Carla's great. She's a regular on my site as well: EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.com. She's currently at the top of the page with the start of her series on winbind.
I interviewed Xybernaut's CEO several years ago at COMDEX. The interview was set up for the purpose of talking about his company's use of Linux on its gear, but he only half-heartedly showed me a few models, then launched into his spiel about Xybernaut's patent attorneys, which he had all over the world. I think he claimed over 60 countries.
He told me Xybernaut could see the downturn coming and that it had decided licensing and royalties were where it's at. To demonstrate the company's "innovative" strides in patent gamesmanship, he pulled out a unit that a hinged and retractable slot cover for a PCMCIA slot. It was a slot cover: It closed when the card was in place, and opening it caused the card to eject.
He said no one had patented anything like it, and that his crack team of attorneys were now vigilantly monitoring dozens of countries to make sure that if anyone did anything like it, they'd be on hand demanding royalties and a cut of the action.
When Xybernaut announces patents like this, I suppose we can take comfort in its consistency: It's going on four years of taking out patents and then watching for someone to run afoul of them so it can get down to its real business, which is making sure the only "useful art or science" left is patent litigation.
LinuxToday has had ads from Microsoft running on it since before I was a full-time editor there, from mid-2000 to early 2002. Glancing at the calendar, I'm noticing it's been over two years since I last worked on LT, and Dave's just now getting around to noticing this and getting his dander up?
I always assumed the LT readership was smart enough to make up its own mind about the ads and their sponsor, and most readers who troubled to write me with their concerns agreed once I put it to them like that.
Re:Snaggy's hard sell ;)
on
Joy of Linux
·
· Score: 2
And let me point out (as one of the authors) that these two were one of the the highlights of the project for me: when the publisher told me they'd do the book, I rejoiced. They're a big part of the book. ---
Michael Hall
Seemed sort of inactive until shortly after the last beta release. Now the debs in question seem to get updated every few days. Works, anyhow. ---
Michael Hall
X Windows and Unix were never really designed for handheld computers. (Yeah, windows wasn't either, but Windows CE is only a little like regular Windows.)
WinCE has its share of problems, not the least of which is the fact that there's a fairly high bar to getting into developing for it. The simple fact that X's initial design wasn't for handhelds doesn't mean much. The iPAQ is a really powerful machine: more horsepower than the 5x86/133 I once used to run X.
Slashdot recently linked to my interview with Jim Gettys about the issues involved with porting X/Linux to the iPAQ. Considering he's one of the lead developers of X from 1986, I think his words have some weight.
At the moment, though, you're right: you wouldn't want to use Linux on an iPAQ for your PDA. Support is rough because they're still laying in the foundation. The long-term view, though, which is what Compaq is taking, is that with an open handheld (as they call the iPAQ) based on tools familiar to Linux developers, they'll have the groundwork for devices that hit the market with a massive developer base built in. No costs for proprietary development tools, a remarkable amount of experience, and the same sort of enthusiasm for development that's been a mark of the Linux/Free Software community to this point.
Even if the iPAQ doesn't succeed (it's sort of expensive at the moment), Linux handhelds are becoming a reality. The Yopy is based on Linux, and the new AgendaVR3 (which is a lot more like the Palm, only more powerful) is based on Linux. In general, in fact, Linux may succeed more as an embedded platform than a desktop platform. It's in the midst of taking off in that area now.
---
Michael Hall
obDisclaimer: I don't represent internet.com or LinuxToday. Anyone who says I tried is full of it.
I post to LinuxToday on a daily basis (my user name is "mhall"), and I write for LinuxPlanet (you can also l ook at my article history. My status in both relationships is that of a freelancer ("independent contractor").
There is a policy against announcing new site launches. I don't know when it was enacted because I'm fairly new to LinuxToday. I can say, however, that we routinely reject new site announcements. If one gets posted, it was a mistake.
There's another side of the coin, though, and one which the person posting the initial question could have followed: part of the LinuxToday "family" is the site LinuxPR, which allows anyone with a Linux-related business or site to join at no cost.
By signing up for LinuxPR, anyone posting a Linux-related press release (new product announcement, conference, or, most important to this case, site launch) gets their press release posted not only on the main page of LinuxPR, but on the front page of LinuxToday. Press releases are posted on a frequent basis as we're able. My own personal habit is to look in on the press releases several times an hour while I'm posting stories. I even take the step of correcting bad URL's and cleaning up some of the more egregious grammar problems.
Second, sites doing more than just announcing their existence are always welcome to use the LinuxToday contribute form.
Spend a few minutes looking at LinuxToday, please. Where do the stories come from? They come from other sites. How much of each story do we carry before pointing the reader to the rest of it? Seldom more than three or four paragraphs. When we have a reciprocal agreement with an organization like VNUNet or when the story is run by another internet.com site that isn't in the Linux channel we'll run the whole thing (which, when you think about it, is actually limiting the number of banners the internet.com site is going to move.) If anything, LinuxToday provides a means by which some smaller Linux-related sites can get more traffic than they might have before we thoughtfully provided a link to their story along with a few paragraphs of "teaser" to get the reader's curiosity up.
If LinuxToday were following an "anti-other-Linux-sites" policy, it would soon dry up and blow away. The strength of the site is the near-constant flow of news from around (and outside) the Linux community.
Finally, (and because this is the part most people will feel the most comfortable ignoring, because I'm talking about my client):
Despite several months of working on LinuxToday, I have never felt particularly "watched over" by internet.com. The other editors on the site and its primary programmer are all Linux enthusiasts who are interested in providing a good service to the Linux community. I've never knowingly withheld a story for any reason other than the fact we've already covered it ad nauseum or that it should be submitted as a press release because it's nothing more than an attempt to sell something (including eyeballs).
When I first threw in my lot with LinuxToday and LinuxPlanet, I had some concerns about the nature of the entity that owned them. My own roots in Linux go back over four years, and I've been a UNIX enthusiast for more than twice that time. I've contributed documentation to a major open free software product under the copyleft. I love Linux, and I love the community surrounding it. I get up each day at 6 a.m. to start posting on LinuxToday, and my thoughts are not to how well the money's flowing that day, but how much information is being moved to readers. When I set fingers to keyboard for a story on LinuxPlanet, it isn't because I'm thrilled at the prospect of creating revenue, it's because I hope I can help people make decisions, or inform them in some way. The people I work with (who are in a more durable relationship with internet.com than I) have shown the same instincts and concern for the Linux community.
There may be a site worthy of paranoia and suspicion, but I don't think LinuxToday is it.
Though it should not require reiteration, I'll note once more that I don't speak for any of the entities mentioned in this post besides myself. I'm just a freelancer.
Kind regards,
Michael ------------ Michael Hall Charlottesville, Virginia
While we're talking about those screenshots, would anyone tell me (and possibly others) what window manager is that nice one?
That's the latest Sawfish running under Helix Code's GNOME 1.2, which, in turn, is running under an up-to-date frozen Debian. The theme is qn-x11, and you can find it at sawmill.themes.org. Look around for the accompanying GTK theme. The Photo-Paint and Corel Draw windows themselves look a little strange because I've made no effort to get my KDE/QT setup to sync with my GNOME stuff, and Corel's apps use your QT setup.
Kind regards, ------------ Michael Hall Charlottesville, Virginia
I don't see what being a Gimp fan has anything aty all to do with Corel Draw.
One's a Vector-based drawing tool, the other is an Image editor. They are meant to do entirely different things. (Or the same thing in entirely different ways. Potato - Po-tah-to, I guess)
Linux has been missing a decent vector-based tool, and this port has been anticipated. Isn't this like comparing C&C and Quake?
No, it's not. CorelDraw is the name of the suite as well as the vector drawing tool, but the suite also includes Photo-Paint, which is an image editor.
Kind regards, ------------ Michael Hall Charlottesville, Virginia
These CorelDraw-vs-GIMP comparisons are starting to annoy me. Repeat after me:
CorelDraw is a vector drawing program.
The Gimp is a bitmap drawing program.
Of course, you might be less annoyed if you read the review and realized that CorelDraw the suite includes Corel Photo-Paint as well as Corel Draw the program.
Kind regards, ------------ Michael Hall Charlottesville, Virginia
There's a "ps passthru" printer, which works great for sending postscript output to lpd and on through to your printer just about every distribution.
Chances are good that if you have a working printer with Red Hat, Debian, Corel, Mandrake, or many other modern distros, you need to go ahead and use the passthru driver. I've used WP8 this way on every distro of Red Hat from 5.1 to 6.1, and Debian 2.1 (Slink).
------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Also possible would be the infusion of "neutraceuticals" - chemicals that would trick a soldier's brain into thinking his stomach is full or that his muscles aren't really tired.
Neat. I wonder what else you could trick soldiers' brains into thinking? We could get rid of all sorts of pesky "human factors". ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
The constipation they induce is sort of handy in a field environment. They are, however, bulky to anyone who makes their living out of a rucksack. They're also really hard to look at after a couple of days.
The fun part comes when you make little explosives out of the chemical heaters that come with them. 2 liter bottle + 100 mph tape + a little water + whatever the hell it is that boils when you add a little water = loud noise. Toss in some chemlight goop before sealing, and you have instant (and violent) Pollack. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Barry in particular brilliantly embodies the 50's/60's music crazy -- addicted, intemperate, astonishingly knowledgeable, arrogantly defensive and superior about music.
This type never went away. In fact, I'd argue that they got worse as time's gone on because the language of criticism has been appropriated by just about every schmuck with an opinion. Including me, by the way.
People used to aspire to an appearance of sophistication by subscribing to the right book clubs and doing paint-by-numbers of old masterpieces. Now they just hang out and talk like post-structuralists. I'd prefer the older forms of middle class insecurity, because people eventually try to dump their paint-by-numbers of sad clowns and moody watermills, or string art, or mass-edition copies of the book du jour, for a nickel apiece. If we keep up this practice of blabbering like academics without creating a demand in the market for the trappings of our sophistication, people like me are going to have nothing to pick up at Salvation Army in twenty years.
I think, by the way, I'd like to cast my vote (with whoever's keeping track) to declare use of the word "geek" oversaturated, or at least badly in need of reevaluation. I overheard a 30-something referring to herself as a "Friends" geek. You know... an unconventional outsider who sits in front of a tv for half an hour per week at the same time as millions of others, feeling the bitter sting of persecution because of her love for a television show some corporation has identified as suitably safe to serve as filler between the commercials. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
... and there are a surprising number of people who do run AOL, despite the fact our school offers a largely unsaturated T1, e-mail, and their browser of choice. I've seen it on four of the six machines in the administrative suite, and I know there are more out there of the 100+ workstations available. It's a support hassle, because even though there's a policy in place saying I don't have to support it, it's a real bridge-burner to refuse to.
This story has me on edge now, and slightly grateful for once that we're largely running Macs behind At Ease. The few clone users in the building are in my immediate area and I can drop a few hints... the Mac users (teachers) don't have the privileges to install anything on their own, anyhow, and this sounds like a Windows issue. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
The search engine is screwed. Go to the search page and select the author senegan to see that. (He was at one time a prolific author but none of his old articles appear).
Unless the Slashdot Kommisarriat has managed to erase all my memories of someone going by a subtly differently spelled name:
Sengan kicked off one of the bloodiest wars of the time on Slashdot with his classic US and UK unilaterally attack Iraq. It garnered 748 comments and earned Sengan a special fan club of his very own. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
If code duplication is bugging you badly, there's always a nice, lightweight solution like genpage, which is what I use for my generally neglected homepage.
With genpage, you can set up template and content files. The template has all the junk in it you don't want to type more than once, the content file is just that: vanilla HTML you want in the body. The content file declares which layout file it wants to be wrapped in, and Bob's your uncle.
Better yet, genpage just looks for stuff in a directory called ~/content and uses the templates found in ~/layout to produce a web site in ~/www, which a periodic cron job can happily squirt up to your live site nightly using sitecopy. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
The following elements are deprecated: APPLET, BASEFONT, CENTER, DIR, FONT, ISINDEX, MENU, STRIKE, and U.
and
The new elements in HTML 4.0 are: ABBR, ACRONYM, BDO, BUTTON, COL, COLGROUP, DEL, FIELDSET, FRAME, FRAMESET, IFRAME , INS, LABEL, LEGEND, NOFRAMES, NOSCRIPT, OBJECT, OPTGROUP, PARAM, S (deprecated), SPAN, TBODY, TFOOT, THEAD, and Q.
It could be that she's gotten confused over the fact that the w3c also identifies "frameset HTML" as a "flavor" of HTML. But the frames-related tags aren't marked as deprecated anywhere in the document posted as "latest" on the w3c's page.
I'm guessing she's trying to use what she thinks is a $10 word (deprecated) to describe a design concept (unneeded and inappropriate). ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Remove all that nonsense with the printer drivers. Spit out Postscript, and let the printer driver handle it.
Uh, that's why there's a printer driver provided called... wait for it... "Generic Post Script Passthru". You just tell it which queue to which it should pass the output. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
...that Eric saw fit to denounce totalitarianism on behalf of all of us. I, for one, was walking around the office all day yesterday to comments like "Hey... Linux user! Free Tibet, you comsymp bastard!" Now, thanks to Eric's comments, no one can say that to me anymore. Close shave, though... I look forward to similar denunciations each time someone We Don't Like decides to adopt Linux. I, for one, am looking forward to Eric squaring off against the likes of Bo Gritz or some similarly psychotic right-wing reactionary luminary who decides Open Source Software is the way forward to the republic of white, agrarian freeholders envisoned by Thomas Jefferson and company.
I also hope that Eric continues, in the midst of offering to speak for all of us, to make his gratuitous swipes at "past ambassadors" and their comsymp ways. We're much better represented by someone who keeps on top of this stuff for us and makes sure that, above all, everyone knows that we ain't no steenkin' commies. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I don't think we're that far apart on this particular issue; I just don't hate long book series the way you do (as long as they stay good).
Then we're not apart at all. I don't hate long series because they're long. I hate them when they suck. And there are a lot of sucky ones out there.:)
Though I'll admit, despite over 25 years of watching Star Trek, that I have a particular aversion to the ST novels as a class. May be snobbery on my part... but when I see all 2,789 ST paperpacks filling up space in the already-cramped confines of my local bookseller's sci-fi/fantasy section (an omen as ill as when they moved "New Age" and "Philosophy" in with each other, putting the Friedrich Nietzsche just after the Shirley McClaine(not that I admire either)) I get irritated.
Well, as it will be.
Pleasant having a civil exchange on Slashdot. Isn't it about time for a KDE or Enlightenment item so we can all have at each other with the long knives again?
:) ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Slashdot Mirror
Carla's great. She's a regular on my site as well: EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.com. She's currently at the top of the page with the start of her series on winbind.
This is no surprise.
I interviewed Xybernaut's CEO several years ago at COMDEX. The interview was set up for the purpose of talking about his company's use of Linux on its gear, but he only half-heartedly showed me a few models, then launched into his spiel about Xybernaut's patent attorneys, which he had all over the world. I think he claimed over 60 countries.
He told me Xybernaut could see the downturn coming and that it had decided licensing and royalties were where it's at. To demonstrate the company's "innovative" strides in patent gamesmanship, he pulled out a unit that a hinged and retractable slot cover for a PCMCIA slot. It was a slot cover: It closed when the card was in place, and opening it caused the card to eject.
He said no one had patented anything like it, and that his crack team of attorneys were now vigilantly monitoring dozens of countries to make sure that if anyone did anything like it, they'd be on hand demanding royalties and a cut of the action.
When Xybernaut announces patents like this, I suppose we can take comfort in its consistency: It's going on four years of taking out patents and then watching for someone to run afoul of them so it can get down to its real business, which is making sure the only "useful art or science" left is patent litigation.
LinuxToday has had ads from Microsoft running on it since before I was a full-time editor there, from mid-2000 to early 2002. Glancing at the calendar, I'm noticing it's been over two years since I last worked on LT, and Dave's just now getting around to noticing this and getting his dander up?
I always assumed the LT readership was smart enough to make up its own mind about the ads and their sponsor, and most readers who troubled to write me with their concerns agreed once I put it to them like that.
And let me point out (as one of the authors) that these two were one of the the highlights of the project for me: when the publisher told me they'd do the book, I rejoiced. They're a big part of the book.
---
Michael Hall
Add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/ potato kde kde2
Seemed sort of inactive until shortly after the last beta release. Now the debs in question seem to get updated every few days. Works, anyhow.
---
Michael Hall
Handhelds.org has pictures.
---
Michael Hall
Good point. I was thinking more about the $3000 Platform Builder.
---
Michael Hall
X Windows and Unix were never really designed for handheld computers. (Yeah, windows wasn't either, but Windows CE is only a little like regular Windows.)
WinCE has its share of problems, not the least of which is the fact that there's a fairly high bar to getting into developing for it. The simple fact that X's initial design wasn't for handhelds doesn't mean much. The iPAQ is a really powerful machine: more horsepower than the 5x86/133 I once used to run X.
Slashdot recently linked to my interview with Jim Gettys about the issues involved with porting X/Linux to the iPAQ. Considering he's one of the lead developers of X from 1986, I think his words have some weight.
At the moment, though, you're right: you wouldn't want to use Linux on an iPAQ for your PDA. Support is rough because they're still laying in the foundation. The long-term view, though, which is what Compaq is taking, is that with an open handheld (as they call the iPAQ) based on tools familiar to Linux developers, they'll have the groundwork for devices that hit the market with a massive developer base built in. No costs for proprietary development tools, a remarkable amount of experience, and the same sort of enthusiasm for development that's been a mark of the Linux/Free Software community to this point.
Even if the iPAQ doesn't succeed (it's sort of expensive at the moment), Linux handhelds are becoming a reality. The Yopy is based on Linux, and the new AgendaVR3 (which is a lot more like the Palm, only more powerful) is based on Linux. In general, in fact, Linux may succeed more as an embedded platform than a desktop platform. It's in the midst of taking off in that area now.
---
Michael Hall
We have the fact sheet on AllLinuxDevices.
Some of the features:
---
Michael Hall
obDisclaimer: I don't represent internet.com or LinuxToday. Anyone who says I tried is full of it.
I post to LinuxToday on a daily basis (my user name is "mhall"), and I write for LinuxPlanet (you can also l ook at my article history. My status in both relationships is that of a freelancer ("independent contractor").
There is a policy against announcing new site launches. I don't know when it was enacted because I'm fairly new to LinuxToday. I can say, however, that we routinely reject new site announcements. If one gets posted, it was a mistake.
There's another side of the coin, though, and one which the person posting the initial question could have followed: part of the LinuxToday "family" is the site LinuxPR, which allows anyone with a Linux-related business or site to join at no cost.
By signing up for LinuxPR, anyone posting a Linux-related press release (new product announcement, conference, or, most important to this case, site launch) gets their press release posted not only on the main page of LinuxPR, but on the front page of LinuxToday. Press releases are posted on a frequent basis as we're able. My own personal habit is to look in on the press releases several times an hour while I'm posting stories. I even take the step of correcting bad URL's and cleaning up some of the more egregious grammar problems.
Second, sites doing more than just announcing their existence are always welcome to use the LinuxToday contribute form.
Spend a few minutes looking at LinuxToday, please. Where do the stories come from? They come from other sites. How much of each story do we carry before pointing the reader to the rest of it? Seldom more than three or four paragraphs. When we have a reciprocal agreement with an organization like VNUNet or when the story is run by another internet.com site that isn't in the Linux channel we'll run the whole thing (which, when you think about it, is actually limiting the number of banners the internet.com site is going to move.) If anything, LinuxToday provides a means by which some smaller Linux-related sites can get more traffic than they might have before we thoughtfully provided a link to their story along with a few paragraphs of "teaser" to get the reader's curiosity up.
If LinuxToday were following an "anti-other-Linux-sites" policy, it would soon dry up and blow away. The strength of the site is the near-constant flow of news from around (and outside) the Linux community.
Finally, (and because this is the part most people will feel the most comfortable ignoring, because I'm talking about my client):
Despite several months of working on LinuxToday, I have never felt particularly "watched over" by internet.com. The other editors on the site and its primary programmer are all Linux enthusiasts who are interested in providing a good service to the Linux community. I've never knowingly withheld a story for any reason other than the fact we've already covered it ad nauseum or that it should be submitted as a press release because it's nothing more than an attempt to sell something (including eyeballs).
When I first threw in my lot with LinuxToday and LinuxPlanet, I had some concerns about the nature of the entity that owned them. My own roots in Linux go back over four years, and I've been a UNIX enthusiast for more than twice that time. I've contributed documentation to a major open free software product under the copyleft. I love Linux, and I love the community surrounding it. I get up each day at 6 a.m. to start posting on LinuxToday, and my thoughts are not to how well the money's flowing that day, but how much information is being moved to readers. When I set fingers to keyboard for a story on LinuxPlanet, it isn't because I'm thrilled at the prospect of creating revenue, it's because I hope I can help people make decisions, or inform them in some way. The people I work with (who are in a more durable relationship with internet.com than I) have shown the same instincts and concern for the Linux community.
There may be a site worthy of paranoia and suspicion, but I don't think LinuxToday is it.
Though it should not require reiteration, I'll note once more that I don't speak for any of the entities mentioned in this post besides myself. I'm just a freelancer.
Kind regards,
Michael
------------
Michael Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia
While we're talking about those screenshots, would anyone tell me (and possibly others) what window manager is that nice one?
That's the latest Sawfish running under Helix Code's GNOME 1.2, which, in turn, is running under an up-to-date frozen Debian. The theme is qn-x11, and you can find it at sawmill.themes.org. Look around for the accompanying GTK theme. The Photo-Paint and Corel Draw windows themselves look a little strange because I've made no effort to get my KDE/QT setup to sync with my GNOME stuff, and Corel's apps use your QT setup.
Kind regards,
------------
Michael Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia
I don't see what being a Gimp fan has anything aty all to do with Corel Draw.
One's a Vector-based drawing tool, the other is an Image editor. They are meant to do entirely different things. (Or the same thing in entirely different ways. Potato - Po-tah-to, I guess)
Linux has been missing a decent vector-based tool, and this port has been anticipated. Isn't this like comparing C&C and Quake?
No, it's not. CorelDraw is the name of the suite as well as the vector drawing tool, but the suite also includes Photo-Paint, which is an image editor.
Kind regards,
------------
Michael Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia
These CorelDraw-vs-GIMP comparisons are starting to annoy me. Repeat after me:
CorelDraw is a vector drawing program.
The Gimp is a bitmap drawing program.
Of course, you might be less annoyed if you read the review and realized that CorelDraw the suite includes Corel Photo-Paint as well as Corel Draw the program.
Kind regards,
------------
Michael Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia
There's a "ps passthru" printer, which works great for sending postscript output to lpd and on through to your printer just about every distribution.
Chances are good that if you have a working printer with Red Hat, Debian, Corel, Mandrake, or many other modern distros, you need to go ahead and use the passthru driver. I've used WP8 this way on every distro of Red Hat from 5.1 to 6.1, and Debian 2.1 (Slink).
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Neat. I wonder what else you could trick soldiers' brains into thinking? We could get rid of all sorts of pesky "human factors".
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I've spent weeks on nothing but MRE's.
The constipation they induce is sort of handy in a field environment. They are, however, bulky to anyone who makes their living out of a rucksack. They're also really hard to look at after a couple of days.
The fun part comes when you make little explosives out of the chemical heaters that come with them. 2 liter bottle + 100 mph tape + a little water + whatever the hell it is that boils when you add a little water = loud noise. Toss in some chemlight goop before sealing, and you have instant (and violent) Pollack.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Barry in particular brilliantly embodies the 50's/60's music crazy -- addicted, intemperate, astonishingly knowledgeable, arrogantly defensive and superior about music.
This type never went away. In fact, I'd argue that they got worse as time's gone on because the language of criticism has been appropriated by just about every schmuck with an opinion. Including me, by the way.
People used to aspire to an appearance of sophistication by subscribing to the right book clubs and doing paint-by-numbers of old masterpieces. Now they just hang out and talk like post-structuralists. I'd prefer the older forms of middle class insecurity, because people eventually try to dump their paint-by-numbers of sad clowns and moody watermills, or string art, or mass-edition copies of the book du jour, for a nickel apiece. If we keep up this practice of blabbering like academics without creating a demand in the market for the trappings of our sophistication, people like me are going to have nothing to pick up at Salvation Army in twenty years.
I think, by the way, I'd like to cast my vote (with whoever's keeping track) to declare use of the word "geek" oversaturated, or at least badly in need of reevaluation. I overheard a 30-something referring to herself as a "Friends" geek. You know... an unconventional outsider who sits in front of a tv for half an hour per week at the same time as millions of others, feeling the bitter sting of persecution because of her love for a television show some corporation has identified as suitably safe to serve as filler between the commercials.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
This story has me on edge now, and slightly grateful for once that we're largely running Macs behind At Ease. The few clone users in the building are in my immediate area and I can drop a few hints... the Mac users (teachers) don't have the privileges to install anything on their own, anyhow, and this sounds like a Windows issue.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Unless the Slashdot Kommisarriat has managed to erase all my memories of someone going by a subtly differently spelled name:
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=sengan yields plenty of his stories. You just had an extra 'e' in there.
Sengan kicked off one of the bloodiest wars of the time on Slashdot with his classic US and UK unilaterally attack Iraq. It garnered 748 comments and earned Sengan a special fan club of his very own.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
If code duplication is bugging you badly, there's always a nice, lightweight solution like genpage, which is what I use for my generally neglected homepage.
With genpage, you can set up template and content files. The template has all the junk in it you don't want to type more than once, the content file is just that: vanilla HTML you want in the body. The content file declares which layout file it wants to be wrapped in, and Bob's your uncle.
Better yet, genpage just looks for stuff in a directory called ~/content and uses the templates found in ~/layout to produce a web site in ~/www, which a periodic cron job can happily squirt up to your live site nightly using sitecopy.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Looking at the list of new and deprecated elements carried in the w3c's specification for HTML 4, I see:
The following elements are deprecated: APPLET, BASEFONT, CENTER, DIR, FONT, ISINDEX, MENU, STRIKE, and U.
and
The new elements in HTML 4.0 are: ABBR, ACRONYM, BDO, BUTTON, COL, COLGROUP, DEL, FIELDSET, FRAME, FRAMESET, IFRAME , INS, LABEL, LEGEND, NOFRAMES , NOSCRIPT, OBJECT, OPTGROUP, PARAM, S (deprecated), SPAN, TBODY, TFOOT, THEAD, and Q.
It could be that she's gotten confused over the fact that the w3c also identifies "frameset HTML" as a "flavor" of HTML. But the frames-related tags aren't marked as deprecated anywhere in the document posted as "latest" on the w3c's page.
I'm guessing she's trying to use what she thinks is a $10 word (deprecated) to describe a design concept (unneeded and inappropriate).
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Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Remove all that nonsense with the printer drivers. Spit out Postscript, and let the printer driver handle it.
Uh, that's why there's a printer driver provided called... wait for it... "Generic Post Script Passthru". You just tell it which queue to which it should pass the output.
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Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
A rose is a rose but looses it charm when you call it 'shit' !
And where does the charm go when it's loosed?
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Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I also hope that Eric continues, in the midst of offering to speak for all of us, to make his gratuitous swipes at "past ambassadors" and their comsymp ways. We're much better represented by someone who keeps on top of this stuff for us and makes sure that, above all, everyone knows that we ain't no steenkin' commies.
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Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I don't think we're that far apart on this particular issue; I just don't hate long book series the way you do (as long as they stay good).
Then we're not apart at all. I don't hate long series because they're long. I hate them when they suck. And there are a lot of sucky ones out there. :)
Though I'll admit, despite over 25 years of watching Star Trek, that I have a particular aversion to the ST novels as a class. May be snobbery on my part... but when I see all 2,789 ST paperpacks filling up space in the already-cramped confines of my local bookseller's sci-fi/fantasy section (an omen as ill as when they moved "New Age" and "Philosophy" in with each other, putting the Friedrich Nietzsche just after the Shirley McClaine(not that I admire either)) I get irritated.
Well, as it will be.
Pleasant having a civil exchange on Slashdot. Isn't it about time for a KDE or Enlightenment item so we can all have at each other with the long knives again?
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Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net