with already. This is what "ideology" is really about, in my opinion: not religon for religion's sake, but a set of shortcuts to speed decision making.
"Pragmatism" is sometimes a code word for "I have no values, morals or ethics ". I just do "whatever works" and I don't worry about any kind of idealistic consistency.
People like this do well in the short term, but really they're just blowing in the wind, and in the long run they don't matter much. They end up dancing to the strings of "impractical idealists" who refuse to compromise and because of that often end up shaping the world.
Look, here's the real problem with this thing, not the ugly purple case:
Tuning is provided by the Kerbango Tuning Service (KTS) with over 4,000 streams to choose from, dynamically updated and graded for quality and reliability.
[...] you are connected to the Internet, and the available stations are displayed by category: Rock & Roll, Classical, Talk Radio, Country, Jazz, and dozens more. By using the tuning knob in much in the way you use a regular radio, you select a category. Individual stations or streams are then displayed. Tune to the one you want to hear, and press 'Select'. The Kerbango radio connects you to the stream and your broadcast begins.
Radio That Gets Better Every Time You Turn It On Your Kerbango tuner always stays up to date with the latest stations, newest music, and current events because every time you turn your radio on it communicates with the Kerbango Tuning Service (KTS). KTS is a sophisticated database that stores information about all the stations that Kerbango finds on the Internet. Each stream is carefully screened for broadcast quality. Once it's added to the available stations, special automated programs, called StreamBots[tm], continually check the station's transmission quality and reliability. [...] StreamBots also detect when a station changes its location on the web, updating the KTS database, and ensuring that your tuning experience is always smooth and seamless.
Get it? One centralized database run by this company is central to the function of this gadget.
This raises some questions:
Can their servers handle the traffic?
As someone else here has pointed out: "What if the company goes belly up?"
How does the company decide what category a signal will be filed under?
What decides the placement? Will they accept payment from the broadcasters?
What's their policy on advertising. Will any appear on the display? (Or worse, *in the audio*?)
Will they make an effort to carry *all* streams, or will they focus on the most popular?
Will they censor any streams that they regard as "inappropriate for a general audience"?
This is not to say that these aren't *answerable* questions. But they need to be addressed...
What I'm really interested in seeing is a good "internet transistor radio" (when they finally release palm pilots with both Richochet and an audio jack, I'll be happy... you can squeeze listenable audio over a Richochet modem, high-quality audio can come later). Second to that, I'm sure an "internet car radio" would be of interest to all the people stuck in car commuting. This particular type of gadget is third down the list. Certainly it's a drawback that it's stationary, but a webradio for the bedroom/livingroom that's cheaper than a full PC would still fill a niche. At least it has a quarter-VGA screeen on it that allows for *some* flexibility in what you can do with it.
The great advantage of a web radio would be to get people out from under the corporate conglomerate blandness that the world seems to be sinking under.
The great danger is that in the effort to make it simpler to access web radio streams, they'll take away some of your freedom to choose what you hear.
Farnhams Freehold begins with a bombshelter situation, where Farnham handles his role as fearless leader of the bomb-shelter in a very high-handed manner. Then the bomb drops, and does something weird, and as it turns out they've been kicked into the far future. The premise is that the Northern hemisphere has nuked itself into the stone age, and the third world is now the first. The people of Africa and India have taken over, and they've enslaved the whites. By the end of the book, a moral is explicitly presented: no one can be trusted with absolute power over any human being, including Our Hero, how now looks back on his role as dictator of the bomb shelter with some regret.
So that's it: it's a "How would you like it if the shoe were on the other foot?" story. It's admittedly clumsy, but it's an attempt at challenging racists to reconsider their attitudes. If it were written by a black guy, no one would take it any other way. But because it was written by Heinlein, some people try and argue that it's some kind of warning "don't let those black guys out from under your thumb, or look at what they'll do to you".
Was he racist? maybe not, but he certainly had the same enemies racists have.
There you have it, politically correct reasoning in a nutshell. Doesn't matter what the man's ideas really were, just that the "good guys" gave him a thumbs down.
The party crowd can vote, Willie. Take care of us.
There's a flaw here. Willie Brown was just re-elected. San Francisco has a two term limit on the mayor's office. What does he care about your vote? (Digression: term limits are a really stupid idea.)
The board of supervisor's on the other hand, they need to worry. They're coming up for re-election, and San Francisco has switched back to district elections, which is to say that neighborhoods in SF now choose their representation on the board much in the same way that States choose their representation in the US house & senate. It's expected that this will cause a shift in power from the downtown/big money crowd out into the neighborhoods, and sucking up to the housing developers isn't likely to play as well as it has in the past.
I'm a fan of mh myself, though if you're looking for something more like an "integrated client", I'd suggest using emacs-mh as a front end. I only run the mh commands directly inside of scripts (or if my emacs is down for some reason).
There's something to be said for living inside your editor.
But it's not as though there aren't problems with mh though. Okay, so all the messages are stashed in ordinary unix files, one message to a file. Nice and simple, right? But it uses arbitrary numbers for file names (1, 2, 3...). So let's say you tar up your ~/Mail/Linux folder, and stash it on tape. Six months later you want to get some old messages off of the tape... Oops, those numbered filenames conflict with each other now, don't they? How do you make sure your old message number 5 doesn't blow away the new message number 5?
Also, using these commands in shell scripts is kind of arcane. I mean I've got dozens of shell scripts like this:
These days most people just learn to use procmail (which is perhaps even more arcane...), which seems to be the last nail in the coffin for the utility of command-line mh.
In general, the "do one thing and do it well" thing is pretty much history. It's more like "do one thing kind-of-okay, and provide two hundred flags to do everything else, plus enough really verbose POSIX alternates to make the man pages incomprensible".
Maybe the writer wears suits, but he's hardly a typical non-tech user. As soon as he talks about compiling and vi v. emacs, he's disqualified.
Gee, I'm a suit, a middle-aged lawyer suit fer chrissakes, but I've been known to fool around with vi and emacs.
I thought the point was that he's not a real emacs using jock, but just another vi luser. (Yeah, yeah, forget about Torvalds for a minute, everyone is allowed a few eccentricities.)
Seriously, I think both sides are right here.
Computer software has a lot of room for improvement before the masses can use it comfortably (while this certainly applies to Linux, it is *not* a problem limited Linux).
The general level of sophistication of the average person is rapidly increasing.
It remains to be seen if the programmers will finally develop something as "easy to use as a telephone", or if people will get so used to telephones with neurosurgery attachments that a typical PC will seem like a joke.
PostScript level 2 - accept nothing else. The various HPGL's are nice too but nothing beats PS. It's the standard. Accept no substitutes ("It's just like PostScript" - yeah - right.) Save the worry and get the real thing.
Would you buy a used operating system from this argument? Even if it was Windows?
Right, I believe you're getting at an important point here that a lot of people miss.
For example, during the days of the anti-apartheid movement, when people were calling for divestiture it was common for the libertarian-types to point out that the economics of this was dubious: if you talk HP into selling an electronics plant in South Africa, the plant is still there, only now it's locally owned (and possibly with less enlightened management than it had previously). So why should anyone in South Africa care if every US firm "divested" and sold off all of their plants at a bargain rate?
I think what this hyper-rational viewpoint missed is that the whole divestiture controversy was a tremendous publicity generating event, and it got to the point where no one from South Africa could travel anywhere without being treated like a pariah.
Buzz is the goal. You don't need to worry that much about details like "do we boycott the whole MPAA?"; "do we go after subsidiaries too?"; "do we ban DVD players", etc. None of these details matters that much... it doesn't even necessarily matter how many people support the boycott (though if you can get it up to even 1%, I guarantee they'll cave immediately, and start looking for someone to fire).
You just want to get it to the point that whenever a Disney exec plays golf he gets sick of hearing people ask if he's worried about those silly boycott.
Actually, I think that boycotts *often* work, but the myth that they don't is suprisingly wide spread.
Just in the last few years: _Global Exchange_ (a small non-profit with a few dozen employees) led a boycott against the Nike corporation, and Nike did ultimately back down (they've now instituted minimum age hiring practices, etc.).
More recently, the same suspects started going after the Gap/Old Navy/Banana Republic because of the way they're running their operation in Saipan (briefly: conning women from Asian into indentured servitude). Soon thereafter, I noticed in article in the business pages about how the Gap's sales had gone flat. Notably this article proposed a number of possible causes for this, but didn't mention the boycott...
In any case, I think the chief barrier to getting a boycott to work in this place is coming up with a short, simple explanation of the issues. It's obvious to *us* that this is bullshit, but how do you make it obvious to everyone? What's the slogan?
When I saw that subject heading, I thought that someone had figured out how to squeeze one of the new goofy looking streamlined palms back into the good old rectangular plastic boxes.
And yes, I know I can set my prefs to screen out Katz. I find that very option vaguely creepy, along with comment thresholds. For me, they end up being counterproductive, since as soon as I set a comment threshold, I'm curious as to what the AC's said that got them moderated to the bottom of the list. So I invariably end up reading the "hidden" posts anyway. Maybe it's just a personal problem.
With me the problem is meta-moderation. I've got my Katz shield up (still haven't read the Hellmouth stuff that people keep refering to), but every so often I get asked to meta-moderate comments on his stories. (Rob refuses to modify the meta-mod query to respect user prefs, says it'd be too hard on the server.)
The problem is similar to usenet killfiles... if there's some ubiquitous poster that you can't stand, you can hide *their* postings easily enough but you can't hide the comments on them very easily. (It would be really cool if people would learn to stop swilling up the flamebait and responding in kind, but I haven't seen any signs of this happening yet).
Do they have deeper thoughts that they're afraid or unwilling to share, or is this really all there is?
Funny, that's what I always wonder about the guys in the Minus One Club.
Katz, I'm afraid really is for real, and really is resoundingly hollow.
Okay, so I just took a trip down into minus one-ville, and I have to admit that despite myself I thought some of the crap was pretty funny.
But yea gods, what a sewer! I know a bunch of folks who refuse to read slashdot "discussions", and is it any wonder why? You know, if you just want to goof around, there are all sorts of places on the net you can do it... irc channels, usenet newsgroups (like alt.flame, alt.kibo...) and I'm sure there's plenty of AOL crap I'm unfamiliar with. Why are you guys picking this particular sandbox to piss in?
Okay, so you like to mess with people's heads a bit, but isn't this kind of lame way of doing it? There are some real battles going on out there in the world that you could be a part of, but instead your just seeing how fast you can make it to minus one.
Come on already, wake up! It's time to play for real stakes with the big boys.
Slashdot Mirror
So vi has a keystroke recorder now, and the keys
can be rebound. That's nice, and it sounds like
an improvement [1], but it doesn't sound like
a full scripting language to me.
[1] One of my peeves about the vi/emacs wars is
that for years if you told the vi guys about some
cool emacs feature they'd respond "You don't
need that!". Now that they've all switched to
vim, they respond "We can do that now!"... but
I thought you didn't *need* to gang?
Typically you do an "ESC $" in emacs to run the
spell checker.
Here's a thought: anyone out there remember
Wordstar? In many ways it was a traditional
program using lots of odd keystroke commands to
get things done. You could do a lot with it
(for a program on an 8bit CPM machine with
preciously little memory or disk to speak of).
The keystrokes certainly weren't "intuitive"
right off the bat, but they did their best to
make it easy for new users to pick up on them
by *putting the cheat sheet on the screen*.
The program was configurable with "beginner" and
"expert" modes, and in the "beginner"'s mode
half of the screen (14 lines that is) was
taken up with a description of common keyboard
commands. A very slick touch was that this
menu was context sensitive. For example the
"Block" commands (used to do stuff like cut and
paste text) were all two keystroke commands
beginning with Control-K. When you did the
first Control-K, the menu would change
immediately to show all of the Block commands.
There were other things that were cool
about Wordstar's command set, as well...
for example, the cursor controls were an
embedded "star" pattern (C-s, C-d for forward
and back, C-e, C-x for up and down), with
other motion keys logically grouped around
the star, e.g. C-f takes you forward a
a word, because it's next to C-d that takes
you forward a character. And the delete keys
were all grouped together as well C-t, C-g and C-y.
This sounds crazy at first, but it turns to be
really easy to get into once you've used it
for just a little while.
So the point is you want software with some
depth to it, which in all likelyhood means
some complexity, but you want to be able to
ease a new user into it gradually. This is
a concept that was lost in the post-Macintosh
scramble to make a computer "as easy to use
as a telephone".
Since when is vi scriptable? Is this some new
feature in vim?
My point is simple: computer screens aren't really much like paper, and white backgrounds emit an awful lot of light that makes the display much more annoying to look at than an old-fashioned terminal used to be.
I agree with nearly everything you say about web design in "Philip and Alex's" guide, except for this one point. The need for high contrast I can understand, but what's wrong with achieving this with a light-on-dark scheme? There's at least one place where you sneer at "trendy" web sites with black backgrounds, but you don't explain why.
Also note that Greenspun walks the walk. A nice, simple layout, wrapped around some nifty photos presented in an easily digestable thumb-nail format. My only complaint is that he uses white backgrounds as a default. (I will never understand why people do this... It's a computer, it doesn't *have* to look like paper, and having a CRT shining it's high beams in your face does not make for a pleasant reading experience).
which of the two sites.
I was just reading through it all again,
And here's some highlights, in my opinion:
An Intel VP
confessed on the stand to a more serious infraction of Oregon's
computer crime law. And the Washington County D.A.'s office, which so
eagerly talked tough when facing the powerless Randal, has observed a
demure silence on this topic.
* No evidence that Intel disapproved of Randal's behavior exists,
except as remembered after the decision was made to prosecute
him. Not so much as a hand-written note indicates anyone had a
problem with Randal beforehand.
* In other contexts, Intel had previously authorized Randal to
commit both the acts allegedly unauthorized in this instance:
cracking passwords and building a gateway to the Internet.
The prosecutor: "I don't represent Intel." The judge: "Not yet."
The Associated Press: "Intel Corp. is handing the local
police $100,000 to have two detectives concentrate their
computer theft efforts at the company."
Randal Schwartz was working as a contractor at Intel, and ran into a situation where he cracked some passwords as a matter of expediency. He reported the bad passwords to Intel (this is how he was "caught"). This was somewhat embarrassing to a certain VP of Intel, who was using the password "vicepresident". Intel then engaged in one of the ugliest, most pointless, displays of corporate muscle flexing I've ever heard of: they prosecuted Randal using some very screwy laws peculiar to Oregon.
Lessons to be learned:
There's another good website on the subject (the "Friends of Randal Schwartz") here:
State of Oregon vs Randal Schwartz computer security case
And for mousage, I've got a Cirque touchpad glued to the middle of the keyboard. Arguably, this sucks, but my philosophy is to avoid mousing anyway.
But, despite the fact that the Kinesis contoured models are clearly the best, they are also clearly not perfect. They're rather thick: I put mine in my lap, and I'd still rather have it a little lower. They've got a bit of a hump, but it's not quite as high as something like an MS Natural, and it probably should be. Also, the keyboard pockets seem a tad close together to me. (One of these days I'm going to try sawing one in half, so I can dangle my hands at my side, ala the infamous Fourteen Dollar Keyboard hack.).
They also take some re-training time of course, but what the hell, if you're an Emacs adept you can handle it.
Please allow me to kick-off the "why the hell did
they run this story" thread.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that they'll take "Mini-Howtos" written in HTML. So maybe I should've just called my stuff a "mini" and sent it in? Yeah, here's the policy from the HOWTO-HOWTO:
It could be that this is the key development that will "lower the bar": Also from the HOWTO-HOWTO:
Here's the place to look for Lyx: http://www.lyx.org/In particular, I was impressed by this argument:
It strikes me that a completly read-only boot system would be a nice anti-cracker trick. But there are a lot of different points here... read it to see if something clicks with you.In general, using devfs sounds like it does some things a bit more cleanly than the traditional /dev, but it does a *lot* of things more cleanly. Sounds like a win.
You need some intellectual shortcuts to make these decisions, you've got to evaluate reputations, based on things like other people's attempts at evangelism and your own attitudes, your previous experiences and the things that your familiar with already. This is what "ideology" is really about, in my opinion: not religon for religion's sake, but a set of shortcuts to speed decision making.
People like this do well in the short term, but really they're just blowing in the wind, and in the long run they don't matter much. They end up dancing to the strings of "impractical idealists" who refuse to compromise and because of that often end up shaping the world.
This raises some questions:
- Can their servers handle the traffic?
- As someone else here has pointed out: "What if the company goes belly up?"
- How does the company decide what category a signal will be filed under?
- What decides the placement? Will they accept payment from the broadcasters?
- What's their policy on advertising. Will any appear on the display? (Or worse, *in the audio*?)
- Will they make an effort to carry *all* streams, or will they focus on the most popular?
- Will they censor any streams that they regard as "inappropriate for a general audience"?
This is not to say that these aren't *answerable* questions. But they need to be addressed...What I'm really interested in seeing is a good "internet transistor radio" (when they finally release palm pilots with both Richochet and an audio jack, I'll be happy... you can squeeze listenable audio over a Richochet modem, high-quality audio can come later). Second to that, I'm sure an "internet car radio" would be of interest to all the people stuck in car commuting. This particular type of gadget is third down the list. Certainly it's a drawback that it's stationary, but a webradio for the bedroom/livingroom that's cheaper than a full PC would still fill a niche. At least it has a quarter-VGA screeen on it that allows for *some* flexibility in what you can do with it.
The great advantage of a web radio would be to get people out from under the corporate conglomerate blandness that the world seems to be sinking under.
The great danger is that in the effort to make it simpler to access web radio streams, they'll take away some of your freedom to choose what you hear.
role as fearless leader of the bomb-shelter in
a very high-handed manner. Then the bomb drops,
and does something weird, and as it turns out
they've been kicked into the far future. The
premise is that the Northern hemisphere has nuked itself into the stone age, and the third world
is now the first. The people of Africa and India have taken over, and they've enslaved the whites.
By the end of the book, a moral is explicitly presented: no one can be trusted with
absolute power over any human being, including
Our Hero, how now looks back on his role as
dictator of the bomb shelter with some regret.
So that's it: it's a "How would you like it if
the shoe were on the other foot?" story. It's admittedly clumsy, but it's an attempt at challenging racists to reconsider their attitudes.
If it were written by a black guy, no one would
take it any other way. But because it was
written by Heinlein, some people try and argue that it's some kind of warning "don't let those
black guys out from under your thumb, or look at
what they'll do to you".
There you have it, politically correct reasoning
in a nutshell. Doesn't matter what the man's
ideas really were, just that the "good guys" gave him a thumbs down.
The board of supervisor's on the other hand, they need to worry. They're coming up for re-election, and San Francisco has switched back to district elections, which is to say that neighborhoods in SF now choose their representation on the board much in the same way that States choose their representation in the US house & senate. It's expected that this will cause a shift in power from the downtown/big money crowd out into the neighborhoods, and sucking up to the housing developers isn't likely to play as well as it has in the past.
There's something to be said for living inside your editor.
But it's not as though there aren't problems with mh though. Okay, so all the messages are stashed in ordinary unix files, one message to a file. Nice and simple, right? But it uses arbitrary numbers for file names (1, 2, 3...). So let's say you tar up your ~/Mail/Linux folder, and stash it on tape. Six months later you want to get some old messages off of the tape... Oops, those numbered filenames conflict with each other now, don't they? How do you make sure your old message number 5 doesn't blow away the new message number 5?
Also, using these commands in shell scripts is kind of arcane. I mean I've got dozens of shell scripts like this:
These days most people just learn to use procmail (which is perhaps even more arcane...), which seems to be the last nail in the coffin for the utility of command-line mh.In general, the "do one thing and do it well" thing is pretty much history. It's more like "do one thing kind-of-okay, and provide two hundred flags to do everything else, plus enough really verbose POSIX alternates to make the man pages incomprensible".
Seriously, I think both sides are right here.
It remains to be seen if the programmers will finally develop something as "easy to use as a telephone", or if people will get so used to telephones with neurosurgery attachments that a typical PC will seem like a joke.
If not, why the addiction to postscript? See this listing of Ghostscript based printers
For example, during the days of the anti-apartheid movement, when people were calling for divestiture it was common for the libertarian-types to point out that the economics of this was dubious: if you talk HP into selling an electronics plant in South Africa, the plant is still there, only now it's locally owned (and possibly with less enlightened management than it had previously). So why should anyone in South Africa care if every US firm "divested" and sold off all of their plants at a bargain rate?
I think what this hyper-rational viewpoint missed is that the whole divestiture controversy was a tremendous publicity generating event, and it got to the point where no one from South Africa could travel anywhere without being treated like a pariah.
Buzz is the goal. You don't need to worry that much about details like "do we boycott the whole MPAA?"; "do we go after subsidiaries too?"; "do we ban DVD players", etc. None of these details matters that much... it doesn't even necessarily matter how many people support the boycott (though if you can get it up to even 1%, I guarantee they'll cave immediately, and start looking for someone to fire).
You just want to get it to the point that whenever a Disney exec plays golf he gets sick of hearing people ask if he's worried about those silly boycott.
Actually, I think that boycotts *often* work, but
the myth that they don't is suprisingly wide spread.
Just in the last few years: _Global Exchange_
(a small non-profit with a few dozen employees)
led a boycott against the Nike corporation, and
Nike did ultimately back down (they've now
instituted minimum age hiring practices, etc.).
More recently, the same suspects started going
after the Gap/Old Navy/Banana Republic because
of the way they're running their operation in
Saipan (briefly: conning women from Asian into
indentured servitude). Soon thereafter, I noticed
in article in the business pages about how the
Gap's sales had gone flat. Notably this article
proposed a number of possible causes for this,
but didn't mention the boycott...
In any case, I think the chief barrier to getting
a boycott to work in this place is coming up
with a short, simple explanation of the issues.
It's obvious to *us* that this is bullshit,
but how do you make it obvious to everyone?
What's the slogan?
Yeah, just think: six months from now, every
weblog in the Universe will come equipped
with a Katz filter!
When I saw that subject heading, I thought
that someone had figured out how to squeeze
one of the new goofy looking streamlined
palms back into the good old rectangular
plastic boxes.
The problem is similar to usenet killfiles... if there's some ubiquitous poster that you can't stand, you can hide *their* postings easily enough but you can't hide the comments on them very easily. (It would be really cool if people would learn to stop swilling up the flamebait and responding in kind, but I haven't seen any signs of this happening yet).
Funny, that's what I always wonder about the guys in the Minus One Club.Katz, I'm afraid really is for real, and really is resoundingly hollow.
Why wouldn't you use CVS for a text-based
project (except perhaps, for the reasons
that you might not want to use CVS for
anything...).
But yea gods, what a sewer! I know a bunch of folks who refuse to read slashdot "discussions", and is it any wonder why? You know, if you just want to goof around, there are all sorts of places on the net you can do it... irc channels, usenet newsgroups (like alt.flame, alt.kibo...) and I'm sure there's plenty of AOL crap I'm unfamiliar with. Why are you guys picking this particular sandbox to piss in?
Okay, so you like to mess with people's heads a bit, but isn't this kind of lame way of doing it? There are some real battles going on out there in the world that you could be a part of, but instead your just seeing how fast you can make it to minus one.
Come on already, wake up! It's time to play for real stakes with the big boys.