I thought it even more bizarre given the list of features, i-Link and USB and stuff. How many more toys can we want?
What I want to know is, how well will it compare with my baby Powerbook, which has USB and external SCSI just the way I wanted? ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
...wasn't there an article on Tomorrow's World on telly about 10 years ago that demonstrated wavelet compression?
Could've sworn it's been around for a while... heck, I was even thinking of doing the obvious things and coding up the algorithm myself at one stage! ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Assuming that because a product is not currently being marketed and sold, it has no commercial value is ludicrous."
How about backing up that assertion? No-longer being actively sold means exactly no commercial value to me.
Yes, folks will want stuff for free - the alternative, always having your wallet dripping out of your pocket for every little thing is downright offensive - and if a company could give it away for no loss to themselves, they should be encouraged to do so.
Of course that means the copyright laws and IP laws are a crock of crap - holding on to something beyond usefulness. If you want to support that corrupt legalistic system, feel free, of course. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Oh, well said:) Exactly the right approach, educate don't legislate, or something like that.
"Is there an application for home browser logging of this variety?"
Set up a decent LAN with no direct web access from their machines (ie they don't have masquerading on port 80) and/or use a transparent web proxy. That way you can just examine your squid logs and because of the networking you're forcing all your folks to use the proxy so you don't miss anything. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The war of politics v technology is simple: * "go ahead, sniff my mail" * "ok, we can" * "beat my encryption" * "anything going over these wires is susceptible to legally enforced decryption" * "asshole".
But what really annoys me is that in the process of setting up legislation, they just sponge off all the hackers who set these things up for everyone to use. The government does not rule the 'net; it is subservient, it lives in its own little ".gov.uk" box just like any other net-connected entity.
Mr Straw, if you're watching: you're a patronising idiot, yeah? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
They didn't deserve it. The book of Corinthians is not a world-wide commercial entity, therefore it's not a.com - for another thing, it actually has some *worth* to its content;) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"If I set up a web interface to Usenet that showed all posts with the word 'Microsoft' rendered as 'Micro$oft' would that be wrong, if I made it obvious it had been altered?"
Yes, it would. If I write "Microsoft" then you have no right to go around changing it to something else. You'd be guilty of either copyright and/or impersonation charges subject to local legislation or failing all else, moral obligation.
Next? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
So far so good. However, it would appear that "most people" are not hackers. Unfortunately, leaning towards the "most people do it therefore that's *all* we'll do" approach in industries and being prepared to settle for being pushed into the majority don't get everybody anywhere.
Driver source must be open. It's the most *flexible* way to go: you produce the source, I can patch it into my kernel. I can even implement a driver in a totally different OS, and -get this- *you* get another OS to add to the list of "supported" OSs, totally free of charge! How is it companies think getting the world to do their work for them can be anything less than beneficial? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
There is already an established Software Industry built on the principle of going with the majority. This means C-based "because everyone knows it" and mainstream Unix-based "because it's always worked so far".
The trouble with this is, in the big industrial scene, the quality of the code produced is abhorable. It is C, batch-produced, written to some Quality Idiot's idea of a "style guide" to be enforced in totally inappropriate ways. Such things as always checking for a symbolic name as the error return value from a function just go straight out the window, "oh no it's -1 if the host's not found, isn't it?". What's even more worrying is that code is not built up with a view to reusability or expansion - things start out small and evolve features until you realise "we should've just used a database for this whole component", but instead of this you get "New! v3! with added triggers!", d'oh.)
I've gone from BASIC through C, C++, Perl and a limited amount of Tcl / Java, into Scheme and other Lisps. I don't find the fact that Lisp as a concept/family is >40 years old a block to it being *good*. It says in the preface to Graham's "ANSI Lisp" book that functional languages can embrace OO languages with minimal addition, and it's right.
But mostly I think it's fair to say that the masses can't cope with the idea of a function being a return-type in its own right (which is probably the defining feature of a pure functional language); they're too used to the "do this, then do that" chronological programmatic way of doing things, rather than saying "make this a list of things, map this function over the list, then this one..." and so on.
I'm learning Scheme. There are some very funky Scheme environments around - Guile, Kawa and Elk all bear lots of inspection; it's definitely coming to something when you can type 'java pig1' and it executes this:
(define (factorial x) (if (= 0 x) 1 (* x (factorial (- x 1)))))
(map factorial '(1 2 3 4 5))
Unfortunately, the corporate scene doesn't seem to wish to spend the time on this. That's its sad lookout. I'm off to have some fun and party!
Quite so. The precedent is bad, although it might have a favourable outcome for the wrong reasons: the RBL and DUL (in particular) are things your ISP subscribes to in order to censor your email for you - if I send mail to somebody from my dialup box and it bounces because of "administrative prohibition", then it will very rarely be the case that I send it through some smarthost or other, and I'll probably tell the recipient to stop using that ISP.
MAPS, RBL and the DUL should be disbanded for censorship reasons, not legally.
"The polices interests were in the fact that hatemail had been sent from one of our accounts.:-("
Well, DIDDUMS! Or at least, I'd have a big dose of cynicism to get through first. Do the police have ultimate control of making the country *nice*, or something? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
X might be large, but it's only bloated if you're not using it *all* in an acceptable amount of time. Someone should profile the code footprint size against a regular X session, then maybe we can strip out unwanted stuff.
What I want to know is, that challenge... why doesn't *he* get off his ass and do it himself?? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
True. But if your wrench's adaptors only worked on a ford....
The emphasis is still on the work of the W3C in producing standards; if you write a "webpage" have the decency to make it standards-compliant, or get the freaking thing off the face of the 'net. Show me the standards, then I'll show you the bugs. There's never yet been a perfect web-browser, there probably never will be, but you can be the best one, by complying with the W3C specs. As long as the features are in the browser not the stuff it supports, you're OK. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Quite so. I wonder what interest the police have in seeing your webmail logs and IP#s and stuff, anyway. OTOH, I would maintain a log of TCP connections when/where and list of who was logged in when, that you could use to restrict it all down a bit. Letting the pragmatic work in favour of the "let it all be private" ethics...
. o O ( I wonder which the most popular cookie in my ONE GIG of httpd ERROR logs was? ) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I have one problem with this approach: it makes the open-source world appear subservient to the capitalist-pig world, yeah? The spec for PDF is "available" *IF* you already grok PDF itself - IOW if I were sitting here on a plan9 box, I would not be able to read the spec in order to write an open-source reader / editor / printer of PDF files. That feels "unclean", to start with. If the open-source world is lagging behind due to attempting to follow non-open (see the GFDL, for example) specs, there's a problem. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"This guy really seems to have some deep anger towards OSS and the success of Linux, and while he makes one or two good points, they are overshadowed by his inaccurate claims."
Agreed, absolutely. Heck, even *I* picked up the inconsistencies and flaws in his talk about the lack of "a standard UI". Who the flip *wants* a standard UI for linux, anyway? Since when did anyone get anywhere by deciding "sod half the population, we'll use KDE"? It's called *choice*, which is something I notice MacOS doesn't exactly excel in... starting from the ONE mouse button and working up!
~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Re:the advertisers aren't helping WAP
on
WAP Under Fire
·
· Score: 2
You're not wrong, as they say...:)
What really annoys me is this "access X-million Internet sites" crap. I don't want a number that so obvious "counts up from zero" like that; it means that tomorrow They'll increase the number as an excuse to charge you shed-loads more. If they said "access loads of sites where the providers have got With It and provided WAP data", then they'd be saying the right thing, but they'd find out a big problem: there is no data on the WWW ("The Internet", d'oh), there's just frutzy graphics....! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yahoo? Please, show some taste. Try www.ibm.com instead;8) This shows my second point: not everyone is likely to respond to pings. We linux users don't *have* to respond to pings either.
I also totally fail to see how RTTs give demographic data anyway. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Is the information superhighway system any different than the automobile superhighway system? IMHO, it shouldn't be!"
Would you object if someone came along and started rubbing your windscreen, out of nowhere? *Precisely* the same analogy. You got no business touching my car, you get lost off my front-facing webservers too, thank you very much;) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
' I like having the "geek industry" dominated by males. '
*nod*. What I think is worthwhile pointing out is that these people who say "look everyone, the geek industry isn't 50% male/female, there's something wrong here" really don't know fsck-all. They start from the assumption that what works for members of one sex works for the other and say "all probabilities are 50%". Er.... What's *wrong* with there being an uneven distribution of skill level, interest, suitability, whatever, between the sexes? (Stereotypical caricature alert: I wouldn't "go for" a woman into chopping trees and I would be surprised if all females on the planet "went for" guys who knitted and sew!!)
You might be vaguely interested in the idea of XDBM btw - as in GDBM but the underlying flatfile "database" format is XML. Sounds good to me, anyway...:) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The email was met by a letter from my MP, and was relatively pacifying - "sure, we don't believe in it either" was the overall tone.
However, when it came to the fax thing, all my MP did was to forward it to Jack Straw and convey an incredibly patronising response back to me. Between them they obviously think that I'm so naiive as to believe it's for the good of the country that we all lose any privacy rights and some essential human rights just to lock up a few stupid criminals.
Someone on here posted a sensible idea: perjury-trap your keys with a comment like "this key not valid if used under duress".
I really *really* don't want to be associated with the UK if the government is going to be a bunch of pillocks like this...
Yes, I'd agree there's potential for the whole thing to be under a choice of licenses - but do you regard "Tripwire for Linux" as a separate *product* from "Tripwire"?
/me doesn't like confusion..... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"OK, we at/. all know how to edit our HOSTS files to take care of this. " Editing your/etc/hosts file isn't the way to do it, surprisingly enough. Far better to run either a) a filtering proxy and/or b) a local name server, pointing *.doubleclick.net to an unrouted IP# (eg localhost, 192.168.x.y, and so on).
"But what about John Q. User, who would be hard pressed to save a file in a text editor?" What indeed? Let him be caught surfing for pr0n by all means;)
What you really want is WWWoffled, which has a very nice web-based admin CGI frontend, allowing you to edit your filter list from the comfort of your own browser... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it even more bizarre given the list of features, i-Link and USB and stuff. How many more toys can we want?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
What I want to know is, how well will it compare with my baby Powerbook, which has USB and external SCSI just the way I wanted?
~Tim
--
...wasn't there an article on Tomorrow's World on telly about 10 years ago that demonstrated wavelet compression?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Could've sworn it's been around for a while... heck, I was even thinking of doing the obvious things and coding up the algorithm myself at one stage!
~Tim
--
I've also been wondering about this "linux-only" "open-source" stuff. Kinda defeats the object, really.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
And I *don't want* a "standard desktop". I want one that *works*, dammit!
~Tim
--
"Assuming that because a product is not currently being marketed and sold, it has no commercial value is ludicrous."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
How about backing up that assertion? No-longer being actively sold means exactly no commercial value to me.
Yes, folks will want stuff for free - the alternative, always having your wallet dripping out of your pocket for every little thing is downright offensive - and if a company could give it away for no loss to themselves, they should be encouraged to do so.
Of course that means the copyright laws and IP laws are a crock of crap - holding on to something beyond usefulness. If you want to support that corrupt legalistic system, feel free, of course.
~Tim
--
Oh, well said :) Exactly the right approach, educate don't legislate, or something like that.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Is there an application for home browser logging of this variety?"
Set up a decent LAN with no direct web access from their machines (ie they don't have masquerading on port 80) and/or use a transparent web proxy. That way you can just examine your squid logs and because of the networking you're forcing all your folks to use the proxy so you don't miss anything.
~Tim
--
The war of politics v technology is simple:
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
* "go ahead, sniff my mail"
* "ok, we can"
* "beat my encryption"
* "anything going over these wires is susceptible to legally enforced decryption"
* "asshole".
But what really annoys me is that in the process of setting up legislation, they just sponge off all the hackers who set these things up for everyone to use. The government does not rule the 'net; it is subservient, it lives in its own little ".gov.uk" box just like any other net-connected entity.
Mr Straw, if you're watching: you're a patronising idiot, yeah?
~Tim
--
They didn't deserve it. The book of Corinthians is not a world-wide commercial entity, therefore it's not a .com - for another thing, it actually has some *worth* to its content ;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
"If I set up a web interface to Usenet that showed all posts with the word 'Microsoft' rendered as 'Micro$oft' would that be wrong, if I made it obvious it had been altered?"
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yes, it would. If I write "Microsoft" then you have no right to go around changing it to something else. You'd be guilty of either copyright and/or impersonation charges subject to local legislation or failing all else, moral obligation.
Next?
~Tim
--
So far so good. However, it would appear that "most people" are not hackers. Unfortunately, leaning towards the "most people do it therefore that's *all* we'll do" approach in industries and being prepared to settle for being pushed into the majority don't get everybody anywhere.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Driver source must be open. It's the most *flexible* way to go: you produce the source, I can patch it into my kernel. I can even implement a driver in a totally different OS, and -get this- *you* get another OS to add to the list of "supported" OSs, totally free of charge! How is it companies think getting the world to do their work for them can be anything less than beneficial?
~Tim
--
There is already an established Software Industry built on the principle of going with the majority. This means C-based "because everyone knows it" and mainstream Unix-based "because it's always worked so far".
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The trouble with this is, in the big industrial scene, the quality of the code produced is abhorable. It is C, batch-produced, written to some Quality Idiot's idea of a "style guide" to be enforced in totally inappropriate ways. Such things as always checking for a symbolic name as the error return value from a function just go straight out the window, "oh no it's -1 if the host's not found, isn't it?".
What's even more worrying is that code is not built up with a view to reusability or expansion - things start out small and evolve features until you realise "we should've just used a database for this whole component", but instead of this you get "New! v3! with added triggers!", d'oh.)
I've gone from BASIC through C, C++, Perl and a limited amount of Tcl / Java, into Scheme and other Lisps. I don't find the fact that Lisp as a concept/family is >40 years old a block to it being *good*. It says in the preface to Graham's "ANSI Lisp" book that functional languages can embrace OO languages with minimal addition, and it's right.
But mostly I think it's fair to say that the masses can't cope with the idea of a function being a return-type in its own right (which is probably the defining feature of a pure functional language); they're too used to the "do this, then do that" chronological programmatic way of doing things, rather than saying "make this a list of things, map this function over the list, then this one..." and so on.
I'm learning Scheme. There are some very funky Scheme environments around - Guile, Kawa and Elk all bear lots of inspection; it's definitely coming to something when you can type 'java pig1' and it executes this:
(define (factorial x)
(if (= 0 x)
1
(* x (factorial (- x 1)))))
(map factorial '(1 2 3 4 5))
Unfortunately, the corporate scene doesn't seem to wish to spend the time on this. That's its sad lookout. I'm off to have some fun and party!
~Tim
--
Quite so. The precedent is bad, although it might have a favourable outcome for the wrong reasons: the RBL and DUL (in particular) are things your ISP subscribes to in order to censor your email for you - if I send mail to somebody from my dialup box and it bounces because of "administrative prohibition", then it will very rarely be the case that I send it through some smarthost or other, and I'll probably tell the recipient to stop using that ISP.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
MAPS, RBL and the DUL should be disbanded for censorship reasons, not legally.
~Tim
--
"The polices interests were in the fact that hatemail had been sent from one of our accounts. :-("
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Well, DIDDUMS! Or at least, I'd have a big dose of cynicism to get through first. Do the police have ultimate control of making the country *nice*, or something?
~Tim
--
"Why is X so large?"
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
...
X might be large, but it's only bloated if you're not using it *all* in an acceptable amount of time. Someone should profile the code footprint size against a regular X session, then maybe we can strip out unwanted stuff.
What I want to know is, that challenge... why doesn't *he* get off his ass and do it himself??
~Tim
--
True. But if your wrench's adaptors only worked on a ford....
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The emphasis is still on the work of the W3C in producing standards; if you write a "webpage" have the decency to make it standards-compliant, or get the freaking thing off the face of the 'net.
Show me the standards, then I'll show you the bugs. There's never yet been a perfect web-browser, there probably never will be, but you can be the best one, by complying with the W3C specs. As long as the features are in the browser not the stuff it supports, you're OK.
~Tim
--
Quite so. I wonder what interest the police have in seeing your webmail logs and IP#s and stuff, anyway. OTOH, I would maintain a log of TCP connections when/where and list of who was logged in when, that you could use to restrict it all down a bit. Letting the pragmatic work in favour of the "let it all be private" ethics...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
. o O ( I wonder which the most popular cookie in my ONE GIG of httpd ERROR logs was? )
~Tim
--
I have one problem with this approach: it makes the open-source world appear subservient to the capitalist-pig world, yeah?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The spec for PDF is "available" *IF* you already grok PDF itself - IOW if I were sitting here on a plan9 box, I would not be able to read the spec in order to write an open-source reader / editor / printer of PDF files. That feels "unclean", to start with.
If the open-source world is lagging behind due to attempting to follow non-open (see the GFDL, for example) specs, there's a problem.
~Tim
--
"This guy really seems to have some deep anger towards OSS and the success of Linux, and while he makes one or two good points, they are overshadowed by his inaccurate claims."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Agreed, absolutely. Heck, even *I* picked up the inconsistencies and flaws in his talk about the lack of "a standard UI". Who the flip *wants* a standard UI for linux, anyway? Since when did anyone get anywhere by deciding "sod half the population, we'll use KDE"? It's called *choice*, which is something I notice MacOS doesn't exactly excel in... starting from the ONE mouse button and working up!
~Tim
--
You're not wrong, as they say... :)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
What really annoys me is this "access X-million Internet sites" crap. I don't want a number that so obvious "counts up from zero" like that; it means that tomorrow They'll increase the number as an excuse to charge you shed-loads more.
If they said "access loads of sites where the providers have got With It and provided WAP data", then they'd be saying the right thing, but they'd find out a big problem: there is no data on the WWW ("The Internet", d'oh), there's just frutzy graphics....!
~Tim
--
Yahoo? Please, show some taste. Try www.ibm.com instead ;8)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
This shows my second point: not everyone is likely to respond to pings. We linux users don't *have* to respond to pings either.
I also totally fail to see how RTTs give demographic data anyway.
~Tim
--
"Is the information superhighway system any different than the automobile superhighway system? IMHO, it shouldn't be!"
;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Would you object if someone came along and started rubbing your windscreen, out of nowhere? *Precisely* the same analogy. You got no business touching my car, you get lost off my front-facing webservers too, thank you very much
~Tim
--
' I like having the "geek industry" dominated by males. '
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
*nod*. What I think is worthwhile pointing out is that these people who say "look everyone, the geek industry isn't 50% male/female, there's something wrong here" really don't know fsck-all. They start from the assumption that what works for members of one sex works for the other and say "all probabilities are 50%". Er....
What's *wrong* with there being an uneven distribution of skill level, interest, suitability, whatever, between the sexes?
(Stereotypical caricature alert: I wouldn't "go for" a woman into chopping trees and I would be surprised if all females on the planet "went for" guys who knitted and sew!!)
~Tim
--
You might be vaguely interested in the idea of XDBM btw - as in GDBM but the underlying flatfile "database" format is XML. Sounds good to me, anyway... :)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Yeah, I've sent one email and one fax so far.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The email was met by a letter from my MP, and was relatively pacifying - "sure, we don't believe in it either" was the overall tone.
However, when it came to the fax thing, all my MP did was to forward it to Jack Straw and convey an incredibly patronising response back to me. Between them they obviously think that I'm so naiive as to believe it's for the good of the country that we all lose any privacy rights and some essential human rights just to lock up a few stupid criminals.
Someone on here posted a sensible idea: perjury-trap your keys with a comment like "this key not valid if used under duress".
I really *really* don't want to be associated with the UK if the government is going to be a bunch of pillocks like this...
~Tim
--
Yes, I'd agree there's potential for the whole thing to be under a choice of licenses - but do you regard "Tripwire for Linux" as a separate *product* from "Tripwire"?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
/me doesn't like confusion.....
~Tim
--
Editing your
a) a filtering proxy and/or
b) a local name server, pointing *.doubleclick.net to an unrouted IP# (eg localhost, 192.168.x.y, and so on).
"But what about John Q. User, who would be hard pressed to save a file in a text editor?" ;)
What indeed? Let him be caught surfing for pr0n by all means
What you really want is WWWoffled, which has a very nice web-based admin CGI frontend, allowing you to edit your filter list from the comfort of your own browser...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--