But which are the exceptions?
on
Platform Evangelism
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe the assholes are the exceptions, not the cool guys?
Things are changing quite a lot in the Mac community. With Mac OS X, there are a lot of fairly new Mac users who aren't necessarily wedded to every dot and comma of the old OS. I'm one, for example. (I hope you wouldn't find me pompous, elitist, or arrogant, but that's not for me to judge:) I've fairly broad experience of platforms before 'going Mac' a couple of year ago; there's a lot I love about current Macs (and just a few things I hate). I'm happy to talk about the good stuff, because I find that a lot of PC users simply don't know that things can be different. (That probably doesn't apply to many Slashdotters, of course.) But I try to be honest rather than rabid about it.
I don't know how representative I am of current Mac users, but I suspect that the closed-minded arrogant ones are a smaller proportion than they were 2 or 3 years ago.
(Oh, and what's wrong with being elitist, anyway? When you know just how good things can be, doesn't having to use crap give you pain, whether it's Windows software, web sites, browsers, closed-source software, proprietary data formats, low-quality audio, or whatever? We can all get rabid about something...)
You'll be laughing on the other side of your MP3 player when the latest CD from $YOUR_FAVOURITE_BAND won't work either.
And you can bet it'll happen. "Hey," they'll think to themselves, "practically no-one complained before. It works!" By which time it'll be too late to stop.
For example, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells 2003 "includes anti-copying technology that is intended to prevent unlawful copying of the CD with a PC". I've yet to find out if I'll be able to play it at all on my Mac...
(Unless by any chance you might possibly have meant a Python-inspired quip, of course...)
Re:But will this wind...
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
Close enough!
It's in a sketch called 'The End Of The World' - originally the closer of the early '60s revue 'Beyond The Fringe', with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett & Jonathan Miller.
However, like you, I remember it best from The Secret Policeman's Ball, a 1979 benefit concert in aid of Amnesty International. It had lots of great stuff, including Monty Python's Cheese Shop and the Four Yorkshiremen. In The End Of The World, Peter Cook repeated his part, and the part in question was taken by Rowan Atkinson, who used one of his exceptionally silly voices and made that line particularly memorable.
...but couldn't that mean that they started with the same source and changed the code, instead of that they'd started with different code and copied the comments? Anyone know which is more likely?
Re:But will this wind...
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
Nope! It does have an (indirect) Python connection, but that probably won't help you.
You have to imagine a group of strange people with their knees tucked up under their grey jumpers...
Good question. Corn is already used in some form or another in a huge proportion of foods, as allergy sufferers (and to some extent diabetics/low-carbers) will know. If it's in the packaging as well, there'll be no getting away from it! Do these guys own shares in a farm or something?
Your reply speaks for itself. If you (as a country) still see the world (when you see it all, of course) as a place to be bested, to be conquered, to be bought, then you've a lot of growing up to do. My 'playground' comment was not intended as a compliment.
I worry about a country that shares such an attitude.
Not for the obvious reasons, though. There's a lot to be said for courange and resolve. But you need wisdom, too. You must be sure that the things that you "keep on keepin' on" doing are the right things.
I'm not saying that the Shuttle isn't one of those right things. (That's been discussed often enough, of course.) Just that your post sounded depressingly close to the arrogant, blinkered, domineering spirit that we're heard far too much of over the last couple of years. As someone who doesn't live in the self-styled "Greatest Nation In The World" (itself a piece of amazing presumption, and one that an awful lot of people round the world would disagree with for various reasons), I worry about what might happen if/when it discovers it's not the biggest kid in the playground any more...
I posted an entry there giving the locale def I wrote for CP1252, and posted the bug as a comment to it. (It didn't seem right to post it as a separate bug, as I think you only encounter it when using a locale such as my new one.)
It's difficult to see how much notice they take of the bug reporter... For the first Mac OS bug I found and fixed, an Apple techie saw a post I'd put on a mailing list about it, and mailed be about it. He was extremely helpful, and we sorted it out together. He pointed me to the bug reported, where I posted a bug about it. This was back in September last year; the fix hasn't been in the several minor releases since then; I understand it'll be in 10.3.
Then in October I posted a bug for the locale issues, and have heard absolutely nothing about it. It's still set to 'Open/Analyze', which sounds as if nothing's been done yet.
And I posted a third bug a fortnight ago, and have heard nothing on that either.
I'm not saying Apple aren't taking any notice of any of these; it'd just be nice to know whether they were or not!
And yes, in hindsight using screen should protect any other programs I'm running, though AFAICT it wouldn't stop vi from crashing regularly. And anyway, vi saves a 'recover' file, so there's rarely any permanent data loss, just masses of irritation.
True. And it does look nice. But remember that the Apple-supplied vi is really nvi, which already has multiple undo levels* and several other nice features. Buffer splitting isn't something I'd use much; whereas supporting CP1252 is a showstopper for me.
I guess what I really want is an editor with the power and flexibility of vi (navigation, REs, editing commands), but with full support for character encodings and proportional fonts. (Yes, for code too. I know, I know, I can hear the screams of "Heresy!" already. But if the code is formatted properly, I find it easier to read in a proportional font, just like English text. I'm surprised no-one else seems to find monospaced text ugly and awkward.)
(* It took me a while to work this out: you hit 'u' for the first undo, but then further 'u's just toggle redo/undo. So what you do is hit 'u' once, and then use '.' (redo) to undo further levels. Probably done that way for backwards compatibility, I guess.)
I tried using vim (v6.1), but I can't get that to show the Windows Latin-1 extended characters at all! (Yes, I could probably hack into it, but I really can't be bothered, not when various other things about it just annoy me - nothing major, but lots of minor differences all add up.)
Besides, the problem may well be somewhere like the curses library or the terminal driver rather than in vi itself, in which case vim would then suffer from the same problems.
if the terminal app crashes you lose ALL of your terminals!
I hit this one a LOT. It's a real annoyance.
Why, I hear you ask? Well... [fx: takes a deep breath] Most of my text files use the Windows Latin-1 encoding (the same as the default ISO Latin-1, but with curly quotes and other useful control characters in an otherwise-unused range). No problem for the Terminal: you can set the character encoding in Window Settings->Display.
I use the vi editor; you can tell it the character encoding through the $LC_CTYPE environment variable. The only problem is that although Mac OS X comes with several character encodings (in/usr/share/locale), it doesn't come with one for Windows Latin-1 (aka CP1252). So I've created my own (with the mklocale(1) command. I've even submitted the result to Apple in the hope that they might include it with future versions... though I haven't heard anything back.)
So, with both Terminal and vi set to use the right encoding, it all works: I can see all the extended characters, and edit them in the usual way. EXCEPT that there's some bug or incompatibility lurking there. Every so often, when I'm editing in vi, the Terminal will suddenly quit for no reason. It happens often enough to be fairly sure that it's related to the extended characters and to vi - it's never happened when editing plain 7-bit ASCII files, nor when using extended characters in the shell. I suspect it may be related to extended characters appearing at the extreme right or bottom of the screen, and/or to the VTwhatever formatting codes (which I don't really understand).
Since I do a lot of editing, I find Terminal crashes several times a day... MOST annoying. So, if anyone has any idea what might be causing these crashes, or can shed any light on this stuff, please let me know!
(BTW, since Mac OS X 10.2.5, vi has stopped taking any notice of $LC_CTYPE! I'm not certain why, or what's changed, but it's easy to download the vi source from Apple's Darwin page, and recompile with a one-line fix I found to restore that functionality. I've raised a bug report with Apple about this, but - again - haven't heard anything yet.)
.pdb (aka Palm DOC) isn't just for Palm-like devices; there are readers for many platforms. And it's freely convertible to/from plain text - there are loads of utilities to do the job.
That's exactly what I meant by `other access methods'.
And there's a lot of bookwares out there if you know where to look. (Mainly Gnutella, though if anyone knows any other sources please let us know!) Plus quite a bit of legal stuff you can buy at places like Fictionwise. (They let you download in many formats; plain text isn't one, but it's trivial to convert PalmDOC to plain text.)
Your use of the term `limiting technology' is interesting. I find it depends upon your PoV.
Yes, plain text does limit what you can represent. (Though as I said above, I find that practically all of what I want fits within that limit.) However, a more complex format is also limiting: it limits what you can do with the file. You may gain the ability to show italics directly, but you lose the ability to knock up simple Perl scripts; you may gain embedded images, but you lose compatibility with handhelds; you may gain coloured text, but you lose the use of your standard editors and tools. And so on. Aren't those limits too?
Yes, it would be great if a more powerful format was in use everywhere. But until then, I'll stick with a format I can use.
There is no "Windows Latin-1" encoding, there's a Windows encoding - I think it's called codepage 1252 - that closely resembles ISO-8859-1 (or Latin-1)
There are many Windows character encodings. The one I'm referring to is called 'Windows Latin-1' as well as 'CP1252'. It's effectively a superset of ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1); the two are identical in the plain ASCII range 0-127, and also in the range 160-255 with accented characters &c. The only difference is in 128-159, where ISO Latin-1 has only control characters (effectively unused), and Windows Latin-1 has some useful punctuation (smart quotes, dashes, &c).
It may have originated with Windows, and so leave a nasty taste in the mouth, but it's a well-defined standard, and it's useful; I'm surprised that the 8-bit Unicode range was based on ISO Latin-1 rather than Windows Latin-1.
Ideally, of course, we'd all be using Unicode (which has all the Windows Latin-1 characters up in the 0x2000 'General Punctuation' range) - a neat solution to all the problems of different 8-bit encodings. But until that's widely supported, I'm sticking with Windows Latin-1.
You'd be surprised how few mainstream books have images. (And even fewer rely on them; most can get by with a note such as '[runes]'.) I've many tens of MB of books and short stories, and only a handful needed images - mostly maps.
And even in those cases where you'd want embedded images, a PDF-like format is not the way to go. It may look great on the right size of screen, and work wonderfully for printing (which was its aim), but as a general book format it's hamstrung by the fixed layout. Yes, there are PDF viewers even for handhelds (I've one on my Psion), but trying to read a book with one is an exercise in pain and eyestrain. Far better to use a format with soft layout, one which can reflow the text to fit the screen. An XML-like format is probably much better for this.
As you say, plain text clearly isn't a complete format. However, IME it's complete enough for the vast majority of cases, and it has so many other benefits.
While I'm on the subject, a mini-rant about HTML/XML: while it's great that newlines &c aren't significant, I find it extremely annoying that spaces aren't either (apart from separating words). Good typography has sentences separated by two spaces; in HTML this needs either a after every sentence, or a non-space blank character (which is what I do here, as Slashdot seems to strip out most & entitites...). Another problem that plain text doesn't have:)
It's universal. Everything supports it, from PDAs to supercomputers.
It's versatile. If properly formatted, it's reflowable on different screen sizes, fonts, layouts, &c. And it's perfect for other access methods.
It supports most characters you'd find in books. The de facto standard is the Windows Latin-1 encoding, which has all the punctuation as well as accented characters. (Yes, I know, I know. But it's not just on Windows -- both my Mac and my Psion use it, for example.)
It's editable. There are tons of tools already available, from spell-checkers in editors to complex analysis. I've written some of my own, for instance; one converts from American to British spelling, which is how I like to read my books.
It has conventions for/italics/, *bold*, _underlining_, &c. Yes, at first, these may look clumsy, but I actually prefer them in many ways, as they're more precise; for example, you can differentiate between *word* *by* *word* and *all at once* highlighting (see the Jargon File for the difference).
It's compact. Plain text files are smaller than HTML, PDF, RTF &c, sometimes by a lot; and when compressed in formats like PalmDOC (pdb) or TCR, they can be made even smaller and still usable directly.
It's future-proof. Plain text has been around for decades, and will be with us for many more, long after DRM keys have been lost and proprietary apps have died.
Yes, of course some spiffy new format will have other advantages. But it's unlikely to gain quick acceptance. Plain text documents are everywhere, as are readers and other software. There are even online publishers selling text files. In fact, ASCII text is arguably the most successful electronic standard there is!
Where were you driving? We have lots of traffic lights. And they're always red... (or so it seems sometimes:)
We have lots of roundabouts, too, of course. You get used to them quickly enough; they can be more efficient than traffic lights (shorter waits), though if traffic is biased in certain directions, they can be rather unfair.
It's interesting driving in a different country; you notice things about your own country's roads that you've always taken for granted. When I drove in the US, for example, I found the four-way stops a little unnerving. Ditto the ability to turn right on a red light, which seemed rather dangerous. And ditto the ability to overtake on either side. OTOH, outside of the big cities, the traffic density seemed to be a lot lower, which helped, so these differences weren't as potentially dangerous as I'd assumed. I also noticed that there they camber the roads properly around slopes; here they're almost always flat.
But in general, driving there was simpler. Junctions are regularly spaced and fairly far apart, and most are relatively simple. The only real trouble I can remember was getting on and off freeways... Whereas here, we have roads that curve in all directions, with all sorts of odd intersections and (in town centres) infuriating one-way systems, and drivers who are usually impatient.
Oh, and cars that you can walk all the way around without stopping for a break...
BTW, speed cameras here are becoming more and more, erm, well, `popular' is hardly the right word, let's just say common. Last night we counted five of them along one particular 2-mile stretch of road; two are new in the last week or so. Not to mention two more cameras to catch cars crossing red lights, in the same stretch. [fx: sigh]
Slashdot Mirror
Things are changing quite a lot in the Mac community. With Mac OS X, there are a lot of fairly new Mac users who aren't necessarily wedded to every dot and comma of the old OS. I'm one, for example. (I hope you wouldn't find me pompous, elitist, or arrogant, but that's not for me to judge :) I've fairly broad experience of platforms before 'going Mac' a couple of year ago; there's a lot I love about current Macs (and just a few things I hate). I'm happy to talk about the good stuff, because I find that a lot of PC users simply don't know that things can be different. (That probably doesn't apply to many Slashdotters, of course.) But I try to be honest rather than rabid about it.
I don't know how representative I am of current Mac users, but I suspect that the closed-minded arrogant ones are a smaller proportion than they were 2 or 3 years ago.
(Oh, and what's wrong with being elitist, anyway? When you know just how good things can be, doesn't having to use crap give you pain, whether it's Windows software, web sites, browsers, closed-source software, proprietary data formats, low-quality audio, or whatever? We can all get rabid about something...)
You'll be laughing on the other side of your MP3 player when the latest CD from $YOUR_FAVOURITE_BAND won't work either.
And you can bet it'll happen. "Hey," they'll think to themselves, "practically no-one complained before. It works!" By which time it'll be too late to stop.
For example, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells 2003 "includes anti-copying technology that is intended to prevent unlawful copying of the CD with a PC". I've yet to find out if I'll be able to play it at all on my Mac...
Gosh, you'd think that 640 lawsuits ought to be enough for anyone...
What? A snake prompted a hairstyle? Bizarre!
(Unless by any chance you might possibly have meant a Python-inspired quip, of course...)
It's in a sketch called 'The End Of The World' - originally the closer of the early '60s revue 'Beyond The Fringe', with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett & Jonathan Miller.
However, like you, I remember it best from The Secret Policeman's Ball, a 1979 benefit concert in aid of Amnesty International. It had lots of great stuff, including Monty Python's Cheese Shop and the Four Yorkshiremen. In The End Of The World, Peter Cook repeated his part, and the part in question was taken by Rowan Atkinson, who used one of his exceptionally silly voices and made that line particularly memorable.
Sorry, I couldn't resist the quote...
...but couldn't that mean that they started with the same source and changed the code, instead of that they'd started with different code and copied the comments? Anyone know which is more likely?
You have to imagine a group of strange people with their knees tucked up under their grey jumpers...
Okay, okay, I know no-one gets the reference. I'll shut up now.
Good question. Corn is already used in some form or another in a huge proportion of foods, as allergy sufferers (and to some extent diabetics/low-carbers) will know. If it's in the packaging as well, there'll be no getting away from it! Do these guys own shares in a farm or something?
Your reply speaks for itself. If you (as a country) still see the world (when you see it all, of course) as a place to be bested, to be conquered, to be bought, then you've a lot of growing up to do. My 'playground' comment was not intended as a compliment.
Not for the obvious reasons, though. There's a lot to be said for courange and resolve. But you need wisdom, too. You must be sure that the things that you "keep on keepin' on" doing are the right things.
I'm not saying that the Shuttle isn't one of those right things. (That's been discussed often enough, of course.) Just that your post sounded depressingly close to the arrogant, blinkered, domineering spirit that we're heard far too much of over the last couple of years. As someone who doesn't live in the self-styled "Greatest Nation In The World" (itself a piece of amazing presumption, and one that an awful lot of people round the world would disagree with for various reasons), I worry about what might happen if/when it discovers it's not the biggest kid in the playground any more...
Is it just me, or does this sound uncannily similar to certain events of, oh, about 17 years ago?
I posted an entry there giving the locale def I wrote for CP1252, and posted the bug as a comment to it. (It didn't seem right to post it as a separate bug, as I think you only encounter it when using a locale such as my new one.)
It's difficult to see how much notice they take of the bug reporter... For the first Mac OS bug I found and fixed, an Apple techie saw a post I'd put on a mailing list about it, and mailed be about it. He was extremely helpful, and we sorted it out together. He pointed me to the bug reported, where I posted a bug about it. This was back in September last year; the fix hasn't been in the several minor releases since then; I understand it'll be in 10.3.
Then in October I posted a bug for the locale issues, and have heard absolutely nothing about it. It's still set to 'Open/Analyze', which sounds as if nothing's been done yet.
And I posted a third bug a fortnight ago, and have heard nothing on that either.
I'm not saying Apple aren't taking any notice of any of these; it'd just be nice to know whether they were or not!
And yes, in hindsight using screen should protect any other programs I'm running, though AFAICT it wouldn't stop vi from crashing regularly. And anyway, vi saves a 'recover' file, so there's rarely any permanent data loss, just masses of irritation.
Use undo ('u') again! 'u' toggles between undoing and redoing, and '.' continues undoing or redoing, whatever you last did. It sort of makes sense.
How come the platform difference, considering there's only one version of the iPod, which works on both platforms?
I guess what I really want is an editor with the power and flexibility of vi (navigation, REs, editing commands), but with full support for character encodings and proportional fonts. (Yes, for code too. I know, I know, I can hear the screams of "Heresy!" already. But if the code is formatted properly, I find it easier to read in a proportional font, just like English text. I'm surprised no-one else seems to find monospaced text ugly and awkward.)
(* It took me a while to work this out: you hit 'u' for the first undo, but then further 'u's just toggle redo/undo. So what you do is hit 'u' once, and then use '.' (redo) to undo further levels. Probably done that way for backwards compatibility, I guess.)
Besides, the problem may well be somewhere like the curses library or the terminal driver rather than in vi itself, in which case vim would then suffer from the same problems.
I hit this one a LOT. It's a real annoyance.
Why, I hear you ask? Well... [fx: takes a deep breath] Most of my text files use the Windows Latin-1 encoding (the same as the default ISO Latin-1, but with curly quotes and other useful control characters in an otherwise-unused range). No problem for the Terminal: you can set the character encoding in Window Settings->Display.
I use the vi editor; you can tell it the character encoding through the $LC_CTYPE environment variable. The only problem is that although Mac OS X comes with several character encodings (in /usr/share/locale), it doesn't come with one for Windows Latin-1 (aka CP1252). So I've created my own (with the mklocale(1) command. I've even submitted the result to Apple in the hope that they might include it with future versions... though I haven't heard anything back.)
So, with both Terminal and vi set to use the right encoding, it all works: I can see all the extended characters, and edit them in the usual way. EXCEPT that there's some bug or incompatibility lurking there. Every so often, when I'm editing in vi, the Terminal will suddenly quit for no reason. It happens often enough to be fairly sure that it's related to the extended characters and to vi - it's never happened when editing plain 7-bit ASCII files, nor when using extended characters in the shell. I suspect it may be related to extended characters appearing at the extreme right or bottom of the screen, and/or to the VTwhatever formatting codes (which I don't really understand).
Since I do a lot of editing, I find Terminal crashes several times a day... MOST annoying. So, if anyone has any idea what might be causing these crashes, or can shed any light on this stuff, please let me know!
(BTW, since Mac OS X 10.2.5, vi has stopped taking any notice of $LC_CTYPE! I'm not certain why, or what's changed, but it's easy to download the vi source from Apple's Darwin page, and recompile with a one-line fix I found to restore that functionality. I've raised a bug report with Apple about this, but - again - haven't heard anything yet.)
<Airplane>So there.</Airplane>
And there's a lot of bookwares out there if you know where to look. (Mainly Gnutella, though if anyone knows any other sources please let us know!) Plus quite a bit of legal stuff you can buy at places like Fictionwise. (They let you download in many formats; plain text isn't one, but it's trivial to convert PalmDOC to plain text.)
Yes, plain text does limit what you can represent. (Though as I said above, I find that practically all of what I want fits within that limit.) However, a more complex format is also limiting: it limits what you can do with the file. You may gain the ability to show italics directly, but you lose the ability to knock up simple Perl scripts; you may gain embedded images, but you lose compatibility with handhelds; you may gain coloured text, but you lose the use of your standard editors and tools. And so on. Aren't those limits too?
Yes, it would be great if a more powerful format was in use everywhere. But until then, I'll stick with a format I can use.
There are many Windows character encodings. The one I'm referring to is called 'Windows Latin-1' as well as 'CP1252'. It's effectively a superset of ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1); the two are identical in the plain ASCII range 0-127, and also in the range 160-255 with accented characters &c. The only difference is in 128-159, where ISO Latin-1 has only control characters (effectively unused), and Windows Latin-1 has some useful punctuation (smart quotes, dashes, &c).
It may have originated with Windows, and so leave a nasty taste in the mouth, but it's a well-defined standard, and it's useful; I'm surprised that the 8-bit Unicode range was based on ISO Latin-1 rather than Windows Latin-1.
Ideally, of course, we'd all be using Unicode (which has all the Windows Latin-1 characters up in the 0x2000 'General Punctuation' range) - a neat solution to all the problems of different 8-bit encodings. But until that's widely supported, I'm sticking with Windows Latin-1.
And even in those cases where you'd want embedded images, a PDF-like format is not the way to go. It may look great on the right size of screen, and work wonderfully for printing (which was its aim), but as a general book format it's hamstrung by the fixed layout. Yes, there are PDF viewers even for handhelds (I've one on my Psion), but trying to read a book with one is an exercise in pain and eyestrain. Far better to use a format with soft layout, one which can reflow the text to fit the screen. An XML-like format is probably much better for this.
As you say, plain text clearly isn't a complete format. However, IME it's complete enough for the vast majority of cases, and it has so many other benefits.
While I'm on the subject, a mini-rant about HTML/XML: while it's great that newlines &c aren't significant, I find it extremely annoying that spaces aren't either (apart from separating words). Good typography has sentences separated by two spaces; in HTML this needs either a after every sentence, or a non-space blank character (which is what I do here, as Slashdot seems to strip out most & entitites...). Another problem that plain text doesn't have :)
Yes, of course some spiffy new format will have other advantages. But it's unlikely to gain quick acceptance. Plain text documents are everywhere, as are readers and other software. There are even online publishers selling text files. In fact, ASCII text is arguably the most successful electronic standard there is!
We have lots of roundabouts, too, of course. You get used to them quickly enough; they can be more efficient than traffic lights (shorter waits), though if traffic is biased in certain directions, they can be rather unfair.
It's interesting driving in a different country; you notice things about your own country's roads that you've always taken for granted. When I drove in the US, for example, I found the four-way stops a little unnerving. Ditto the ability to turn right on a red light, which seemed rather dangerous. And ditto the ability to overtake on either side. OTOH, outside of the big cities, the traffic density seemed to be a lot lower, which helped, so these differences weren't as potentially dangerous as I'd assumed. I also noticed that there they camber the roads properly around slopes; here they're almost always flat.
But in general, driving there was simpler. Junctions are regularly spaced and fairly far apart, and most are relatively simple. The only real trouble I can remember was getting on and off freeways... Whereas here, we have roads that curve in all directions, with all sorts of odd intersections and (in town centres) infuriating one-way systems, and drivers who are usually impatient.
Oh, and cars that you can walk all the way around without stopping for a break...
BTW, speed cameras here are becoming more and more, erm, well, `popular' is hardly the right word, let's just say common. Last night we counted five of them along one particular 2-mile stretch of road; two are new in the last week or so. Not to mention two more cameras to catch cars crossing red lights, in the same stretch. [fx: sigh]