The thing is that a couple of months ago I was doing some heavy reading into Scientology and Amway. Much like the subjects of my studies, this situation looks a bit... uh... cultish? Very disturbing. Very disturbing indeed.
This hit the news about a week ago around here, and my father commented that the third symbol looked like a penguin. Not having seen the ads yet (I saw one recently in downtown Boston) I said, "Yeah, probably is" and explained it.
After everything Jason's been through I'm surprised he's stuck with it this long, but it's probably good for us Mac folk that he did. Even so, I think he deserves a round of applause -- recovering from a major car accident is no picnic (my dad went through something similar a couple of years ago) and let's hope the LinuxPPC world can carry on without him.
I have this SF story arc floating around in my head -- two hundred years from now we figure out how to send things faster than light. So we send a probe to a nearby planet, turn around, and wait for the transmissions to start to show up from ten years in the future...
Meantime there is such a thing as a (nearly) unbreakable reactor, but they all have the same problem: meltdown-proof or not, the ash from that furnace is the single nastiest cleanup job in existence...
I worked on a project a year and a half ago (VB development -- I was slumming) where a lot of the back-end code was in Cobol (didn't have to deal with that myself) and had no coding standards to speak of. Even better, the VB code I was dealing with was cookie-cutter code based on the work of someone else who seemed to have a pathological fear of writing comments.
Didn't help me with my VB much, and it's something of a joke to say I know anything about programming the AS/400 -- I got more information on the system by playing with the generic GUI front end than I did writing the code that talked to the database directly.
This is why dusty decks get dusty. You can't just throw them out.
I have this fantasy of becoming an IT director some day. Now I'd love to have all the old Windows servers schlepped out to the curb if I ever get this job, but that can't be done by fiat because you never know what's floating around that someone might actually need. Penguins are great, but try running some obscure custom VB3 app on WINE -- betcha it hurts...
This is why things like this should be openly available, IMHO...
I had a curious discussion on the benefits of free software with the business manager at a prep school where my father works security. "My job is to minimize risk" is basically what he said, which was an interesting comment in light of the fact that he believes strongly in outsourcing business functions (small organization). I couldn't quite explain the benefits of having complete control over what software is used in the organization, at least not to his satisfaction.
Minimizing risk... I don't know about a prep school, but if you're a government there is a strong incentive to run systems with no back doors. It is very much a Bad Thing to tie yourself to a system that cannot be placed completely under your control; from that standpoint the Argentinian government is doing precisely what should be done. (In any case, "may the best software win in the marketplace" is a libertarian delusion. If it actually held true we'd all be using Amigas.)
I actually have a bit more of a PostScript fetish myself, but I think that's just a personal quirk. I don't claim that functional languages are the be-all, end-all of language design, but there's a certain appealing rhythm to a language that seems to go "do this to this to this to this to this to..."
But it's all in what you're trying to do. I wouldn't write an operating system in PostScript, but that doesn't mean I don't think it's a good language for what it does (and a few other purposes besides).
About six years ago I went on alt.folklore.computers on Usenet to create a language spec by this very process, except I did it as a joke. You don't want to write a spec by Bazaar methods -- it's a sure guarantee of an unnecessarily baroque design that will be a bitch to implement from the ground up. If you're doing it seriously, you'll start unnecessary language wars as people pull out there MFTLs for design inspiration. You will get a reference manual two inches thick like Ada or C++. You will get bitched and whined at because your objects aren't as pure as Smalltalk, because your functions aren't as functional as ML, because you're more baroque than Perl.
Too tough even to change, now that I think of it -- I went back to try and rework Magenta into something coherent and I couldn't cram enough of the design back into my head to make any sense of it a year later. Implementation by committee can be a thing of beauty; that's how the Internet was built. But design by committee... let's just say I originally wanted to call Magenta Linda (as in Lovelace) because it sucked so bad.
I always saw the GNU/Linux terminology as a raw power play on RMS' part myself. I don't consider him much different from people like BillG in that regard; I remember flipping through the docs for gcc years ago and finding out that the purpose of other C compilers is to bootstrap gcc.
I gotta think that cloning is one of the weirdest ethical dilemmas we've ever met, and the US Government is doing its damndest to convince itself that it's pretty cut-and-dried.
I am somewhat against it myself, especially because of the problems involved in producing a viable embryo. That probably comes from my Catholic background. But what I don't get: illegal to import a clone...
Now, I don't know about anyone else. I once asked my father about cloning and he was convinced that a clone of a person is not a person. How the hell does that follow? The genes are human, presumably the mind is human. If it looks like a sheep, baahs like a sheep...
I don't know. This could be an extended rant but I just don't have the energy to put into it right now.
Why is it that corporate types are not clued into the following facts:
a) Geeks, given an opportunity such as this, are generally not inclined to obey instructions to "Do our dirty work and then fall in line, you subversive m0?#3rp#uK3r$", and in fact are just as likely to take you up on your challenge without telling you, and
b) academic stuff really tends to be better done in the open (a blind spot shared with many, many government types over the millennia).
I guess it's a bit naive of me to wonder about this, but it really hurts to get myself into a frame of mind so blinded that I can't see the logic in cutting off other's access to maintain an edge. (After all, I would think the dubious success of Mutually Assured Destruction would be enough to convince even the most hawkishly secretive politician that secrets are more trouble than they're worth, but this is a terribly weird and tasteless example...)
And I do sometimes wonder whether it ever occurs to the entertainment-industry types that you can hit a point of diminishing returns when it comes to money vs. control. But they obviously haven't learned the Divx lesson, have they?
IPv4 works fine as long as your four billion possible hosts are asssigned with no slack. But it's a bit hard to see how giving someone who needs a block of four IP addresses a full Class C address is really a good idea...
(Try living in New York or Boston for a while, and see what's happened to our phone system. It's very much the same phenomenon.)
Write it yourself, that's what open source is all about...
Keep in mind, too. You can't just chuck everything just because a new scheme is better. You need to consider reverse compatibility or you're going to break everything.
Now if you want XMTP, make it; you might even find people interested in helping out. But don't expect to replace the system that's already in there -- you're talking about displacing something as basic to net traffic as, I don't know, FTP or HTTP. The net is big, and it's a long way to go to create a competing standard.
/Brian
That old book? (and a review of something similar)
on
The New Flatland
·
· Score: 2
I have only flipped through the new book (though there was another one published some time back called Sphereland or something of the sort -- it was sort of "Mr Tomkins in Wonderland" rewritten for the Square's hexagonal grandson). So I can't really comment.
To those of you who haven't read the original, you should, if only to see how frightening the mores of late 19th century England really were. The culture of Flatland is one in which classism and sexism (and probably racism as well -- it's been a while since I read it) is hardcoded in the biology of its inhabitants. It doesn't put a great deal of effort into scientific logic (if you think about it, the Flatlanders basically live their lives floating in empty space), but its culture is vividly drawn.
Sadly, Edwin Abbott Abbott's writing style doesn't measure up to his imagination -- he's very heavy-handed, with every corner of the story steeped in the telltale narrative overload of Delivering a Message. You get a peculiar picture of a man who is either strongly pro-status quo or violently against it but either way resigned to the belief that things are ordained to be as they were in his time and could never change.
It's a peculiar little book -- I got my edition as a Dover Thrift Classic for a buck and I think it wound up in the custody of a high school theology teacher of mine (Catholic schooled and proud). I do recommend getting the cheapest printed version you can find; it's better with the pictures.
If you're interested in a more scientifically thought out book about a flat universe, you might want to check out The Planiverse by A.K. Dewdney -- it's a story based on some old Scientific American columns he did about what life would really be like in a flat universe. It's a rather more interesting book that probably more resembles Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward than it does Flatland and follows the story of a laboratory full of grad students and researchers as their computer somehow makes contact with a two-dimensional universe through an inhabitant by the name of Yendred who leaves his relatively civilized home on a spiritual quest. It's quite heavy on details (but isn't that the point?) and a much easier read than Abbott.
I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to use USB for such purposes; I'm merely trying to say that you don't need USB horsepower for a keyboard. It really is just a bandwidth issue, and I'm not saying that's a problem.
And as it happens I've never done the PS/2 mouse trick; I mostly work on Macs and ADB isn't that finicky:-)
You *like* Mumps? I put it slightly higher than Befunge for readable...
I suspect forced indentation is something of a holy war issue. I'm repulsed by it myself but I can see it having advantages that don't necessarily apply to me. I really don't think it's a visual ergonomics issue at all, just a question of personal taste. (Of course, I happen to consider PostScript syntax to be elegant, so who am I to talk?)
USB is massive overkill for a mouse and keyboard. The big advantage it has is that (in theory for most PC users; in practice for Mac users) it provides one less port you have to fight with. You may not need anything resembling USB's bandwidth for a keyboard, but it's great for a scanner or a printer (passable for mass storage, but FireWire does better there).
I tend to wonder if having a fiber-based bus is a good idea, though -- it's one thing to run your networks or external storage on fiber, but quite another to try and build your motherboard with it.
What I want to see is a hot-pluggable open expansion bus based on something similar to PCMCIA, especially on the Mac. I find it rather strange that I can crack the case on a G4 while it's running but I can't do anything useful in there.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is that a couple of months ago I was doing some heavy reading into Scientology and Amway. Much like the subjects of my studies, this situation looks a bit... uh... cultish? Very disturbing. Very disturbing indeed.
/Brian
TurboLinux is the Asian Linux more than it is anything else.
/Brian
This hit the news about a week ago around here, and my father commented that the third symbol looked like a penguin. Not having seen the ads yet (I saw one recently in downtown Boston) I said, "Yeah, probably is" and explained it.
Not much, just an interesting bit...
/Brian
After everything Jason's been through I'm surprised he's stuck with it this long, but it's probably good for us Mac folk that he did. Even so, I think he deserves a round of applause -- recovering from a major car accident is no picnic (my dad went through something similar a couple of years ago) and let's hope the LinuxPPC world can carry on without him.
/Brian
I have this SF story arc floating around in my head -- two hundred years from now we figure out how to send things faster than light. So we send a probe to a nearby planet, turn around, and wait for the transmissions to start to show up from ten years in the future...
Cheers to NASA, though. May Pioneer continue.
/Brian
Meantime there is such a thing as a (nearly) unbreakable reactor, but they all have the same problem: meltdown-proof or not, the ash from that furnace is the single nastiest cleanup job in existence...
/Brian
Okay, how's this...
I worked on a project a year and a half ago (VB development -- I was slumming) where a lot of the back-end code was in Cobol (didn't have to deal with that myself) and had no coding standards to speak of. Even better, the VB code I was dealing with was cookie-cutter code based on the work of someone else who seemed to have a pathological fear of writing comments.
Didn't help me with my VB much, and it's something of a joke to say I know anything about programming the AS/400 -- I got more information on the system by playing with the generic GUI front end than I did writing the code that talked to the database directly.
/Brian
So that's where all those grey market Win9X packages come from at geek flea markets...
/Brian
This is why dusty decks get dusty. You can't just throw them out.
I have this fantasy of becoming an IT director some day. Now I'd love to have all the old Windows servers schlepped out to the curb if I ever get this job, but that can't be done by fiat because you never know what's floating around that someone might actually need. Penguins are great, but try running some obscure custom VB3 app on WINE -- betcha it hurts...
This is why things like this should be openly available, IMHO...
/Brian
Somewhat. But there is good logic behind it.
/Brian
I had a curious discussion on the benefits of free software with the business manager at a prep school where my father works security. "My job is to minimize risk" is basically what he said, which was an interesting comment in light of the fact that he believes strongly in outsourcing business functions (small organization). I couldn't quite explain the benefits of having complete control over what software is used in the organization, at least not to his satisfaction.
Minimizing risk... I don't know about a prep school, but if you're a government there is a strong incentive to run systems with no back doors. It is very much a Bad Thing to tie yourself to a system that cannot be placed completely under your control; from that standpoint the Argentinian government is doing precisely what should be done. (In any case, "may the best software win in the marketplace" is a libertarian delusion. If it actually held true we'd all be using Amigas.)
/Brian
Ah. The old corporate-types-can't-understand-any-mindset-but-g reed trick.
Explains a lot, really...
/Brian
I actually have a bit more of a PostScript fetish myself, but I think that's just a personal quirk. I don't claim that functional languages are the be-all, end-all of language design, but there's a certain appealing rhythm to a language that seems to go "do this to this to this to this to this to..."
But it's all in what you're trying to do. I wouldn't write an operating system in PostScript, but that doesn't mean I don't think it's a good language for what it does (and a few other purposes besides).
/Brian
Uhhh... Squeak is Smalltalk. Maybe a bit more added since the ST80 definition, but it's nothing *new*.
/Brian
http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/tarpit/magenta.h tml
About six years ago I went on alt.folklore.computers on Usenet to create a language spec by this very process, except I did it as a joke. You don't want to write a spec by Bazaar methods -- it's a sure guarantee of an unnecessarily baroque design that will be a bitch to implement from the ground up. If you're doing it seriously, you'll start unnecessary language wars as people pull out there MFTLs for design inspiration. You will get a reference manual two inches thick like Ada or C++. You will get bitched and whined at because your objects aren't as pure as Smalltalk, because your functions aren't as functional as ML, because you're more baroque than Perl.
Too tough even to change, now that I think of it -- I went back to try and rework Magenta into something coherent and I couldn't cram enough of the design back into my head to make any sense of it a year later. Implementation by committee can be a thing of beauty; that's how the Internet was built. But design by committee... let's just say I originally wanted to call Magenta Linda (as in Lovelace) because it sucked so bad.
/Brian
I always saw the GNU/Linux terminology as a raw power play on RMS' part myself. I don't consider him much different from people like BillG in that regard; I remember flipping through the docs for gcc years ago and finding out that the purpose of other C compilers is to bootstrap gcc.
http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/stallman.html
/Brian
I gotta think that cloning is one of the weirdest ethical dilemmas we've ever met, and the US Government is doing its damndest to convince itself that it's pretty cut-and-dried.
I am somewhat against it myself, especially because of the problems involved in producing a viable embryo. That probably comes from my Catholic background. But what I don't get: illegal to import a clone...
Now, I don't know about anyone else. I once asked my father about cloning and he was convinced that a clone of a person is not a person. How the hell does that follow? The genes are human, presumably the mind is human. If it looks like a sheep, baahs like a sheep...
I don't know. This could be an extended rant but I just don't have the energy to put into it right now.
/Brian
What I don't get about this Hack SDMI thing...
Why is it that corporate types are not clued into the following facts:
a) Geeks, given an opportunity such as this, are generally not inclined to obey instructions to "Do our dirty work and then fall in line, you subversive m0?#3rp#uK3r$", and in fact are just as likely to take you up on your challenge without telling you, and
b) academic stuff really tends to be better done in the open (a blind spot shared with many, many government types over the millennia).
I guess it's a bit naive of me to wonder about this, but it really hurts to get myself into a frame of mind so blinded that I can't see the logic in cutting off other's access to maintain an edge. (After all, I would think the dubious success of Mutually Assured Destruction would be enough to convince even the most hawkishly secretive politician that secrets are more trouble than they're worth, but this is a terribly weird and tasteless example...)
And I do sometimes wonder whether it ever occurs to the entertainment-industry types that you can hit a point of diminishing returns when it comes to money vs. control. But they obviously haven't learned the Divx lesson, have they?
/Brian
That's a bit sloppy, IMHO -- why not do a full 2821 with all the trimmings and then an informational abridged version?
/Brian
IPv4 works fine as long as your four billion possible hosts are asssigned with no slack. But it's a bit hard to see how giving someone who needs a block of four IP addresses a full Class C address is really a good idea...
(Try living in New York or Boston for a while, and see what's happened to our phone system. It's very much the same phenomenon.)
/Brian
Write it yourself, that's what open source is all about...
Keep in mind, too. You can't just chuck everything just because a new scheme is better. You need to consider reverse compatibility or you're going to break everything.
Now if you want XMTP, make it; you might even find people interested in helping out. But don't expect to replace the system that's already in there -- you're talking about displacing something as basic to net traffic as, I don't know, FTP or HTTP. The net is big, and it's a long way to go to create a competing standard.
/Brian
I have only flipped through the new book (though there was another one published some time back called Sphereland or something of the sort -- it was sort of "Mr Tomkins in Wonderland" rewritten for the Square's hexagonal grandson). So I can't really comment.
To those of you who haven't read the original, you should, if only to see how frightening the mores of late 19th century England really were. The culture of Flatland is one in which classism and sexism (and probably racism as well -- it's been a while since I read it) is hardcoded in the biology of its inhabitants. It doesn't put a great deal of effort into scientific logic (if you think about it, the Flatlanders basically live their lives floating in empty space), but its culture is vividly drawn.
Sadly, Edwin Abbott Abbott's writing style doesn't measure up to his imagination -- he's very heavy-handed, with every corner of the story steeped in the telltale narrative overload of Delivering a Message. You get a peculiar picture of a man who is either strongly pro-status quo or violently against it but either way resigned to the belief that things are ordained to be as they were in his time and could never change.
It's a peculiar little book -- I got my edition as a Dover Thrift Classic for a buck and I think it wound up in the custody of a high school theology teacher of mine (Catholic schooled and proud). I do recommend getting the cheapest printed version you can find; it's better with the pictures.
If you're interested in a more scientifically thought out book about a flat universe, you might want to check out The Planiverse by A.K. Dewdney -- it's a story based on some old Scientific American columns he did about what life would really be like in a flat universe. It's a rather more interesting book that probably more resembles Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward than it does Flatland and follows the story of a laboratory full of grad students and researchers as their computer somehow makes contact with a two-dimensional universe through an inhabitant by the name of Yendred who leaves his relatively civilized home on a spiritual quest. It's quite heavy on details (but isn't that the point?) and a much easier read than Abbott.
So now I guess I have to read two books...
/Brian
I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to use USB for such purposes; I'm merely trying to say that you don't need USB horsepower for a keyboard. It really is just a bandwidth issue, and I'm not saying that's a problem.
:-)
And as it happens I've never done the PS/2 mouse trick; I mostly work on Macs and ADB isn't that finicky
(Chilling random thought: SCSI keyboard...)
/Brian
You *like* Mumps? I put it slightly higher than Befunge for readable...
I suspect forced indentation is something of a holy war issue. I'm repulsed by it myself but I can see it having advantages that don't necessarily apply to me. I really don't think it's a visual ergonomics issue at all, just a question of personal taste. (Of course, I happen to consider PostScript syntax to be elegant, so who am I to talk?)
/Brian
USB is massive overkill for a mouse and keyboard. The big advantage it has is that (in theory for most PC users; in practice for Mac users) it provides one less port you have to fight with. You may not need anything resembling USB's bandwidth for a keyboard, but it's great for a scanner or a printer (passable for mass storage, but FireWire does better there).
I tend to wonder if having a fiber-based bus is a good idea, though -- it's one thing to run your networks or external storage on fiber, but quite another to try and build your motherboard with it.
What I want to see is a hot-pluggable open expansion bus based on something similar to PCMCIA, especially on the Mac. I find it rather strange that I can crack the case on a G4 while it's running but I can't do anything useful in there.
/Brian