I tuned out as soon as I saw the subhead "Unlimited bandwidth for everyone." It's one of those words that trips my BS detector. It's one thing to say our present usage is suboptimal. It's quite another to start throwing around words like "unlimited."
We'll never run out of nuclear energy, because breeders create more fuel than they consume... the hydrogen economy is limitless, because the amount of hydrogen atoms in the ocean is inexhaustible... there's no shortage of petroleum because rising prices CAUSE new supplies to be discovered WITHOUT LIMIT...
Yeah, and the Dow is going to reach 36,000. And Moore's Law will hold indefinitely.
No, no, no. "Napster" without file SHARING is not Napster. Napster was never about "free music." Napster was always about community, about "sharing my collection--my very own, personal, idiosyncratic collection."
There is no way the record companies are going to provide the same variety or the same breadth of coverage as a bunch of dedicated enthusiasts.
Sure, I'll be able to get Britney Spears from this site--but am I really going to be able to get Arthur Askey? Or cylinder recordings by Billy Murray? Or sound effects? The Weavers' recording of "Tzena, tzena, tzena?" Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground?"
What, you say--you've never heard about them and don't care about them? Of course not. But on the old Napster there were people who did, and shared them with me. And you have a bunch of stuff of your own that you care about, that _I"ve_ never heard of. Maybe even stuff that isn't available on CD.
This new "Napster" is a one way road. It's going to be all about what the record companies push, and nothing about what the music buying public wants.
It's about political power struggles in science...
on
Defining "Planet"
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· Score: 1
While I wouldn't go so far as to call it "the dark side" of science, stuff like this makes it clear that there are the usual pecking-order rivalries and power games going on in science just as anywhere else.
Obviously there's very little no scientific importance to the definition of "a planet." It's a little self-aggrandizing, for example, to suggest that the Earth is somehow in the same category as Jupiter.
It's all about which scientists get to have _their_ definition of planet get into the textbooks (and control what projects can get "planetary studies" funding, etc.)
email is by far the most widely used of all Internet services. I belong to an organization many of whose members are retirees are on fixed incomes, and it is only within the last two years that the number of people with email has grown to a critical mass (about 2/3 of the membership).
Of members of the lay public who regularly use email as a means of communication do not have the level of technical comfort that most Slashdot readers take for granted.
Of people who use email, the percentage who know how to use a web browser is much less than 100%. The percentage who can google for information is much less than 100%. The percentage who can successful extract and decode an email attachment is much less than 100%. The percentage who can view a government form or a corporate brochure in PDF format and read it with Acrobat is much less than 100%.
And the average age of their computers and operating systems is much more than three years--and they're not likely to update their email programs.
Whatever is done needs to be 100% backward compatible with existing email clients, not requiring even simple upgrades, or an astonishing proportion of real-world Net users will be disenfranchised.
(And please, let's not have any facile expressions of contempt for AOL users or webtv clients or people who bought email appliances (that includes one of the retirees I mentioned).
Not LEDs, but I thought I'd mention that we currently have three Microsun HID metal-halide lamps in our house and are very happy with them.
Microsun makes table and floor lamps that are nice-looking pieces of furniture, mostly of wood. Not cheap but not out of line for "nice furniture." They incorporate a "gearpack'" which holds a 68-watt E17N metal-halide HID bulb and two conventional 25-watt incandescent bulbs.
The company claims "more than 300 watts [sic] [sigh...] of crisp white light, yet uses less than half the energy to do so." I think the claim is reasonable. The bulb package, annoyingly, does not state the light output in lumens, but such bulbs typically seem to have an output of about 5000 lumens. (The 25-watt bulbs, of course, don't add very much light but are just there to warm up and smooth out the spectrum).
That is, of course, not nearly as energy-efficient as fluorescent. However, most of the compact fluorescents we've tried really have fairly unpleasant color balance AND just don't put out much light.
These lamps put out a LOT of light and the color balance is quite pleasant. And they just look "normal," small bright sources of light inside a lampshade that light up the room just the way traditional lamps do.
Nothing revolutionary here, just nice, bright, ready-made, energy-efficient lighting with no "geekiness."
A decade ago I worked at a now-defunct minicomputer company that shall remain nameless. They were constantly struggling with the issue of how much effort to devote to supporting the Macintosh. This company had been very successful in marketing to law firms in particular. One day I saw a memo circulating among management that said something like this.
"We are finding that there is significant penetration by Apple into the legal marketplace. Many of the law firms we deal with now have Macintoshes in use within their business. The actual number of people using Macintoshes in these firms is not large. Unfortunately, they tend to be the senior partners."
I used to have fairly good luck getting managers to approve purchases of graphic packages. But ever since Excel came out, the answer has always been "Why do you need that? Excel does graphs."
Worse yet, I usually CAN get Excel to produce the graphs I need--after hours of struggling, trickery, hand-creating special data series, fussing with the fact that the charts are made of rubber and aren't any particular size--no problem unless you want a set of charts that are consistent with each other--can't get decent graduations on a logarithmic axis, etc. etc. etc.
Anyone have any tips on how to QUICKLY convince a manager that you have a credible, specific need that Excel can't handle?
In "The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information," Edward Tufte makes a large number of specific suggestions for ways to make graphs more informative by increasing the proportion of "data ink."
Conceptually, he suggests trying to erase every bit of ink that doesn't represent data.
More concretely, his book is replete with suggestions that produce graphs that are beautiful, easy to comprehend--and slightly unconventional.
For example, he proposes doing away with standard evenly graduated axes. Basically he suggests that each point on the graph should have an individual tick on the axis labelled with its exact value--and skip the round-numbered ticks (10, 20, 30). Of course this doesn't work if there are too many data points, but it is astonishing how many real-world graphs do NOT have too many.
Has anyone seen software on any platform that aims to implement Tufte's approach?
(Excel and friends have gone in exactly the opposite direction, of course. Tufte is vitriolic in his distaste for idiocy such as taking a single data point and illustrating it as a three-dimensional solid bar.)
Ozone is highly toxic to humans
on
Ozone As Pesticide
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The article says "It isn't clear how the ozone kills the insects," but apparently it does, and apparently in low concentrations. We are told that it "uses such low concentrations of ozone that it rapidly dissipates. It would not add to ground-level ozone." Ah, that word "dissipates." But as Barry Commoner reminded us, "everything must go someplace." "Dissipation" isn't the same as vanishing!
And generally speaking things that kill one kind of life (e.g. insects) are hazardous to others (e.g. humans).
HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCE FACT SHEET Common Name: OZONE CAS Number: 10028-15-6 DOT Number: None
* Ozone can affect you when breathed in.
* Ozone may cause mutations. Handle with extreme caution.
* Ozone can cause reproductive damage. Handle with extreme caution
* Repeated exposure can cause lung damage.
* ODOR THRESHOLD = 0.045 ppm.
* The range of accepted odor threshold values is quite broad. Caution should be used in relying on odor alone as a warning of potentially hazardous exposures.
WORKPLACE EXPOSURE LIMITS
OSHA: The legal airborne permissible exposure limit
(PEL) is 0.1 ppm averaged over an 8-hour workshift.
NIOSH: The recommended airborne exposure limit is 0.1 ppm which should not be exceeded at any time.
ACGIH: The recommended airborne exposure limit is 0.1 ppm averaged over an 8-hour workshift.
Aren't we grateful for Standard ECMA-262 and isn't it wonderful that everyone follows it?
Particularly gratifying, considering that this standard has only been out since 1999... so most vendors have only had half-a-dozen or so revision opportunities...
How many lumens per watt?
on
Thin, Flat LEDs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's disappointing that the article doesn't say anything about luminous efficacy (lumens per watt). Is it greater than or less than traditional LED's?
From the fact that it's NOT mentioned I'm guessing that it's less, meaning that these are more useful for decorative applications than as a serious source of illumination.
I've used and loved the freeware BBEdit Lite for, five? six? years now. It's just a perfect little gem. Everything I needed and nothing I didn't need. Opens big files beautifully. Fast, efficient, no bloat.
When I emailed them to mention that it had some issues running under Classic in OS X, they informed me that there WAS an OS X native version of BBEdit Lite, and that in fact it had gone through two major revs since I downloaded it. I hadn't even known, because BBEdit Lite was so satisfactory that I never got around to checking for updates!
It was at about that time that I tried to get them to accept a completely voluntary $30 donation for BBEdit Lite. I really didn't want or need the features of the full BBEdit, but I did feel that I morally "owed" them for BBEdit Lite.
They refused to accept my payment!
So, while I am very disappointed that they have withdrawn BBEdit Lite, nevertheless I will happily purchase TextWrangler, because I think it's above time I paid them back for all the use I've gotten out of BBEdit Lite over all these years.
No, I'm not shilling for them, and, yes, I'm perfectly sincere.
BBEdit Lite was just plain NICE, and I hope TextWrangler continues that tradition.
I personally have an account on The World and have recently been experiencing serious issues with false positives.
Others' mileage may vary, but I would rather get a thousand spams than miss a single valid message.
The thing that's so insidious, of course, is that I have no way to know it's happening.
During the last six months I: a) have been unable to register for a conference because an essential part of the registration procedure involved replying to an automated email sent from the site, and the automated email kept being rejected as UCE; b) found that a specific organization to which I donate money, whom I had asked to keep me informed by email, was unable to do so; c) found that a relative who wanted to "send" me Shutterfly pictures (an automatic email containing a specific link to the Shutterfly site) could not do so; d) stopped receiving digests from a mailing list I subscribe to.
In all four cases, I tried hard to get the people whose legitimate mail was blocked to send me the message, with headers, and in all four cases I failed. Ordinary users frequently do not know how to do this, and web sites that send LEGITIMATE automated often have busy webmasters who do not respond (or respond with insufficient detail).
Why don't The World (and other ISP's) give me some control over spam filter settings? Why isn't there a way for me to make a weekly review of the subject lines and sender emails of messages that have been filtered out so that I can detect "false positives?"
"How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?"
Well, you asked... I have a number of scripts--they're written in Apple's MPW, but think "shell script" and "egrep" and you'll get the idea--that are specifically tuned to Project Gutenberg's format. Massages line breaks, provides true open and close quotes, and so forth.
They output the particular restricted subset of HTML that's acceptable as input to RocketLibrarian. Then I use RocketLibrarian to download them into my Rocket eBook, which really has very good characteristics. The size is right (midway BETWEEN PDA and laptop) and the screen is very readable.
Unfortunately... the Rocket eBook was acquired by a bunch of business geniuses at Gemstar who proceded to morph it into the REB1100, which is essentially identical to the Rocket EXCEPT that you can ONLY use it to read purchased (and expensive!) content. No "personal content" allowed any more.
It's a pathetic mess and if I get started I'll rant for hours...
But the bottom line is that I've NEVER been able to read comfortably from a fixed CRT sitting at a desk. And I've NEVER been able to read comfortably on cramped 160x160 pixel Palm.
But reading from the Rocket, which I purchased mainly for the specific purpose of reading PG texts, I read pleasurably and comfortably for hours.
It's a darned shame that the eBook industry has seemingly killed itself through greed and digital restrictions management.
It's still a shame. Back in the seventies, when I wore earplugs because of the insidious levels of fan noise in the room where I worked (with three minicomputers, terminals, CRT's, printers, etc. ALL with noisy fans) the totally silent Apple ][ was a revelation.
"Wow!" I said when I saw one for the first time. "No fan? They must be geniuses at thermal engineering!" Little did I know that it was just the opposite--they knew so little about thermal engineering they didn't KNOW they needed to do it.
Still, it was amazingly luxurious and soothing to work on a totally silent machine.
Ditto for the original Mac (and Mac Plus). Blessedly silent... but cursedly prone to heat-induced failures.
The difference between a very quiet machine and a silent machine is very significant.
Apple's Power Macs have been, in general, no better or worse than competitors in terms of noise... but they should really be ashamed of themselves for coming out with a conspicuously noisy machine.
Since Steve Jobs is known to care about noise, I wonder whether he had any personal role in Apple's decision to do the right thing?
Wasn't there something in Ecclesiastes about this?
on
Fooled by Randomness
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· Score: 1, Interesting
...something about seeing under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all?
I guess it just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun.
This should be the final proof, if proof were required, that privacy policies and TRUSTe seals audits and seals are ineffective at protecting consumers.
"This late in the development process, bugs are often passed along, or "punted," to the next Windows release--Longhorn--if they're not sufficiently problematic."
"The atmosphere in War Room is intimidating, and I spent most of my time in the room, silent and almost cowering, praying that Wanke wouldn't turn his attention to me or my group.... The most virulent treatment, naturally, is saved for those foolish enough to blow off a War Room meeting. On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, "F#$% 'em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It's in Longhorn. Next bug."
So... in this macho atmosphere, reeking of testosterone... the punishment for not being that the bug meet is that... YOU DON'T HAVE TO FIX YOUR BUGS UNTIL THE NEXT MAJOR RELEASE?????????
Words fail me...
Misleading title... it's NOT about HACKING
on
Hacker's Challenge 2
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· Score: 4, Insightful
A book entitled "HACKER'S Challenge" ought to be a series of programming puzzles with clever, nonintuitive answers.
I suppose trying to get writers and the general public to distinguish between hacking and cracking is a lost cause, but we need to keep trying.
The example given is totally unimpressive: analyzing State of the Union messages, "In the years that immediately followed the American Revolution, for example, sudden bursts in the use of words such as "militia", "British" and "savages" are found. From 1930 to 1937 a spike in the use of the word "depression" is seen. And from 1949 to 1959 "atomic" is the word with the greatest "burstiness". Later in the 20th century, words such as "Vietnam", "Soviet", "communist" and "Afghanistan" increase sharply in usage." What a surprise. No tenth-grade history student would have ever guessed.
Equally appalling is the suggested "use:"
"For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze."
See Shurtape's web site for a letter explaining to distributors that they have shifted all production to three popular consumer products that lead times on every other kind of duct tape is increasing to eight weeks... If only Shurtape had analyzed the burstiness of the words "duct tape" in blogs would they have been able to anticipate the spike in demand?
I'm all in favor of easy-to-use, accessible programming systems, and I'm very much against the kind of snobbery that says "everything must be programmed in C++ 'because' that is the language that is correct for modern development.'"
But I don't quite see why this is a breakthrough or how it is dramatically different from any of a number of accessible programming systems. AppleScript Studio... REALbasic... Hypercard. (OK, I know Hypercard is pretty much dead... but it SHOULDN'T be!).
What would be a breakthrough would be a change in PHILOSOPHY.
If only Apple (OR Microsoft) to return to the philosophy of the earliest days of micros, in which an accessible, easy-to-use, elementary programming system WITH GOOD END-USER TUTORIAL DOCUMENTATION was bundled with every computer.
One of the saddest features of the evolution of microcomputers has been the progressive development of an elitist attitude. In the eighties, retirees would buy these PC things just to see what they what they were all about and days later would be bragging about something they had written in QuickBasic...
"Computer literacy" USED to mean the ability to write simple programs. Now, it just means the ability to memorize the meaning of Excel toolbar pictograms...
...which has an active, bustling little general-aviation airport--unlike the abandoned one in nearby Canton, MA--make it quite clear that in the late years of the Roaring Twenties, the local developers had Big Plans for the town. They were very proud of the airport; it was one of the things that was going to put Norwood on the map. The crash of 1929 modified a lot of those plans.
I suspect that a lot of little airfields may have started in the same way--when aviation was new, and land was plentiful and cheap--perhaps a lot of towns put them in hoping to get in on the ground floor.
Of course, there's an amazing amount of abandoned STUFF all over the place. Every place has its "lost cities" and ghost towns. Road systems for developments that were never built, military installations that were abandoned, etc. etc. It's just that anything abandoned rapidly becomes invisible--names vanish even from the topographic map, and unless you investigate on the ground or are curious about aerial photos, how are you ever going to know they are there?
Slashdot Mirror
I tuned out as soon as I saw the subhead "Unlimited bandwidth for everyone." It's one of those words that trips my BS detector. It's one thing to say our present usage is suboptimal. It's quite another to start throwing around words like "unlimited."
We'll never run out of nuclear energy, because breeders create more fuel than they consume... the hydrogen economy is limitless, because the amount of hydrogen atoms in the ocean is inexhaustible... there's no shortage of petroleum because rising prices CAUSE new supplies to be discovered WITHOUT LIMIT...
Yeah, and the Dow is going to reach 36,000. And Moore's Law will hold indefinitely.
And the buffalo are inexhaustible.
No, no, no. "Napster" without file SHARING is not Napster.
Napster was never about "free music." Napster was always about community, about "sharing my collection--my very own, personal, idiosyncratic collection."
There is no way the record companies are going to provide the same variety or the same breadth of coverage as a bunch of dedicated enthusiasts.
Sure, I'll be able to get Britney Spears from this site--but am I really going to be able to get Arthur Askey? Or cylinder recordings by Billy Murray? Or sound effects? The Weavers' recording of "Tzena, tzena, tzena?" Bernard Cribbins singing "'Ole in the Ground?"
What, you say--you've never heard about them and don't care about them? Of course not. But on the old Napster there were people who did, and shared them with me. And you have a bunch of stuff of your own that you care about, that _I"ve_ never heard of. Maybe even stuff that isn't available on CD.
This new "Napster" is a one way road. It's going to be all about what the record companies push, and nothing about what the music buying public wants.
While I wouldn't go so far as to call it "the dark side" of science, stuff like this makes it clear that there are the usual pecking-order rivalries and power games going on in science just as anywhere else.
Obviously there's very little no scientific importance to the definition of "a planet." It's a little self-aggrandizing, for example, to suggest that the Earth is somehow in the same category as Jupiter.
It's all about which scientists get to have _their_ definition of planet get into the textbooks (and control what projects can get "planetary studies" funding, etc.)
email is by far the most widely used of all Internet services. I belong to an organization many of whose members are retirees are on fixed incomes, and it is only within the last two years that the number of people with email has grown to a critical mass (about 2/3 of the membership).
Of members of the lay public who regularly use email as a means of communication do not have the level of technical comfort that most Slashdot readers take for granted.
Of people who use email, the percentage who know how to use a web browser is much less than 100%. The percentage who can google for information is much less than 100%. The percentage who can successful extract and decode an email attachment is much less than 100%. The percentage who can view a government form or a corporate brochure in PDF format and read it with Acrobat is much less than 100%.
And the average age of their computers and operating systems is much more than three years--and they're not likely to update their email programs.
Whatever is done needs to be 100% backward compatible with existing email clients, not requiring even simple upgrades, or an astonishing proportion of real-world Net users will be disenfranchised.
(And please, let's not have any facile expressions of contempt for AOL users or webtv clients or people who bought email appliances (that includes one of the retirees I mentioned).
Not LEDs, but I thought I'd mention that we currently have three Microsun HID metal-halide lamps in our house and are very happy with them.
Microsun makes table and floor lamps that are nice-looking pieces of furniture, mostly of wood. Not cheap but not out of line for "nice furniture." They incorporate a "gearpack'" which holds a 68-watt E17N metal-halide HID bulb and two conventional 25-watt incandescent bulbs.
The company claims "more than 300 watts [sic] [sigh...] of crisp white light, yet uses less than half the energy to do so." I think the claim is reasonable. The bulb package, annoyingly, does not state the light output in lumens, but such bulbs typically seem to have an output of about 5000 lumens. (The 25-watt bulbs, of course, don't add very much light but are just there to warm up and smooth out the spectrum).
That is, of course, not nearly as energy-efficient as fluorescent. However, most of the compact fluorescents we've tried really have fairly unpleasant color balance AND just don't put out much light.
These lamps put out a LOT of light and the color balance is quite pleasant. And they just look "normal," small bright sources of light inside a lampshade that light up the room just the way traditional lamps do.
Nothing revolutionary here, just nice, bright, ready-made, energy-efficient lighting with no "geekiness."
A decade ago I worked at a now-defunct minicomputer company that shall remain nameless. They were constantly struggling with the issue of how much effort to devote to supporting the Macintosh. This company had been very successful in marketing to law firms in particular. One day I saw a memo circulating among management that said something like this.
"We are finding that there is significant penetration by Apple into the legal marketplace. Many of the law firms we deal with now have Macintoshes in use within their business. The actual number of people using Macintoshes in these firms is not large. Unfortunately, they tend to be the senior partners."
I used to have fairly good luck getting managers to approve purchases of graphic packages. But ever since Excel came out, the answer has always been "Why do you need that? Excel does graphs."
Worse yet, I usually CAN get Excel to produce the graphs I need--after hours of struggling, trickery, hand-creating special data series, fussing with the fact that the charts are made of rubber and aren't any particular size--no problem unless you want a set of charts that are consistent with each other--can't get decent graduations on a logarithmic axis, etc. etc. etc.
Anyone have any tips on how to QUICKLY convince a manager that you have a credible, specific need that Excel can't handle?
In "The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information," Edward Tufte makes a large number of specific suggestions for ways to make graphs more informative by increasing the proportion of "data ink."
Conceptually, he suggests trying to erase every bit of ink that doesn't represent data.
More concretely, his book is replete with suggestions that produce graphs that are beautiful, easy to comprehend--and slightly unconventional.
For example, he proposes doing away with standard evenly graduated axes. Basically he suggests that each point on the graph should have an individual tick on the axis labelled with its exact value--and skip the round-numbered ticks (10, 20, 30). Of course this doesn't work if there are too many data points, but it is astonishing how many real-world graphs do NOT have too many.
Has anyone seen software on any platform that aims to implement Tufte's approach?
(Excel and friends have gone in exactly the opposite direction, of course. Tufte is vitriolic in his distaste for idiocy such as taking a single data point and illustrating it as a three-dimensional solid bar.)
The article says "It isn't clear how the ozone kills the insects," but apparently it does, and apparently in low concentrations. We are told that it "uses such low concentrations of ozone that it rapidly dissipates. It would not add to ground-level ozone." Ah, that word "dissipates." But as Barry Commoner reminded us, "everything must go someplace." "Dissipation" isn't the same as vanishing!
And generally speaking things that kill one kind of life (e.g. insects) are hazardous to others (e.g. humans).
See this factsheet, which notes, in part:
HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCE FACT SHEET
Common Name: OZONE
CAS Number: 10028-15-6
DOT Number: None
* Ozone can affect you when breathed in.
* Ozone may cause mutations. Handle with extreme caution.
* Ozone can cause reproductive damage. Handle with extreme caution
* Repeated exposure can cause lung damage.
* ODOR THRESHOLD = 0.045 ppm.
* The range of accepted odor threshold values is quite broad. Caution should be used in relying on odor alone as a warning of potentially hazardous exposures.
WORKPLACE EXPOSURE LIMITS
OSHA: The legal airborne permissible exposure limit
(PEL) is 0.1 ppm averaged over an 8-hour workshift.
NIOSH: The recommended airborne exposure limit is 0.1 ppm which should not be exceeded at any time.
ACGIH: The recommended airborne exposure limit is 0.1 ppm averaged over an 8-hour workshift.
Aren't we grateful for Standard ECMA-262 and isn't it wonderful that everyone follows it?
Particularly gratifying, considering that this standard has only been out since 1999... so most vendors have only had half-a-dozen or so revision opportunities...
It's disappointing that the article doesn't say anything about luminous efficacy (lumens per watt). Is it greater than or less than traditional LED's?
From the fact that it's NOT mentioned I'm guessing that it's less, meaning that these are more useful for decorative applications than as a serious source of illumination.
That's been their slogan for as long as I can remember:
BBEdit. It doesn't suck.®.
In this day and age, that is a truly remarkable claim for any piece of software, and in my opinion it makes BBEdit truly amazing.
I've used and loved the freeware BBEdit Lite for, five? six? years now. It's just a perfect little gem. Everything I needed and nothing I didn't need. Opens big files beautifully. Fast, efficient, no bloat.
When I emailed them to mention that it had some issues running under Classic in OS X, they informed me that there WAS an OS X native version of BBEdit Lite, and that in fact it had gone through two major revs since I downloaded it. I hadn't even known, because BBEdit Lite was so satisfactory that I never got around to checking for updates!
It was at about that time that I tried to get them to accept a completely voluntary $30 donation for BBEdit Lite. I really didn't want or need the features of the full BBEdit, but I did feel that I morally "owed" them for BBEdit Lite.
They refused to accept my payment!
So, while I am very disappointed that they have withdrawn BBEdit Lite, nevertheless I will happily purchase TextWrangler, because I think it's above time I paid them back for all the use I've gotten out of BBEdit Lite over all these years.
No, I'm not shilling for them, and, yes, I'm perfectly sincere.
BBEdit Lite was just plain NICE, and I hope TextWrangler continues that tradition.
I personally have an account on The World and have recently been experiencing serious issues with false positives.
Others' mileage may vary, but I would rather get a thousand spams than miss a single valid message.
The thing that's so insidious, of course, is that I have no way to know it's happening.
During the last six months I: a) have been unable to register for a conference because an essential part of the registration procedure involved replying to an automated email sent from the site, and the automated email kept being rejected as UCE; b) found that a specific organization to which I donate money, whom I had asked to keep me informed by email, was unable to do so; c) found that a relative who wanted to "send" me Shutterfly pictures (an automatic email containing a specific link to the Shutterfly site) could not do so; d) stopped receiving digests from a mailing list I subscribe to.
In all four cases, I tried hard to get the people whose legitimate mail was blocked to send me the message, with headers, and in all four cases I failed. Ordinary users frequently do not know how to do this, and web sites that send LEGITIMATE automated often have busy webmasters who do not respond (or respond with insufficient detail).
Why don't The World (and other ISP's) give me some control over spam filter settings? Why isn't there a way for me to make a weekly review of the subject lines and sender emails of messages that have been filtered out so that I can detect "false positives?"
"How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?"
Well, you asked... I have a number of scripts--they're written in Apple's MPW, but think "shell script" and "egrep" and you'll get the idea--that are specifically tuned to Project Gutenberg's format. Massages line breaks, provides true open and close quotes, and so forth.
They output the particular restricted subset of HTML that's acceptable as input to RocketLibrarian. Then I use RocketLibrarian to download them into my Rocket eBook, which really has very good characteristics. The size is right (midway BETWEEN PDA and laptop) and the screen is very readable.
Unfortunately... the Rocket eBook was acquired by a bunch of business geniuses at Gemstar who proceded to morph it into the REB1100, which is essentially identical to the Rocket EXCEPT that you can ONLY use it to read purchased (and expensive!) content. No "personal content" allowed any more.
It's a pathetic mess and if I get started I'll rant for hours...
But the bottom line is that I've NEVER been able to read comfortably from a fixed CRT sitting at a desk. And I've NEVER been able to read comfortably on cramped 160x160 pixel Palm.
But reading from the Rocket, which I purchased mainly for the specific purpose of reading PG texts, I read pleasurably and comfortably for hours.
It's a darned shame that the eBook industry has seemingly killed itself through greed and digital restrictions management.
Good for g4noise.com and good for Apple.
It's still a shame. Back in the seventies, when I wore earplugs because of the insidious levels of fan noise in the room where I worked (with three minicomputers, terminals, CRT's, printers, etc. ALL with noisy fans) the totally silent Apple ][ was a revelation.
"Wow!" I said when I saw one for the first time. "No fan? They must be geniuses at thermal engineering!" Little did I know that it was just the opposite--they knew so little about thermal engineering they didn't KNOW they needed to do it.
Still, it was amazingly luxurious and soothing to work on a totally silent machine.
Ditto for the original Mac (and Mac Plus). Blessedly silent... but cursedly prone to heat-induced failures.
The difference between a very quiet machine and a silent machine is very significant.
Apple's Power Macs have been, in general, no better or worse than competitors in terms of noise... but they should really be ashamed of themselves for coming out with a conspicuously noisy machine.
Since Steve Jobs is known to care about noise, I wonder whether he had any personal role in Apple's decision to do the right thing?
...something about seeing under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all?
I guess it just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun.
This should be the final proof, if proof were required, that privacy policies and TRUSTe seals audits and seals are ineffective at protecting consumers.
Let's see if I've got this right:
"This late in the development process, bugs are often passed along, or "punted," to the next Windows release--Longhorn--if they're not sufficiently problematic."
"The atmosphere in War Room is intimidating, and I spent most of my time in the room, silent and almost cowering, praying that Wanke wouldn't turn his attention to me or my group.... The most virulent treatment, naturally, is saved for those foolish enough to blow off a War Room meeting. On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, "F#$% 'em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It's in Longhorn. Next bug."
So... in this macho atmosphere, reeking of testosterone... the punishment for not being that the bug meet is that... YOU DON'T HAVE TO FIX YOUR BUGS UNTIL THE NEXT MAJOR RELEASE?????????
Words fail me...
A book entitled "HACKER'S Challenge" ought to be a series of programming puzzles with clever, nonintuitive answers.
I suppose trying to get writers and the general public to distinguish between hacking and cracking is a lost cause, but we need to keep trying.
The example given is totally unimpressive: analyzing State of the Union messages, "In the years that immediately followed the American Revolution, for example, sudden bursts in the use of words such as "militia", "British" and "savages" are found. From 1930 to 1937 a spike in the use of the word "depression" is seen. And from 1949 to 1959 "atomic" is the word with the greatest "burstiness". Later in the 20th century, words such as "Vietnam", "Soviet", "communist" and "Afghanistan" increase sharply in usage." What a surprise. No tenth-grade history student would have ever guessed.
Equally appalling is the suggested "use:"
"For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze."
See Shurtape's web site for a letter explaining to distributors that they have shifted all production to three popular consumer products that lead times on every other kind of duct tape is increasing to eight weeks... If only Shurtape had analyzed the burstiness of the words "duct tape" in blogs would they have been able to anticipate the spike in demand?
I'm all in favor of easy-to-use, accessible programming systems, and I'm very much against the kind of snobbery that says "everything must be programmed in C++ 'because' that is the language that is correct for modern development.'"
But I don't quite see why this is a breakthrough or how it is dramatically different from any of a number of accessible programming systems. AppleScript Studio... REALbasic... Hypercard. (OK, I know Hypercard is pretty much dead... but it SHOULDN'T be!).
What would be a breakthrough would be a change in PHILOSOPHY.
If only Apple (OR Microsoft) to return to the philosophy of the earliest days of micros, in which an accessible, easy-to-use, elementary programming system WITH GOOD END-USER TUTORIAL DOCUMENTATION was bundled with every computer.
One of the saddest features of the evolution of microcomputers has been the progressive development of an elitist attitude. In the eighties, retirees would buy these PC things just to see what they what they were all about and days later would be bragging about something they had written in QuickBasic...
"Computer literacy" USED to mean the ability to write simple programs. Now, it just means the ability to memorize the meaning of Excel toolbar pictograms...
...which has an active, bustling little general-aviation airport--unlike the abandoned one in nearby Canton, MA--make it quite clear that in the late years of the Roaring Twenties, the local developers had Big Plans for the town. They were very proud of the airport; it was one of the things that was going to put Norwood on the map. The crash of 1929 modified a lot of those plans.
I suspect that a lot of little airfields may have started in the same way--when aviation was new, and land was plentiful and cheap--perhaps a lot of towns put them in hoping to get in on the ground floor.
Of course, there's an amazing amount of abandoned STUFF all over the place. Every place has its "lost cities" and ghost towns. Road systems for developments that were never built, military installations that were abandoned, etc. etc. It's just that anything abandoned rapidly becomes invisible--names vanish even from the topographic map, and unless you investigate on the ground or are curious about aerial photos, how are you ever going to know they are there?
Duct tape. Just be sure you have plenty of duct tape. It could save your life in the event of an asteroid collision.
...I bet that in a couple of weeks they will be advertising positions that require "three years experience in iSCSI."
It's hot! It's NOW!