I fucking _hate_ emacs, yes it's over-generalisation gone _crazy_. However, I love it too, I use it almost all the time for almost everything, because it is the only editor I've found (tried 20 or 30 just in the last year) that has all the functions I commonly use. Actually all I want is the ability to run a shell and gdb comfortably in editor panes/windows, roughly emacs-like basic controls (C-A, C-E, etc.) and secondarily to have a features like jumping to compilation errors. I'll happily take recommendations.
It's actually xEmacs that I truly hate, it seems to redraw the whole freaking screen when something changes that's _outside_ the visible portion of one of the documents. A complete waste of CPU.
It's like an abusive husband, it leaves me black and blue, but I still go back to it!
I thought g/re/p came from the editor ed rather than sed. (Not that it's not in sed as well, but its origins were in ed.) That's/precisely/ the reason I listed the programs that I did, and in the order that I did, due to their relations with each other.
/sbin Needed at boot time, not intended for non-root
So billy user's not supposed to fsck his zip-disk, is he?
It may explain how it is, but it doesn't justify why it is.
I've also worked with unices where 'ping' and 'traceroute' were in/sbin. If I can't get a page off a web-site, two of the first things that I, as billy user, do, are ping and traceroute. Oooh, in fact I still have such a system: <<< $ which traceroute/usr/sbin/traceroute >>>
So a) is traceroute required at boot time - yes or no? One system says yes, another system says no. b) is traceroute intended for non-root - yes or no? One system says yes, another system says no. c) how many traceroutes can be performed on the head of a needle?
YAW.
Oh, I'm not a 'Billy' user, I'm an 'Ian' user, but you see what I mean.
I'd say the two biggest sins of the open-sourcers are a) over-generalisation (it'll be able to do everything) and b) over-specialisation (it does one task, but can't do similar ones)
I'm finding it hard to think of examples, but I guess GNU grep's an OK example of something that's just about right. Expanded to do enough things like context greps (e.g. give me 4 lines before the line containing "Name:" and 1 line after), and a few other features (e.g. '-c' so that you don't need to '|wc-l') that add to its functionality, so it isn't over-specialised. Likewise, it's not sed, awk or perl, they realised that just keeping it simple and lightweight was the way to maximise its usefulness.
I think highly of Spyveillance's bot in the same way that I'd like every airport security guard to stick his finger up my arse in order to see if I was smuggling heroin.
Maybe some people approve of such things, but I ain't one of them.
Yup a Dutch invention, a great idea! They have it in many cafes too, it's not just the airport. The Dutch are a funny lot when it comes to, ehem, downstairs functions - they like those crappers where it just sits on a shelf until you flush, eugh!
There's a difference between private and copyright. All my website is copyright me, but not private. I have no problem with sharing the results of my research with humans, however, I don't want my copyrights violated. I'm happy with google caching them, I consider that a favour, as it does a public service like a library. This is different though, it's not a public resource.
If every website were to contain a query-response entry page which screened out non-humans (or unintelligent ones, or ones that can't read English well, or do maths well, or whatever query I set them), then I'd piss of many hundreds of humans. It's ungentlemanly to force me to piss off hundreds of people just to keep those who I don't want to read my site out.
""" I think evolution is better than revolution. """
Where possible, yes. One thing that stuck out in the article as much as your use of "revolution" above was the following: """ The software-installation process should be distribution-agnostic """ i.e. All distributions must understand the new installation process. i.e. all distributions must change what they currently do to conform to the new one true installation mechanism. i.e. Get rid of incompatabilities by making everyone change.
That ranks alongside Stroustrup's naming of C++ header files with no extension, so that all of the ".h", ".H", ".hpp", ".hh", ".hxx", ".h++" camps were left in an equal state of needing to change.
However, on the whole it looks like most of what he says could be slowly adopted on a piecemeal basis, and perhaps that means only partially, so that even teh distributions that dont want to conform, can still minimise their differences.
""" Yeah, and crashing a comet into the planet speeds up evolution.;) """
Yup, good thing too. It needs a helping hand; the fitness functions are far too slack nowadays.
""" disrespect for wartime leader detected. dispatching hit squad. """
In my country we have more enlightened electorate and politicians, and in fact now have both a female president and a female prime minister. We're also not at war. Hence "your", not "my". Sure, send the hit squads to get me anyway, I think it will be funny seeing US citizens trying to find this country! God help the neighbouring ones, though.
Yes. I use w3m 50% of the time, Opera 50% of the time, but I can't get some of the plugins to work, so I occasionally have to pull up Nutscrape. Everything over 5 was either crashy as hell, bloaty as billy-boy-output, or crashy and bloaty. I kept having to go back to NN4.78, as it was the closest to workingness I could find. Bletch.
Nope, because before the definition of a prime comes a definition of a ring, and the definition of a unit. Both of these were elided, but they take care of 0 (ring definition) and 1 (unit definition) before you even get to look at the definition for primes. However, the definition for prime should include a rider that it doesn't refer to zeros or units.
What complete bullcrap. This has no implications for RSA or cryptography at all.
The story is a misrepresentation anyway - no "records" have been "smashed". This is simply a new asymptotic improvement in some particular feature of prime number distribution. (There are an infinitude of consecutive primes whose gap between them satisfies some relation based on teh size of the prime.)
There used to be an big-Oh relation and now it's a little-oh relation, so it's far more significant than the simple multiplicative-constant improvements that have been achieved over the last 80 years or so.
There are no numeric embodiments of this analytic improvement, so there are no "records" to "smash". The proved theorems are all _so_ far away from the real distribution that these models are practically useless.
i.e. Moderate parent down.
For prime number information, start at http://primepages.org/ For relevant prime distribution background info, your best bet is to google for "Chen" and "Vinogradov", but my betting is that the best links will be the ones to Mathworld.
There are cheats, some are more subtly than others.
One that I've seen work was simply a bike wheel with thick black spokes (possibly dense rubber or plastic), no hidden batteries or anything.
It only worked because of its position in the room, in particular its position relative to the window (the museum was closed at night-time, and we guessed it would stop at night, but could test this hypothesis (heck we were 10, we didn't even know it was called a hypothesis!)).
To be precise, it only worked when it was illuminated more on one side (180 degrees, not one face), than on the other. The expansion in the spokes pulled the centre of gravity away from the axis it was supported on, and so it very slowly turned (thus bringing new spokes into the sun, and some others out of the sun).
"every company can come up with their own rules and it's magically OK, because the standard allows for that."
Yeah, that was the first thing that jumped out of the "doesn't suck" document: """ [lots of example uses of XML]
That's a lot of syntaxes that didn't have to be invented. """
WRONG!
That's a whole lot of syntaxes that _did_ need to be invented, however, they're all syntaxes that are based on a single simple pattern and are defined by XML schemas.
The rest of his diatribe wasn't wrong, it was just completely vapid. It's almost as if he thinks no format has ever been unambiguously defined before. Does (E)BNF not exist in his world? Did Church and Post not crop up in his education?
The examples he gives of with-XML-I-can-do are far less impressive than the interoperabilities that have been achieved _before_ XML. (S7, IP, GSM, heck user-visible things like H320 - dozens, hundreds, thousands even for IP, of vendors with interoperability designed in, from the outset, _without_ XML).
If he'd have changed the question "who thinks they're going to be using the same word processor in ten years" to "who thinks they're going to be using the same editor in ten years?" then I'd stick my hand up. I was using that editor 15 years ago, and I expect to be using it in 15 years time too.
It's all a religious argument. I like the attitude of "it works for me so I'll use it", but I don't like it when peddlers push what works for them down my throat pretending it's the best thing since sliced bread and is perfect for every purpose. I've writen parsers, I've generated and decoded data that's interoperated on dozens of platforms. I'm simply not impressed by the same arguments that sell technology to managers and marketting departments.
Use it if it does the job well.
That's all there is to the whole issue. The answer's sometimes XML, it's sometimes not.
My figures came from the 20th Century World Atlas, Matthew White http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm Tuck er, 1998, cites the Hanoi information and still gives the figure as 1100000. That's because your figure is for the whole of the Indochina war (plus 6 years prior to that), not just the American phase of the Vietnam war. As the ratio was pertaining to American involvement I think that the 1100000 figure is the best one to use.
North Vietnamese military and and Viet Cong deaths are estimated at 850000 (various sources give 400000-1100000, that's the median), and North Vietnamese civilian deaths at 65000.
South Vietnamese deaths were not quite as high, but they shouldn't feature in your ratio, surely?
Yup, bacteria are certainly playing a part, but a good thick sweat will give those bacteria loads to dine on.
(not all smells are bacterial, some are fungal - particularly in foot and crotch areas. However, these are usually nasty, an you'd want to get something from your local apothecary.)
OK, I often smell of garlic, I'll give you that, as I've been known to throw half a dozen cloves into my cooking. And after a curry I can smell of cumin too! However, I am not French, but compared with my unchosen nationality, I'd much rather be French at the moment.
Yes, you're right, I was over simplifying to the point of inaccuracy.
If I'm 'oily' sweaty, then I will usually have a cup of hot Masala Tea (indian tea with spices, including ginger and black pepper), which causes the 'wet' sweat to start. I find it easier, or at least more refreshing, to wash after I've added the wet sweat.
Your 'broken down into smelly components' is what I meant by 'stale'.
Thanks for following up. My lifestyle is: Yes to { Tea, Lean meat, Fresh veg } No to { Fast food, processed food, Soda } Not by design, that's just what I like (maybe I can smell myself if I indulge in the bad stuff, and give myself negative feedback, bleh!)
Yeah. Thanks! I really should have known. I once used a PC with Digital-Research's original GEM, it had a 1600x1200 resolution monochrome screen, nothing amazing for the late 90s, but this was the 80s! The video-card was full-length, full-height, and double-width (i.e.it took up 2 ISA slots) and was covered in about 120 chips, mostly RAM. So I/should/ have remembered GEM.
I stuck that 'TOS' one on at the beginning of the list as an afterthought. Not enough afterthought, it appears!
Slashdot Mirror
I fucking _hate_ emacs, yes it's over-generalisation gone _crazy_.
However, I love it too, I use it almost all the time for almost everything, because it is the only editor I've found (tried 20 or 30 just in the last year) that has all the functions I commonly use. Actually all I want is the ability to run a shell and gdb comfortably in editor panes/windows, roughly emacs-like basic controls (C-A, C-E, etc.) and secondarily to have a features like jumping to compilation errors. I'll happily take recommendations.
It's actually xEmacs that I truly hate, it seems to redraw the whole freaking screen when something changes that's _outside_ the visible portion of one of the documents. A complete waste of CPU.
It's like an abusive husband, it leaves me black and blue, but I still go back to it!
YAW.
I thought g/re/p came from the editor ed rather than sed. (Not that it's not in sed as well, but its origins were in ed.) That's /precisely/ the reason I listed the programs that I did, and in the order that I did, due to their relations with each other.
YAW.
/sbin Needed at boot time, not intended for non-root
/sbin. If I can't get a page off a web-site, two of the first things that I, as billy user, do, are ping and traceroute. /usr/sbin/traceroute
So billy user's not supposed to fsck his zip-disk, is he?
It may explain how it is, but it doesn't justify why it is.
I've also worked with unices where 'ping' and 'traceroute' were in
Oooh, in fact I still have such a system:
<<<
$ which traceroute
>>>
So
a) is traceroute required at boot time - yes or no?
One system says yes, another system says no.
b) is traceroute intended for non-root - yes or no?
One system says yes, another system says no.
c) how many traceroutes can be performed on the head of a needle?
YAW.
Oh, I'm not a 'Billy' user, I'm an 'Ian' user, but you see what I mean.
Your subject line says it all. Well, nearly...
I'd say the two biggest sins of the open-sourcers are
a) over-generalisation (it'll be able to do everything)
and
b) over-specialisation (it does one task, but can't do similar ones)
I'm finding it hard to think of examples, but I guess GNU grep's an OK example of something that's just about right.
Expanded to do enough things like context greps (e.g. give me 4 lines before the line containing "Name:" and 1 line after), and a few other features (e.g. '-c' so that you don't need to '|wc-l') that add to its functionality, so it isn't over-specialised. Likewise, it's not sed, awk or perl, they realised that just keeping it simple and lightweight was the way to maximise its usefulness.
YAW.
"Open source sucks" ...
"
their Hotmail account which is what needs the filtering most desperately in the first place
"
So closed source sucks.
Keep clear of thig journo, everything sucks and he's going to implode soon.
YAW.
I think highly of Spyveillance's bot in the same way that I'd like every airport security guard to stick his finger up my arse in order to see if I was smuggling heroin.
Maybe some people approve of such things, but I ain't one of them.
YAW
Yup a Dutch invention, a great idea! They have it in many cafes too, it's not just the airport.
The Dutch are a funny lot when it comes to, ehem, downstairs functions - they like those crappers where it just sits on a shelf until you flush, eugh!
Back to your usual programming...
YAW.
"""
Robots.txt is not like locking your door with a weak latch. It's like leaving the door unlocked with a "please behave while inside" sign on it.
Oddly enough, I don't think the police would have much sympathy for anyone who's house got burgled like this...
"""
You need to see "Bowling for Columbine", particularly the parts about Canada and front doors.
YAW.
There's a difference between private and copyright.
All my website is copyright me, but not private. I have no problem with sharing the results of my research with humans, however, I don't want my copyrights violated. I'm happy with google caching them, I consider that a favour, as it does a public service like a library. This is different though, it's not a public resource.
If every website were to contain a query-response entry page which screened out non-humans (or unintelligent ones, or ones that can't read English well, or do maths well, or whatever query I set them), then I'd piss of many hundreds of humans.
It's ungentlemanly to force me to piss off hundreds of people just to keep those who I don't want to read my site out.
Where has honour gone?
YAW.
"""
I think evolution is better than revolution.
"""
Where possible, yes. One thing that stuck out in the article as much as your use of "revolution" above was the following:
"""
The software-installation process should be distribution-agnostic
"""
i.e. All distributions must understand the new installation process.
i.e. all distributions must change what they currently do to conform to the new one true installation mechanism.
i.e. Get rid of incompatabilities by making everyone change.
That ranks alongside Stroustrup's naming of C++ header files with no extension, so that all of the ".h", ".H", ".hpp", ".hh", ".hxx",
".h++" camps were left in an equal state of needing to change.
However, on the whole it looks like most of what he says could be slowly adopted on a piecemeal basis, and perhaps that means only partially, so that even teh distributions that dont want to conform, can still minimise their differences.
YAW.
""" ;)
Yeah, and crashing a comet into the planet speeds up evolution.
"""
Yup, good thing too. It needs a helping hand; the fitness functions are far too slack nowadays.
"""
disrespect for wartime leader detected. dispatching hit squad.
"""
In my country we have more enlightened electorate and politicians, and in fact now have both a female president and a female prime minister. We're also not at war. Hence "your", not "my". Sure, send the hit squads to get me anyway, I think it will be funny seeing US citizens trying to find this country! God help the neighbouring ones, though.
YAW.
Yes. I use w3m 50% of the time, Opera 50% of the time, but I can't get some of the plugins to work, so I occasionally have to pull up Nutscrape. Everything over 5 was either crashy as hell, bloaty as billy-boy-output, or crashy and bloaty. I kept having to go back to NN4.78, as it was the closest to workingness I could find. Bletch.
YAW
"""
BTW - IE for Pocket PC 2002 doesn't crash with this bug.
"""
It fails to crash? Does that mean there's a bug in their implementation of the bug that makes it fail sometimes?
YAW.
"""
babbling about "freedom to innovate"?
"""
This latest crash is innovative, isn't it?
YAW.
Nope, because before the definition of a prime comes a definition of a ring, and the definition of a unit. Both of these were elided, but they take care of 0 (ring definition) and 1 (unit definition) before you even get to look at the definition for primes. However, the definition for prime should include a rider that it doesn't refer to zeros or units.
YAW.
What complete bullcrap. This has no implications for RSA or cryptography at all.
The story is a misrepresentation anyway - no "records" have been "smashed". This is simply a new asymptotic improvement in some particular feature of prime number distribution. (There are an infinitude of consecutive primes whose gap between them satisfies some relation based on teh size of the prime.)
There used to be an big-Oh relation and now it's a little-oh relation, so it's far more significant than the simple multiplicative-constant improvements that have been achieved over the last 80 years or so.
There are no numeric embodiments of this analytic improvement, so there are no "records" to "smash". The proved theorems are all _so_ far away from the real distribution that these models are practically useless.
i.e. Moderate parent down.
For prime number information, start at http://primepages.org/
For relevant prime distribution background info, your best bet is to google for "Chen" and "Vinogradov", but my betting is that the best links will be the ones to Mathworld.
YAW
There are cheats, some are more subtly than others.
One that I've seen work was simply a bike wheel with thick black spokes (possibly dense rubber or plastic), no hidden batteries or anything.
It only worked because of its position in the room, in particular its position relative to the window (the museum was closed at night-time, and we guessed it would stop at night, but could test this hypothesis (heck we were 10, we didn't even know it was called a hypothesis!)).
To be precise, it only worked when it was illuminated more on one side (180 degrees, not one face), than on the other. The expansion in the spokes pulled the centre of gravity away from the axis it was supported on, and so it very slowly turned (thus bringing new spokes into the sun, and some others out of the sun).
Brilliant. Or at least to a 10-year-old it was.
I still want to build my own...
YAW.
"every company can come up with their own rules and it's magically OK, because the standard allows for that."
Yeah, that was the first thing that jumped out of the "doesn't suck" document:
"""
[lots of example uses of XML]
That's a lot of syntaxes that didn't have to be invented.
"""
WRONG!
That's a whole lot of syntaxes that _did_ need to be invented, however, they're all syntaxes that are based on a single simple pattern and are defined by XML schemas.
The rest of his diatribe wasn't wrong, it was just completely vapid. It's almost as if he thinks no format has ever been unambiguously defined before. Does (E)BNF not exist in his world? Did Church and Post not crop up in his education?
The examples he gives of with-XML-I-can-do are far less impressive than the interoperabilities that have been achieved _before_ XML. (S7, IP, GSM, heck user-visible things like H320 - dozens, hundreds, thousands even for IP, of vendors with interoperability designed in, from the outset, _without_ XML).
If he'd have changed the question "who thinks they're going to be using the same word processor in ten years" to "who thinks they're going to be using the same editor in ten years?" then I'd stick my hand up. I was using that editor 15 years ago, and I expect to be using it in 15 years time too.
It's all a religious argument. I like the attitude of "it works for me so I'll use it", but I don't like it when peddlers push what works for them down my throat pretending it's the best thing since sliced bread and is perfect for every purpose. I've writen parsers, I've generated and decoded data that's interoperated on dozens of platforms. I'm simply not impressed by the same arguments that sell technology to managers and marketting departments.
Use it if it does the job well.
That's all there is to the whole issue. The answer's sometimes XML, it's sometimes not.
YAW.
My figures came from the 20th Century World Atlas, Matthew White http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htmk er, 1998, cites the Hanoi information and still gives the figure as 1100000. That's because your figure is for the whole of the Indochina war (plus 6 years prior to that), not just the American phase of the Vietnam war. As the ratio was pertaining to American involvement I think that the 1100000 figure is the best one to use.
Tuc
YAW.
"5.1 million Vietnamese"
???
North Vietnamese military and and Viet Cong deaths are estimated at 850000 (various sources give 400000-1100000, that's the median), and North Vietnamese civilian deaths at 65000.
South Vietnamese deaths were not quite as high, but they shouldn't feature in your ratio, surely?
YAW.
Yup, bacteria are certainly playing a part, but a good thick sweat will give those bacteria loads to dine on.
(not all smells are bacterial, some are fungal - particularly in foot and crotch areas. However, these are usually nasty, an you'd want to get something from your local apothecary.)
YAW.
OK, I often smell of garlic, I'll give you that, as I've been known to throw half a dozen cloves into my cooking. And after a curry I can smell of cumin too!
However, I am not French, but compared with my unchosen nationality, I'd much rather be French at the moment.
YAW.
Yes, you're right, I was over simplifying to the point of inaccuracy.
If I'm 'oily' sweaty, then I will usually have a cup of hot Masala Tea (indian tea with spices, including ginger and black pepper), which causes the 'wet' sweat to start. I find it easier, or at least more refreshing, to wash after I've added the wet sweat.
Your 'broken down into smelly components' is what I meant by 'stale'.
Eugh, was a lovely subject matter.
YAW.
Thanks for following up. My lifestyle is:
Yes to { Tea, Lean meat, Fresh veg }
No to { Fast food, processed food, Soda }
Not by design, that's just what I like (maybe I can smell myself if I indulge in the bad stuff, and give myself negative feedback, bleh!)
YAW.
Yeah. Thanks! I really should have known. I once used a PC with Digital-Research's original GEM, it had a 1600x1200 resolution monochrome screen, nothing amazing for the late 90s, but this was the 80s! The video-card was full-length, full-height, and double-width (i.e.it took up 2 ISA slots) and was covered in about 120 chips, mostly RAM. So I /should/ have remembered GEM.
I stuck that 'TOS' one on at the beginning of the list as an afterthought. Not enough afterthought, it appears!
YAW.