Assuming that this book stil contains all of these, I'd buy it just for the statistics algorithms (I have managed to "misplace" my undergrad stats book).
Occasionally it's useful for a TA to be able to show that slight differences in average homework grades by gender aren't statistically significant.
Since when did O'Reilly confine themselves to endangered species?
I'm remembering the "Making TeX work" book which has on the cover a European Garden Spider - hardly an endangered species.
I thought that O'Reilly's animals were limited by the set of 19th century wood engravings that they were using as picture sources, though maybe they've moved away from that set.
I suppose I should also mention that you can see the cover by following the link posted in the top article. It appears to be a grey wolf.
> You Stinks as hell. You need higher education before you consider posting your stuff.
And you would say this why?
Were you attempting, in your typo-filled response, to criticize the previous poster's grammar and/or punctuation? I suggest that your post looks significantly more foolish than the one you replied to. The original post, while it contained text that could be improved by changing some punctuation marks to other punctuation marks, never contained a subject-verb disagreement or a blatant capitalization mistake; it certainly never contained a spelling typo (you spelled "well" as "hell" in your post's body). In fact, the first post if read aloud read as perfectly grammatically correct English.
So apparently this higher education you suggest isn't one of learning to proofread posts for grammar or spelling nits; what then could you be suggesting? Do you hope that a higher education would allow the first poster to build his own stuff from scratch, thereby obviating the need to ever buy any computer hardware from anyone? Perhaps you mean that if properly "educated", the first poster would never think of criticizing Toshiba. If so, I think I join with the first poster when I tell you to crawl back into the muck from whence you came. Once again, an anonymous coward has succeeded in creating a post that just makes me boggle at the potential idiocy present in humanity.
When I think about the reactions to Katz, and the fact that my gut instinct is to flee far from anything he has written, at first I stop myself and say "remember, everyone was a newbie once". Then I remember that that Katz's technical inexpertice is not what's causing that gut reaction.
Growing up, I had the good fortune to have access to my father's old collection of Doonesbury comics (early 70s-era stuff) and there's a scene that seems to me a good analogy. Mike Doonesbury, the inveterate geek, (and I mean that in the "socially clueless" sense of the word) decides one day that it's silly that the lunch tables are segregated by social custom, and decides to go mix with the black students. Essentially, over a series of about 4 or 5 strips, he is told that by the black students that they don't want him to sit there, because they don't want to be part of his college "experience". Mike Doonesbury was an outsider who wanted, not to join a group, but to "share in the experience". I've seen some of the faces the black students made at Doonesbury reflected in my monitor when I read one of Katz's articles.
My senior year in high school a (Philadelphia Inquirer) reporter did a series of articles on "the class of 1993"; she did this by interviewing selected students at my high school (basically, she interviewed people in a program similar to high school work-study). The reports (there was a series of 4 inserts into the Saturday paper)made me twitch each time they came out. Surely this woman had not visited my world; even when I knew the life stories of the people she interviewed, I couldn't imagine how the reporter had turned them into what I read in the paper. In every story there was something fundamental she just didn't get. The gut feeling then is very similar to the gut feeling Katz gives me.
As an aside, I was not the only one to feel this way; in fact, the reporter had to come back and address the concerns of those students what wanted to be there; this did little but convince the students present that the reporter was possibly from another planet.
I view Katz as a similar interloper. His writing conveys the impression that he is drunk on the feeling of the philosophy of open source software, but when I look into it there's obviously something he just doesn't get - I can't put my finger on it at the moment, but it becomes clear that he is writing about the free software movement not because having heard about and investigated the free software movement he is moved to write, but because he decided to write about something cool, and free software is the latest cool thing. Note that it's not so much a lack of commitment to free software that dooms his efforts - I can easily imagine wonderful free software writings by people who can't compile "Hello world" - but his motivation and direction of approach guarantee not only that he will always be the outsider looking in, but that he will always be the outsider looking at a deliberate distance.
The true story of the 1960s generation was not told in the 1960s. The story could only really be told by those who were part of the generation (which took time); the outside media of the time just didn't get it. The free software story will not be told by the likes of Katz (or by Wired magazine, which is what his stuff reminds me of often), but by those involved. Katz (and other outside media) hangs on to his own identity as outsider too strongly to ever get the story right.
Incidentally, I get this feeling of "wrongness" from the media whenever they cover a story which I know from the inside, and after a while, I begin to see how they must be badly distorting other stories as well. One source of media where this isn't the case (that is, I get the twitches of wrongness less often, though regrettably it still happens) is NPR. Those who listen to "All Things Considered" or "Morning Edition" regularly, and then watch any form of TV news (or even then pick up most local papers) will know the difference.
I suppose I can't blame you for thinking that it does - "Nugatory" is not a word in my vocabulary either - but it only removes tags that are used as follows:
<P><UL>This text is in a paragraph. </UL></P>
becomes:
<p>This text is in a paragraph.
It leaves other occurences of </P> alone. (well, it also removes empty <P></P> paragraphs entirely) I agree, though, that it probably shouldn't be removing the </P> in this case; as other people have pointed out, it's explicitly not required in HTML 4.0 or 3.2, but I think that in the 3.0 draft (that all the browser vendors rejected because they thought it was too hard - such a shame too, because I was really looking forward to MathML) you are correct. Even if it was never required, </P> is a good idea.
Also, after looking at the actual script, I take back my comment about it being a good starting point for a general HTML-cleaner. Such an HTML cleaner is still a good idea, but it should probably be written from scratch.
Actually, this seems like a starting point for a full-fledged HTML cleaner.
Now, most of the HTML produced by Rob's slash scripts is pretty good, but there are a few complaints I have (basically, most of the page winds up on one bigass-long line, making debugging the HTML code (as when I was trying to figure out which Netscape bug the "ask slashdot" header triggers) annoying in the extreme) that this seems to clear up - it doesn't just go through and convert windows-specific quotation characters to standards-based equivalents; among other things, it will wrap HTML lines so that you can read the code later.
Actually, if some enhancements were made to this (say, applying a standard sorting to text-level markup and eliminating consecutive open/close tags), it could be used as a rather nice HTML cleaner; for example, getting something that turns: This is a test into: This is a test Or even something as awful as: This is a test would be very nice - I've noticed many odd tag-ordering problems in all sorts of auto-generated HTML. Turning crufty HTML into something that renders identically but will pass a weblint test would be very nice indeed.
I always thought rob's debian logo was pretty neat.
So did I - especially since it isn't based around a penguin; Debian would like to be multi-OS as well as multi-platform (the Hurd port exists and continues to improve; at least now they've got a working X). Also, the logo scales well, works in black and white, and looks good on machines with few colormap entries to spare.
Well, if you look at the HTML code, you'll see what's wrong - the problem has to do with how one's browser interprets "width=100%" in an image tag that's inside a table. The image is the little image http://images.slashdot.org/sbs.gif - this image forms the bottom of the title bar (in this case, the "Ask Slashdot: Are There Computer Programs Designed to get Youngers Interested in Computers?").
Now, this little image is given a table cell (<TD> element) all to its lonesome. The desired effect is that this image fill up the entire horizontal width of the table cell (hence the width=100% in the IMG tag). Unfortunately, Netscape is (incorrectly) interpretting the 100% as relative to the table one up in the nesting hierarchy, making that image too wide, which then screws up everything else.
The workaround that most slashdot pages employ is to use this image as the TD's background, instead of having a 100% image tag inside it. This is rendered correctly in Netscape.
And good lord, you do not want to run weblint on slashdot-produced code. I shudder at the prospect.
I think the Rob's made the code available, though - some aspiring perl hacker code get their ten minutes of fame by giving that code a thorough cleaning; it really needs it. (And while they were at it, they could make the HTML output have linebreaks every now and then so that bugs would be easier to track down)
I don't think it was MS. For one, the trojan itself is pretty benign. As someone pointed out, this looks more like proof of concept, or a warning.
See my response to the "Why just UID and hostname" thread above. This trojan is most definitely NOT benign; it grants anyone a root shell on login.
Hrm... This reminds me - I got an attempted connection from someone at [name withheld].akh-wien.ac.at yesterday shortly after I dialed in (dynamic IP). I wonder if that indicates that that machine was hit by this, or more likely that someone else using JHU's ppp service got bitten.
Well, I see no reason to port this monstrosity to Linux. I mean, why on earth would I pour my effort into this when there are so many really free software projects out there that need coders? Take a good, long look at the license. If I'm going to put effort into porting this, I'm going to want the freedom to port only a part at a time, and release my early attempts - this is the only way I can see a collaborative porting effort working.
Ok, granted it is nicer than, say, some license that prevented any local modifications at all. And having the source is certainly much nicer than not having it at all. If it existed on Linux, I suppose I'd use it when I wanted the functionality, and for some reason couldn't get it from Moonlight Creator. Still, I see no incentive to spend time porting this.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, for me it was the Ayn Rand quotes that really said it all...
Assuming that this book stil contains all of these, I'd buy it just for the statistics algorithms (I have managed to "misplace" my undergrad stats book).
Occasionally it's useful for a TA to be able to show that slight differences in average homework grades by gender aren't statistically significant.
Since when did O'Reilly confine themselves to endangered species?
I'm remembering the "Making TeX work" book which has on the cover a European Garden Spider - hardly an endangered species.
I thought that O'Reilly's animals were limited by the set of 19th century wood engravings that they were using as picture sources, though maybe they've moved away from that set.
I suppose I should also mention that you can see the cover by following the link posted in the top article. It appears to be a grey wolf.
> You Stinks as hell. You need higher education before you consider posting your stuff.
And you would say this why?
Were you attempting, in your typo-filled response, to criticize the previous poster's grammar and/or punctuation? I suggest that your post looks significantly more foolish than the one you replied to. The original post, while it contained text that could be improved by changing some punctuation marks to other punctuation marks, never contained a subject-verb disagreement or a blatant capitalization mistake; it certainly never contained a spelling typo (you spelled "well" as "hell" in your post's body). In fact, the first post if read aloud read as perfectly grammatically correct English.
So apparently this higher education you suggest isn't one of learning to proofread posts for grammar or spelling nits; what then could you be suggesting? Do you hope that a higher education would allow the first poster to build his own stuff from scratch, thereby obviating the need to ever buy any computer hardware from anyone? Perhaps you mean that if properly "educated", the first poster would never think of criticizing Toshiba. If so, I think I join with the first poster when I tell you to crawl back into the muck from whence you came. Once again, an anonymous coward has succeeded in creating a post that just makes me boggle at the potential idiocy present in humanity.
When I think about the reactions to Katz, and the fact that my gut instinct is to flee far from anything he has written, at first I stop myself and say "remember, everyone was a newbie once". Then I remember that that Katz's technical inexpertice is not what's causing that gut reaction.
Growing up, I had the good fortune to have access to my father's old collection of Doonesbury comics (early 70s-era stuff) and there's a scene that seems to me a good analogy. Mike Doonesbury, the inveterate geek, (and I mean that in the "socially clueless" sense of the word) decides one day that it's silly that the lunch tables are segregated by social custom, and decides to go mix with the black students. Essentially, over a series of about 4 or 5 strips, he is told that by the black students that they don't want him to sit there, because they don't want to be part of his college "experience". Mike Doonesbury was an outsider who wanted, not to join a group, but to "share in the experience". I've seen some of the faces the black students made at Doonesbury reflected in my monitor when I read one of Katz's articles.
My senior year in high school a (Philadelphia Inquirer) reporter did a series of articles on "the class of 1993"; she did this by interviewing selected students at my high school (basically, she interviewed people in a program similar to high school work-study). The reports (there was a series of 4 inserts into the Saturday paper)made me twitch each time they came out. Surely this woman had not visited my world; even when I knew the life stories of the people she interviewed, I couldn't imagine how the reporter had turned them into what I read in the paper. In every story there was something fundamental she just didn't get. The gut feeling then is very similar to the gut feeling Katz gives me.
As an aside, I was not the only one to feel this way; in fact, the reporter had to come back and address the concerns of those students what wanted to be there; this did little but convince the students present that the reporter was possibly from another planet.
I view Katz as a similar interloper. His writing conveys the impression that he is drunk on the feeling of the philosophy of open source software, but when I look into it there's obviously something he just doesn't get - I can't put my finger on it at the moment, but it becomes clear that he is writing about the free software movement not because having heard about and investigated the free software movement he is moved to write, but because he decided to write about something cool, and free software is the latest cool thing. Note that it's not so much a lack of commitment to free software that dooms his efforts - I can easily imagine wonderful free software writings by people who can't compile "Hello world" - but his motivation and direction of approach guarantee not only that he will always be the outsider looking in, but that he will always be the outsider looking at a deliberate distance.
The true story of the 1960s generation was not told in the 1960s. The story could only really be told by those who were part of the generation (which took time); the outside media of the time just didn't get it. The free software story will not be told by the likes of Katz (or by Wired magazine, which is what his stuff reminds me of often), but by those involved. Katz (and other outside media) hangs on to his own identity as outsider too strongly to ever get the story right.
Incidentally, I get this feeling of "wrongness" from the media whenever they cover a story which I know from the inside, and after a while, I begin to see how they must be badly distorting other stories as well. One source of media where this isn't the case (that is, I get the twitches of wrongness less often, though regrettably it still happens) is NPR. Those who listen to "All Things Considered" or "Morning Edition" regularly, and then watch any form of TV news (or even then pick up most local papers) will know the difference.
And then there's the version numbering scheme of TeX and metafont, which just helps to point out the silliness of version numbers:
martind:~/public_html % tex -v
TeX (Web2C 7.2) 3.14159
...
martind:~/public_html % mf -v
Metafont (Web2C 7.2) 2.718
...
Yes, they're approaching $\pi$ and $e$, respectively, as specified in Knuth's original TeX book.
<P><UL>This text is in a paragraph.
</UL></P>
becomes:
<p>This text is in a paragraph.
It leaves other occurences of </P> alone. (well, it also removes empty <P></P> paragraphs entirely) I agree, though, that it probably shouldn't be removing the </P> in this case; as other people have pointed out, it's explicitly not required in HTML 4.0 or 3.2, but I think that in the 3.0 draft (that all the browser vendors rejected because they thought it was too hard - such a shame too, because I was really looking forward to MathML) you are correct. Even if it was never required, </P> is a good idea.
Also, after looking at the actual script, I take back my comment about it being a good starting point for a general HTML-cleaner. Such an HTML cleaner is still a good idea, but it should probably be written from scratch.
Actually, this seems like a starting point for a full-fledged HTML cleaner.
Now, most of the HTML produced by Rob's slash scripts is pretty good, but there are a few complaints I have (basically, most of the page winds up on one bigass-long line, making debugging the HTML code (as when I was trying to figure out which Netscape bug the "ask slashdot" header triggers) annoying in the extreme) that this seems to clear up - it doesn't just go through and convert windows-specific quotation characters to standards-based equivalents; among other things, it will wrap HTML lines so that you can read the code later.
Actually, if some enhancements were made to this (say, applying a standard sorting to text-level markup and eliminating consecutive open/close tags), it could be used as a rather nice HTML cleaner; for example, getting something that turns:
This is a test
into:
This is a test
Or even something as awful as:
This is a test
would be very nice - I've noticed many odd tag-ordering problems in all sorts of auto-generated HTML. Turning crufty HTML into something that renders identically but will pass a weblint test would be very nice indeed.
What's the difference between this Word thing from TeX manuscript files, circa 1960
Um... While I agree that TeX predates the 1990 Word mentioned in the previous post, no way in hell is it anywhere near that old. Try mid 1980's.
I always thought rob's debian logo was pretty neat.
So did I - especially since it isn't based around a penguin; Debian would like to be multi-OS as well as multi-platform (the Hurd port exists and continues to improve; at least now they've got a working X). Also, the logo scales well, works in black and white, and looks good on machines with few colormap entries to spare.
Well, if you look at the HTML code, you'll see what's wrong - the problem has to do with how one's browser interprets "width=100%" in an image tag that's inside a table. The image is the little image http://images.slashdot.org/sbs.gif - this image forms the bottom of the title bar (in this case, the "Ask Slashdot: Are There Computer Programs Designed to get Youngers Interested in Computers?").
Now, this little image is given a table cell (<TD> element) all to its lonesome. The desired effect is that this image fill up the entire horizontal width of the table cell (hence the width=100% in the IMG tag). Unfortunately, Netscape is (incorrectly) interpretting the 100% as relative to the table one up in the nesting hierarchy, making that image too wide, which then screws up everything else.
The workaround that most slashdot pages employ is to use this image as the TD's background, instead of having a 100% image tag inside it. This is rendered correctly in Netscape.
And good lord, you do not want to run weblint on slashdot-produced code. I shudder at the prospect.
I think the Rob's made the code available, though - some aspiring perl hacker code get their ten minutes of fame by giving that code a thorough cleaning; it really needs it. (And while they were at it, they could make the HTML output have linebreaks every now and then so that bugs would be easier to track down)
I don't think it was MS. For one, the trojan itself is pretty benign. As someone pointed out, this looks more like proof of concept, or a warning.
See my response to the "Why just UID and hostname" thread above. This trojan is most definitely NOT benign; it grants anyone a root shell on login.
Hrm... This reminds me - I got an attempted connection from someone at [name withheld].akh-wien.ac.at yesterday shortly after I dialed in (dynamic IP). I wonder if that indicates that that machine was hit by this, or more likely that someone else using JHU's ppp service got bitten.
Well, I see no reason to port this monstrosity to Linux. I mean, why on earth would I pour my effort into this when there are so many really free software projects out there that need coders? Take a good, long look at the license. If I'm going to put effort into porting this, I'm going to want the freedom to port only a part at a time, and release my early attempts - this is the only way I can see a collaborative porting effort working.
Ok, granted it is nicer than, say, some license that prevented any local modifications at all. And having the source is certainly much nicer than not having it at all. If it existed on Linux, I suppose I'd use it when I wanted the functionality, and for some reason couldn't get it from Moonlight Creator. Still, I see no incentive to spend time porting this.