I first tried it coz Mac OS X doesn't come with ksh, where my previous experience was, but it did come with zsh which was supposed to be like it.
But since then, I've come to love some of its unique features. In particular, the recursive filename completion is just wonderful -- I use it all the time, and it makes things so much easier. All right, you can probably use the 'find' command to do many of the same things, but having it right there in the globbing is so much neater and easier.
Trivial example: to remove a file from the current directory, I might use
rm.DS_Store
To remove it from any subfolders too, I just use
rm **/.DS_Store
But it's much more powerful than that: it's trivial to select files by type, size, permissions, age, &c &c, and there are exclusions and umpteen other possibilities. In fact, I haven't used the find command once since getting the hang of zsh!
And zsh has many other great features, too, including most things I recall from bash, ksh, &c. And it's free and open source, and supplied with Mac OS X... I'm really surprised it's not more popular, coz IMO it deserves to be.
Personally, I don't have time to spend writing down everything I do. That's because I have a life. I don't feel that writing down my experiences somehow validates them, nor does it make my life seem any more important. And I'm not arrogant enough to think that too many other people would be interested.
And for the same reason, I don't feel the need to read every tiny detail of someone else's life. I have my own to think about!
I think it's the same with soap operas. I've never watched any, apart from a couple of weeks' worth of one, because a friend asked me to. He was convinced I'd be hooked, and couldn't understand why I didn't care what happened to the characters after that. Maybe I'm a cold, uncaring person, but I can't understand why people keep watching, why they feel the need to follow all the detail of those fictional characters' lives just because they're familiar.
So that's my first worry: don't all these blog readers have lives of their own???
My other concern is that blogs are a very impersonal way of communicating. They may be convenient, but they're hardly a substitute for a real live conversation, where you can ask questions and discuss issues. They're probably great for impersonal and technical matters, but blogs are by definition personal, and putting out all that personal information in such an impersonal medium, where there's no tone of voice, feedback, or even handwriting to convey expression, seems quite perverse.
(The woeful state of most native English-speakers' spelling, grammar, and other writing skills is only a sub-worry on that front.)
Have I misunderstood what blogging is about, or do these issues worry anyone else too?
As always, we get into the problem that different people use 'free' to mean different things; but I don't think BSD-style licences are particularly 'about free software' under any of them.
If you want to give people total freedom to do what they want with your code, then you should make it public domain and explicitly disclaim any copyright on it. Any licence (BSD, GPL, or whatever) is more restrictive than this.
If you want your source code to be available wherever and however people use it, which is very roughly the FSF meaning, then the GPL is more free than BSD-style ones.
If you want your application to be available at no cost, then a simple traditional Freeware-type of licence does more to ensure this than BSD.
For each of these meanings, BSD-style licences are less 'free' than other options. They're just one way of balancing the various restrictions and intentions; the GPL is another. Use whichever best suits your intentions, but don't claim it's more 'free'.
When it first got used, I think it really meant 'pocket computer' -- Newtons and Psions are general-purpose machines and you can do an awful lot of stuff with them, particularly the later ones. But then Palms and their type became popular and took over the market, and 'PDA' came to mean 'electronic calendar and address book', because that's all people could find to do with them (and, initially, all they were up to).
So, personally speaking, I'm not too upset that that sort of 'PDA' has lost its novelty value. Meanwhile, my Psion 5mx is just as useful as ever, and I'll carry on using it for my address book, calendar, email, reading ebooks (I have several bookcases' worth on CF), reference (the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, etc.; Wikipedia too when I get a bigger CF), my OLR (with 250,000-odd messages in its messagebase, and the ability to connect via mobile phone), writing s/ware (Java, Perl, OPL; Python is possible too), playing Infocom adventures, navigation, crosswords and other games, writing SMSs (the touch-type keyboard is so much faster than my phone's), writing technical articles (well, it's been a while since I had anything published, but the word processor's certainly up to it), and lots more too -- all in my pocket wherever I am.
Okay, this might read like an advert, but the point is that a pocket computer can be so much more than just a glorified diary and address book. If people are happy merging a PDA into a phone, then it shows just how narrow their expectations -- and imaginations -- are. Maybe the market dropping might leave room for some more real uses of the technology.
I'm in the UK, too, but I'm not as optimistic. AIUI, 3G (mobile) connections may be faster than the current 9.6kbps, but they're still pretty far from broadband as the term applies to landlines. And anyway, bandwidth is only half the story; high latency might well make running apps remotely fairly painful.
And as for WiFi, 'most of the UK'? I've no personal experience, but that's rather far from my (hazy) impression -- anyone else care to comment?
Apparently, 'twas not always thus -- many moons ago, the word 'gnu' (meaning a type of antelope) used to be pronounced with a silent 'g'. I gather that The Gnu Song by Flanders and Swann a few decades back was one of the major factors in changing the pronunciation.
But if IE wasn't bundled, pre-loaded, and forced down everyone's throats, do you think it would have taken as long as it has for other browsers to regain even double-figure market-share?
That's the sort of thing they're trying to prevent here.
Just look at the number of.wmx files on the P2P networks...
But this isn't just about the situation now; it's about the future. By the time IE had started to pull away from Netscape and we could see just what damage a bundled browser could do, it was too late to fix things. Similarly, by the time WMP looks like a serious danger, it'll be too late. I think the EU is right in acting now.
Using throwaway addresses for web forms isn't a bad idea, but I don't think it's necessary.
Until recently, I always entered my address as web_site_name@my_domain, with the result that I could trace any spam I received back to the web site who released my details.
But, apart from a few properly-attributed and traceable newsletters, none of the mountain of spam I got resulted from web forms. It's all from other sources, in particular:
Usenet posts (a handful of posts made back about a decade ago), and
web site text (my email address was shown in the clear for a while on a couple of friends' web sites).
So provided you can keep your address from anything directly Googleable, then you're probably fairly safe.
Maybe -- but it's the same sort of nit-picking as complaining about books printed using monospaced fonts, or dot-matrix quality print. Other computer-generated scores may have the same information, and may even look superficially similar, but they do tend to be a bit robotic and inelegant. LilyPond's output is clearer, more natural, and easier to read. Which is exactly the point.
LilyPond isn't perfect; there are some things it's still not easy to do (e.g. vocal scores where lyrics are shared or voices switch between staves, or pieces in free time), and placing of marks like dynamics isn't always ideal. (Though I'm stuck with an older version, so it's probably improved since.) But it has far far better instincts about layout than anything else I've used (Cubase Score and SX, Finale, Harmony Assistant). Although the initial entry may take a little longer than other packages, it needs much much less tweaking afterwards, so it works out quicker overall, as well as producing much more professional output.
Result: even though I've shelled out lots of the folding stuff for Cubase SX, I haven't touched its score editor since installing LilyPond. Those nits can turn out to be more important than you'd think.
Oh yeah, print is dead. Just look what happened to the 'paperless office' idea.
To be fair, a lot of the ideals of the 'paperless office' are here and in common use already. Many of the things which used to be on paper are sometimes, mostly, or completely in electronic form: phone lists, agendas, memos, directories, accounts, correspondence, ledgers, catalogues, manuals, brochures -- even source code is almost exclusively online.
It's true that there's still a lot of paper about in offices, but its nature has changed -- a fair proportion consists of things which simply weren't possible in the old days.
It's the same at home and elsewhere, too, of course. In my case, for instance, as most of my reading is now on the screen of my Mac or my palmtop, I can probably get away without buying another bookshelf in the near future. And my printer tends to get used for things like printing sheet music -- still just as vital (you can't have a choir singing over the tops of monitors!), but it's now fairly easy to engrave (typeset) your own arrangements and compositions, which would previously have involved publishers (and lots of money), or paper, ink, and photocopier (and lots of time).
In short, many of the 'paperless office's goals have already been met -- it's just that we've found new uses for paper that we couldn't have before. (Whether you consider that 'progress' is up to you, of course...)
Real's music isn't in FairPlay wrapped AAC format. It's a Real DRM'd file, wrapped with Harmony in such a way that it appears to be a legitimate file to the iPod... But it's not FairPlay wrapped.
Ah. I see. That puts rather a different complexion on the matter, then!
No. But it means that they can't do anything specifically intended to break compatibility with AbiWord-generated files. (Like they've been proved to have done in umpteen cases from DR-DOS onwards...)
In fact, I might go so far as to say that if AbiWord (or whoever) have done their reverse engineering properly, then M$ would have no way of breaking compatibility with them without also breaking compatibility with existing Word-generated files too.
(Though that particular argument doesn't necessarily stretch to DRM, which needs keys and things...)
Unfair and anti-competitive business practices. (We can argue about whether Apple qualifies as a monopoly in any of the relevant markets, but AIUI it's a crime to try to gain a monopoly unfairly, just as it is to maintain or spread one.)
The one you should be angry at here is Real, who, by their own design, are not allowing you to format-shift music you purchase from them. Anything you buy from the iTMS, you can burn to CD and/or transfer to any other hardware device, including stripping off the DRM and turning it into a WAV, MP3, RM, etc. Real are the ones who don't allow you to do that.
Erm... once Real's music is in FairPlay-wrapped AAC format, ideally you'd be able to do anything with it that you can do with other FairPlay-wrapped AAC, including burning to CD &c? Real themselves shouldn't need to give you specific tools to do that.
Oh, and while I'm ranting on the subject, it annoys me to see other posters talk about Real 'hacking' Apple's DRM, as I think that's misrepresenting them. Do we talk of the folks at AbiWord and OpenOffice 'hacking' M$'s Word format? No. They reverse-engineer it quite legitimately, for the purposes of interoperability. And that's precisely what Real have done. They haven't stopped Apple's DRM working in the slightest; all they've done is to work out how to produce other files in the same (DRMed) format.
Maybe there are Apple fanboys (I refuse to misspell it) who think that way. But please don't think all Apple supporters do.
I like a lot of what Apple does (I have a G4 and an iPod); they make really cool software and hardware that too many people dismiss out of ignorance. They often don't get a fair chance, and so the underdog mentality often crops up.
But I for one think (and have said before) that this time they've gone too far. It's one thing to avoid providing special support for a particular format or service; it's quite another to introduce changes specifically to prevent interoperability. I suspect that this time, their actions may land them in court -- and rightfully so.
This doesn't stop me liking some of the other things they do, of course. Apple is a corporate entity, not a person, and I'm quite capable of considering their various actions separately, without resorting to a facile 'goodie' or 'baddie' label.
Thatcher was her own person; you knew what she believed in, and what she wanted (whether you agreed with her or not). You knew where you were with her -- you might have hated her and everything she did, but you knew where you were with her. She had that integrity, at least.
Whereas who knows what Blair believes (if anything)? The only thing he seems to believe in is power. You get the impression he'd say anything at all to keep it. A will of his own? A plan? Integrity? Blair craves not these things...
We need to keep up with this momentum to make firefox the standard browser.
No you don't. You need to keep up with this momentum to make Firefox a standard browser.
Make anything the one and only standard, and you're back to a monoculture, with all the potential problems that embodies. (Yes, I know that Firefox would by its nature be a much more benign monoculture, but that wouldn't prevent those problems.)
Firefox is a great app, and I'm very pleased for its success, but it's not The One True Browser. Instead, it's the browser that's good enough to show that there's a whole family of True Browsers, and that once people start coding to standards we all benefit, whether we user Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Lynx, or whatever.
Please don't get all arrogant and monopolistic now!
While 'light' DRM is obviously far more useful than the heavier kind, it's still not a solution, and can't ever be.
AISI, there are essentially two kinds of DRM: one that allows you to do specific things, preventing everything else, and one that prevents you from doing specific things, allowing everything else. Now, the specific things are arguable in each case, but it's that 'everything else' which ends up causing the biggest problems.
'Everything else' includes all the changes in technology which will occur in future, the great new killer apps and uses that haven't been invented yet, along with progressive improvements to existing apps uses. But it also includes all the tricks and loopholes that we, er, sorry, naughty evil hackers can use to bypass the DRM. So you can't allow free access to 'everything else' for future-proofing without also allowing it for evil hackers.
The upshot of this is that DRM will only allow specific things and prevent everything else, and in doing so, ensures that even if it's not a huge nuisance now, it will be in the future. All DRM ends up being heavy eventually.
I hate to do this, as it looks like English isn't your native language, but did you mean 'genius' (inspired, of exceptional intellectual or creative power) instead of 'genial' (sociable, friendly, cheerful)?
Anyway, thanks to you and the others who've recommended the series, it's now high on my to-read list, so thanks!
Maybe in the big-ideas and backstory departments, but his characters and dialogue could have done with a boost. Even setting aside the huge numbers of dashes that his characters somehow managed to pronounce, they all turned into excessively polite robots, with no inner emotion, which spoke in a strange, mannered, long-winded fashion.
He was still worth reading even then, of course. Though, interestingly enough, his last book (Forward the Foundation) did seem a lot closer to his earlier style, which fitted in the timeline very well.
Slashdot Mirror
I first tried it coz Mac OS X doesn't come with ksh, where my previous experience was, but it did come with zsh which was supposed to be like it.
But since then, I've come to love some of its unique features. In particular, the recursive filename completion is just wonderful -- I use it all the time, and it makes things so much easier. All right, you can probably use the 'find' command to do many of the same things, but having it right there in the globbing is so much neater and easier.
Trivial example: to remove a file from the current directory, I might use
To remove it from any subfolders too, I just use But it's much more powerful than that: it's trivial to select files by type, size, permissions, age, &c &c, and there are exclusions and umpteen other possibilities. In fact, I haven't used the find command once since getting the hang of zsh!And zsh has many other great features, too, including most things I recall from bash, ksh, &c. And it's free and open source, and supplied with Mac OS X... I'm really surprised it's not more popular, coz IMO it deserves to be.
And for the same reason, I don't feel the need to read every tiny detail of someone else's life. I have my own to think about!
I think it's the same with soap operas. I've never watched any, apart from a couple of weeks' worth of one, because a friend asked me to. He was convinced I'd be hooked, and couldn't understand why I didn't care what happened to the characters after that. Maybe I'm a cold, uncaring person, but I can't understand why people keep watching, why they feel the need to follow all the detail of those fictional characters' lives just because they're familiar.
So that's my first worry: don't all these blog readers have lives of their own???
My other concern is that blogs are a very impersonal way of communicating. They may be convenient, but they're hardly a substitute for a real live conversation, where you can ask questions and discuss issues. They're probably great for impersonal and technical matters, but blogs are by definition personal, and putting out all that personal information in such an impersonal medium, where there's no tone of voice, feedback, or even handwriting to convey expression, seems quite perverse.
(The woeful state of most native English-speakers' spelling, grammar, and other writing skills is only a sub-worry on that front.)
Have I misunderstood what blogging is about, or do these issues worry anyone else too?
As always, we get into the problem that different people use 'free' to mean different things; but I don't think BSD-style licences are particularly 'about free software' under any of them.
-
If you want to give people total freedom to do what they want with your code, then you should make it public domain and explicitly disclaim any copyright on it. Any licence (BSD, GPL, or whatever) is more restrictive than this.
-
If you want your source code to be available wherever and however people use it, which is very roughly the FSF meaning, then the GPL is more free than BSD-style ones.
-
If you want your application to be available at no cost, then a simple traditional Freeware-type of licence does more to ensure this than BSD.
For each of these meanings, BSD-style licences are less 'free' than other options. They're just one way of balancing the various restrictions and intentions; the GPL is another. Use whichever best suits your intentions, but don't claim it's more 'free'.When it first got used, I think it really meant 'pocket computer' -- Newtons and Psions are general-purpose machines and you can do an awful lot of stuff with them, particularly the later ones. But then Palms and their type became popular and took over the market, and 'PDA' came to mean 'electronic calendar and address book', because that's all people could find to do with them (and, initially, all they were up to).
So, personally speaking, I'm not too upset that that sort of 'PDA' has lost its novelty value. Meanwhile, my Psion 5mx is just as useful as ever, and I'll carry on using it for my address book, calendar, email, reading ebooks (I have several bookcases' worth on CF), reference (the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, etc.; Wikipedia too when I get a bigger CF), my OLR (with 250,000-odd messages in its messagebase, and the ability to connect via mobile phone), writing s/ware (Java, Perl, OPL; Python is possible too), playing Infocom adventures, navigation, crosswords and other games, writing SMSs (the touch-type keyboard is so much faster than my phone's), writing technical articles (well, it's been a while since I had anything published, but the word processor's certainly up to it), and lots more too -- all in my pocket wherever I am.
Okay, this might read like an advert, but the point is that a pocket computer can be so much more than just a glorified diary and address book. If people are happy merging a PDA into a phone, then it shows just how narrow their expectations -- and imaginations -- are. Maybe the market dropping might leave room for some more real uses of the technology.
And as for WiFi, 'most of the UK'? I've no personal experience, but that's rather far from my (hazy) impression -- anyone else care to comment?
Apparently, 'twas not always thus -- many moons ago, the word 'gnu' (meaning a type of antelope) used to be pronounced with a silent 'g'. I gather that The Gnu Song by Flanders and Swann a few decades back was one of the major factors in changing the pronunciation.
But if IE wasn't bundled, pre-loaded, and forced down everyone's throats, do you think it would have taken as long as it has for other browsers to regain even double-figure market-share?
That's the sort of thing they're trying to prevent here.
But this isn't just about the situation now; it's about the future. By the time IE had started to pull away from Netscape and we could see just what damage a bundled browser could do, it was too late to fix things. Similarly, by the time WMP looks like a serious danger, it'll be too late. I think the EU is right in acting now.
...but, presumably, it won't be able to connect to the net, display pictures, or make annoying beeps any more, due to 'technical reasons'?
Until recently, I always entered my address as web_site_name@my_domain, with the result that I could trace any spam I received back to the web site who released my details.
But, apart from a few properly-attributed and traceable newsletters, none of the mountain of spam I got resulted from web forms. It's all from other sources, in particular:
- Usenet posts (a handful of posts made back about a decade ago), and
- web site text (my email address was shown in the clear for a while on a couple of friends' web sites).
So provided you can keep your address from anything directly Googleable, then you're probably fairly safe.Maybe -- but it's the same sort of nit-picking as complaining about books printed using monospaced fonts, or dot-matrix quality print. Other computer-generated scores may have the same information, and may even look superficially similar, but they do tend to be a bit robotic and inelegant. LilyPond's output is clearer, more natural, and easier to read. Which is exactly the point.
LilyPond isn't perfect; there are some things it's still not easy to do (e.g. vocal scores where lyrics are shared or voices switch between staves, or pieces in free time), and placing of marks like dynamics isn't always ideal. (Though I'm stuck with an older version, so it's probably improved since.) But it has far far better instincts about layout than anything else I've used (Cubase Score and SX, Finale, Harmony Assistant). Although the initial entry may take a little longer than other packages, it needs much much less tweaking afterwards, so it works out quicker overall, as well as producing much more professional output.
Result: even though I've shelled out lots of the folding stuff for Cubase SX, I haven't touched its score editor since installing LilyPond. Those nits can turn out to be more important than you'd think.
Merely a snapshot of the continually-evolving Jargon File.
The Big Book of [Urban Ledgends|Hoaxes|Vice|Loosers|Conspiracy| etc.]
Again, more up-to-date stuff can be found at Snopes, The Straight Dope, The Urban Legends Research Centre, Hoaxkill, The Museum of Hoaxes, &c.
Nothing wrong with dead-tree books, of course, but nice to know of alternatives.
To be fair, a lot of the ideals of the 'paperless office' are here and in common use already. Many of the things which used to be on paper are sometimes, mostly, or completely in electronic form: phone lists, agendas, memos, directories, accounts, correspondence, ledgers, catalogues, manuals, brochures -- even source code is almost exclusively online.
It's true that there's still a lot of paper about in offices, but its nature has changed -- a fair proportion consists of things which simply weren't possible in the old days.
It's the same at home and elsewhere, too, of course. In my case, for instance, as most of my reading is now on the screen of my Mac or my palmtop, I can probably get away without buying another bookshelf in the near future. And my printer tends to get used for things like printing sheet music -- still just as vital (you can't have a choir singing over the tops of monitors!), but it's now fairly easy to engrave (typeset) your own arrangements and compositions, which would previously have involved publishers (and lots of money), or paper, ink, and photocopier (and lots of time).
In short, many of the 'paperless office's goals have already been met -- it's just that we've found new uses for paper that we couldn't have before. (Whether you consider that 'progress' is up to you, of course...)
I just find it a useful tactic on odd occasions. It puts your opponent completely off his guard >:-)
Ah. I see. That puts rather a different complexion on the matter, then!
Thanks for the info.
In fact, I might go so far as to say that if AbiWord (or whoever) have done their reverse engineering properly, then M$ would have no way of breaking compatibility with them without also breaking compatibility with existing Word-generated files too.
(Though that particular argument doesn't necessarily stretch to DRM, which needs keys and things...)
Oh, and while I'm ranting on the subject, it annoys me to see other posters talk about Real 'hacking' Apple's DRM, as I think that's misrepresenting them. Do we talk of the folks at AbiWord and OpenOffice 'hacking' M$'s Word format? No. They reverse-engineer it quite legitimately, for the purposes of interoperability. And that's precisely what Real have done. They haven't stopped Apple's DRM working in the slightest; all they've done is to work out how to produce other files in the same (DRMed) format.
I like a lot of what Apple does (I have a G4 and an iPod); they make really cool software and hardware that too many people dismiss out of ignorance. They often don't get a fair chance, and so the underdog mentality often crops up.
But I for one think (and have said before) that this time they've gone too far. It's one thing to avoid providing special support for a particular format or service; it's quite another to introduce changes specifically to prevent interoperability. I suspect that this time, their actions may land them in court -- and rightfully so.
This doesn't stop me liking some of the other things they do, of course. Apple is a corporate entity, not a person, and I'm quite capable of considering their various actions separately, without resorting to a facile 'goodie' or 'baddie' label.
Thatcher was her own person; you knew what she believed in, and what she wanted (whether you agreed with her or not). You knew where you were with her -- you might have hated her and everything she did, but you knew where you were with her. She had that integrity, at least.
Whereas who knows what Blair believes (if anything)? The only thing he seems to believe in is power. You get the impression he'd say anything at all to keep it. A will of his own? A plan? Integrity? Blair craves not these things...
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
No you don't. You need to keep up with this momentum to make Firefox a standard browser.
Make anything the one and only standard, and you're back to a monoculture, with all the potential problems that embodies. (Yes, I know that Firefox would by its nature be a much more benign monoculture, but that wouldn't prevent those problems.)
Firefox is a great app, and I'm very pleased for its success, but it's not The One True Browser. Instead, it's the browser that's good enough to show that there's a whole family of True Browsers, and that once people start coding to standards we all benefit, whether we user Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Lynx, or whatever.
Please don't get all arrogant and monopolistic now!
AISI, there are essentially two kinds of DRM: one that allows you to do specific things, preventing everything else, and one that prevents you from doing specific things, allowing everything else. Now, the specific things are arguable in each case, but it's that 'everything else' which ends up causing the biggest problems.
'Everything else' includes all the changes in technology which will occur in future, the great new killer apps and uses that haven't been invented yet, along with progressive improvements to existing apps uses. But it also includes all the tricks and loopholes that we, er, sorry, naughty evil hackers can use to bypass the DRM. So you can't allow free access to 'everything else' for future-proofing without also allowing it for evil hackers.
The upshot of this is that DRM will only allow specific things and prevent everything else, and in doing so, ensures that even if it's not a huge nuisance now, it will be in the future. All DRM ends up being heavy eventually.
I hate to do this, as it looks like English isn't your native language, but did you mean 'genius' (inspired, of exceptional intellectual or creative power) instead of 'genial' (sociable, friendly, cheerful)?
Anyway, thanks to you and the others who've recommended the series, it's now high on my to-read list, so thanks!
Maybe in the big-ideas and backstory departments, but his characters and dialogue could have done with a boost. Even setting aside the huge numbers of dashes that his characters somehow managed to pronounce, they all turned into excessively polite robots, with no inner emotion, which spoke in a strange, mannered, long-winded fashion.
He was still worth reading even then, of course. Though, interestingly enough, his last book (Forward the Foundation) did seem a lot closer to his earlier style, which fitted in the timeline very well.
It's my second choice...