Spolsky also criticizes ESR for flaming Windows programmers while clearly never having never written a line of code on Windows.
So? By their fruits shall ye know them. They write crappy software for a crappy OS--why shouldn't they be flamed? One doesn't need to wrestle in execrement oneself to criticise excrement-wrestlers.
Amusingly, I'd reverse that exactly. After all, Unix is rational and works, and therefor American, while Windows is silly, looks sharp and never really accomplishes much--it's gotta be European:-)
Now, here's a question: what do you do when the lady who responds to you is more of a LotR geek (and wellspring of useless knowledge) than you are?
I believe that the standard solution is to marry her;-)
Michel Delving, BTW, means 'big digging'--Michel is Tolkien's modernisation of micel (pron. like Mitchell), cog. to Scots mickle. When I was a boy, Michel Delving sounded a grand name--then I figured it out...
Of course, that doesn't beat C.S. Lewis's reference to the Voluspa in Prince Caspian...
Never mind that much of the charm of European cities is that there aren't 'residential areas'; people just live and work in the city. Try to shunt traffic away from where folks live, and you end up not allowing cars in town. Which is, I suppose, the secret dream of every penny-ante fascist around.
I agree, mostly, about the Harrington books--I just couldn't get into them. OTOH, Weber's collaboration with John Ringo has been very productive. March Upcountry (the name's a reference to a famous classical work of military history), March to the Sea and March to the Stars have been pretty consistently good IMHO. I can't wait until it's completed.
Sometimes I curse Tolkien--ever since, it seems that sci fi/fantasy writers just love to write series rather than single books. Makes it a chore at the library.
I think I finally signed up when/. stopped remembering my info, or switched to some sucky defaults, or something. I remember how when user accounts first came around, I didn't bother because/. wasn't going to last (kiddos, this is why I don't play the stock market...). Then when I did get an account, I was bitter because it was so high. Still am, to tell the truth. Oh well.
Linux is running on my desktop right now. So obviously it's good enough. And I would never consider Windows, so obviously Windows isn't good enough for my desktop.
And I'd be much happier giving my mother (despite three college degrees and quite a high IQ, Macs are too complex for her) a Linux box than a Windows box or Mac.
info can be converted to HTML quite easily. It can also be converted to LaTeX and pretty-printed, which is not true of HTML. HTML serves a particular purpose more-or-less adequately. It is not a proper computer documentation system. Neither, of course, is info--but it's better.
A manual which is bother a tutorial and a reference is quite doable: any number of separate volumes in a series where one is a tutorial and the other a reference do it quite well indeed. An info manual should contain top-level links to the manual and the reference. One cannot blame the format for those who use it.
info/dir is incredibly stupid, and wreaks havoc with such things as stow. It should be fixed pronto.
Info will display a man page if it cannot find an info page. Man cannot do the same (automatically).
Info docs can also easily be converted into LaTeX and then into books. This is much better than trying to print HTML. They can also be converted into HTML.
My only quibbles with info are that a) it's snide of the GNU project not to maintain man pages and b) it hasn't taken off like it should.
The energy needed to smack a rock out of its orbit and toss it back this way is very small. The hardest part is getting off this rock in the first place.
And 'getting off this rock in the first place' is part of the job of getting asteroids back here. And, at the current cost of components and the necessary risks involved far outweight, for the moment, the potential payoff. That may not always be the case, but it is for now.
At some point, we will have consumed every natural resource that can be consumed.
Resources aren't consumed, but transformed. It's not as though turning gold ore into a ring destroys the gold. The only truly difficult to recover substance is oil--and that's not going to be found in space. The stuff most vital to life is organic, not the metals to be found in an asteroid.
As long as there's a market, the planet will be alright: scarcity will drive production of more. The only thing we have to fear is non-market mechanisms, which inevitably lead to inefficiencies--which is to say misery, pollution, contagion and death.
The reason we've not returned to the moon is that it is insanely expensive to go there, with no correspondingly lucrative payoff. Sure, there are lots of asteroids with valuable metals and stuff out in the asteroid belt, but getting them back here would be infeasible--and once they were retrieved, the market value of their contents would plummet. That'd be no way to run an economy, investing trillions to bring back rocks worth billions which then instantly eat up millions of dollars of value.
Yeah, in a normal economy the value of goods changes--buggy whips aren't worth what they once were--but it's normally gradual, not sudden.
At this point in history, space is a pipe dream--a ridiculous and silly pipe dream. I wish that weren't the case--I'm an avid reader of science fiction, after all, and there's nothing I'd like more than to be able to travel to the stars--but it's the truth.
Mother Theresa and Stalin had different goals. You're entitled, of course, to claim that some goals are more noble than other goals.
My point is that some goals are more noble than others, and that in fact some goals are hardly noble at all. Proprietary software is wrong, end of story.
Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.
Not really. My brother has his own blog, and he's not a CS student (of course, he is an engineer with a degree from the US Naval Academy, so he's obviously quite bright). I have my own personal site and blog as well, although in my case I was a CS student.
It's not all that difficult. A few hours at W3C, a few tutorials and one's up and running. HTML is dead-simple; CSS is slightly more complicated--and that's all one needs to know.
He who cannot write HTML by hand can not, in all likelihood, write anything.
From http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm, the Great War had 8.5 million military dead and prob. about that many civilians--far from 'hundreds of millions dead.' The same source also give 50 millions dead in the Second World War.
The League of Nations was worldwide, it jsut lacked the US. I believe that even the UN doesn't contain every single state.
The Matrix aims for depth? In a word, no. In two words, hell no. In three, no fsckin' way. The Matrix is just another action movie--a fun action movie, one I enjoy, but naught but an action movie. Its 'philosophy' is the stuff of dope-dreams and dorm-room bull sessions: anyone with a brain has long since considered and decided on every issue it raises.
LotR, OTOH, is a classic and enduring work of literature (yeah, it was written in books) which has been adapted to the screen. The real excitement is about the books, and how well Jackson does at translating them. His work is not perfect, which makes the LotR films imperfect retellings of a near-perfect work, whereas the Matrix movies are imperfect tellings of a slipshod work.
If you think the Matrix makes one think, then read the Hobbit, then the LotR, then the Silmarillion, then the vaarious books of the History of Middle Earth. That will show the difference between random neurons firing and actual thought.
Tolkien created a world, races, languages, history. In fact, the story of the War of the Ring is practically a footnote in history: Sauron is only a servant of the greatest evil, Morgoth, who darkened the entire world. Shelob is naught but a dimly-reflected descendant of Ungoliant. Even Aragorn is nobody compared to Earendil, Beren &c.
Tolkien actually thought through how his world worked. His work has an internal logic the Matrix movies sadly lack. Not to mention the fact that he writes in an epic style which had, until that time, ceased to exist.
The Matrix films are fun to watch, sure. But they aren't worthy to tie the sandals of Tolkien's books.
Didn't damage the story?! Didn't damage the story!? Faramir's a great guy, beloved by his people, his men and even the hobbits. The movie ruined him, for no particular reason. I can understand Arwen at the Fords; I can approve of the deletion of Bombadil (is there anyone who doesn't read quickly through that bit?); I can accept almost every change made, but the destruction of Faramir's character and the reduction of Gimli to comic relief (and the consequent ruination of the tally-keeping) irk.
What's amusing, though, is that Tolkien would quite possibly have approved of spelling Uruk-hai as oroki. The man was, after all, a linguist, and he knew languages change and play about. I figure he'd have been amused at it.
And of course, the one big in-book linguistics play I recall is Yrch/Orc, both of which are corruptions of Uruk. Loved that one since first I read it...
R. Heinlien, in his book StarShip Troopers, created a society where to be able to vote you must first join the military, thus establishing your willingness to serve the public.
Not true--that was Verhoeven's distortion of the story (although admittedly others have made the same mistake reading the book, in Verhoeven's case it was almost certainly willful). Heinlein himself pointed out that this is not the case in the ST world. In order to become a citizen, one must perform some kind of public service; the vast majority never join the military, but instead go into the equivalents of the Dept. of Agriculture, social services and suchlike.
The story focuses on a young man who goes into the military because, let's be honest, the harrowing tale of a government chemist working on a new form of rubber isn't nearly so interesting as Starship Troopers:-)
No--you should learn more. The set and level of your skills are not static, but rather ever-increasing (until the onset of senility, anyway). Richard Stallman didn't spring fully-formed from his father's head with a knowledge of hacking; Linux Torvalds's skill at coding didn't wash in on sea-foam: they had to learn.
Feel free to use free software. Feel free to learn how to improve free software. Don't feel particularly free to complain that others don't make the improvements you want.
OS X 'has obviated the need for Linux on the desktop'? When did Apple release the entire thing under the L?GPL? Until it's free software, it's not a suitable replacement.
The key is that the Romans look at everything from a legalistic point of view: sin is a violation of God's Law, and He'll whack you for it. We look at things from a therapeutic point of view: sin is a sickness which must be cured. Sure, it's better not to use contraception, but (non-murderous) contraception is not evil. The ideal is one thing, and to be striven for, but we do live in a fallen world. It's better to use (non-murderous) contraception than to beget a child who will be mistreated or impoverished; better still to abstain, of course, but sometimes people don't. The key is to do the best with the material one has to work with.
As for the early fathers, it used to be thought that sperm contained a homunculus or two which travelled to the woman and took up residence (hence references to seed and being barren). Obv. if there's a homunculus and he's allowed to die, then contraception is murder and wrong. But, as anyone who's taken sixth grade biology knows, it turns out that sperm are no more independent humans than are fingernails or hair.
And as for the `one is natural; the other's not' argument (regarding contraception vs. the rhythm method), I find it specious in the extreme. It's not natural, period, to mate without chance of children--it defeats the entire purpose of mating, which is to create children. To only have sex during infertile periods is just as much an obstruction of nature as to wear a condom.
We go back to the point that the Romans very rarely see things in aught but binary terms. In reality, there's a continuum: procreative sex is best; then abstinence; then the rhythm method; then (non-murderous) contraception; then (murderous) contraception; then infanticide. That's one view, considering only sex itself. On the other hand, one must also consider the salutary effect which sexual relations between man and wife have on both. In that view, the ranking would be: procreative sex; rhythm method; (non-murderous) contraception; abstinence; (murderous) contraception; finally infanticide.
In any case, I'd draw the line before murderous contraception, which should be illegal. And of course encourage folks to work their way towards the better end of the spectrum.
Well of course. It's free software: that doesn't mean you get it for free, but that you're free to improve it. It's all about the freedom.
With proprietary software one is beholden to the developers, while with free software one is one of the developers. With the former, complaining is all one can do, while with the latter, one has other options.
Well, then spend some time to contribute more up-to-date docs! It's not that hard, just simple writing. If outdated docs are your itch, scratch 'em by writing new ones. This is free software, after all, and it's produced by all of us.
...use things like...pico, etc right out of the box just totally sold me.
Pico?!? That says it all...
From my point of view, OS X offers me nothing I want that, say, Red Hat doesn't offer as well--but it's proprietary, costs a packet, requires special hardware &c.
I used to be a big Mac fan. Most of my college friends are now Mac users, because I evangelised them so heavily. But I've long since left the Mac behind--and to an extent it has left me behind as well. The OS X GUI is pretty, certainly, but it doesn't seem to have the same amount of thought behind it that the original GUI had. There were debates back in '83 over how many 'racing stripes' a window's titlebar should have; OS X shows none of the same signs of dedication and concern.
What's more, I simply don't wish to use proprietary software. I believe that people should be free to make and use it if they wish, but it's not for me. I like freedom, and a lot of freedom is worth a little nuisance; indeed, a little freedom is worth a lot of nuisance. I want the vote, and I want my weapons, and I want free speech, and I want the source. I've not done a whole lot of hacking of code (a slight patch to XMMS which was rejected is my biggest contribution), but I like the freedom to do so.
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So? By their fruits shall ye know them. They write crappy software for a crappy OS--why shouldn't they be flamed? One doesn't need to wrestle in execrement oneself to criticise excrement-wrestlers.
Amusingly, I'd reverse that exactly. After all, Unix is rational and works, and therefor American, while Windows is silly, looks sharp and never really accomplishes much--it's gotta be European:-)
I believe that the standard solution is to marry her;-)
Michel Delving, BTW, means 'big digging'--Michel is Tolkien's modernisation of micel (pron. like Mitchell), cog. to Scots mickle. When I was a boy, Michel Delving sounded a grand name--then I figured it out...
Of course, that doesn't beat C.S. Lewis's reference to the Voluspa in Prince Caspian...
Never mind that much of the charm of European cities is that there aren't 'residential areas'; people just live and work in the city. Try to shunt traffic away from where folks live, and you end up not allowing cars in town. Which is, I suppose, the secret dream of every penny-ante fascist around.
Sometimes I curse Tolkien--ever since, it seems that sci fi/fantasy writers just love to write series rather than single books. Makes it a chore at the library.
I think I finally signed up when /. stopped remembering my info, or switched to some sucky defaults, or something. I remember how when user accounts first came around, I didn't bother because /. wasn't going to last (kiddos, this is why I don't play the stock market...). Then when I did get an account, I was bitter because it was so high. Still am, to tell the truth. Oh well.
And I'd be much happier giving my mother (despite three college degrees and quite a high IQ, Macs are too complex for her) a Linux box than a Windows box or Mac.
info can be converted to HTML quite easily. It can also be converted to LaTeX and pretty-printed, which is not true of HTML. HTML serves a particular purpose more-or-less adequately. It is not a proper computer documentation system. Neither, of course, is info--but it's better.
A manual which is bother a tutorial and a reference is quite doable: any number of separate volumes in a series where one is a tutorial and the other a reference do it quite well indeed. An info manual should contain top-level links to the manual and the reference. One cannot blame the format for those who use it.
info/dir is incredibly stupid, and wreaks havoc with such things as stow. It should be fixed pronto.
Info will display a man page if it cannot find an info page. Man cannot do the same (automatically).
Info docs can also easily be converted into LaTeX and then into books. This is much better than trying to print HTML. They can also be converted into HTML.
My only quibbles with info are that a) it's snide of the GNU project not to maintain man pages and b) it hasn't taken off like it should.
But then, Dragonlance wasn't written with the same skill, respect and care that went in LotR. Not even close. Not even a little.
Not that it wasn't fun to read when I was a kid.
And 'getting off this rock in the first place' is part of the job of getting asteroids back here. And, at the current cost of components and the necessary risks involved far outweight, for the moment, the potential payoff. That may not always be the case, but it is for now.
At some point, we will have consumed every natural resource that can be consumed.
Resources aren't consumed, but transformed. It's not as though turning gold ore into a ring destroys the gold. The only truly difficult to recover substance is oil--and that's not going to be found in space. The stuff most vital to life is organic, not the metals to be found in an asteroid.
As long as there's a market, the planet will be alright: scarcity will drive production of more. The only thing we have to fear is non-market mechanisms, which inevitably lead to inefficiencies--which is to say misery, pollution, contagion and death.
Yeah, in a normal economy the value of goods changes--buggy whips aren't worth what they once were--but it's normally gradual, not sudden.
At this point in history, space is a pipe dream--a ridiculous and silly pipe dream. I wish that weren't the case--I'm an avid reader of science fiction, after all, and there's nothing I'd like more than to be able to travel to the stars--but it's the truth.
Mother Theresa and Stalin had different goals. You're entitled, of course, to claim that some goals are more noble than other goals.
My point is that some goals are more noble than others, and that in fact some goals are hardly noble at all. Proprietary software is wrong, end of story.
Not really. My brother has his own blog, and he's not a CS student (of course, he is an engineer with a degree from the US Naval Academy, so he's obviously quite bright). I have my own personal site and blog as well, although in my case I was a CS student.
It's not all that difficult. A few hours at W3C, a few tutorials and one's up and running. HTML is dead-simple; CSS is slightly more complicated--and that's all one needs to know.
He who cannot write HTML by hand can not, in all likelihood, write anything.
The League of Nations was worldwide, it jsut lacked the US. I believe that even the UN doesn't contain every single state.
LotR, OTOH, is a classic and enduring work of literature (yeah, it was written in books) which has been adapted to the screen. The real excitement is about the books, and how well Jackson does at translating them. His work is not perfect, which makes the LotR films imperfect retellings of a near-perfect work, whereas the Matrix movies are imperfect tellings of a slipshod work.
If you think the Matrix makes one think, then read the Hobbit, then the LotR, then the Silmarillion, then the vaarious books of the History of Middle Earth. That will show the difference between random neurons firing and actual thought.
Tolkien created a world, races, languages, history. In fact, the story of the War of the Ring is practically a footnote in history: Sauron is only a servant of the greatest evil, Morgoth, who darkened the entire world. Shelob is naught but a dimly-reflected descendant of Ungoliant. Even Aragorn is nobody compared to Earendil, Beren &c.
Tolkien actually thought through how his world worked. His work has an internal logic the Matrix movies sadly lack. Not to mention the fact that he writes in an epic style which had, until that time, ceased to exist.
The Matrix films are fun to watch, sure. But they aren't worthy to tie the sandals of Tolkien's books.
Didn't damage the story?! Didn't damage the story!? Faramir's a great guy, beloved by his people, his men and even the hobbits. The movie ruined him, for no particular reason. I can understand Arwen at the Fords; I can approve of the deletion of Bombadil (is there anyone who doesn't read quickly through that bit?); I can accept almost every change made, but the destruction of Faramir's character and the reduction of Gimli to comic relief (and the consequent ruination of the tally-keeping) irk.
And of course, the one big in-book linguistics play I recall is Yrch/Orc, both of which are corruptions of Uruk. Loved that one since first I read it...
Not true--that was Verhoeven's distortion of the story (although admittedly others have made the same mistake reading the book, in Verhoeven's case it was almost certainly willful). Heinlein himself pointed out that this is not the case in the ST world. In order to become a citizen, one must perform some kind of public service; the vast majority never join the military, but instead go into the equivalents of the Dept. of Agriculture, social services and suchlike.
The story focuses on a young man who goes into the military because, let's be honest, the harrowing tale of a government chemist working on a new form of rubber isn't nearly so interesting as Starship Troopers:-)
Feel free to use free software. Feel free to learn how to improve free software. Don't feel particularly free to complain that others don't make the improvements you want.
OS X 'has obviated the need for Linux on the desktop'? When did Apple release the entire thing under the L?GPL? Until it's free software, it's not a suitable replacement.
As for the early fathers, it used to be thought that sperm contained a homunculus or two which travelled to the woman and took up residence (hence references to seed and being barren). Obv. if there's a homunculus and he's allowed to die, then contraception is murder and wrong. But, as anyone who's taken sixth grade biology knows, it turns out that sperm are no more independent humans than are fingernails or hair.
And as for the `one is natural; the other's not' argument (regarding contraception vs. the rhythm method), I find it specious in the extreme. It's not natural, period, to mate without chance of children--it defeats the entire purpose of mating, which is to create children. To only have sex during infertile periods is just as much an obstruction of nature as to wear a condom.
We go back to the point that the Romans very rarely see things in aught but binary terms. In reality, there's a continuum: procreative sex is best; then abstinence; then the rhythm method; then (non-murderous) contraception; then (murderous) contraception; then infanticide. That's one view, considering only sex itself. On the other hand, one must also consider the salutary effect which sexual relations between man and wife have on both. In that view, the ranking would be: procreative sex; rhythm method; (non-murderous) contraception; abstinence; (murderous) contraception; finally infanticide.
In any case, I'd draw the line before murderous contraception, which should be illegal. And of course encourage folks to work their way towards the better end of the spectrum.
With proprietary software one is beholden to the developers, while with free software one is one of the developers. With the former, complaining is all one can do, while with the latter, one has other options.
Well, then spend some time to contribute more up-to-date docs! It's not that hard, just simple writing. If outdated docs are your itch, scratch 'em by writing new ones. This is free software, after all, and it's produced by all of us.
Pico?!? That says it all...
From my point of view, OS X offers me nothing I want that, say, Red Hat doesn't offer as well--but it's proprietary, costs a packet, requires special hardware &c.
I used to be a big Mac fan. Most of my college friends are now Mac users, because I evangelised them so heavily. But I've long since left the Mac behind--and to an extent it has left me behind as well. The OS X GUI is pretty, certainly, but it doesn't seem to have the same amount of thought behind it that the original GUI had. There were debates back in '83 over how many 'racing stripes' a window's titlebar should have; OS X shows none of the same signs of dedication and concern.
What's more, I simply don't wish to use proprietary software. I believe that people should be free to make and use it if they wish, but it's not for me. I like freedom, and a lot of freedom is worth a little nuisance; indeed, a little freedom is worth a lot of nuisance. I want the vote, and I want my weapons, and I want free speech, and I want the source. I've not done a whole lot of hacking of code (a slight patch to XMMS which was rejected is my biggest contribution), but I like the freedom to do so.