Ok. How about books that have some philosophical meat on which to chew. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged spring to mind. (Parenthetically, while I wouldn't say I'm an "objectivist", I just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I was recently perusing the hof when I saw
this interview with Ralph Nader. Read his answer to question 3. Nader is a deeply immoral man.)
Back to the question. You could just try a different genre than scifi/techno-thriller. How about crime noir (Raymond Chandler's books) or some serious historical writing (try reading Shelby Foote's series on the Civil War).
I realise that this may not be exactly what you are looking for, but geek encompasses a lot more than specifically technical or fantasy/sci-fi writing. Part of being a geek is the ability to immerse deeply in and think critically about the task at hand. Philosophy, history, culture, ethics, theology... Good literature that grapples with deep questions is always worth exploring.
First the cheap shot:) mason.org is some guy's homepage and has nothing to do with Mason.
More substantially, however, your comparison is ridiculous. Mason is not a programming language. I could say "Perl? You've got to be kidding! BinaryCloud (or ezContentManager or Roadsend Sitemanager etc) is a better solution." That, however, is comparing apples to oranges: perl is a language, the application server/CMS/apis that I mentioned happen to be implemented in php, but they are not languages...
Even if I take your comparison at face value though, it immediately falls down. PHP, you tell me, is the epitome of mixing content and presentation while Mason is the way to truth and light. Yet when i go to the Mason home page the first thing I see trumpeted is that Mason allows you to (drumroll please) EMBED Perl CODE IN YOUR HTML!!!
Pardon my Irony, but this is too much. I write php code for a living and use templates religiously so as to keep the presentation seperated from the content as much as possible. PHP, like most web-oriented languages out there, allows for a quick and dirty code-and-html-all-mixed-together style. But nobody is forcing you to use it. If you want to be a language bigot, at least be cool and learn Lisp. But don't compare my language of choice to your application framework and say that's a valid comparison. And don't stereotype my code based on the way you may choose to use the language...
This makes complete sense to me based on personal experience. I work for a web shop and some users complain who see javascript errors in the status bar at the bottom of IE. It usually isn't affecting them, but users don't like to see errors!
If the major browser makers would include this feature (even when they still have code to work around non-standard stuff) html compliance would soar.
Even aside from that, having compliance validation right in the browser would be helpful to me as a programmer... I often don't go to the enormous hassle of using the w3c's online validator... a 'right in the browser' check would probably help...
I am also fascinated by the idea of straw bale construction. I intend to build a house using nebraska style (load bearing) straw bale construction and have been reading as much about it as possible.
Some of the earliest straw bale homes were built around the turn of the century (see this paper for a few details) and still seem to have good structural integrity... Aside from that I would hesitate to make any extravagant claims about the length of time straw bale structures might last.
In addition to the other points mentioned, however, I would add a few of my own to consider.
Energy efficiency. If the environmental arguments don't grab you, perhaps the monetary ones would. With an insulative value of > R50 and signifigant thermal mass, straw bale homes pose a variety of advantages on both the heating and cooling fronts. What advantages/disadvantages do other technologies hold?
Sustainability of the construction methods. Now as a fan of people like Julian Simon, I don't tend to be much impressed by arguments that we're "running out of raw materials!". Human ingenuity tends to make the supply of raw materials infinite, simply by changing what is considered valuable. That said, here in CA there are vast quantities of rice straw that (as of 2000) it is illegal to burn. That means that not only is it ecologically friendly to use that "waste product" of agriculture, it is also extremely affordable!
Last, but not least, is the economics of the whole idea of housing. Even in a "white collar" job that is considered privileged by most, housing is quite expensive. Where I live (in the central valley) the wages for IT professionals is 1/2 to 1/3 the wages in the Bay Area. Housing is proportionally less expensive, but new houses with small lots in my city start around $200k. Spending 250-300k is not difficult... but I don't have that kind of money yet and am not eager to commit to a 30 year $300k mortgage. In part my solution is to choose building methods that are inherently less expensive and that allow for the possibility of significant 'unskilled' labor in the construction of the home. Not only does this satisfy my pocketbook, but being involved in the construction, design, etc satisfies my hobbyist side.
So what about it? It's fun to speculate as if money were no object, but has anyone else researched alternative construction methods that have advantages over the traditional frame construction? Has anybody actually done this?
Well I was trying to be funny... But I am sorta serious.
I don't know about anybody else, but I keep my "work" mp3 collection on a ide hd that belongs to me and isn't actually screwed to the frame... My case is kept unscrewed and I figure if my boss ever gets audited by the IRS or BSA, my mp3 hd would come free and get tucked in my jacket in approx. 15 seconds. Course, if it was all encrypted on the drive (and something better than 64 bit DES) I might not have to bother...
Good point. I noticed the same thing... It's nice that Linux supports PPPOE nowadays, but as far as i could tell it was impossible to get my Mandrake distro on the net without installing their software on a windows partition, running through their installation program, and then going back to Linux with the username and password...
Also I think my install directions said that win9x/ME was the only user installed supported system. If you ran winNT4/2K and did the install yourself, don't call them for tech support on the install (which was a bit of a pain with 3 different CDs just to get nic card drivers, the dsl modem drivers, and their "Enternet" software.)
Not to be totally negative though... Since getting the install done I've used my dsl regularly for something like 9 months without a single service outage...
I'm going to give their "incredible new features" a pass though...
This is slightly offtopic, but i've been dying to say this for some time now...
I keep seeing people who say they *had* to buy 700meg cd's to burn the isos... That wasn't an option for me as i have an ancient HP-650 cdr (650megs only). So, if (and i suspect a lot of us are doing this) you are dual booting your system there is an easy solution. Download the isos to your existing windows partition and unpack the files to a common directory (lots of freeware windows apps out there, i used isobuster).
Then just make a boot disk (.exes to do so are included with the mandrake distro) and select the hd.img. This allows you to do your install from a hardrive instead of a CD. Reboot to the floppy, correctly guess the partition your windows install is sitting on, and select the directory with the files in it... Install goes quicker, no switching of disks is required, and no CD-Rs were wasted...
Of course if you are looking for a good excuse to convince the wife that a hardware upgrade is absolutely necessary... disregard all i've said and get a spiffy new burner.
OK, am really responding to the.sig, not the comment, so mod me down as offtopic, I guess...
Adolf Hitler would be delighted to see plenty of justification for the shoah just by watching how israël acts
I really do have to take exception, however, to expressing such a sentiment. Let me list the ways in which this is flagrantly wrong.
First, you are implying that there can be justification for genocide. Now most people, from the Noam Chomsky left to the Pat Buchanan right, seem to be able to agree that there is no justification at all for genocide... It doesn't matter if you think Isreal is right, wrong, or if you think Israel is commiting genocide itself in its actions towards the Palestinians (which, I presume, is what you are referencing).
Secondly, not only are you claiming justification for mass murder, but you seem to be arguing from the typical anti-semitic viewpoint: Jews are evil and must be destroyed. I say this because you aren't suggesting that today's israel should be punished for actions you disagree with, you are claiming that Hitler was right in his desire to destroy the Jews and paint them as the source of evil in Germany. In effect, you are claiming that modern Israels actions are retroactively legitimating Hitler's intentions (and no one can deny that they were profoundly anti-semitic). The destruction of European jewry in the holocaust was a great evil, a crime of tremendous magnitude, period. This is true no matter what modern day Jews may do.
Lastly, you are actually hurting your own cause by espousing such rascist and offensive ideas. I might be inclined to sympathise with your sentiments if you criticised Israel in a more constructive matter (you could even invoke the holocaust (if you must) by saying something like "You would think a people who had undergone incredible oppression like the shoah would make every attempt to avoid oppressing others.") I recently read a book written by an aquaintance of mine, Art Gish, about his experiences in Hebron as part of a peace team, and have somewhat modified my views on realising that the lunatics on the Israeli settler fringe are just as stupid and violent as the Hamas "the Zionists must be pushed into the sea" terrorists. Reading an idiotic comment about the holocaust, however, gives me an urge to put an Israeli flag on my car and a Star of David on my jacket as a sign of solidarity with Israel against anti-semites.
Those of you looking for additional perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict might check out Hebron Journal for a first hand account...
For Pig Hogger, however, i have some other reading suggestions. Try reading and applying this book on critical thinking before you make any more editorial comments on the holocaust.
First of all, windows2000 is not 3 cd's, it is one. This was not a real install of win2000. This was a use of a propreitary 'recovery tool' supplied by sony. The ads and cd swapping do not occur when you use a fresh install of windows
Ok, good point. This isn't a truly fair comparison- installing from a *real* Win2k is probably a lot easier. That said, obviously to those who get their computers from sony, this is a real install. I've done a few of these for a friend (courtesy of the HP pavilion's "you don't really get an os with this computer so use our 'recovery' disks" policy) and they are a pita.
Even given the limitations of the story, i think the punchline is a message to emphasize when talking about linux. People are unneccessarily intimidated by the idea of installing linux.
I recently installed Mandrake8.1 on my win2k system at home. I was shocked (last linux install i did was slackware about 4 years ago and it wanted to know the dataword size on my machine, how big the clusters on my hd should be, etc). Mandrake not only auto detected my hardware, it automatically detected my adsl connection and installed a PPOE client and connects automatically when i boot into linux. By contrast on my win2k partition i had a 3 cd procedure to get my alcatel modem drivers, the ethernet drivers, and run a custom app (<sarcasm>cleverly<sarcasm> named Enternet) in order to get my connection up and going.
So am i saying that it's easier to install mandrake than win2k? Not yet, but getting close...I wouldn't rate the article a complete troll
Please don't knock php as "hackish" programming and then praise perl. I could note that some of the most obfuscated code i ever see is written in perl. I won't.:)
Instead i'll note that the quality of the code in any programming language is all in how you write it. It's true that php lends itself very well to dropping snippets of code into html. As a professional web developer, however, i use php in "enterprise" applications everyday. phplib provides me with a templating class so that content and programming are completely separated, a OO html widgets class so that form elements are generated and automatically validated with client side javascript, a database abstraction class (switching from a prototype in mysql to the application with MS-SQL db is no problem), and fine tuned session and authentication classes.
Even php as a language itself works well in an enterprise context: c like syntax means training new new graduates is easy, OO (as of version 4, at any rate) is powerful, and the built in libraries are comparable, if not superior, to other scripting languages (regex and string/array/stack/list manipulation, everybody's got, but flash generation, pdf interaction, SOAP, xml-rpc... with php the riches go on and on).
Finally, I find mod_php to be very comparable in speed of execution to mod_perl (benchmarks here)with superior readability. All this to say: opinions are fine, but back them up with real world experience and real data. If you have had experience with php in an enterprise level application where the language or runtime failed to meet your needs, please share with/.! Otherwise, please don't run down my web-app language of choice with hearsay simply because you learned something else first...
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Ok. How about books that have some philosophical meat on which to chew. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged spring to mind. (Parenthetically, while I wouldn't say I'm an "objectivist", I just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I was recently perusing the hof when I saw this interview with Ralph Nader. Read his answer to question 3. Nader is a deeply immoral man.)
Back to the question. You could just try a different genre than scifi/techno-thriller. How about crime noir (Raymond Chandler's books) or some serious historical writing (try reading Shelby Foote's series on the Civil War).
I realise that this may not be exactly what you are looking for, but geek encompasses a lot more than specifically technical or fantasy/sci-fi writing. Part of being a geek is the ability to immerse deeply in and think critically about the task at hand. Philosophy, history, culture, ethics, theology... Good literature that grapples with deep questions is always worth exploring.
First the cheap shot :) mason.org is some guy's homepage and has nothing to do with Mason.
More substantially, however, your comparison is ridiculous. Mason is not a programming language. I could say "Perl? You've got to be kidding! BinaryCloud (or ezContentManager or Roadsend Sitemanager etc) is a better solution." That, however, is comparing apples to oranges: perl is a language, the application server/CMS/apis that I mentioned happen to be implemented in php, but they are not languages...
Even if I take your comparison at face value though, it immediately falls down. PHP, you tell me, is the epitome of mixing content and presentation while Mason is the way to truth and light. Yet when i go to the Mason home page the first thing I see trumpeted is that Mason allows you to (drumroll please) EMBED Perl CODE IN YOUR HTML!!!
Pardon my Irony, but this is too much. I write php code for a living and use templates religiously so as to keep the presentation seperated from the content as much as possible. PHP, like most web-oriented languages out there, allows for a quick and dirty code-and-html-all-mixed-together style. But nobody is forcing you to use it. If you want to be a language bigot, at least be cool and learn Lisp. But don't compare my language of choice to your application framework and say that's a valid comparison. And don't stereotype my code based on the way you may choose to use the language...
-regards
Simeon
Excellent idea! If i had mod points i'd up you.
This makes complete sense to me based on personal experience. I work for a web shop and some users complain who see javascript errors in the status bar at the bottom of IE. It usually isn't affecting them, but users don't like to see errors!
If the major browser makers would include this feature (even when they still have code to work around non-standard stuff) html compliance would soar.
Even aside from that, having compliance validation right in the browser would be helpful to me as a programmer... I often don't go to the enormous hassle of using the w3c's online validator... a 'right in the browser' check would probably help...
Some of the earliest straw bale homes were built around the turn of the century (see this paper for a few details) and still seem to have good structural integrity... Aside from that I would hesitate to make any extravagant claims about the length of time straw bale structures might last.
In addition to the other points mentioned, however, I would add a few of my own to consider.
So what about it? It's fun to speculate as if money were no object, but has anyone else researched alternative construction methods that have advantages over the traditional frame construction? Has anybody actually done this?
$500 to access a db? Shouldn't they at least offer free download of a flat file with the addresses?
Course if they do that, does anyone else see international spammers using the "opt-out" list as a db of known good emails?
Is it just me, or did anybody else misread his last response to be "Lobbying means lying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view".
Must have had my "Universal Translator" turned on...
Well I was trying to be funny... But I am sorta serious.
I don't know about anybody else, but I keep my "work" mp3 collection on a ide hd that belongs to me and isn't actually screwed to the frame... My case is kept unscrewed and I figure if my boss ever gets audited by the IRS or BSA, my mp3 hd would come free and get tucked in my jacket in approx. 15 seconds. Course, if it was all encrypted on the drive (and something better than 64 bit DES) I might not have to bother...
Does my mp3 collection count?
Good point. I noticed the same thing... It's nice that Linux supports PPPOE nowadays, but as far as i could tell it was impossible to get my Mandrake distro on the net without installing their software on a windows partition, running through their installation program, and then going back to Linux with the username and password...
Also I think my install directions said that win9x/ME was the only user installed supported system. If you ran winNT4/2K and did the install yourself, don't call them for tech support on the install (which was a bit of a pain with 3 different CDs just to get nic card drivers, the dsl modem drivers, and their "Enternet" software.)
Not to be totally negative though... Since getting the install done I've used my dsl regularly for something like 9 months without a single service outage...
I'm going to give their "incredible new features" a pass though...
This is slightly offtopic, but i've been dying to say this for some time now...
I keep seeing people who say they *had* to buy 700meg cd's to burn the isos... That wasn't an option for me as i have an ancient HP-650 cdr (650megs only). So, if (and i suspect a lot of us are doing this) you are dual booting your system there is an easy solution. Download the isos to your existing windows partition and unpack the files to a common directory (lots of freeware windows apps out there, i used isobuster).
Then just make a boot disk (.exes to do so are included with the mandrake distro) and select the hd.img. This allows you to do your install from a hardrive instead of a CD. Reboot to the floppy, correctly guess the partition your windows install is sitting on, and select the directory with the files in it... Install goes quicker, no switching of disks is required, and no CD-Rs were wasted...
Of course if you are looking for a good excuse to convince the wife that a hardware upgrade is absolutely necessary... disregard all i've said and get a spiffy new burner.
OK, am really responding to the .sig, not the comment, so mod me down as offtopic, I guess...
Adolf Hitler would be delighted to see plenty of justification for the shoah just by watching how israël acts
I really do have to take exception, however, to expressing such a sentiment. Let me list the ways in which this is flagrantly wrong.
First, you are implying that there can be justification for genocide. Now most people, from the Noam Chomsky left to the Pat Buchanan right, seem to be able to agree that there is no justification at all for genocide... It doesn't matter if you think Isreal is right, wrong, or if you think Israel is commiting genocide itself in its actions towards the Palestinians (which, I presume, is what you are referencing).
Secondly, not only are you claiming justification for mass murder, but you seem to be arguing from the typical anti-semitic viewpoint: Jews are evil and must be destroyed. I say this because you aren't suggesting that today's israel should be punished for actions you disagree with, you are claiming that Hitler was right in his desire to destroy the Jews and paint them as the source of evil in Germany. In effect, you are claiming that modern Israels actions are retroactively legitimating Hitler's intentions (and no one can deny that they were profoundly anti-semitic). The destruction of European jewry in the holocaust was a great evil, a crime of tremendous magnitude, period. This is true no matter what modern day Jews may do.
Lastly, you are actually hurting your own cause by espousing such rascist and offensive ideas. I might be inclined to sympathise with your sentiments if you criticised Israel in a more constructive matter (you could even invoke the holocaust (if you must) by saying something like "You would think a people who had undergone incredible oppression like the shoah would make every attempt to avoid oppressing others.") I recently read a book written by an aquaintance of mine, Art Gish, about his experiences in Hebron as part of a peace team, and have somewhat modified my views on realising that the lunatics on the Israeli settler fringe are just as stupid and violent as the Hamas "the Zionists must be pushed into the sea" terrorists. Reading an idiotic comment about the holocaust, however, gives me an urge to put an Israeli flag on my car and a Star of David on my jacket as a sign of solidarity with Israel against anti-semites.
Those of you looking for additional perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict might check out Hebron Journal for a first hand account... For Pig Hogger, however, i have some other reading suggestions. Try reading and applying this book on critical thinking before you make any more editorial comments on the holocaust.
regards
Simeon
First of all, windows2000 is not 3 cd's, it is one. This was not a real install of win2000. This was a use of a propreitary 'recovery tool' supplied by sony. The ads and cd swapping do not occur when you use a fresh install of windows
Ok, good point. This isn't a truly fair comparison- installing from a *real* Win2k is probably a lot easier. That said, obviously to those who get their computers from sony, this is a real install. I've done a few of these for a friend (courtesy of the HP pavilion's "you don't really get an os with this computer so use our 'recovery' disks" policy) and they are a pita.
Even given the limitations of the story, i think the punchline is a message to emphasize when talking about linux. People are unneccessarily intimidated by the idea of installing linux.
I recently installed Mandrake8.1 on my win2k system at home. I was shocked (last linux install i did was slackware about 4 years ago and it wanted to know the dataword size on my machine, how big the clusters on my hd should be, etc). Mandrake not only auto detected my hardware, it automatically detected my adsl connection and installed a PPOE client and connects automatically when i boot into linux. By contrast on my win2k partition i had a 3 cd procedure to get my alcatel modem drivers, the ethernet drivers, and run a custom app (<sarcasm>cleverly<sarcasm> named Enternet) in order to get my connection up and going.
So am i saying that it's easier to install mandrake than win2k? Not yet, but getting close...I wouldn't rate the article a complete troll
Simeon
Please don't knock php as "hackish" programming and then praise perl. I could note that some of the most obfuscated code i ever see is written in perl. I won't. :)
Instead i'll note that the quality of the code in any programming language is all in how you write it. It's true that php lends itself very well to dropping snippets of code into html. As a professional web developer, however, i use php in "enterprise" applications everyday. phplib provides me with a templating class so that content and programming are completely separated, a OO html widgets class so that form elements are generated and automatically validated with client side javascript, a database abstraction class (switching from a prototype in mysql to the application with MS-SQL db is no problem), and fine tuned session and authentication classes.
Even php as a language itself works well in an enterprise context: c like syntax means training new new graduates is easy, OO (as of version 4, at any rate) is powerful, and the built in libraries are comparable, if not superior, to other scripting languages (regex and string/array/stack/list manipulation, everybody's got, but flash generation, pdf interaction, SOAP, xml-rpc... with php the riches go on and on).
Finally, I find mod_php to be very comparable in speed of execution to mod_perl (benchmarks here)with superior readability. All this to say: opinions are fine, but back them up with real world experience and real data. If you have had experience with php in an enterprise level application where the language or runtime failed to meet your needs, please share with /.! Otherwise, please don't run down my web-app language of choice with hearsay simply because you learned something else first...
RegardsSimeon