I'll bite the troll... and will give an example from personal experience.
In our lab here, there are plots created with stuff like WingZ (NeXT based spreadsheet/plotting program) and AppsoftDraw (a visio like program) -- both type of plots from about 1995.... The programs no longer exist. We don't even bother to make changes to them.
On the other hand, we also have plots created with gnuplot, xfig, and much older documents created with latex. They all work as if they are created just now...
In this particular case, people behind latex and xfig have incentive to keep working on them -- and it wouldn't really matter that much even if all the development with latex and xfig stop. Just like the core components of emacs, the development occurs at galactic time scales, but that is not a big deal...
I am a layman when it comes to physics, but let me put in my layman's two cents in...
Science normally deals with things that we observe, and scientists try to find out the whys and the hows. Once in a while, though there are things that are sometimes theoretically identified before, and it may be a while before such things are actually observed.
There are criminal acts such as robbing a bank, or malicious pranks such as removing stop signs at intersections that endanger public safety (I remember news about some kids doing it and causing an accident, and they went to jail). However, classifying those acts as "terrorist acts" instead of regular crimes makes it very likely that in some cases the punishment would be disproportionately high when compared with the crime.
Drawing a line is a tough thing, but one thing to be concerned about is that under given socio-political climate, getting charged under some terrorist laws means that often guilt is presumed...
I reached the conclusion of "two filters better than humans" by using two sequential filters: server side spamassassin, and a couple of simple procmail recipes. They have kept almost all the SPAM away.
However, it is good to see such good techniques becoming available and we can hope to see them as straight forward usable tools.
So, when will mozilla/TB (or your favourite server side or client side filter) get them?
"what a great way to make sure a great invention never makes it big. I predict that in 10 years it will still have less than 5% market share. kind of like linux."
As opposed to, say, commercial stuff like Irix, which are...
Some of these big things in the world have been based on "free" service, and don't indeed "give the shaft". Redcross, public domain art work, literature, and scientific material.
Most of the stuff in life is better when it is not paid for (e.g. love/sex, friendships, politicians, a speech/event at the local social/religious gathering, directions at the gas station in a new town, a recipe from friends, etc). A visit to the "free" national/state parks can be as refreshing as, if not more than, visiting a disney themepark.
was a little disappointed that after decades of popularity there was still not even the simplest wysiwyg apps for it, and decent documentation was rare as diamonds
You can do a texdoc or texdoctk (texdoctk actually highlights categories that you can explore and learn new things).
There is a lot of free documentation (see tug.org.in), and http://www.tug.org/interest.html#doc
S
Re:Why are genetically defective people breeding?
on
Three Blind Phreaks
·
· Score: 1
Hold on there... You are probably trolling, and I'll bite... I will resist comparison with Hitler and all...
I can understand the first kid coming out blind, but when that happened, the parents should have stopped breeding.
May be the parents didn't know much about genetic disorders and were just hoping that the new borns will be fine -- also, the first child was fine. Hope in the face of setbacks has been one of the biggest strengths of humanity (and of all life forms in general).
but at least two of them should never have been born.
Just to paraphrase a statement from LOTR, don't be quick to give out death as a judgement. Many that deserve to die live, and many that deserve to live die.
There are several extensions that I find indispensible:
(a) Adblock: block images/scripts/etc based on URL patterns. As simple as right clicking an image/iframe and saying Adblock image/iframe.
(b) Nuke anything: right click on an object and remove it from the page (say, you are reading an article on CNN and a (relevant) picture makes the article look ugly, you can simply remove the object -- next time you reload, the picture will be there).
(c) Preferences toolbar: helps enable disable various options very easily (colors, scripts, cookies, images, popups, etc)
In case of Mozilla, if I need to do any web coding (say web page parsing), DOM inspector is wonderful.
I would venture to say that most linux and unix users are not very experienced with windows (WIN32) programming. In order to write a virus, one needs to be comfortable with the environment. Heck, even RMS + Linus + Alan Cox + Cmdr Taco together can't get a Melissa virus coded even if they sat on it for a long time -- if not due to lack of ability and motive, at least due to the lack on interest in using the tools needed to create such viruses.
Given the media's bent these days... They would have a long story of how "The war on steriods in sports" is going on, and will have showcase a great rivalry between two teams where half the players on each side have been traded to each other in the last couple of years:)
Some junior scripters and sysadmins that use perl probably haven't spent 1/100th time on "learning perl" as they would have spent on "learning C".
Consequently, people get stuck with a very limited set of tools in the language, and (many are stuck in the perl4 syntax I believe), and write code accordingly. To a newcomer that reads such code, it becomes a nightmare.
I found Visual Basic code written by someone very complicated. Turns out that the code was written in a very adhoc manner. Not being familiar with Visual Basic, I could have easily concluded VB is hard to read. Being mature:), I spent the time on asking for help and later easily understood the code.
The only reason for Perl's popularity is the elitists who get kicks out of other people not understanding their code. Perl encourages people to write very compact, easily readable code in perl. Ofcourse, some familiarity with basic syntax is needed. However, many people write code in perl just like they are writing AWK or C code.
Just to contrast, have you seen any C++ code generated by Visual Studio? How would that code look to someone not familiar with the environment?
Here is a cut down example of easy to understand code from the CGI page... well, lameness filter is complaining too much. Anyway, if you do perldoc CGI, you will see how it looks.
People who develop using Microsoft technology (.Net) are just insane. How long will it be before parts of the.Net Web Services XML formats are proprietary as well?
The people who develop using.Net can actually have it both ways. They can use the stuff from the open source community while still not contributing much (leeching). If the parts are proprietary, they will use an M$FT supplied.Net class to handle the data.
It has always been a case that people who are "friendly" towards unfair governments or organizations benefit more (at least in the short term, monetary sense). Just like the people who bought SCO stock at a couple of bucks when the lawsuit was announced.
They are not definitely insane.
S
Looks impressive... Needs some evangelism...
on
MandrakeSoft Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Things are really boding well for the linux desktop. I believe one main obstacle is for people to just know about what all can be done with a standard linux distro since there are so many nifty applications (my experience was with KDE and all little utils such as kdirstat).
Here is one example related to the need for evangelism: I have used latex very much, but only now, after killing some time on the net looking at related stuff, did I find information about "texdoc", a sort of a "browser for tex/latex". When I tried to look at texdoc, I found the shell showing texdoc and texdoctk, texdoctk has a GUI and a sort of a comprehensive reference. If it took me so much time to come across such a useful tidbit, imagine how much time it would take for someone that does not even have much interest in exploring. He/she would be stuck with cryptic menus
BTW, Mandrake's 10.0 beta looks impressive (KDE 3.2Pre Linux 2.6.1 (+2.4.25)), and the bittorrent link is at here
If it weren't for a single company dominating PC software, there would be a lot less motivation to find an open source alternatives. Without Microsoft, the choice was (and probably still would be) between several crappy closed source software venders.
The whole FSF, and BSD/MIT licenses were up well before M$FT was even a big player. It was a time when there were a lot of unix players.
GNU has its origins "GNU's not Unix"
S
I have had a similar experience with Illustrator. I had to embed some eps figures (complex math equations made from latex, with fonts embedded in the eps). Acrobat shows the pdf fine, but illustrator has a lot of problems.
Turns out that Illustrator doesn't want people to use unauthorized fonts. So, I copy the latex fonts to distiller directory and try to view the equations -- they are messed up, because latex shifts the fonts a bit (characters in the fonts) to accomodate other viewers, and that shifted font table is inside the eps. So, I get strange characters in the equations *after taking care of putting in the fonts at the right place*.
I believe in this case, the rule was, "thou shall not pirate fonts." Doesn't matter if the fonts are 20 yr old fonts in public domain.
Over simplified rules "thou shall not photocopy money" are similar in spirit to the Talebanesque rules like "thou shall not look at another woman's face". Duh, I may be the only doc around and if the woman has a tumor on her face (or other, more private parts), I should be able to see it to cure it.
Pal, you mis-interpreted me. There is no defence or bashing involved.
My post was in the context of "success of bad plots". Mind you, I didn't generalize the stuff to hollywood movies (I have a high opinion of them*), or some decent TV shows (they are getting rarer and rarer, as expeceted, as the number of channels and shows keeps increasing).
S
* The budget of a chick flick "Monolisa Smile" far exceeds the record for the biggest budget ever for a Bollywood flick ("The Hero"). If I am not wrong, the buget for "The Hero" was Rs. 50 crore (500 million indian rupees, which is approximately equal to about 10-12 mil US dollars).
Slashdot Mirror
SCOX went up after the ruling, though it fell over 10% during the day (the net is still down 8%), so it is a good thing :).
SCO may try to spin it as a positive for them, though I do not see how any of it can be positive...
S
I'll bite the troll... and will give an example from personal experience.
In our lab here, there are plots created with stuff like WingZ (NeXT based spreadsheet/plotting program) and AppsoftDraw (a visio like program) -- both type of plots from about 1995.... The programs no longer exist. We don't even bother to make changes to them.
On the other hand, we also have plots created with gnuplot, xfig, and much older documents created with latex. They all work as if they are created just now...
In this particular case, people behind latex and xfig have incentive to keep working on them -- and it wouldn't really matter that much even if all the development with latex and xfig stop. Just like the core components of emacs, the development occurs at galactic time scales, but that is not a big deal...
S
I am a layman when it comes to physics, but let me put in my layman's two cents in...
Science normally deals with things that we observe, and scientists try to find out the whys and the hows. Once in a while, though there are things that are sometimes theoretically identified before, and it may be a while before such things are actually observed.
S
There are criminal acts such as robbing a bank, or malicious pranks such as removing stop signs at intersections that endanger public safety (I remember news about some kids doing it and causing an accident, and they went to jail). However, classifying those acts as "terrorist acts" instead of regular crimes makes it very likely that in some cases the punishment would be disproportionately high when compared with the crime.
Drawing a line is a tough thing, but one thing to be concerned about is that under given socio-political climate, getting charged under some terrorist laws means that often guilt is presumed...
S
I reached the conclusion of "two filters better than humans" by using two sequential filters:
server side spamassassin, and a couple of simple procmail recipes. They have kept almost all the SPAM away.
However, it is good to see such good techniques becoming available and we can hope to see them as straight forward usable tools.
So, when will mozilla/TB (or your favourite server side or client side filter) get them?
S
"what a great way to make sure a great invention never makes it big. I predict that in 10 years it will still have less than 5% market share. kind of like linux."
...
As opposed to, say, commercial stuff like Irix, which are
S
Someone has to state the obvious...
Some of these big things in the world have been based on "free" service, and don't indeed "give the shaft". Redcross, public domain art work, literature, and scientific material.
Most of the stuff in life is better when it is not paid for (e.g. love/sex, friendships, politicians, a speech/event at the local social/religious gathering, directions at the gas station in a new town, a recipe from friends, etc). A visit to the "free" national/state parks can be as refreshing as, if not more than, visiting a disney themepark.
S
"You can sterilize a robot. But you cannot do the same to an astronaut."
With a chopping block and a knife....
You can use konstruct for installing the system in a personal directory (to get a sense of how it runs), without touching your main directory.
:(
Bugs... I noticed that my screen locking (KDE and also xlock) doesn't work at all with 3.2 RC1
S
I am sure M$FT will spin it as if this is an innovative feature.
S
was a little disappointed that after decades of popularity there was still not even the simplest wysiwyg apps for it, and decent documentation was rare as diamonds
You can do a texdoc or texdoctk (texdoctk actually highlights categories that you can explore and learn new things).
There is a lot of free documentation (see tug.org.in), and http://www.tug.org/interest.html#doc
S
Hold on there... You are probably trolling, and I'll bite... I will resist comparison with Hitler and all...
I can understand the first kid coming out blind, but when that happened, the parents should have stopped breeding.
May be the parents didn't know much about genetic disorders and were just hoping that the new borns will be fine -- also, the first child was fine. Hope in the face of setbacks has been one of the biggest strengths of humanity (and of all life forms in general).
but at least two of them should never have been born.
Just to paraphrase a statement from LOTR, don't be quick to give out death as a judgement. Many that deserve to die live, and many that deserve to live die.
S
There are several extensions that I find indispensible:
(a) Adblock: block images/scripts/etc based on URL patterns. As simple as right clicking an image/iframe and saying Adblock image/iframe.
(b) Nuke anything: right click on an object and remove it from the page (say, you are reading an article on CNN and a (relevant) picture makes the article look ugly, you can simply remove the object -- next time you reload, the picture will be there).
(c) Preferences toolbar: helps enable disable various options very easily (colors, scripts, cookies, images, popups, etc)
In case of Mozilla, if I need to do any web coding (say web page parsing), DOM inspector is wonderful.
S
Linux on it seems kind of unfair to Microsoft since it's unlikely ... That'd put an end to the Linux leeches buying them to use as cheap hardware.
M$FT doesn't have problems with people paying for DELL boxes only to load linux on them.
S
I would venture to say that most linux and unix users are not very experienced with windows (WIN32) programming. In order to write a virus, one needs to be comfortable with the environment. Heck, even RMS + Linus + Alan Cox + Cmdr Taco together can't get a Melissa virus coded even if they sat on it for a long time -- if not due to lack of ability and motive, at least due to the lack on interest in using the tools needed to create such viruses.
S
Given the media's bent these days... They would have a long story of how "The war on steriods in sports" is going on, and will have showcase a great rivalry between two teams where half the players on each side have been traded to each other in the last couple of years :)
S
A lot depends on how much you had to pay for the girl^H^H^H^H phone -- and the problems with all the viruses and all.
S
Some junior scripters and sysadmins that use perl probably haven't spent 1/100th time on "learning perl" as they would have spent on "learning C".
:), I spent the time on asking for help and later easily understood the code.
Consequently, people get stuck with a very limited set of tools in the language, and (many are stuck in the perl4 syntax I believe), and write code accordingly. To a newcomer that reads such code, it becomes a nightmare.
I found Visual Basic code written by someone very complicated. Turns out that the code was written in a very adhoc manner. Not being familiar with Visual Basic, I could have easily concluded VB is hard to read. Being mature
S
The only reason for Perl's popularity is the elitists who get kicks out of other people not understanding their code.
Perl encourages people to write very compact, easily readable code in perl. Ofcourse, some familiarity with basic syntax is needed. However, many people write code in perl just like they are writing AWK or C code.
Just to contrast, have you seen any C++ code generated by Visual Studio? How would that code look to someone not familiar with the environment?
Here is a cut down example of easy to understand code from the CGI page... well, lameness filter is complaining too much. Anyway, if you do perldoc CGI, you will see how it looks.
S
People who develop using Microsoft technology (.Net) are just insane. How long will it be before parts of the .Net Web Services XML formats are proprietary as well?
.Net can actually have it both ways. They can use the stuff from the open source community while still not contributing much (leeching). If the parts are proprietary, they will use an M$FT supplied .Net class to handle the data.
The people who develop using
It has always been a case that people who are "friendly" towards unfair governments or organizations benefit more (at least in the short term, monetary sense). Just like the people who bought SCO stock at a couple of bucks when the lawsuit was announced.
They are not definitely insane.
S
Things are really boding well for the linux desktop. I believe one main obstacle is for people to just know about what all can be done with a standard linux distro since there are so many nifty applications (my experience was with KDE and all little utils such as kdirstat).
Here is one example related to the need for evangelism: I have used latex very much, but only now, after killing some time on the net looking at related stuff, did I find information about "texdoc", a sort of a "browser for tex/latex". When I tried to look at texdoc, I found the shell showing texdoc and texdoctk, texdoctk has a GUI and a sort of a comprehensive reference. If it took me so much time to come across such a useful tidbit, imagine how much time it would take for someone that does not even have much interest in exploring. He/she would be stuck with cryptic menus
BTW, Mandrake's 10.0 beta looks impressive (KDE 3.2Pre Linux 2.6.1 (+2.4.25)), and the bittorrent link is at here
S
The whole FSF, and BSD/MIT licenses were up well before M$FT was even a big player. It was a time when there were a lot of unix players. GNU has its origins "GNU's not Unix" S
I have had a similar experience with Illustrator. I had to embed some eps figures (complex math equations made from latex, with fonts embedded in the eps). Acrobat shows the pdf fine, but illustrator has a lot of problems.
Turns out that Illustrator doesn't want people to use unauthorized fonts. So, I copy the latex fonts to distiller directory and try to view the equations -- they are messed up, because latex shifts the fonts a bit (characters in the fonts) to accomodate other viewers, and that shifted font table is inside the eps. So, I get strange characters in the equations *after taking care of putting in the fonts at the right place*.
I believe in this case, the rule was, "thou shall not pirate fonts." Doesn't matter if the fonts are
20 yr old fonts in public domain.
Over simplified rules "thou shall not photocopy money" are similar in spirit to the Talebanesque rules like "thou shall not look at another woman's face". Duh, I may be the only doc around and if the woman has a tumor on her face (or other, more private parts), I should be able to see it to cure it.
S
Someone mod parent up...
Whoever you are, anon, very well said. Very insightful indeed. Please reveal your id so that I can put you on my friend list...
S
Pal, you mis-interpreted me. There is no defence or bashing involved.
My post was in the context of "success of bad plots". Mind you, I didn't generalize the stuff to hollywood movies (I have a high opinion of them*), or some decent TV shows (they are getting rarer and rarer, as expeceted, as the number of channels and shows keeps increasing).
S
* The budget of a chick flick "Monolisa Smile" far exceeds the record for the biggest budget ever for a Bollywood flick ("The Hero"). If I am not wrong, the buget for "The Hero" was Rs. 50 crore (500 million indian rupees, which is approximately equal to about 10-12 mil US dollars).