An oldster is anyone older then roughly 30 (in the context of the article). People who can remember using 14.4 and/or slower modems, and playing things like LORD.
No, you mean rogue(6), whose magic word was Elbereth. My fingers have the movements in muscle memory. Something about 100,000 lines of C code written in vi does that to a kid. Or maybe the 10,000 games of rogue(6). Prolly both.
Earlier still was ADVENT, whose magic word was xyzzy. Whole 'nother country, that.
The posted article has too many false assumptions in it to be anything like reasonable. It's trying to establish a false dichotomy. I've been on the Internet since the early 80s -- essentially, all my computing life -- and certainly never resorted to silly BBS systems or AOL/Prodigy abominations. Bletch!
Sure, there were times I had to dial into a terminal server, but I still connected directly to a nice friendly BSD Unix system on the real Internet. The firstish of which was what became known as uwvax.cs.wisc.edu. Yes, we had an ARPANET IMP. Pesky little thing it was, too.
What category then do I fall into? Neither of the two misleadingly presented ones from the original article, that's for certain. The question is: how many others were in my camp? Pretty obviously the kinderwriter of the article never thought of people like us.
Huh? Could you please tell us your evidence for this? I was under the impression (based on JRRT's letters and novels) that he wasn't too keen on technology and the so-called modern world. So I have some difficulty imagining him interested in a distant future filled with spaceships and robots.
Certainly. In Letter #294, Tolkien himself wrote:
I read quite a lot - or more truly, try to read many books (notably so-called Science Fiction and Fantasy).... I enjoy the the S.F. of Isaac Asimov.
That's as straight-from-the-horse's-mouth as it gets.
Science Fiction films tend to be subsets of either action or drama films, but with more special effects.
Not necessarily. Gattaca certainly was not full of special effects; neither, really, was Blade Runner, and both were better movies than 99% of the dreck that purports to be science fiction.
Avatar was about as sci-fi as Lord of the Rings which won the Oscar.
Say what? There was nothingThe Lord of the Rings, — at all.
Tolkien actually enjoyed hard sf, especially Asimov, but his roots were in Beowulf and the Eddas, not in H.G. Wells. It’s like comparing apples with aardvarks: not even in the same kingdom.
Tolkien’s work is fundamentally mythologic in scope, looking to the past and recreating a series of tales out of old myths and half-remembered memories. Science fiction is a completely different beast. It extrapolates possible futures by applying known principles to unknown possibilities, all the while keeping within the laws of nature as we understand them. Yes, both are story-telling, but that is as close as it gets.
Science and myth are truly about as far apart as you can get, so I cannot see how you could possibly make such an outlandish statement.
Web sites without advertisements in the middle of the body text still exist, such as wikipedia.org, tvtropes.org, and even slashdot.org once you've maxed your karma for a while.
I never see any of these spamvertisements that people are referring to, no matter what my karma or status is on this or that site.
Mostly that's because I use privoxy, which does 99% of the adblocking I ever want. However, I do on rare occasion play the "Block Content" or even "Edit Site Preferences" games in Opera. I think of "Block Content" as something of a first-person-shooter video game to shoot down intrusive spamverts.
I am so allergic to spamvertising of all sorts that I really can't read generic stuff on the web using somebody else's browser setup without going pretty completely batshit. I've been known to cover the stupid jumping pictures with giant postits or a taped on piece of paper. I am no more capable of reading static text while something is juggling screaming cats right in front of my face than I am capable of reading a book while a wailing banshee blasts out my eardrums from 2" away.
It's like how people with Tivo report that when they're visiting someone else's home and see a TV running with commercials on it, their first thought is something like "Huh! That TV's broken." That's exactly how I react when I come across someone else looking at the web with all its spammy in-your-face attention-seeking whinings: that their browser must be broken or something.
Disabling moving GIFs and sound by default is really mandatory, and really probably plugins, too, unless you have some other mechanism to block them. I've even been known to turn off javascript on specific sites just so the dumb things stop moving around on me. Even tooltip popup balloons can be maddening: just shut up, get out of my face and my mind, and let me read in peace, damn it! I would never read a book or magazine that had a loud screaming baby built right into it, and it simply astounds me that anyone puts up with this sort of outrageous assault.
I truly think that without the the serene freedom from the otherwise relentless spamvertising that this privoxy+opera combo gives me, I'd've long ago gone medieval and probably completely postal on these rude assholes. It's criminally abusive what they try to do to us.
Nobody has the right to strap you in a seat with your eyelids sewn open so they can steamshovel their spamverts into you. We call that assault, and nobody but nobody should put up with it. It's like the insulting "can't fast-forward through ads" property on some DVDs and some players. Their rights stop long before they reach my mind: I am not their prisoner, so go find some other sheep to bugger.
Re:The question nobody wants to ask....
on
Perl 5.14 Released
·
· Score: 1
In a string context (in Perl, it would have to be something besides ===, but we'll get to that later), it would be "visually equal to" - any characters that are visually equal would be considered equal (useful mainly when using Unicode). So the Cyrillic "e" (0435) would be considered equal to Roman "e" (0065). I'm not sure how to handle complexities like "is the single character 'small a with macron' equal to the sequence 'small a' and 'combining diacritic macron'". We'll need a committee for that, probably. And since Perl uses different operators to determine context, we'd need something else for that. "veq", maybe?
You cannot use visual similarities between glyphs that may or may not look similar in one font or another, because there exists no standard that spells out their correspondence.
In contrast, there does exist a standard that says whether two code
points should be considered the same basic character. This is what you
get when you compare two strings at the primary collation strength using
the Unicode Collation Algorithm. This is perfectly easy to do in Perl, and is extensible to locale tailoring as well.
To do more than that is to ask to translate 133t$p3@k into normal text. It may have some applications, but it is not as useful as you think.
> Considering that Colorado is surrounded by land on all sides and New York is > about as far away as possible from the pacific ocean (while staying in the US) > i'm not surprised the tuna sushi you get there is a bit off.
Nonsense! The distance from wharf to table is the same as the distance from wharf to major airline hub to table. Denver is United's main hub. That means everything is as fresh as the airport is distant--very close. Any quality restaurant gets its fish flown in daily.
Regard:
Sushi Den; Denver CO
How does Sushi Den get such fresh fish?
One of the most important ingredients of sushi making is getting the
freshest fish available. In Colorado, as a land locked state, many
sushi bars do not have easy access directly to the fish market. We are
one of the very first sushi bars in the United States to purchase
directly from the fish market in Japan. At Sushi Den, Koichi, our
youngest brother, is stationed at one of the largest fish markets,
Nagahama Fish Market, located in our home prefecture in the
southern-most island, called Kyushu Island. At 4:00 AM, he carefully
hand selects the freshest fish just unloaded from the boat, then within
a few hours, the fish speeds its way to Denver, arriving within 24
hours. Toshi also goes to the local fish market at 7:00 AM in Denver 6
days a week, where he painstakingly handpicks the freshest fish
available just for that day. We also source many exotic fish from
Alaska, Seattle, Boston, Hawaii, Florida as well as from Philippines,
Canada, Mexico, and Spain.
"We owe our awards to our loyal customers, who have come to Hapa since
we opened 10 years ago," says owner Mark Van Grack. "We believe we have
the freshest sushi in town -- most of the tuna is flown in from Hawaii.
D&D promotes open, imaginate thinking and problem-solving ability. Consumerist alpha-state zombies entranced by the bube tomb do not develop these skills. From the moment I took up D&D in 1975, lo these 33 years ago, I never again watched TV with any regularity, racking up fewer hours per year than the average American does in a single week. I later became convinced by Postman's position, and his take on Huxley's _Brave_New_Word_, and so came to see television as modern-day soma.
The crossover between gamers and programmers, especially but apparently not uniquely those of us of a certain age, is remarkably high. For it's still going on as young players, often social outcasts looking for a safe- space for nerds or geeks or whatever outsider term you care to apply to them and us, are always coming into the gaming world.
The imaginative, creative, problem-solving ability essential in any good admin or programmer is not nurtured by couch potatoes in trance state worshiping their false idols of TV and spectator sports, wasting away "Amusing Themselves to Death" per Postman. That ability is stifled, quelled, stanched, nipped in the bud before it can even develop. Instead, these abilities are much better fed by interactive challenges, and this is why good gamers make good sysadmins, and good programmers sometimes, too.
Gary also helped plant the seed in me of being a word-guy, something of a vocabulary antiquarian. He would plumb older sources for words in English that in modern times were either unused entirely, or used quite differently. A brief list of these might include:
[ I know it's late, but trying to write even a half-decent eulogy and
restrospective of a person like Gary Gygax this takes a bit of time
to think about. Mea culpa. ]
To the rest of the world world, Gary Gygax was the guy who created D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) back in Lake Geneva, WI, and who started the company there called TSR Hobbies, which produced it.
To me, though, Gary was just my neighbor down the ways a bit along Center Street. I lived down the street and around the corner from from him, *worked* for him at TSR for about 4 years, played games with him, on and off the job. Hung out with his son Ernie and pal Skip (Ralph) Williams a good bit in high school, since the other kids of my own age I found--um, boring and slow. I'd sub for Skip on his paper route at times, and once Ernie dragged Skip into D&D, I wasn't far behind, even thought I was like five years younger than they were.
Gary was from my folks' generation--actually a little older even. Gary was smoething of a nobody for the longest time, our semi-employed town cobbler, whose flame-haired wife, Mary, a fervent Jehovah's Witness, was the mother of their 6 children (2m+4f) who lived in the only sesquistoried house I'd ever been in. His dad was a violinist down in the Chicago Symphony, but Gary never got the hang of the instrument.
I also seem to recall Gary may only gotten a college degree later in life, if then, but even so, it was something like a BA-English and may have been of the honorary or over-the-net or mail-in variety, Gary initially being one of those bored-with-school drop-out sorts. People around town really didn't think much of him--*UNTIL* he became rich.
But before then, the talk of the town wasn't very good about him. "All those kids, and all you did was shoe repair with maybe a little insurance on the side? And your wife has nothing better to do than to be knocking on our doors passing out Watchtower pamphlets? What kind of a way to raise a family is that?" You know how critical some small-town people can be of others, especially when they just don't know the people their bad-mouthing.
But I did, and I never thought that. It was especially fun to go over to Gary's house, not just because of his jokes and stories, not to mention the virtual library books and comics he had littered about everywhere, but also because that extra half-story was kidsville, since only we kids could get around standing up straight in it and the adults were crippled. I always enjoyed Gary's first wife, Mary, even if she did have funny pamphlets.
I got into D&D just after Don Kaye died, which would be in 1975. I remember stopping off at 542 Sage Street with Skip (Ralph) Williams to get some D&D books or supplements from Don's widow. This was just across from the street from Eastview, the grade school I'd only just then completed the 6th grade at, and barely half a block from my home.
Later when Gary and Brian Blume moved the business to the corner house a couple blocks to the north, called the "Dungeon Hobby Shop" then. The downstairs was retail, the upstairs games-design. I helped out in the store and in shipping and mailing. By the time I was old enough to be hirable, TSR had moved down to the choicest of spots in town: the old hotel property at corner of Broad and Main, which at that time was Lake Geneva's only stop-light. We didn't even have 5k inhabitants at the time. There were well under 2 dozen employees when I first went on the payroll; I think my employee number, if you counted extant employees was 13, or 19 if you didn't.
I'd work in the retail hobby shop under Ernie, or upstairs in mailing, or eventually in the GenCon (Geneva Convention) department itself under Joe Orlowski (R.I.P.) and Skip Williams. GenCon started out in Lake Geneva
True. Even in the microcontroller world counting bytes is becoming more expensive than simply buying more. I kind of miss the days when you absolutely HAD to write tight, efficient code, but those days are coming to an end.
Putting an extra comparison would only cost a couple of bytes and a few clock cycles for certain date calculations. I can't see that being a big deal even in 1990.
What's wrong with:
is_leapyear = year % 4 ? 0 : year % 100 ? 1 : year % 400 ? 0 : 1;
which through the wonders of right-associativity is really just
So, IMHO, all it takes is a few preconcieved [sic] notions to get you to pick one theory over another. Which one is right?
Excuse me, but there really are no competing theories in this area.
The only theory we have is the evolutionary one. There's aren't
any others. Zero. Zip. Zilch. The Great Nought Itself. We only have
one, one which we admittedly sometimes adjust in minor ways as new data
come in, as new hypotheses are proposed and put to the test and those tests' results evaluated.
But the theory of evolution itself remains intact.
Not only are there no other theories, this one is the master theory
that ties virtually everything in the biological sciences together.
It underpins and informs our understanding of all those many related fields.
In laboratories around the world, day in and day out, its fundamental
accuracy and applicability are proved again and again and again. No other
theory ever developed has been so subjected to so many tests across so many application areas.
Without it, we could never have made the advances we've made in molecular
biology, in genetics, in physiology,
in medicine--in dozens of related fields. If there's any model
of our natural world that we know to work, it is this one.
Theory is a problem-word. No big surprise: I'm sure most/.ers realize this. But I can't help but wonder whether we don't all underestimate how *much* of a problem this little word is.
Referring to the *theory* of evolution makes too many people think of some dubious hypothesis, perhaps just another man's opinion, rather than of the fact-constructed model for explaining observed phenomena that it truly is.
I bet if we talked about the *model* of evolution, we'd have less trouble than we currently do with all the knee-jerkers who attack the word theory. A model is stronger than a mere conjecture, but even an unproven conjecture as it's used in math or science is on firmer territory than figmental tenets of something like, oh, Frisbeetarianism (just to pick a religion I'm unlikely to get lynched over).
Consider number theory: no one imagines number theory to be some vague notion open to individual interpretation and belief. Imagine if instead of talking of Newton's three laws of motion, these were bundled together and called Newton's theory of motion. Swap law into theory and what happens? Sound a bit shakier?
Not if you understand that theory means more than just somebody's guess. The Dictionary records 7 principle senses for the noun theory; of these, the first 2 are obsolete, and the 7th is for combining forms such as theory-neutral or theory-making. The last main sense, sense 6 (whose first citation is from 1792) is the one giving us grief here:
6 In loose or general sense: A hypothesis proposed as an explanation;
hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of
ideas about something; an individual view or notion.
However, sense 6 that's *not* the operative definition for theory as used in number or automata theory, or in the theories of gravity, of relativity, or of evolution. Instead, it's sense 4 (first cited in a 1638 example) that applies here, usually in subsense 4a but sometimes in 4c:
4a A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or
account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been
confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is
propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement
of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of
something known or observed.
4c A systematic statement of the general principles or laws of some
branch of mathematics; a set of theorems forming a connected system:
as the theory of equations, of functions, of numbers, of probabilities.
If our treatment of science and math in primary and secondary education in the United States weren't in such sorry shambles, more Americans might understand that *this* sort of theory isn't so much a loose notion as a model that explains observed phenomena and predicts others, all subject to empirical testing.
Which would be easier: fixing general science education in American public schools, or adopting a term like evolutionary model? Although the second may seem only a small measure compared with how serious the first is, wouldn't it still be a good idea to attempt the second anyway?
Perhaps I've been listening too much to George Lakoff or Jeffrey Feldman talking about the importance of word-choice in framing discourse and debate. But I truly see this "theory"=="hypothesis" misunderstanding as an unnecessary source of trouble, and think underplaying "theory" in favor of something more readily apprehended by the layman might help.
You also can't go on an indiscriminate shooting spree in a nearby poor neighborhood, reasoning that you're just protecting your home by killing the "potential burglars" who otherwise might, at some time in the future, have tried to rob you.
Don't be ridiculous.
Of course you can--if you're George W. Bush. And he
even got away with it (so far).
I thought "Burning Man" was like the west coast version of Bonnaroo.
I don't see how "hippie fests" have anything to do with developing
great software. But then again, I don't like hippies.
To pretend that Burning Man is "like" any one particular
thing is like unto converting first a long and intricate novel to
a flash-bang Hollywood movie, that movie then to a trailer clip,
and finally, that little clip to nothing but a simplistic sound-byte.
Just like some data-stream lossily compressed into an inpoverished
palimpsest of the original, this final sound-byte, so devoid of depth
and detail, cannot help but be misleading, be deceptive--and
ultimately, therefore, insulting.
For even a Burner who purports to represent Burning Man as
"like" any single thing and then leaves it at that without
elaboration is guilty of this sort of reductionist marketing (read:
lying) crime. As for a non-Burner who does this, why, this is even
worse, nothing but a foreigner speaking out of hearsay and ignorance.
Either go to the Burn, or don't even try to start
to describe the experience. You have absolutely no clue.
This hippy thing is really quite curious. To be a "hippy" changed
from a positive thing to a negative one, largely depending on one's
birth year. Children born near the start of the 60's think of
"hippies" as simple and kindly folk who have no trek with DDT,
killing, or cruelty, with meaningless rules required by mindless,
goose-stepping obediance to their fathers' fathers' fathers'
notions of Victorian prudence and propriety, a people who can't
always be bothered to shave precisely when and where they're told
to.
Yet for those who were born sometime in the late 70's or beyond, a
"hippy" seems in contrast to be more apt to conjure notions of
unwashed beggars in ragged but colorful clothing who as before
can't be bothered to shave when and where they're told to.
They have no connection to the Beat Generation, just dirty spongers
seeking a life without ties--of all sorts.
Personally, I do find
it peculiar how often the latter-borns point out superficial cleanliness as
some negative determining factor. What about the people? Perhaps
these prudes, so quick to judge their fellow, need a sobering turn at
Outward Bound with a backpack and a week in the wilderness--or a bit
of time spent in 90+% of the world outside their fairytale
bubble of extreme hygiene.
A couple weeks past this last Burn, The Economist
had an article largely pooh-poohing the gift culture at Burning Man,
much more so than that newspaper has ever decried the open source movement. One thing they got right, though, is seen here:
Normally, behind any hippie event, there are various corporate sorts or
hairy entrepreneurs filling their boots with cash. But at Burning Man
all buying, selling or advertising was banned. The 3.75-square-mile
(six-square-km) site was strictly a commerce-free zone, with two
exceptions to prove the rule: first, you had to buy a ticket to get in
(which could cost $300 for the whole week and paid for the site, the
Portaloos and a few basic amenities); and, second, at the central camp
you could buy coffee, tea and ice. Everything else had to be given away.
Even bartering is discouraged.
To be freed for even a brief spell from the constant crush
of the unending, ubiquitous advertising and consequent grovelling
and lying that plague our society
really
is a refreshing change, a respite from tyranny and deception.
No one ever asks what "you do for living"; sometimes, though, they
ask you what "you live for doing", which seems more important.
As for the cost, try renting a hotel for 8 days: you'll be spending
more than the cost of a Burning Man ticket ($175 - 2x that last year)
most anywhere and anywhen in the United States today.
The "gift culture" thing really is shared in common between
the open source culture and Burner culture. If you don'
It ought to; it is that time of the year, after all.
I went to Tim's first Foo camp, my gear still playa-inflicted, but with the schedule shift, it's just too hard to do that and also get set all the myriad things you need to think about for the Burn. With no offence intended toward Tim, for I think he's going a pretty cool thing, when it comes to making a choice between Foo and the Burn, there isn't any and never was one.
What I always liked about Stevens, is that he delivered print-ready copy to
his publisher. This guy did everything himself. Layout, typesetting,
graphics, indexing, the whole works. Where can you find people like that
nowadays who take so much pride in their product that they hand-hold it
from draft to customer?
Amongst other things, Richard wrote quite the elaborate but easy-to-use
troff macro set to aid in the production of those books.
You're right: that level of pride in workmanship is nearly (but not
quite) unheard of in modern technical publishing. But can a publisher ever
really measure up to the exacting standards of the most extreme of precise-minded (aka anal)
authors?
Probably not. That sort of author is apt to be seen as more than
half-mad and too much of a hassle for the publisher to try to work with.
"After all," says the publisher, "it's just a book." "Sure, but it's my book!"
carps back the meticulous author.
You asked where one can find such people. The best living example of
fastidious attention to detail that springs to mind is Jeffrey Friedl, as
seen in his 500-page arcane tome, Mastering Regular
Expressions, now it its second edition.
If I recall correctly, Jeffrey did the typesetting, indexing, etc,
which means that he was his own production team. This is nearly
universally deemed far more trouble than it's worth, but at least you'll
have no one to complain about if, for example, the index doesn't measure
up--which it seldom if ever does.
Check out Jeffrey's
index for MRE (it's in PDF format). Give it a glance. Notice the richness, the
usefulness. Notice the multiple levels of headings, rather than just two.
Notice the careful treatment of fonts and of the ordering of analphabetic
symbols. Many another gem is hidden within that index, which you'll notice
if you skim it a bit.
This sort of quality you will never, ever get from some freelance,
paid-by-the-hour indexer who doesn't know the problem space, who
won't have their name on that book's cover. It does make a
difference.
Whoops. We now return you from this unintentional pæan to MRE's production quality.
On Richard
Stevens, he was a marvelous and wonderful human being, and he is missed,
not just by me, but by many.
"Should", "Could" and "Would" don't have ANY tense.
That's not wholly accurate. Witness:
Today, I can ride my bike to work, but won't.
Yesterday, I could ride my bike to work, but didn't.
You can't use the defective verb can in the past, for could is the
past of can. Therefore, could does indeed have tense.
However, as a modal auxiliary, its defectiveness makes it behave differently than how normal verbs behave.
And a very entertaining NYT article that is in the process of expiring.
Here's the faux-expired article without the crap.
If you could sit back with Zen-like detachment and observe the
dross piling up in your electronic mailbox, the spam wars might
come to seem like a fascinating electronic game.
Like creatures running through a maze with constantly shifting
walls, spammers dart and weave to sneak their solicitations past
ever wilier junk mail filters. They are organisms, or maybe genomes,
grinding out one random mutation after another, desperately trying
to elude the Grim Reaper.
Viagra becomes "vi@gra" or
"v-i-@-g-r-a." Then, as the filters adapt, "v1@gr@" and even
"\/l@gr@." Currently, the Internet is swarming with mutants like
this: "Cheap Val?(u)m, Viagr@, X(a)n@x, Som@ Di3t Pills Many M3ds
RIZfURqgHr77B," the final string of gibberish hanging like an
appendage of junk DNA.
Taking a different approach, a come-on for barnyard pornography
devolves into "faurm galz bing e rottic." Another pitch promises
to reveal "Seakrets of ((eks-eks-eks)) stars."
Dispiriting as it is to start the morning with a hundred of these
orthographic monsters crouching in your inbox, there is reason to
take heart. Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam
may not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which
learns to recognize the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having
an effect. The spammers' messages are becoming harder and harder
to decipher. Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like
a pileup of random mutations in an endangered species gasping its
last breaths.
Earlier this month, when Internet experts met in Cambridge,
Mass., for the 2004 Spam Conference (available as a Web broadcast
at Spamconference.org),
they showed just how far the science of spam fighting has come. For
all the recent talk of suing spammers and compiling a national
do-not-spam list, most speakers were putting their hopes in
technological, not legal solutions. The federal government's new
junk e-mail law, the Can Spam Act, barely rated a mention.
Terry Sullivan, a spam researcher with a doctorate in information
science, described how he used a "handy 10-dimensional high-fidelity
model of historical spam space" to analyze how junk e-mail changes
over time. Long stretches of stability are suddenly interrupted by
brief bursts of innovation, a pattern he compared to what some
evolutionary biologists call punctuated equilibrium. The encouraging
news is that there is enough stability--an enduring core of
"spamminess"--for the invaders to be quickly identified and destroyed.
Another presentation, called "Cockroaches Hate the Light,"
considered how to authenticate senders so that spammers can't easily
fake their identities. Other speakers proposed eco-electronic
solutions such as digital postage stamps that would put a price on
sending e-mail--trivial for an individual user but making hit-or-miss
barrages prohibitively expensive.
Like epidemiologists discussing how to predict and control a
biological outbreak, conferencegoers compared the merits of various
filtering techniques. Which is better: first-order Bayesian, token
grab bag, sparse binary polynomial hash or markovian weighting? The
meaning of the terms may be opaque to outsiders, but the underlying
message comes through: the spammers are up against some increasingly
advanced cybernetic artillery.
Many experts believe that solving the spam problem will require
a combination of approaches. But laws take forever to pass and
amend. Technological fixes like sender authentication and electronic
stamps would also take time to carry out, but filtering is already
here--and it is reducing the spammers' messages to feeble signals
swamped by a roar of alphanumeric noise.
I'm torn on whether to be surprised by this--the Economist has run stories
before (there was one last issue on the SCO deal) that seem to be subtly,
quietly favoring GNU/Linux.
Running some simple searches on their site, since the beginning of
this year alone, The Economist has
mentioned Linux 16 times in its stories, 84 times if you let
them sift back till 1997. A search for open
source also turns up some great articles.
Here are a couple other, older Economist citations:
From a story called
"Hackers Rule" from February 18th, 1999:
Companies using the Internet often rely on open-source software
for mission-critical tasks. Yahoo!, the worlds most popular
website, uses an open-source operating system called FreeBSD,
a web-server program called Apache and the programming language
Perl. Without collectively written code, the Internet would
disintegrate: Apache runs on 53% of all web servers, and Sendmail
routes 78% of all e-mail.
These languages rose to prominence largely because they are so
flexible and adaptable to the needs of the Internet. Examples
include Perl, a language that can be used to communicate between
a web server and its clients, and Python, a language used, among
other things, for managing discussion forums on the Internet.
Other examples with more awkward names include Tcl/Tk, awk and
C Shell. There is even a scripting language called JavaScripta
clever marketing ploy, since it is linguistically unrelated to
Java.
Those two are interesting, among other reasons, for the technical
precision in percentages (I said it was precise; I didn't
say it was accurate:-), the awareness of non-Linux open-source
operating systems, and, well, that little jab about JavaScript's (re)naming being a
"clever marketing ploy"--in other words, a deceit, by any other name.
If you read over the various articles the
searches pull up, it sure seems that the Economist is a lot more on the ball than say, Time or
Newsweek.
--tom
(PS: You might take quick exception to their characterizations of Perl and Python, but a reread will show that those were just example application areas cited.)
I hope you realize that
you can paste all the happy stickers on your keys that you want, or even
get all the keyboards with exactly those glyphs that you want already on them, yet still
find yourself with nothing usable. What precisely are the codes being
delivered by those keys, and how exactly will your system interpret
such codes?
Imagine you want to write out Jean-Baptist Moliere's name correctly--and in all
caps, to boot. Now, that first e should carry a grave accent. So
do you just find a keyboard with a capital e+grave on it? Let's
say that your system interprets a keypress there to mean character
number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-1 (Latin1 for Western European
languages) eight-bit encoding, this number is indeed a LATIN CAPITAL
LETTER E WITH GRAVE.
So you might appear to be all taken care of. But you aren't.
Tomorrow, you decide you'd like to write "correctly" the famous name
of the inventor of robots, Karel Capek (aka Karla Capka). That
C there should carry a caron, because it's not pronounced "Kapka",
but "Chapka". So you go find yourself a Czech keyboard, and lo and behold,
it has the proper character!
Are you set? Not at all;
to the contrary, now you're I in trouble. Because you might well find that the
character generated by that key, as recognized by your computer,
is also number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-2 (Latin2 for Eastern European
languages) eight-bit encoding, that same 0xC8 is now taken to mean
a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON.
See the problem? If you look at Karel's name in your trusty Latin1 locale, it will
be screwed up, and if you look at Jean-Baptist's under a Latin2 locale, then
it will be screwed up. You can't win.
Now, as for the Euro symbol, you're going to have even more (none-)fun,
because you aren't going to find a suitable ISO eight-bit encoding
that includes it. The 8859's just aren't going to do it for you.
Of course, were this but in ISO 10646 (that is, in Unicode), these particular problems do go
away. There, the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE is at U+C8 (yes,
really; the same as in Latin1), but the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON is at U+10C,
a completely distinct numeric code point. This is as it should be, since those really
are different glyphs, so they shouldn't share the same numeric representation. On the matter
of the Euro for your keyboard,
under Unicode, you've even got EURO SIGN sitting there at U+20AC for you.
Even
if you tried to go this route, I suspect that you're
probably just exchanging one set of problems with another. After all,
how well is your system truly set up for you to use Unicode?
Can it map keyboard events into appropriate code points? And what
about the tools you're using? What are you going to do with it
once you have it? Consider the multiplicity of external encodings
for the same code points, such as for disk storage, network transfers,
etc, that you find in UTF-8, UTF16-LE, etc.
So, I don't think
there are answers to the submitter's query that are at all so simple
as others have presented the matter here. For the curious, here's a good reference on
the mess we're in now, called appropriately enough, ISO Alphabet
Soups.
I am sorry but in my opinion Javascripts [sic] has 2 useful functions.
Form data validation. But you should still do the validation
on the server, so your stuff still works with people that don't
have Javascript enabled.
True.
If you care that the data values received truly
conform to the ranges you expected (which you must have done, or else why
did you put in Javascript checks?), then server-side validation
is absolutely indispensable.
Irrespective of client-side scripting validation, a far more compelling reason
for mandatory field validation on the server is easily demonstrated--and
far too frequently overloaded.
As you indicate, the client may not be
running Javascript. This can happen not simply because they've disabled such
functionality, but also because
the client
sending you the form values is something other than some common spamvert viewer
(er, web browser). It's quite possible that the data might come
from a simulated spamvert viewer, a program of their own
devising carefully crafted to send you
canned and possibly out-of-range values.
Nefarious abuses are easily imaginable once they figure out that
you've naïvely assumed Javascript validation really did its job.
This must never be counted on, as it is never guaranteed. No great
stretch of the imagination is needed to envision how in certain
server-side scripts, unexpected and unchecked data values could
easily produce unreasonable, unforeseen, and potentially compromising
effects.
The Lingua::Romana::Perligata module makes it makes it
possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?",
then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)
The module is used at the start of the program, and installs
a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in
(modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.
EXEMPLUM
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use
Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis
maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso
scribe. vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo. maximum tum
novumversum egresso scribe. da II tum maximum conscribementa
meis listis. dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa da
listis. next tum biguttam tum stadium tum nextum tum
novumversum
scribe egresso.
Slashdot Mirror
An oldster is anyone older then roughly 30 (in the context of the article). People who can remember using 14.4 and/or slower modems, and playing things like LORD.
No, you mean rogue(6), whose magic word was Elbereth . My fingers have the movements in muscle memory. Something about 100,000 lines of C code written in vi does that to a kid. Or maybe the 10,000 games of rogue(6). Prolly both.
Earlier still was ADVENT, whose magic word was xyzzy . Whole 'nother country, that.
The posted article has too many false assumptions in it to be anything like reasonable. It's trying to establish a false dichotomy. I've been on the Internet since the early 80s -- essentially, all my computing life -- and certainly never resorted to silly BBS systems or AOL/Prodigy abominations. Bletch!
Sure, there were times I had to dial into a terminal server, but I still connected directly to a nice friendly BSD Unix system on the real Internet. The firstish of which was what became known as uwvax.cs.wisc.edu. Yes, we had an ARPANET IMP. Pesky little thing it was, too.
What category then do I fall into? Neither of the two misleadingly presented ones from the original article, that's for certain. The question is: how many others were in my camp? Pretty obviously the kinderwriter of the article never thought of people like us.
Certainly. In Letter #294, Tolkien himself wrote:
That's as straight-from-the-horse's-mouth as it gets.
Not necessarily. Gattaca certainly was not full of special effects; neither, really, was Blade Runner, and both were better movies than 99% of the dreck that purports to be science fiction.
Say what? There was nothingThe Lord of the Rings, — at all.
Tolkien actually enjoyed hard sf, especially Asimov, but his roots were in Beowulf and the Eddas, not in H.G. Wells. It’s like comparing apples with aardvarks: not even in the same kingdom.
Tolkien’s work is fundamentally mythologic in scope, looking to the past and recreating a series of tales out of old myths and half-remembered memories. Science fiction is a completely different beast. It extrapolates possible futures by applying known principles to unknown possibilities, all the while keeping within the laws of nature as we understand them. Yes, both are story-telling, but that is as close as it gets.
Science and myth are truly about as far apart as you can get, so I cannot see how you could possibly make such an outlandish statement.
I never see any of these spamvertisements that people are referring to, no matter what my karma or status is on this or that site.
Mostly that's because I use privoxy, which does 99% of the adblocking I ever want. However, I do on rare occasion play the "Block Content" or even "Edit Site Preferences" games in Opera. I think of "Block Content" as something of a first-person-shooter video game to shoot down intrusive spamverts.
I am so allergic to spamvertising of all sorts that I really can't read generic stuff on the web using somebody else's browser setup without going pretty completely batshit. I've been known to cover the stupid jumping pictures with giant postits or a taped on piece of paper. I am no more capable of reading static text while something is juggling screaming cats right in front of my face than I am capable of reading a book while a wailing banshee blasts out my eardrums from 2" away.
It's like how people with Tivo report that when they're visiting someone else's home and see a TV running with commercials on it, their first thought is something like "Huh! That TV's broken." That's exactly how I react when I come across someone else looking at the web with all its spammy in-your-face attention-seeking whinings: that their browser must be broken or something.
Disabling moving GIFs and sound by default is really mandatory, and really probably plugins, too, unless you have some other mechanism to block them. I've even been known to turn off javascript on specific sites just so the dumb things stop moving around on me. Even tooltip popup balloons can be maddening: just shut up, get out of my face and my mind, and let me read in peace, damn it! I would never read a book or magazine that had a loud screaming baby built right into it, and it simply astounds me that anyone puts up with this sort of outrageous assault.
I truly think that without the the serene freedom from the otherwise relentless spamvertising that this privoxy+opera combo gives me, I'd've long ago gone medieval and probably completely postal on these rude assholes. It's criminally abusive what they try to do to us.
Nobody has the right to strap you in a seat with your eyelids sewn open so they can steamshovel their spamverts into you. We call that assault, and nobody but nobody should put up with it. It's like the insulting "can't fast-forward through ads" property on some DVDs and some players. Their rights stop long before they reach my mind: I am not their prisoner, so go find some other sheep to bugger.
You cannot use visual similarities between glyphs that may or may not look similar in one font or another, because there exists no standard that spells out their correspondence.
In contrast, there does exist a standard that says whether two code points should be considered the same basic character. This is what you get when you compare two strings at the primary collation strength using the Unicode Collation Algorithm. This is perfectly easy to do in Perl, and is extensible to locale tailoring as well.
To do more than that is to ask to translate 133t$p3@k into normal text. It may have some applications, but it is not as useful as you think.
> Considering that Colorado is surrounded by land on all sides and New York is
> about as far away as possible from the pacific ocean (while staying in the US)
> i'm not surprised the tuna sushi you get there is a bit off.
Nonsense! The distance from wharf to table is the same as the distance
from wharf to major airline hub to table. Denver is United's main hub.
That means everything is as fresh as the airport is distant--very close.
Any quality restaurant gets its fish flown in daily.
Regard:
Sushi Den; Denver CO
How does Sushi Den get such fresh fish?
One of the most important ingredients of sushi making is getting the
freshest fish available. In Colorado, as a land locked state, many
sushi bars do not have easy access directly to the fish market. We are
one of the very first sushi bars in the United States to purchase
directly from the fish market in Japan. At Sushi Den, Koichi, our
youngest brother, is stationed at one of the largest fish markets,
Nagahama Fish Market, located in our home prefecture in the
southern-most island, called Kyushu Island. At 4:00 AM, he carefully
hand selects the freshest fish just unloaded from the boat, then within
a few hours, the fish speeds its way to Denver, arriving within 24
hours. Toshi also goes to the local fish market at 7:00 AM in Denver 6
days a week, where he painstakingly handpicks the freshest fish
available just for that day. We also source many exotic fish from
Alaska, Seattle, Boston, Hawaii, Florida as well as from Philippines,
Canada, Mexico, and Spain.
http://www.sushiden.net/faq.html#faq7
Hapa Sushi; Boulder & Denver CO
"We owe our awards to our loyal customers, who have come to Hapa since
we opened 10 years ago," says owner Mark Van Grack. "We believe we have
the freshest sushi in town -- most of the tuna is flown in from Hawaii.
http://bouldercountygold.com/2009/eats-drinks-entertainment/best-sushi-hapa-sushi/
http://www.franchise.hapasushi.com/
Sushi Tora; Boulder CO
We get fresh fish flown in daily including fish from Tsukiji Market in
Tokyo every Wednesday.
http://sushitora.net/bouldersushi.html
Jax Fish House; Boulder CO
Jax famous Raw Bar features a variety of fresh oysters, clams, chilled
crabs and lobsters, all flown in daily.
http://www.jaxfishhouseboulder.com/Portals/0/Jax%20Fish%20House%20Boulder%20Press%20Kit.pdf
http://www.jaxfishhouseboulder.com/Menus/DinnerMenu/tabid/62/Default.aspx
Flagstaff House; Boulder CO
Mark's menu changes daily to take advantage of the freshest seasonal
ingredients including fresh fish flown in daily, locally g
> Thanks for taking the time to write this.
You're very welcome. It's something I needed to do, a sort of
professional-piety response, perhaps, giving credit where due.
> I enjoyed it very much. I never stop to think about how my affinity
> for Perl might be related to imagination then related to AD&D.
Adam Rogers of Wired Magazine wrote convincingly in the NY Times that:
GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse.
This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
I strongly encourage you and all programmers and gamers alike to check out
what Adam has to say there about our world being one that Gary built.
Adam also has a 17-minute segment on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88062853
D&D promotes open, imaginate thinking and problem-solving ability.
Consumerist alpha-state zombies entranced by the bube tomb do not
develop these skills. From the moment I took up D&D in 1975, lo these
33 years ago, I never again watched TV with any regularity, racking up
fewer hours per year than the average American does in a single week. I
later became convinced by Postman's position, and his take on Huxley's
_Brave_New_Word_, and so came to see television as modern-day soma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_with_George_Orwell.27s_1984
The crossover between gamers and programmers, especially but apparently
not uniquely those of us of a certain age, is remarkably high. For it's
still going on as young players, often social outcasts looking for a safe-
space for nerds or geeks or whatever outsider term you care to apply to
them and us, are always coming into the gaming world.
The imaginative, creative, problem-solving ability essential in any good
admin or programmer is not nurtured by couch potatoes in trance state
worshiping their false idols of TV and spectator sports, wasting away
"Amusing Themselves to Death" per Postman. That ability is stifled, quelled,
stanched, nipped in the bud before it can even develop. Instead, these
abilities are much better fed by interactive challenges, and this is why
good gamers make good sysadmins, and good programmers sometimes, too.
Gary also helped plant the seed in me of being a word-guy, something of
a vocabulary antiquarian. He would plumb older sources for words in
English that in modern times were either unused entirely, or used
quite differently. A brief list of these might include:
adamantite, aegis, cantrip, cuirass, curate, drow, durance vile,
dweomer, electrum, glaive, habergeon, lich, morningstar, myrmidon,
panoply, rune, sigaldry, sigil, thaumaturge, theurgist, and wight.
I should really write these all down some time. I'll bet even such words
as apothecary and dwarves owe much to Gary for their modern currency.
For a while, Slate had the best Gary Gygax article at:
http://www.slate.com/id/2185914/pagenum/all/#page_start
But I think now that the Wired treatment is most impressive:
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax
--tom
[ I know it's late, but trying to write even a half-decent eulogy and
restrospective of a person like Gary Gygax this takes a bit of time
to think about. Mea culpa. ]
To the rest of the world world, Gary Gygax was the guy who created D&D
(Dungeons and Dragons) back in Lake Geneva, WI, and who started the company
there called TSR Hobbies, which produced it.
To me, though, Gary was just my neighbor down the ways a bit along Center
Street. I lived down the street and around the corner from from him,
*worked* for him at TSR for about 4 years, played games with him, on and
off the job. Hung out with his son Ernie and pal Skip (Ralph) Williams a
good bit in high school, since the other kids of my own age I found--um,
boring and slow. I'd sub for Skip on his paper route at times, and once
Ernie dragged Skip into D&D, I wasn't far behind, even thought I was like
five years younger than they were.
Gary was from my folks' generation--actually a little older even. Gary was
smoething of a nobody for the longest time, our semi-employed town cobbler,
whose flame-haired wife, Mary, a fervent Jehovah's Witness, was the mother
of their 6 children (2m+4f) who lived in the only sesquistoried house I'd
ever been in. His dad was a violinist down in the Chicago Symphony, but
Gary never got the hang of the instrument.
I also seem to recall Gary may only gotten a college degree later in life,
if then, but even so, it was something like a BA-English and may have been
of the honorary or over-the-net or mail-in variety, Gary initially being
one of those bored-with-school drop-out sorts. People around town really
didn't think much of him--*UNTIL* he became rich.
But before then, the talk of the town wasn't very good about him. "All
those kids, and all you did was shoe repair with maybe a little insurance
on the side? And your wife has nothing better to do than to be knocking on
our doors passing out Watchtower pamphlets? What kind of a way to raise a
family is that?" You know how critical some small-town people can be of
others, especially when they just don't know the people their bad-mouthing.
But I did, and I never thought that. It was especially fun to go over to
Gary's house, not just because of his jokes and stories, not to mention the
virtual library books and comics he had littered about everywhere, but also
because that extra half-story was kidsville, since only we kids could get
around standing up straight in it and the adults were crippled. I always
enjoyed Gary's first wife, Mary, even if she did have funny pamphlets.
I got into D&D just after Don Kaye died, which would be in 1975. I
remember stopping off at 542 Sage Street with Skip (Ralph) Williams to get
some D&D books or supplements from Don's widow. This was just across from
the street from Eastview, the grade school I'd only just then completed the
6th grade at, and barely half a block from my home.
Later when Gary and Brian Blume moved the business to the corner house a
couple blocks to the north, called the "Dungeon Hobby Shop" then. The
downstairs was retail, the upstairs games-design. I helped out in the
store and in shipping and mailing. By the time I was old enough to be
hirable, TSR had moved down to the choicest of spots in town: the old
hotel property at corner of Broad and Main, which at that time was Lake
Geneva's only stop-light. We didn't even have 5k inhabitants at the
time. There were well under 2 dozen employees when I first went on the
payroll; I think my employee number, if you counted extant employees was
13, or 19 if you didn't.
I'd work in the retail hobby shop under Ernie, or upstairs in mailing, or
eventually in the GenCon (Geneva Convention) department itself under Joe
Orlowski (R.I.P.) and Skip Williams. GenCon started out in Lake Geneva
expensive than simply buying more. I kind of miss the days when you
absolutely HAD to write tight, efficient code, but those days are coming to
an end.
What's wrong with: which through the wonders of right-associativity is really just or with white-space for cognitive grouping:Putting an extra comparison would only cost a couple of bytes and a few
clock cycles for certain date calculations. I can't see that being a big
deal even in 1990.
Just testing out the ecode tag.
--tom
Not only are there no other theories, this one is the master theory that ties virtually everything in the biological sciences together. It underpins and informs our understanding of all those many related fields. In laboratories around the world, day in and day out, its fundamental accuracy and applicability are proved again and again and again. No other theory ever developed has been so subjected to so many tests across so many application areas. Without it, we could never have made the advances we've made in molecular biology, in genetics, in physiology, in medicine--in dozens of related fields. If there's any model of our natural world that we know to work, it is this one.
--tom
Theory is a problem-word. No big surprise: I'm sure most /.ers
realize this. But I can't help but wonder whether we don't all
underestimate how *much* of a problem this little word is.
Referring to the *theory* of evolution makes too many people think of
some dubious hypothesis, perhaps just another man's opinion, rather
than of the fact-constructed model for explaining observed phenomena
that it truly is.
I bet if we talked about the *model* of evolution, we'd have less
trouble than we currently do with all the knee-jerkers who attack
the word theory. A model is stronger than a mere conjecture, but
even an unproven conjecture as it's used in math or science is on
firmer territory than figmental tenets of something like, oh,
Frisbeetarianism (just to pick a religion I'm unlikely to get
lynched over).
Consider number theory: no one imagines number theory to be some vague
notion open to individual interpretation and belief. Imagine if
instead of talking of Newton's three laws of motion, these were
bundled together and called Newton's theory of motion. Swap law into
theory and what happens? Sound a bit shakier?
Not if you understand that theory means more than just somebody's
guess. The Dictionary records 7 principle senses for the noun theory;
of these, the first 2 are obsolete, and the 7th is for combining forms
such as theory-neutral or theory-making. The last main sense, sense 6
(whose first citation is from 1792) is the one giving us grief here:
6 In loose or general sense: A hypothesis proposed as an explanation;
hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of
ideas about something; an individual view or notion.
However, sense 6 that's *not* the operative definition for theory as used
in number or automata theory, or in the theories of gravity, of relativity,
or of evolution. Instead, it's sense 4 (first cited in a 1638 example) that
applies here, usually in subsense 4a but sometimes in 4c:
4a A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or
account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been
confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is
propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement
of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of
something known or observed.
4c A systematic statement of the general principles or laws of some
branch of mathematics; a set of theorems forming a connected system:
as the theory of equations, of functions, of numbers, of probabilities.
If our treatment of science and math in primary and secondary education in
the United States weren't in such sorry shambles, more Americans might
understand that *this* sort of theory isn't so much a loose notion as a
model that explains observed phenomena and predicts others, all subject
to empirical testing.
Which would be easier: fixing general science education in American public
schools, or adopting a term like evolutionary model? Although the second
may seem only a small measure compared with how serious the first is,
wouldn't it still be a good idea to attempt the second anyway?
Perhaps I've been listening too much to George Lakoff or Jeffrey Feldman
talking about the importance of word-choice in framing discourse and
debate. But I truly see this "theory"=="hypothesis" misunderstanding as
an unnecessary source of trouble, and think underplaying "theory" in
favor of something more readily apprehended by the layman might help.
--tom
> Why this obsession with UNIX?
As Mike O'Dell once observed, while Unix is not without its flaws,
its file system is not one of these.
--tom
Of course you can--if you're George W. Bush. And he even got away with it (so far).
--tom
To pretend that Burning Man is "like" any one particular thing is like unto converting first a long and intricate novel to a flash-bang Hollywood movie, that movie then to a trailer clip, and finally, that little clip to nothing but a simplistic sound-byte. Just like some data-stream lossily compressed into an inpoverished palimpsest of the original, this final sound-byte, so devoid of depth and detail, cannot help but be misleading, be deceptive--and ultimately, therefore, insulting.
For even a Burner who purports to represent Burning Man as "like" any single thing and then leaves it at that without elaboration is guilty of this sort of reductionist marketing (read: lying) crime. As for a non-Burner who does this, why, this is even worse, nothing but a foreigner speaking out of hearsay and ignorance.
Either go to the Burn, or don't even try to start to describe the experience. You have absolutely no clue.
This hippy thing is really quite curious. To be a "hippy" changed from a positive thing to a negative one, largely depending on one's birth year. Children born near the start of the 60's think of "hippies" as simple and kindly folk who have no trek with DDT, killing, or cruelty, with meaningless rules required by mindless, goose-stepping obediance to their fathers' fathers' fathers' notions of Victorian prudence and propriety, a people who can't always be bothered to shave precisely when and where they're told to.
Yet for those who were born sometime in the late 70's or beyond, a "hippy" seems in contrast to be more apt to conjure notions of unwashed beggars in ragged but colorful clothing who as before can't be bothered to shave when and where they're told to. They have no connection to the Beat Generation, just dirty spongers seeking a life without ties--of all sorts.
Personally, I do find it peculiar how often the latter-borns point out superficial cleanliness as some negative determining factor. What about the people? Perhaps these prudes, so quick to judge their fellow, need a sobering turn at Outward Bound with a backpack and a week in the wilderness--or a bit of time spent in 90+% of the world outside their fairytale bubble of extreme hygiene.
A couple weeks past this last Burn, The Economist had an article largely pooh-poohing the gift culture at Burning Man, much more so than that newspaper has ever decried the open source movement. One thing they got right, though, is seen here:
To be freed for even a brief spell from the constant crush of the unending, ubiquitous advertising and consequent grovelling and lying that plague our society really is a refreshing change, a respite from tyranny and deception. No one ever asks what "you do for living"; sometimes, though, they ask you what "you live for doing", which seems more important.
As for the cost, try renting a hotel for 8 days: you'll be spending more than the cost of a Burning Man ticket ($175 - 2x that last year) most anywhere and anywhen in the United States today.
The "gift culture" thing really is shared in common between the open source culture and Burner culture. If you don'
> burning man comes to mind
It ought to; it is that time of the year, after all.
I went to Tim's first Foo camp, my gear still playa-inflicted,
but with the schedule shift, it's just too hard to do that and
also get set all the myriad things you need to think about for
the Burn. With no offence intended toward Tim, for I think
he's going a pretty cool thing, when it comes to making a choice
between Foo and the Burn, there isn't any and never was one.
--tom
You're right: that level of pride in workmanship is nearly (but not quite) unheard of in modern technical publishing. But can a publisher ever really measure up to the exacting standards of the most extreme of precise-minded (aka anal) authors? Probably not. That sort of author is apt to be seen as more than half-mad and too much of a hassle for the publisher to try to work with. "After all," says the publisher, "it's just a book." "Sure, but it's my book!" carps back the meticulous author.
You asked where one can find such people. The best living example of fastidious attention to detail that springs to mind is Jeffrey Friedl, as seen in his 500-page arcane tome, Mastering Regular Expressions, now it its second edition. If I recall correctly, Jeffrey did the typesetting, indexing, etc, which means that he was his own production team. This is nearly universally deemed far more trouble than it's worth, but at least you'll have no one to complain about if, for example, the index doesn't measure up--which it seldom if ever does.
Check out Jeffrey's index for MRE (it's in PDF format). Give it a glance. Notice the richness, the usefulness. Notice the multiple levels of headings, rather than just two. Notice the careful treatment of fonts and of the ordering of analphabetic symbols. Many another gem is hidden within that index, which you'll notice if you skim it a bit.
This sort of quality you will never, ever get from some freelance, paid-by-the-hour indexer who doesn't know the problem space, who won't have their name on that book's cover. It does make a difference.
Whoops. We now return you from this unintentional pæan to MRE's production quality.
On Richard Stevens, he was a marvelous and wonderful human being, and he is missed, not just by me, but by many.
--tom
- Today, I can ride my bike to work, but won't.
- Yesterday, I could ride my bike to work, but didn't.
You can't use the defective verb can in the past, for could is the past of can. Therefore, could does indeed have tense. However, as a modal auxiliary, its defectiveness makes it behave differently than how normal verbs behave.--tom
Here's the faux-expired article without the crap.
At least, that's what got me.
--tom
Here are a couple other, older Economist citations:
Those two are interesting, among other reasons, for the technical precision in percentages (I said it was precise; I didn't say it was accurate :-), the awareness of non-Linux open-source
operating systems, and, well, that little jab about JavaScript's (re)naming being a
"clever marketing ploy"--in other words, a deceit, by any other name.
If you read over the various articles the searches pull up, it sure seems that the Economist is a lot more on the ball than say, Time or Newsweek.
--tom
(PS: You might take quick exception to their characterizations of Perl and Python, but a reread will show that those were just example application areas cited.)
Imagine you want to write out Jean-Baptist Moliere's name correctly--and in all caps, to boot. Now, that first e should carry a grave accent. So do you just find a keyboard with a capital e+grave on it? Let's say that your system interprets a keypress there to mean character number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-1 (Latin1 for Western European languages) eight-bit encoding, this number is indeed a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE.
So you might appear to be all taken care of. But you aren't. Tomorrow, you decide you'd like to write "correctly" the famous name of the inventor of robots, Karel Capek (aka Karla Capka). That C there should carry a caron, because it's not pronounced "Kapka", but "Chapka". So you go find yourself a Czech keyboard, and lo and behold, it has the proper character!
Are you set? Not at all; to the contrary, now you're I in trouble. Because you might well find that the character generated by that key, as recognized by your computer, is also number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-2 (Latin2 for Eastern European languages) eight-bit encoding, that same 0xC8 is now taken to mean a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON.
See the problem? If you look at Karel's name in your trusty Latin1 locale, it will be screwed up, and if you look at Jean-Baptist's under a Latin2 locale, then it will be screwed up. You can't win.
Now, as for the Euro symbol, you're going to have even more (none-)fun, because you aren't going to find a suitable ISO eight-bit encoding that includes it. The 8859's just aren't going to do it for you.
Of course, were this but in ISO 10646 (that is, in Unicode), these particular problems do go away. There, the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE is at U+C8 (yes, really; the same as in Latin1), but the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON is at U+10C, a completely distinct numeric code point. This is as it should be, since those really are different glyphs, so they shouldn't share the same numeric representation. On the matter of the Euro for your keyboard, under Unicode, you've even got EURO SIGN sitting there at U+20AC for you.
Even if you tried to go this route, I suspect that you're probably just exchanging one set of problems with another. After all, how well is your system truly set up for you to use Unicode? Can it map keyboard events into appropriate code points? And what about the tools you're using? What are you going to do with it once you have it? Consider the multiplicity of external encodings for the same code points, such as for disk storage, network transfers, etc, that you find in UTF-8, UTF16-LE, etc.
So, I don't think there are answers to the submitter's query that are at all so simple as others have presented the matter here. For the curious, here's a good reference on the mess we're in now, called appropriately enough, ISO Alphabet Soups.
--tom
If you care that the data values received truly conform to the ranges you expected (which you must have done, or else why did you put in Javascript checks?), then server-side validation is absolutely indispensable. Irrespective of client-side scripting validation, a far more compelling reason for mandatory field validation on the server is easily demonstrated--and far too frequently overloaded.
As you indicate, the client may not be running Javascript. This can happen not simply because they've disabled such functionality, but also because the client sending you the form values is something other than some common spamvert viewer (er, web browser). It's quite possible that the data might come from a simulated spamvert viewer, a program of their own devising carefully crafted to send you canned and possibly out-of-range values.
Nefarious abuses are easily imaginable once they figure out that you've naïvely assumed Javascript validation really did its job. This must never be counted on, as it is never guaranteed. No great stretch of the imagination is needed to envision how in certain server-side scripts, unexpected and unchecked data values could easily produce unreasonable, unforeseen, and potentially compromising effects.
--tom
________________________________
cis.SCRIPTOR
Damian Conway (damian@conway.org)
IUS TRANSCRIBENDI
Copyright (c) 2000, Damian Conway. All Rights Reserved.
This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Perl Artistic License (see http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html)
MUTATIONES IN EDITIO 0.01
Initial release.
ADITUS
Lingua::Romana::Perligata has been uploaded to the CPAN and is also available from:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/CPAN/Lingua- Romana-Perligata.tar.gz
_____________________
There you go. Isn't that a much saner, much more legible language? :-)