Holy shit, look at the guy third from the left in the NJSP picture. Goddamned scary if you ask
me... perhaps your sister would get a kick out of seeing that.
I think the guy fourth from the left is a pretty damned ugly, hairy bastard.
And the one second from the right is downright evil-looking. He looks just like the German ones i've seen in those WWII movies.
:)
Come on, dude... find any picture of any police officer in 1920 and he'll look scary, because that's what uniforms looked like in the 1920s. Some uniforms still looked that way in the 1930s and 1940s too. Get over it.
He never revealed to his gang that there was never any "counterclaim" against anyone but FR. There
was no counterclaim against FAB or against any individuals.
but then, in the paragraph immediately following:
And, as we pointed out to him, his Counterclaim against FR was fatally flawed. We moved to dismiss it
in its entirety.
"We will state unequivocally that there was no counterclaim. But we hope you don't remember that we said that, because right after that we'll mention that he was so stupid that he produced a counterclaim flawed enough that we moved to dismiss it."
That's not reporting... that's vitriol. Can anyone supply an actual impartial view, or at the very least a balanced one that includes biased views from both parties? I would have expected a link to a counterview in the so-called "story" on the front page of Slashdot, in fact....
A guy named Jim Knoble puts out a set of fonts called "Neep" that are designed specifically to address these issues. You can get them here.
Wow. Just when you think something has fallen off into relative obscurity, it pops up in comments like the one above.
Unfortunately, Neep was a rather good first try. The last published version is over a year and a half old now, and suffers from several problems:
The single quote (') and grave accent (`) characters have good, but wrong, intentions. They follow the old and misguided glyph forms ('9'-shaped right quote and backwards-'9'-shaped left quote) perpetuated by otherwise useful programs such as gcc and groff. At the time, i was following the lead of the then-prevalent 'fixed' family of fonts shipped with XFree86. I am sorry for the consequences of my ignorance.
The fonts are designed for increasingly obsolete 75-dpi displays. When i recently (nine months ago is recently?) switched most of my X displays to default to 100 dpi (and my fontservers to 100 dpi fonts), i discovered that Neep doesn't provide 100 dpi variants. At 1280x1024 on a 17-inch monitor, -*-neep-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-75-75-*-*-iso8859- * is just too small. And i don't like -*-neep-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-75-75-*-*-iso8859- *, even in its unpublished, more legible form. I made that one because other folks wanted it.;)
Neep does not come in Unicode/ISO-10646 encoding. It was a mistake for me not to make Neep into a Unicode font to begin with. I apologize for the consequences of my ignorance.[*]
Related to the above points: Neep is composed of beautiful, legible, hand-tuned bitmaps, and i just plain have kein Bock mehr to make more and bigger sizes, not to mention merging the existing, improved, but unpublished ISO8859-* fonts with Markus Kuhn's[*] UCS-encoded ones. I really wish i had learned how to create and hint TrueType or OpenType fonts instead of making bitmaps, so i could be lazy and simply make two or three fonts instead of fifty-some.
I myself have pretty much stopped using Neep and am using Lucida Console (10 pt, 100 dpi) instead[**] (though i still wish i could find actual bold, italic, and bold-italic variants so that i could use it with nedit).
If someone is interested in maintaining jmk-x11-fonts further, using the improved, unpublished edition, feel free to contact me (address is listed at the bottom of this page). Note, though, that i'm liable to be slightly cranky, and i may not hand these over to just anyone; i'd prefer for the design goals and aesthetic sense to be preserved, since they do have my name on them....
[Sigh.] Success's sword has two edges. (And yes, Brainchild = Jim Knoble).
________________
[*] Markus Kuhn has converted the most recently (year-and-half-old) published version of Neep into Unicode fonts. I'm not sure whether he's published them or not; check here. I have them, though, and (as i mention above) am partway through the process of merging them with subsequent changes in the ISO-8859-* fonts. If enough folks ask (and it's okay with Markus), i suppose i could publish them if they're not available at his site.
[**] I've been through several iterations of "there must be something else out there that has what i want", and i continually come up with this:
Andale Mono is nice, but it has too much leading (at least, after getting used to the Lucida type family) and its punctuation is too light.
Lucida Sans Typewriter has the single-quote problem in XFree86-3.3.x, and it's neither TrueType nor UCS-encoded.
Courier New has too much leading, is too light in normal weight and too heavy in bold weight, and is much too ugly in any weight.
While i realize that living in Michigan can turn
the most world-savvy cosmopolitan into a drooling
provincial, what the hell is michael thinking with this Eastern Standard Time crap? Hello, and welcome to the Age of the Internet, folks! Why don't we do this in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), since that's what it's there for? Or, at the very least, let's move into the Neolithic period and use Internet Be@ts.
Would you believe, too, that the Earth isn't flat? That's how Mir is able to actually be
in orbit....
ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
There's 225 million American, 5.8 billion other people on this planet, most whom don't speak English
and don't write in modified, vowel poor, aplhabets.
Can you say "ASCII is cutting us off from big potential markets?" Sure... I knew you could...
Unicode will spread because it's NEEDED.
Actually, sending ASCII is equivalent to sending text in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode/ISO-10646, since characters 0x0..0xff are exactly the same in both encodings. UTF-8 is a widely accepted encoding of Unicode. Hence, using ASCII is transparently upward-compatible with Unicode, while using 8-bit encodings such as ISO-8859-x or Windows Code Page 125x is not.
So when we have software that's actually capable of displaying the full range of UTF-8-encoded text, complete with character composition and correct bidirectional algorithms, then ASCII will just work.
However, note that some folks don't like Unicode due to the Unified Han space. While Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems all share a set of similar glyph shapes, the style of writing them differs among writing systems: there are styles that are recognizably Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The actual glyph shapes, of course depend on the font that's being used. So, for example, if you have a document that contains text in both Chinese and Japanese, you have two choices:
Pick one. Use either a "Chinese" or "Japanese" Unicode font to display the entire document. You might as well raise your middle finger to readers from the place you didn't pick.
Use different fonts to display the Chinese section and the Japanese section. Suddenly you don't have plain text anymore, but a document that requires font metatext to travel with it. You might as well use the system of different encodings we have now, since that already works.
In my humble but terribly insightful opinion, the differences between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean styles of the Han character space are equivalent to the differences between similar-looking characters in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, which do have separate characters for "Uppercase Latin letter A", "Uppercase Greek letter Alpha", and "Uppercase Cyrillic letter A" in the Unicode spec.
Unlike the "real" dos, for instance, it won't do
command line argument interpolation. If you feed a program you've written a filename including a whildcard,
it doesn't recognize it as such and just feeds the name, wildcard and all, to the program. In "real" DOS,
OTOH, it expands the wildcard so that your program actually receives a list.
Huh? When did DOS start doing this? The last i remember, a program got whatever you put on the command line, with no interpretation other than parsing words separated by spaces as separate arguments. To expand wildcards, you had to call an MS-DOS interrupt with a 'find first' and then 'find next' functions. Admittedly, the last time i did this was MS-DOS-4.x, but still... has the architecture changed that much?
Interesting, I have a.cx domain, and I know www.nic.cx used to be hosted in.au
nic.cx has been planet-three.co.uk for quite some time. And you should have gotten email recently (within the last 30 or 45 days) noting changes in the.cx structure, in particular that nic.cx -> niccx.com.
When I first started using WindowMaker I thought the lack of a pager was a glaring omission, but it's [sic] absence forced me to use the kbd shortcuts which are WAY faster than mouse clicks.
And if you build Window Maker from source (and your X server is set up properly), you can use your mouse's scrollwheel to switch between workspaces by "scrolling" on the root window.
To do this:
Ensure that MOUSE_WS_SWITCH is defined in src/wconfig.h.in
Optionally, change the sense of the scrollwheel in src/event.c [hint: change the sign in the calls to wWorkspaceRelativeChange() near line 638].
The most recent problem with SSH 1.xx and OpenSSH is that they link against RSAREF [...]
SSH 1.2.x only links against RSAREF if you tell it to. This is only an issue for places where the RSA patent is valid (which, by the way, expires in September of this year).
OpenSSH doesn't link against RSAREF. It links against OpenSSL, which may or may not link against RSAREF, depending on how it was compiled. Again, same patent deal applies. Regardless, if i recall correctly, the problem in RSAREF did not affect OpenSSL (and hence OpenSSH), only SSH 1.2.x
In short, RSAREF is only a potential problem if you use SSH 1.2.x in the USA until September.
Open-source software is about providing software so people don't have to pay for it
Whoa, there, Trigger!
Open source software is not at all about price tags. It's about things like reliability, peer review, consumers' freedom to fix things that are broken or make needed enhancements, and developers' freedom to reuse others' work (not necessarily in that order).
A side effect of open source software can often be a lower total cost of ownership, but it has never, ever been ``so that people don't have to pay for it''. You're confusing beer with speech.
It's particularly important to get this right, otherwise many businesses will shirk open source software because they'll believe they have to give their software away in order to make it open source.
Anyone in the world, can learn how to work in tech support. It's basic memorization, there is no real math or intelligence skills required. All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too.
*Bzzzzzzt* Thanks for playing, Scott.
Tech support is significantly more than ``basic memorization''. In particular, quality technical support requires the following:
(1) A thorough understanding of the domain for which the support is being offered. Basic memorization does not necessarily correlate with actual understanding---a grasp of how parts of a system actually relate is necessary as well. Such a grasp requires some level of intelligence.
(2) Problem analysis skills. In order to solve a customer's problem effectively, i need to be able to understand and analyze a problem, often without having actual access to the software, hardware, or network that is experiencing or causing the problem. I have to be able to wrap my brain around the problem and come up with one or more possible diagnoses for the problem, think about their probable cause, and invent experiments (verbal or otherwise) to test whether the diagnoses are correct---all with the cooperation of the customer! That's damn close to a scientific method, is it not?
(3) Supreme communication skills. If i cannot communicate effectively---using the written word, the spoken word, or both---i will be utterly unable to provide quality technical support, chiefly because i won't be able to find out what the actual symptoms of the problem are. Being able to communicate effectively in a way that the customer understands is a skill which many equate with intelligence (consider job or scholarship interviews, for example). (4) Patience and a sense of humor. Without either of these, a technical support rep would go insane after a short amount of time on the job. Obviously, neither of these qualities depends much on intelligence, but they're requisite to do a good job. --jim
Slashdot Mirror
I think the guy fourth from the left is a pretty damned ugly, hairy bastard.
And the one second from the right is downright evil-looking. He looks just like the German ones i've seen in those WWII movies.
:)
Come on, dude ... find any picture of any police officer in 1920 and he'll look scary, because that's what uniforms looked like in the 1920s. Some uniforms still looked that way in the 1930s and 1940s too. Get over it.
That's not reporting ... that's vitriol. Can anyone supply an actual impartial view, or at the very least a balanced one that includes biased views from both parties? I would have expected a link to a counterview in the so-called "story" on the front page of Slashdot, in fact....
Actually, i believe it was the more apt: "Welcome to the desert of the Real."
Wow. Just when you think something has fallen off into relative obscurity, it pops up in comments like the one above.
Unfortunately, Neep was a rather good first try. The last published version is over a year and a half old now, and suffers from several problems:
I myself have pretty much stopped using Neep and am using Lucida Console (10 pt, 100 dpi) instead[**] (though i still wish i could find actual bold, italic, and bold-italic variants so that i could use it with nedit).
Regardless, if you must get Neep, please get it from http://www.jmknoble.cx/fonts/ rather than the place that points to. Web pages move easily, but jmknoble.cx is likely to stick around for quite a while.
If someone is interested in maintaining jmk-x11-fonts further, using the improved, unpublished edition, feel free to contact me (address is listed at the bottom of this page). Note, though, that i'm liable to be slightly cranky, and i may not hand these over to just anyone; i'd prefer for the design goals and aesthetic sense to be preserved, since they do have my name on them....
[Sigh.] Success's sword has two edges. (And yes, Brainchild = Jim Knoble).
________________
[*] Markus Kuhn has converted the most recently (year-and-half-old) published version of Neep into Unicode fonts. I'm not sure whether he's published them or not; check here. I have them, though, and (as i mention above) am partway through the process of merging them with subsequent changes in the ISO-8859-* fonts. If enough folks ask (and it's okay with Markus), i suppose i could publish them if they're not available at his site.
[**] I've been through several iterations of "there must be something else out there that has what i want", and i continually come up with this:
- Andale Mono is nice, but it has too much leading (at least, after getting used to the Lucida type family) and its punctuation is too light.
- Lucida Sans Typewriter has the single-quote problem in XFree86-3.3.x, and it's neither TrueType nor UCS-encoded.
- Courier New has too much leading, is too light in normal weight and too heavy in bold weight, and is much too ugly in any weight.
- None of the other easily available monospace fonts look as good or legible to me as Lucida Console.
Oh well.Would you believe, too, that the Earth isn't flat? That's how Mir is able to actually be in orbit....
There's 225 million American, 5.8 billion other people on this planet, most whom don't speak English and don't write in modified, vowel poor, aplhabets.
Can you say "ASCII is cutting us off from big potential markets?" Sure... I knew you could...
Unicode will spread because it's NEEDED.
Actually, sending ASCII is equivalent to sending text in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode/ISO-10646, since characters 0x0..0xff are exactly the same in both encodings. UTF-8 is a widely accepted encoding of Unicode. Hence, using ASCII is transparently upward-compatible with Unicode, while using 8-bit encodings such as ISO-8859-x or Windows Code Page 125x is not.
So when we have software that's actually capable of displaying the full range of UTF-8-encoded text, complete with character composition and correct bidirectional algorithms, then ASCII will just work.
However, note that some folks don't like Unicode due to the Unified Han space. While Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems all share a set of similar glyph shapes, the style of writing them differs among writing systems: there are styles that are recognizably Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The actual glyph shapes, of course depend on the font that's being used. So, for example, if you have a document that contains text in both Chinese and Japanese, you have two choices:
In my humble but terribly insightful opinion, the differences between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean styles of the Han character space are equivalent to the differences between similar-looking characters in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, which do have separate characters for "Uppercase Latin letter A", "Uppercase Greek letter Alpha", and "Uppercase Cyrillic letter A" in the Unicode spec.
But then, what do i know?
Huh? When did DOS start doing this? The last i remember, a program got whatever you put on the command line, with no interpretation other than parsing words separated by spaces as separate arguments. To expand wildcards, you had to call an MS-DOS interrupt with a 'find first' and then 'find next' functions. Admittedly, the last time i did this was MS-DOS-4.x, but still ... has the architecture changed that much?
nic.cx has been planet-three.co.uk for quite some time. And you should have gotten email recently (within the last 30 or 45 days) noting changes in the .cx structure, in particular that nic.cx -> niccx.com.
And if you build Window Maker from source (and your X server is set up properly), you can use your mouse's scrollwheel to switch between workspaces by "scrolling" on the root window.
To do this:
SSH 1.2.x only links against RSAREF if you tell it to. This is only an issue for places where the RSA patent is valid (which, by the way, expires in September of this year).
OpenSSH doesn't link against RSAREF. It links against OpenSSL, which may or may not link against RSAREF, depending on how it was compiled. Again, same patent deal applies. Regardless, if i recall correctly, the problem in RSAREF did not affect OpenSSL (and hence OpenSSH), only SSH 1.2.x
In short, RSAREF is only a potential problem if you use SSH 1.2.x in the USA until September.
Ack. Don't use stow. Use epkg and the encap package format, if that's what you want to do.
Whoa, there, Trigger!
Open source software is not at all about price tags. It's about things like reliability, peer review, consumers' freedom to fix things that are broken or make needed enhancements, and developers' freedom to reuse others' work (not necessarily in that order).
A side effect of open source software can often be a lower total cost of ownership, but it has never, ever been ``so that people don't have to pay for it''. You're confusing beer with speech.
It's particularly important to get this right, otherwise many businesses will shirk open source software because they'll believe they have to give their software away in order to make it open source.
--jim
Anyone in the world, can learn how to work in tech support. It's basic memorization, there is no real math or intelligence skills required. All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too.
*Bzzzzzzt* Thanks for playing, Scott.
Tech support is significantly more than ``basic memorization''. In particular, quality technical support requires the following:
(1) A thorough understanding of the domain for which the support is being offered. Basic memorization does not necessarily correlate with actual understanding---a grasp of how parts of a system actually relate is necessary as well. Such a grasp requires some level of intelligence.
(2) Problem analysis skills. In order to solve a customer's problem effectively, i need to be able to understand and analyze a problem, often without having actual access to the software, hardware, or network that is experiencing or causing the problem. I have to be able to wrap my brain around the problem and come up with one or more possible diagnoses for the problem, think about their probable cause, and invent experiments (verbal or otherwise) to test whether the diagnoses are correct---all with the cooperation of the customer! That's damn close to a scientific method, is it not?
(3) Supreme communication skills. If i cannot communicate effectively---using the written word, the spoken word, or both---i will be utterly unable to provide quality technical support, chiefly because i won't be able to find out what the actual symptoms of the problem are. Being able to communicate effectively in a way that the customer understands is a skill which many equate with intelligence (consider job or scholarship interviews, for example). (4) Patience and a sense of humor. Without either of these, a technical support rep would go insane after a short amount of time on the job. Obviously, neither of these qualities depends much on intelligence, but they're requisite to do a good job. --jim