It sure would work. 100% weight loss quite quickly. You'd be reduced to pure, weightless soul. Or more precisely:
In Soviet Russia, weight loses you!
Actually, you could achieve the same end effect (total weight loss) with far lesser volumes of Soviet Russian wodka.
(I believe last year, a young, healthy woman, died from hyperhydration after a self-administered "cleansing" cure, drinking lots of non-isotonic water. It gives a whole new meaning to "brainwashing".)
I'd suggest taking the parent with a grain of salt, but I am afraid it would not be sufficient. A few spoonfuls would probably be required to maintain the salt balance and prevent death.
Interesting. If I recall correctly, AOCE/PowerTalk was presented at the 94 WWDC. A friend of mine attended, and shared what he had brought home with me. I saw the Demo video, and the docs. The API docs were huge - about two Inside Mac VI, I think. Incredible. The idea to empower _every_ application with e-mail capability was great in a way. As was many other ideas in AOCE/PowerTalk. But it was too complex and too inefficient.
However, what really killed it, IMO, was that one of the premises it was built upon, was soon to be shown as false. Few people seem to remember it, but at that time, it was not at all clear that the Internet would take over the world completely. Networking yes, but it was widely believed that the Internet would be an interim solution, soon to be replaced by ISO OSI protocols like TP4. And of course X.400/X.500 etc etc. In addition, Apple still had a dedication to AppleTalk. And there were existing proprietary mailsystems like QuickMail.
The idea was that PowerTalk users would have adapters that would enable a workstation to use legacy mail systems. In hindsight, this of course is a totally stupid idea, today we would put such gateway functionality at the mailserver. But with the following prevalence of plain SMTP/POP/IMAP mail, this capability would just constitute deadweight in the PowerTalk software.
The idea of an in-basket on the desktop, and send-mail capabilities in all applications is in a way something that we still miss today. And if you think about it, it is in a way just a GUI rendition of old Unix ideas, with the ~7mbox (= in-basket), and:w !mail user from vi.
In my opinion the user interface principles as they were strictly defined even up to AOCE are still unsurpassed, no interface has ever had the same completely natural feel. Windows, OS X, KDE, GNOME - nothing comes close to the interface as it was back in good old System 7.
I sure wish there was an open source project to take the lessons learned back then, and make a new X11 based GUI that puts them to effective use, while trying to retain some fundamental simplicity.
Just for the record, I abandoned Eudora (Mac) at version 3 or 4 or thereabouts, after an incident where the Tomcat-users mailing list, which I directed to a mailbox, passed the 32K messages mark. For some reason Eudora used signed 16 bit int as a mailbox counter, and promptly truncated the mailbox, resulting in the loss of my archive of the list. I was not amused.
I have always admired Steve Dorner for making a wonderful mail application, but that incident really disappointed me. As a result, I don't trust any mail program these days - my mail is now delived into a Maildir by Postfix and I read it using a few simple shell scripts which I wrote myself.
May I ask - what *exactly* would prevent Christopher Eccleston from reappearing as the ninth doctor again? Is there some law requiring that episodes of a TV-series are recorded in a chronological manner when the subject is time-travel? Hey - why not have Doctor 9 and Doctor 10 meet? Having two Billie Pipers on screen sure would be nice too.
As I have only seen a few seconds of David Tennant (Danish National TV has just finished showing the Eccleston series) I have little to judge from, but it seems he's not of the same quality. But then, Eccleston sure was (is? will again be?) great as the ninth doctor. All good things come to an end, I suppose. Just like MASH was still excellent after Radar left, even though he was missed.
Why on Earth would you want to read it again? You are LIVING it!?
Personally I will not touch a dystopian sf novel again, ever. My nerves can hardly deal with the dystopic real world. It is almost as if after the nuclear holocaust fears of the cold war, we humans cannot live without hanging a sword of Damocles - or an ozone hole - over our heads. I prefer watching escapist humourous stuff like Doctor Who - stuff that makes you feel 12 and without a care in the world again. I might reread HHGTTG however - all four volumes of the trilogy.
Oh, haven't you heard yet? Soon, when all the speakers have been installed in the surveillance cameras you have, BB will announce that the place you live was never called the UK. It's Oceania, I'm afraid. And remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
WTF. Every programmer I know thinks writing stuff for reuse is much more difficult than not. The problem with reuse is that the writer of that component need all kinds of experience of the different ways the component could be used before they are able to make a decent reusable component.
So true! I think there are two separate issues with this. 1. As you say: WTF. Everyone reading the daily WTF know that other people write awful code. So why take a risk using that code, which is probably buggy, and unreadable, and unfixable, when you can roll your own? This of course tends to becode the NIH-syndrome.
2. A decent reusable component - does what exactly? Either it is 100% reusable - meaning it does nothing specific and is effectively equivalent to Yet Another Programming Language, or it is not. So it probably does some things you need and can reuse, some things that you don't need, and which will just annoy you because you can't take them out, and there still remains some things that you need which it does not provide, and which you have to fit onto the "reusable component", which can also be hard.
Say, you need a "small furry gray mammal" (a mouse.) Instead of making a mouse, you decide to take a reusable component. Your developers have already developed an elephant, which nearly fits the requirements. Now all you have to do is make it small and furry. And somehow work around the trunk, which *will* get in your way.
You think that's a good example of a bad case of reuse? No, that was good reuse. Bad reuse is when you buy a big blue whale to solve the same problem. Why would you do that? Perhaps because it's big and blue. And any manager will tell you that blue is the nicest shade of gray there is.
(html (head (title Huh?)) (body (p So what (i exactly) is wrong with writing a web page in LISP?) (p At least there will be half as many parentheses as there would be <> in the HTML.)))
Calming online discussions (OK, well, sort of - asynchronous online) were possible with Usenet, invented 1979 (according to Wikipedia.)
All TBL deserves is a kick in the ass for butchering hypertext technology. At that time there was stuff like NoteCards (PARC) and several other projects - including Xanadu. By making the abomination that is WWW a success, TBL assured that all progress in hypertext would be near-impossible. Instead we now have a mess, entangled and ugly beyond belief. Just thinking of the futile efforts needed to recreate a session-oriented protocol on top of the HTTP protocol, this being an effectively stateless protocol despite running over the connection oriented TCP/IP protocol, makes me sick.
No, I stand by my opinion that the world would have been better of if TBL had never touched a computer.
I pay money for them to pick up my trash right? They take my trash, zap it into electricity. I have to pay for electricity. So, I'm basically paying to have my trash back? WTF?
Wow... you mean you'd have to pay for someone to haul away what you DON'T want and give you back something you DO want? I can't imagine why.:)
The electricity company probably don't want to keep the electricity they produce either, do they? So how come they can be paid, and grand-parent poster cannot be paid for his trash?
For some reason I think economy is really just about who cheats, and who gets cheated.
While it is true that Linux wasn't made for embedded computing, saying that this market didn't exist when Linux was created is nonsense. Microprocessors were *designed* in part for embedded devices.
Store it vertically and make it LIFO instead. Someone else stated the height of a CD as 1.2 mm. So you just need one rod of 36 m length. Of course you will need to ensure that the CDs are sorted by date at all times for ease of access. You can use the well-known Hanoi-algorithm for that. Just have two more identical rods for buffering.
-Lasse
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
Wow. I feel exactly the same way. When I first encountered Macs in 1989, I had little but contempt for them, being a command line guy at heart. But they soon grew on me, and I became a student assistant of the sysadmin. Eventually took over the job. System 7 remains the greatest UI ever designed. Because it *was* designed. I remember reading the GUI guidelines in Inside Macintosh vol VI - the attention to detail, oh boy.
I simply HATE the Mac OS X Finder - it lack all of the consistency of Direct Manipulation Interface that the original Finder had.
A story, to be on-topic: At one point I was updating all machines at the department with a fresh OS install. I did that by blanking the disk and copying a new system folder (and some tools and programs) if it was a lab machine, or by additionally making a backup of all data if it was a staff machine. Booted from an external SCSI disk with room for the copy and system folders for all types of Mac. However, when I wanted to do the Macintosh II computers, for some reason the internal disk would not show up when I booted from the external disk. Just didn't show up in the SCSI chain - not even SCSIProbe would mount it. What to do? I shut down the machine, took off the lid, removed the power from the internal disk. Booted and reapplied the power, now it came up in SCSIProbe. Had to do this for all the Mac IIs. It has puzzled me ever since.
Macintosh II with seagate 40 and 80 MB drives too. My predecessor systemadministrator would pick up the entire cabinet (big crate) and yank it. I suppose that eventually ruined his back. Me, I just took off the lid, removed the disk and yanked it gently with a turn of the wrist.
Indeed. As any Mac-freak recalling those days will tell you: Windows 95 = Macintosh 85, and it certainly was true at the time. We said that a lot back then, however noone heard us over the roar of Bill's marketing wave.
Seeing again and again that "good" marketing can sell even the worst crap, I sometimes regret I didn't choose a career in marketing/sales. But as a child I was taught that it is bad to tell lies and steal.
And if a Danish university CS department was ever to make a research operating system, either cloned from Plan 9, based on something else, or from scratch, I will hereby propose it be called ReptilicOS.
I may be dumb, but so are you. And you sure must look stupid if you don goggles everytime you go for a walk in the woods. The good thing about glasses is that by wearing them all the time, you get a protection (admittedly not from all angles, but from the most important angle: straight front) all the time. Not as good as goggles, but a hell of a lot better looking. The problem with goggles is that you don't wear them all the time, therefore you may end up in a situation where you should have worn them, but didn't.
As for protecting the glasses, well, most of the more likely things to happen that would damage eyes significantly, will at most result in a tiny scratch in my glasses, many will not leave any trace at all.
... is it more likely that in 30 years of wearing glasses, something will go wrong that hurts you [...]?
That argument goes both ways. By wearing glasses, my eyes are always protected from flying splinters and sparks when cutting wood or metal, from twigs and thorns when I walk in dense vegetation, etc. They don't cover as much as real safety goggles, but I suppose the eyes are a bigger target and therefore at greater risk from something coming directly in, than from stuff coming from the sides.
My glasses have saved me from pain and even injury numerous times. I am considering surgery, but I still think it's too early. I'm nearsighted, but not that nearsighted.
If you would bother to read what I wrote a while back, you will see that Mr. forgotten_his_nick argued that if I had problems with Notes, it might be due to incompetence on part of my Notes administrators. I merely stated that due to the circumstances, which I made explicit (working for IBM - nothing secret about that), his argument was rather pointless. Other than saying that Notes has a bad user interface, which it does, I have said nothing bad about IBM. If IBM has a problem with what I say, I would expect to hear it from my boss or HR, not from some random Dick, Joe or Anon Coward.
Slashdot Mirror
1277? Or 1397?
-Lasse
It sure would work. 100% weight loss quite quickly. You'd be reduced to pure, weightless soul. Or more precisely:
In Soviet Russia, weight loses you!
Actually, you could achieve the same end effect (total weight loss) with far lesser volumes of Soviet Russian wodka.
(I believe last year, a young, healthy woman, died from hyperhydration after a self-administered "cleansing" cure, drinking lots of non-isotonic water. It gives a whole new meaning to "brainwashing".)
-Lasse
I'd suggest taking the parent with a grain of salt, but I am afraid it would not be sufficient. A few spoonfuls would probably be required to maintain the salt balance and prevent death.
-Lasse
Interesting. If I recall correctly, AOCE/PowerTalk was presented at the 94 WWDC. A friend of mine attended, and shared what he had brought home with me. I saw the Demo video, and the docs. The API docs were huge - about two Inside Mac VI, I think. Incredible. The idea to empower _every_ application with e-mail capability was great in a way. As was many other ideas in AOCE/PowerTalk. But it was too complex and too inefficient.
:w !mail user from vi.
However, what really killed it, IMO, was that one of the premises it was built upon, was soon to be shown as false. Few people seem to remember it, but at that time, it was not at all clear that the Internet would take over the world completely. Networking yes, but it was widely believed that the Internet would be an interim solution, soon to be replaced by ISO OSI protocols like TP4. And of course X.400/X.500 etc etc. In addition, Apple still had a dedication to AppleTalk. And there were existing proprietary mailsystems like QuickMail.
The idea was that PowerTalk users would have adapters that would enable a workstation to use legacy mail systems. In hindsight, this of course is a totally stupid idea, today we would put such gateway functionality at the mailserver. But with the following prevalence of plain SMTP/POP/IMAP mail, this capability would just constitute deadweight in the PowerTalk software.
The idea of an in-basket on the desktop, and send-mail capabilities in all applications is in a way something that we still miss today. And if you think about it, it is in a way just a GUI rendition of old Unix ideas, with the ~7mbox (= in-basket), and
In my opinion the user interface principles as they were strictly defined even up to AOCE are still unsurpassed, no interface has ever had the same completely natural feel. Windows, OS X, KDE, GNOME - nothing comes close to the interface as it was back in good old System 7.
I sure wish there was an open source project to take the lessons learned back then, and make a new X11 based GUI that puts them to effective use, while trying to retain some fundamental simplicity.
-Lasse
Just for the record, I abandoned Eudora (Mac) at version 3 or 4 or thereabouts, after an incident where the Tomcat-users mailing list, which I directed to a mailbox, passed the 32K messages mark. For some reason Eudora used signed 16 bit int as a mailbox counter, and promptly truncated the mailbox, resulting in the loss of my archive of the list. I was not amused.
I have always admired Steve Dorner for making a wonderful mail application, but that incident really disappointed me. As a result, I don't trust any mail program these days - my mail is now delived into a Maildir by Postfix and I read it using a few simple shell scripts which I wrote myself.
-Lasse
May I ask - what *exactly* would prevent Christopher Eccleston from reappearing as the ninth doctor again? Is there some law requiring that episodes of a TV-series are recorded in a chronological manner when the subject is time-travel? Hey - why not have Doctor 9 and Doctor 10 meet? Having two Billie Pipers on screen sure would be nice too.
As I have only seen a few seconds of David Tennant (Danish National TV has just finished showing the Eccleston series) I have little to judge from, but it seems he's not of the same quality. But then, Eccleston sure was (is? will again be?) great as the ninth doctor. All good things come to an end, I suppose. Just like MASH was still excellent after Radar left, even though he was missed.
-Lasse
Why on Earth would you want to read it again? You are LIVING it!?
Personally I will not touch a dystopian sf novel again, ever. My nerves can hardly deal with the dystopic real world. It is almost as if after the nuclear holocaust fears of the cold war, we humans cannot live without hanging a sword of Damocles - or an ozone hole - over our heads. I prefer watching escapist humourous stuff like Doctor Who - stuff that makes you feel 12 and without a care in the world again. I might reread HHGTTG however - all four volumes of the trilogy.
-Lasse
Oh, haven't you heard yet? Soon, when all the speakers have been installed in the surveillance cameras you have, BB will announce that the place you live was never called the UK. It's Oceania, I'm afraid. And remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
-Lasse
WTF. Every programmer I know thinks writing stuff for reuse is much more difficult than not. The problem with reuse is that the writer of that component need all kinds of experience of the different ways the component could be used before they are able to make a decent reusable component.
So true! I think there are two separate issues with this.
1. As you say: WTF. Everyone reading the daily WTF know that other people write awful code. So why take a risk using that code, which is probably buggy, and unreadable, and unfixable, when you can roll your own? This of course tends to becode the NIH-syndrome.
2. A decent reusable component - does what exactly? Either it is 100% reusable - meaning it does nothing specific and is effectively equivalent to Yet Another Programming Language, or it is not. So it probably does some things you need and can reuse, some things that you don't need, and which will just annoy you because you can't take them out, and there still remains some things that you need which it does not provide, and which you have to fit onto the "reusable component", which can also be hard.
Say, you need a "small furry gray mammal" (a mouse.) Instead of making a mouse, you decide to take a reusable component. Your developers have already developed an elephant, which nearly fits the requirements. Now all you have to do is make it small and furry. And somehow work around the trunk, which *will* get in your way.
You think that's a good example of a bad case of reuse? No, that was good reuse. Bad reuse is when you buy a big blue whale to solve the same problem. Why would you do that? Perhaps because it's big and blue. And any manager will tell you that blue is the nicest shade of gray there is.
-Lasse
(html (head (title Huh?)) (body (p So what (i exactly) is wrong with writing a web page in LISP?) (p At least there will be half as many parentheses as there would be <> in the HTML.)))
-Lasse
Calming online discussions (OK, well, sort of - asynchronous online) were possible with Usenet, invented 1979 (according to Wikipedia.)
All TBL deserves is a kick in the ass for butchering hypertext technology. At that time there was stuff like NoteCards (PARC) and several other projects - including Xanadu. By making the abomination that is WWW a success, TBL assured that all progress in hypertext would be near-impossible. Instead we now have a mess, entangled and ugly beyond belief. Just thinking of the futile efforts needed to recreate a session-oriented protocol on top of the HTTP protocol, this being an effectively stateless protocol despite
running over the connection oriented TCP/IP protocol, makes me sick.
No, I stand by my opinion that the world would have been better of if TBL had never touched a computer.
-Lasse
The electricity company probably don't want to keep the electricity they produce either, do they? So how
come they can be paid, and grand-parent poster cannot be paid for his trash?
For some reason I think economy is really just about who cheats, and who gets cheated.
-Lasse
While it is true that Linux wasn't made for embedded computing, saying that this market didn't exist when Linux was created is nonsense. Microprocessors were *designed* in part for embedded devices.
-Lasse
Store it vertically and make it LIFO instead. Someone else stated the height of a CD as 1.2 mm. So you just need one rod of 36 m length. Of course you will need to ensure that the CDs are sorted by date at all times for ease of access. You can use the well-known Hanoi-algorithm for that. Just have two more identical rods for buffering.
-Lasse
Wow. I feel exactly the same way. When I first encountered Macs in 1989, I had little but contempt for them, being a command line guy at heart. But they soon grew on me, and I became a student assistant of the sysadmin. Eventually took over the job. System 7 remains the greatest UI ever designed. Because it *was* designed. I remember reading the GUI guidelines in Inside Macintosh vol VI - the attention to detail, oh boy.
I simply HATE the Mac OS X Finder - it lack all of the consistency of Direct Manipulation Interface that the original Finder had.
A story, to be on-topic:
At one point I was updating all machines at the department with a fresh OS install. I did that by blanking the disk and copying a new system folder (and some tools and programs) if it was a lab machine, or by additionally making a backup of all data if it was a staff machine. Booted from an external SCSI disk with room for the copy and system folders for all types of Mac. However, when I wanted to do the Macintosh II computers, for some reason the internal disk would not show up when I booted from the external disk. Just didn't show up in the SCSI chain - not even SCSIProbe would mount it. What to do? I shut down the machine, took off the lid, removed the power from the internal disk. Booted and reapplied the power, now it came up in SCSIProbe. Had to do this for all the Mac IIs. It has puzzled me ever since.
-Lasse
Macintosh II with seagate 40 and 80 MB drives too. My predecessor systemadministrator would pick up the entire cabinet (big crate) and yank it. I suppose that eventually ruined his back. Me, I just took off the lid, removed the disk and yanked it gently with a turn of the wrist.
-Lasse
Indeed. As any Mac-freak recalling those days will tell you: Windows 95 = Macintosh 85, and it certainly was true at the time. We said that a lot back then, however noone heard us over the roar of Bill's marketing wave.
Seeing again and again that "good" marketing can sell even the worst crap, I sometimes regret I didn't choose a career in marketing/sales. But as a child I was taught that it is bad to tell lies and steal.
-Lasse
And if a Danish university CS department was ever to make a research operating system, either cloned from Plan 9, based on something else, or from scratch, I will hereby propose it be called ReptilicOS.
-Lasse
For a start, it falls like a stone.
-Lasse
No. Wiener Melange.
I may be dumb, but so are you. And you sure must look stupid if you don goggles everytime you go for a walk in the woods. The good thing about glasses is that by wearing them all the time, you get a protection (admittedly not from all angles, but from the most important angle: straight front) all the time. Not as good as goggles, but a hell of a lot better looking. The problem with goggles is that you don't wear them all the time, therefore you may end up in a situation where you should have worn them, but didn't.
As for protecting the glasses, well, most of the more likely things to happen that would damage eyes significantly, will at most result in a tiny scratch in my glasses, many will not leave any trace at all.
-Lasse
That argument goes both ways. By wearing glasses, my eyes are always protected from flying splinters and sparks when cutting wood or metal, from twigs and thorns when I walk in dense vegetation, etc. They don't cover as much as real safety goggles, but I suppose the eyes are a bigger target and therefore at greater risk from something coming directly in, than from stuff coming from the sides.
My glasses have saved me from pain and even injury numerous times. I am considering surgery, but I still think it's too early. I'm nearsighted, but not that nearsighted.
-Lasse
Nut-free Nutella for nut allergy sufferers? I sure hope you are nut soffering from nut allergy, as in that case it would be a severe autoallergy.
How about a vegetarian T-bone steak? And a glass of dry water? Or perhaps a shot of non-alcoholic vodka?
-Lasse
If you would bother to read what I wrote a while back, you will see that Mr. forgotten_his_nick argued that if I had problems with Notes, it might be due to incompetence on part of my Notes administrators. I merely stated that due to the circumstances, which I made explicit (working for IBM - nothing secret about that), his argument was rather pointless. Other than saying that Notes has a bad user interface, which it does, I have said nothing bad about IBM. If IBM has a problem with what I say, I would expect to hear it from my boss or HR, not from some random Dick, Joe or Anon Coward.
I don't succumb to any form of mind control.
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
Wow, I didn't know that when the company I work for was bought by big blue, I suddenly lost all my civil rights under Danish law. Impressive.
-Lasse