You're thinking the more extreme forms of Kanner autism. I'm a fellow traveler- I have Asperger's syndrome (I'm one of the many _adult_ Asperger people out there who fell through the cracks in childhood and just had to wing it) When you read accounts from someone who's experienced this 'can't-cope' or if you've had a taste of it yourself, then it's easy to get a little more specific about what is going on. It's not really so much that the center of personality is so _weak_- what's happening is basically that the sensory input is being set nice -256 or so! o_O (For those who haven't gotten that far, 'nice' sets priority levels, and the high negative numbers set a process to very high priority, nearly locking out everything else- another telling similarity is that userland doesn't typically get to nice processes to such levels, only root gets to set negative numbers and users are normally restrained to setting processes to _lower_ values- i.e. 'forgetting' the process and having the computer pay less attention to it!) With that understood, it should be easier to imagine what it's like having a sensory input set to unbearably high priority. I'm not Kanner-type autistic but I _have_ had experience with this- when I was a kid we had cats (I still identify with cats powerfully) and at times they had fleas. I developed a horror of having fleas in my bed biting me when I had to sleep- and I'd end up unable to sleep whether or not there were any fleas, because _touch_ would become so intolerably acute for me that I would be feeling individual thread-ends or grains of sand, all over, with the intensity of flea bites or crawling insects (normally a much more intrusive input!) I've seen many reports that sight and sound etc. can be this intrusive as well, so I wanted to try and clarify it a little:) 'open content', it's time for me to share some of my reality for the betterment of the community. After all, a _lot_ of Asperger people (or other stuff like ADD, see below) are hackers...
Surely the serious geek mousepad is the 3M one. How can you not have a 'precision mousing surface' and specialty wristrest gelfilled support when you _know_ since it's 3M they invented every material in the thing from scratch, just to do it right... 3M are unbeatable for chemicals and materials, and this just confirms it. I bet it improves Q3 scores too. >;) On a less serious note, I have a calculator watch:)
This is the 90s. Musicians _already_ have to go on tour _and_ pay for their own promotion _and_ merchandising and do that all themselves and still won't make any money. If you are really _serious_ about business _and_ play brilliant music you might be able to be self-supporting through it, but 2/3 of your work will be running the business. What do you think this is, the 60s or something?;P Me, I have two mp3s up. I produced an album with good pop songs years ago but couldn't get anywhere with it. As soon as I have the technical capability, I'll be finding a way to release the whole album freely as mp3, as I have nothing to lose. I hope eventually to be burning CDs and selling those over the net- that isn't likely to be self-supporting either but it could be a nice source of pocket change- I am a damn good engineer and the CDs would sound markedly better than the mp3s. Another point is that this poverty-stricken situation is rather liberating musically- it doesn't matter if my music fits a mold (like the pop-ready album I recorded). I could put out singles rather than try and accumulate entire albums. I could put out long experimental musical pieces that'd never ever be played on the radio. ever;) I can't even be angry at the RIAA. They have done nothing for me, ever. They've done nothing for the musicians I listen to either- if you're educated you know that the industry is a damned slaughterhouse and musicians are the cattle. That just is, there's no changing it from the inside under these conditions. So I am grateful I _didn't_ try so hard to make it on their terms. I'll be happier and very possibly make more money by doing it on my terms. Here, have some mp3 instrumentals (due to lack of money and RAM for editing these are sections of longer pieces, and they are likely to be remixed in future to make them even better) TreacherousCretins.mp3 ExtendedPlay.mp3
Network Solutions 'deed' pinned up
on
Infinite Space
·
· Score: 1
Hey, _I_ thought of doing that. I didn't bother doing that.... I _shall_ do that! *pin* Ahhh:) homesteading. I rent my apartment (and am moving 'cause the building's being sold out from under me- sucks) but I _own_ airwindows.com:) and hey- it's in the high rents!;)
I sympathize with your viewpoint: I just would like to mention that bad PR is not an accurate litmus test for problems. If, as it appears, Mindcraft made a concerted effort to destroy Linux performance, then their results are not a broadly useful indicator of problem areas needing immediate attention, and efforts to 'fix' these 'problems' are to some extent wheelspinning, attempts to cover for pathological situations that wouldn't normally happen. If somebody beats you in a race by tying your leg to your opposite arm and putting warm oatmeal in your ear that you're forbidden to spill, then the thing to do is not to try valiantly to get better at hopping on one leg with an ear full of warm oatmeal. It's more useful to continue training for more normal races, and kicking up a fuss anytime someone approaches you again with warm oatmeal:) This is what happened. Except for the oatmeal, which is metaphorical in this case:)
Hey, don't look at _me_, I'm not anonymous;) My personal agenda is this: I am determined to put together a minimal distribution, probably an unholy perversion of RH and Slackware (;) ) that delivers high gloss with low resources for use with little client computers like 486es. This is assuming that there will be a steady supply of NOS (new old stock) PCs from earlier days, at prices under $100. At the shop I work at we are already experimenting with this and can sell PCs without monitor for $150, $100 less than with Windows. The trick is, we have to get Linux into a distribution that is completely turnkey (I'm wondering if we can use that for a name- Turnkey Linux) and installs into a completely preconfigured system, possibly through entering stuff in the installer or a 'post-install wizard' such as Apple's taken to including too. It also has to be _very_ flashy or luxurious, and should be a clean break from Windows-like ways of doing things. People always say it has to look and work like Windows, but I'm completely unconvinced you can sell something on the basis of it's being 'like' a chief competitor, but not enough like it to be useful as such. It's gotta be different- real different- I'm thinking a carefully set up Window Maker with many workspaces, heavy use of aterms (my pet term:) ) running console programs such as pine and pico and lynx, perhaps both vi and emacs also there for visiting unix guru friendliness:) and maybe whatever Netscape seems most feasible given ram constraints. Target hardware is 8M ram, maybe 270M HD, 24 of which should be swap- we are running 16 and it is not too happy with it. Musts include a set of desktop pictures/themes for WM (preferably changed independently), a means for actuating the aterms either white on black, black on white, or transparent using black or white lettering (means == tile or shell one-word alias for the rather long CLI invocation), and menu support for xlock -inroot with a selection of screensaver decorations that run pretty well without sucking too much precious CPU power- even though this is supposed to _look_ almost infinitely cooler and more desirable and modern than Windows, it has to be able to run on a 486/33, that being our target. Wish us luck! I bet there are also projects like this aiming to make the custom dist as much _like_ Windows as possible. We are going to make it quite different. It should be possible to make a dist more user friendly than windows- that isn't really such a daunting task. It's like trying to make something cleaner than mud:)
Come to think of it, aren't we missing something? Benches should be realworld, and should be created from a budget with labor costs included at full industry rates (no free labor! no Linus-labor _or_ teams of Softies working for free!). BUT! Granted that, then the bench should be the amount of work done over the course of a month, with any maintenance billed at full rates. I'm picturing a vanilla linux box, set up properly, sitting unattended and chugging along while an NT box puts in spurts of blinding activity interspersed with falling over and being repaired by $100 an hour MCSEs >:)
I already gave some good benches in an earlier thread, including an active server page one. It's so very easy- simply have all benches measured by 'Amount of (x) per $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000'. Possibly Linux would have difficulty at $10,000, but maybe an Alpha could be used or something. The point is, we _want_ to measure everything by realworld dollars. The fact that linux is free is not _our_ problem, nor is it the problem of linux deployers. To be fair, have any and all Linux tech support used in the test charge their full hourly rate (no freebies)- and have the NT techs charge their full hourly rate (NO FREEBIES!). What, I ask you, could be fairer? If you like you could also extend this testing paradigm to $50,000 and $100,000 price points. The linux side could talk Beowulf servers, but remember time spent setting it up _would_ be paid for as well- what could be fairer?
How much RC5 cracking can be done per minute for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000
How many active server pages served a minute for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000
How many active Perl pages (like comments.pl) served a minute for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000
How many (insert generic SQL query bench here) for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000
How many Email clients can be kept active for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000
How many clients that can compose, send and recieve Email over a network can be _purchased_ for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000
How many clients capable of running a graphical web browser capable of handling forms, tables, frames and cookies can be purchased for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000
How many floppies can be formatted a minute for: $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000;)
They are very serious for getting computers into peoples' hands for under $300. Or under $200. Or under $100... Cuts into your premium Windows-based price structure a little, doesn't it? >:)
Yarbles. I am _personally_ taking an interest in working out how to devise a linux distribution (probably off Slackware) that provides a really high-gloss but low overhead CLIENT computer for novice computer users. It will have all the eye candy, but do a lot with terms and console programs running in tricked-out terms. It will probably also have extensive development libraries- depends on how much space there is. Why? Because the shop I work at is selling new-old-stock (NOS) PCs and we can sell a Linux box for a _hundred_ dollars cheaper than the Windows box. Even the most inadequate legitimate Windows we can get costs us more than all the hardware put together! We are being given no consideration by Microsoft, we are getting _no_ special treatment or help, and we have nothing to lose at this point. You, sir, talk like 'astroturf'- and you'd better go back to your boss and tell him, 'We can't keep people from running us into the ground on cheap operating systems! The real grass roots are deserting us over cost issues and they can sell for half the cost of our OEMs!' and then you better desperately try to subvert all the standards at once for all the good it will do (it will only hasten the collapse, go for it). What can I say? YOU LOSE. Nothing makes that clearer to me than our shop paying over HALF Windows tax on _seriously_ low cost computing. We want to hype linux and to be able to legitimately claim a _seriously_ low price for our entry PC- but if we didn't want to hype linux we could sell the linux box for ten dollars LESS than the Windows box AND make FIFTY PERCENT more on it besides! Do you understand this, or is it too frightening to face? Recent remarks from Steve Ballmer about how people will inevitably pay more money for quality (*LOL* worked good for Apple all those years eh?) suggest that you guys are _not_ facing this. It's this simple. YOU LOSE. Thank you for playing, it's been fun watching you corrupt the whole industry and turn it into completely commoditized incompatible unreliable garbage, and now that you have been beaten at your own game and can't even pretend to undercut what's currently going down, don't let the door hit you in the butt on your way out. Try to be a good loser, for loser you shall be.
This is from iCab, which generates error reports:) Altogether 35 errors found. Only 25 errors are listed below. Warning (1/1): is missing. Warning (22/1): The attribute "TOPMARGIN" is not defined for the tag . Warning (22/1): The attribute "LEFTMARGIN" is not defined for the tag . Warning (78/1): In the tag the value of the attribute "WIDTH" must be quoted. Warning (78/75): In the tag the value of the attribute "WIDTH" must be quoted. Error (87/48): In the tag the attribute "BORDER" is not allowed. Warning (87/48): The attribute "WIDTH" is not defined for the tag . Warning (87/48): The attribute "HEIGHT" is not defined for the tag . Warning (95/197): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted. Warning (95/197): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted. Warning (95/586): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted. Warning (95/586): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted. Warning (95/772): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted. Warning (96/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted. Warning (96/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted. Warning (96/206): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted. Warning (97/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted. Warning (97/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted. Warning (97/210): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted. Warning (98/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted. Warning (98/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted. Warning (98/204): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted. Warning (99/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted. Warning (99/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted. Warning (99/211): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted. Warning (100/38): In the tag
the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted. Error (104/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values. Error (105/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values. Error (106/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values. Error (107/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values. Error (113/1): The start tag for can't be found. Error (114/24): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values. Error (119/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (120/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (128/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (129/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (142/1): must not contain block level tags like
.
Error (148/1): The start tag for can't be found. Error (148/8): The start tag for can't be found. Error (150/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (152/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (159/1): must not contain block level tags like
.
Error (165/8): The start tag for can't be found. Error (167/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (169/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (178/8): The start tag for can't be found. Error (180/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (182/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2. Error (184/8): The start tag for can't be found. Error (190/1): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values.
If it's a G* making use (granted, this wasn't IBM's baby, but still) of the AltiVec registers, then it's basically allowing extensive general purpose operations on effectively 128-bit general purpose registers. The application to anything 3D is quite obvious, and there could easily be other applications (the _compilers_ get to use these registers anytime they want to, and there aren't really fancy rules apart from the sheer word (sentence?;) ) size of the registers, so compilers don't have to be superlatively fancy to do stuff with this. At the least it's free parallel operations in a basic way, and there are some very big win situations as I understand it- some guy got (I think) a matrix blur going several _hundred_ times faster than non-Altivec. A game console _would_ be the ideal introduction for this. I wonder if Nintendo are expecting Altivec. Certainly the most obvious use is 3D graphics- particularly with respect to complicated geometries- what with modern cards stuff isn't particularly fill-bound, it's all more and more complicated and fluid geometries now.
Re:"Our readers are stupid uneducated dimwits" - E
on
ABCNews GNOME Acticle
·
· Score: 1
Actually, in advertising, this is a great way to completely fail to sell product to people:) ad people like David Ogilvy rebelled against that 'great unwashed' concept long ago. Ogilvy, in the '50s or '60s- "The customer is not a dummy. She is your wife." Ogilvy made a _lot_ of money treating consumers like intelligent people who can read. In general, if you treat people like a bunch of easily manipulated suckers, any effectiveness you have will be obliterated by a massive backlash effect. In one study (Ogilvy also pioneered actually _researching_ advertising effectiveness), a stupid and annoying advertising campaign that cost millions actually _reduced_ the number of sales of the product that previously wasn't being advertised! That should serve as a warning.
Heck, I am completely into Window Maker, and in that you _always_ doubleclick tiles to launch them. I just think this is incredibly superior to singleclick for actions/launches. Singleclick turns the GUI into a minefield with stuff that can go off unexpectedly. Doubleclicking is totally easy and separates selection from activation very effectively and I agree with the Window Maker people- the last I heard there weren't even _plans_ to add activation on singleclick to WM tiles, because basically this is just wrong and steps on the select/drag functionality. So there;)
The remark about "almost no reason for a current Windows, Mac or Amiga user to use the Linux desktop" irritated me. I'm a current Mac user and I _like_ Linux for what it is. I am not asking for office programs and I am not asking for a desktop (Clarisworks and MacOS Finder do both those things better than anything I've seen elsewhere). Instead I like letting Linux be what it is, and I run Window Maker with such an individualised way of setting it up that it's almost a totally novel interface. No desktop and in fact I also have a lot of stuff running without titlebars or resizebars, but zoomable by keyboard shortcuts. I don't _want_ Linux to be just exactly like the MacOS I already have, and I sure don't want it to be more like Windows. Why can't you just let me do it my way? Wait- you _do_ just let me do it my way, because it's linux and nobody can _stop_ me from inventing my own way around it. Nevermind;) I guess my point is that I feel this wish for Office and desktops is incredibly stupid. Who has been putting subliminal messages in everybody's subconscious that desktops are the final pinnacle of evolution and there's no other way to do anything? Wait, let me guess, starts with an 'Ap' and ends some years later with a 'ft';) That's been _done_. Fine. I even like it and (regarding the 'Ap' version) happily use it. Let's be willing to develop new stuff for Linux, shall we, and not squander the amazing freedom from influence, the amazing opportunity, by frantically making it just like everything else?
Damn straight! That is absolutely right. My approach to generating airwindows.com is to put _structural_ markup in the data files. In other words, I have pages with text information (and inline HTML if I like) on them, and the first two lines are header lines in a special format which gives the title and a summary of the page. These two headers turned out to be enough for my purposes, but others might find use for more elaborate headers. The point is, the headers don't go into the HTML, they are used to direct the _tool_ that's generating the HTML, and can produce more intelligent references to the page from other pages, or give fine-grained control over the whole structure of the resulting site. I'll repeat the key phrase beause it's so right and worth repeating-
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
That could be done on the fly by Perl scripts like slashdot, or it can be done on your own machine whereupon you just re-upload all the pages or whichever set of pages is affected by the most recent update- but the auto-generating is a must. An example (not live on the web yet)- I use iCab as a browser. It has a smily-frowny face feature (invariably frowny) regarding HTML compliance as stated in the page. If the page has errors, iCab makes a frowny and can give you an error report telling you what errors were found. I went to my site with this tool, and found that it was giving lots of errors. This was partly because I'm doing HTML 3.2, on purpose, and am not enthusiastic about HTML 4 at all. I went into SiteBot and started changing code. After adding a comment that tells browsers the site is 3.2, most errors went away as the code _was_ correct HTML for 3.2, but there were a few details, a table tag that Netscape accepted that wasn't technically legal, minor stuff. I edited Sitebot's code some more and fixed that too, and rebuilt the site. There are 384 items in the airwindows.com folder. That equates to somewhat less than 180 pages all told. _All_ were fixed by the changes, effortlessly. With a pure text editor you'd at least be composing massive search and replaces- and God knows what you'd have to deal with in a WYSIWYG, it'd be really ugly. Instead, the data is separate and the whole site is ready, next time I add new content and re-upload it, to switch to total HTML compliance and alert browsers to exactly what sort of parsing it will be needing.
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
What about when you're maintaining a site with over 100 pages? I'm sorry- even in this reply it is plain that FrontPage has its priorities wrong. Rename an image? How about adding a page in a category and having all the related pages seamlessly update to include the new link. How about a timestamp with creation and modification dates for pages to give a time context to the content you're providing? How about taking inline graphics and transparently adding size tags to help browsers lay out quicker? I don't believe FrontPage is good enough, and it certainly isn't good enough to handle airwindows.com. It'd be a Sisyphean task maintaining a site like that with such a tool. Instead I use Sitebot for the job. Stands to reason, after all I wrote it. It's a Mac program, but since the source is GPLed and online, anyone who wants to take any or all of it and make a Linux program out of it is quite welcome to do so. At any rate, when you talk about elegant handling of site management, I have to laugh, because _none_ of the WYSIWYG tools _or_ a plain text editor is really up to the task. I use Sitebot, and Slashdot uses perl scripts, and any really serious site with a lot of content is _forced_ to use something suitable, otherwise it just won't be possible to manage the site at all. This means scripting or some form of site compiling- sitebot is more the latter and works from a directory structure on my hard disk. You can also use stuff like Frontier or Slashdot's perl scripts to dynamically generate the pages from a collection of data. That data is not HTML, and this is the key point you're missing. It's just not feasible to have your actual data be in HTML. Instead it needs to be something editable and workable which is _turned_ into HTML as needed, producing HTML pages that are either disposable (Slashdot's generate-on-the-fly pages) or freely replaceable (my SiteBot's output, overwritten every time I run the bot- the original data is never touched.) Do you understand this yet? 20 pages is _nothing_. 20 pages is corporate HTML art wankery-ville. Try 200 or 2000 and see how you do. At a certain point you hit a paradigm shift. Do you think news.com uses FrontPage? They, too, are using some custom software. Hell, man, even MSNBC is not using FrontPage. FRONTPAGE IS NOT SERIOUS, and to some extent neither is a standalone text editor all by itself- when you start dealing with really _demanding_ web tasks, it becomes specialized software, and the data you feed it might well be handled in a text editor- or you could be generating the data in a word processor and having the software translate the styling to HTML. But you won't be using FrontPage: it is inadequate.
You're taking a shortsighted view, Jon, but you've really hit on something here, and I'd like to encourage that if I may. I just had a guest over, for the sole purpose of showing him my Linux dualboot. He actually never saw the Mac side- he's seen those before, nothing special. Instead I was showing him all that was resident in Linux- the scope of possibility there. On airwindows.com (and you better believe I snapped up the dotcom address- it was a primary motivator for my homesteading that domain when I did), I have desktop backgrounds and tiles and titlebars for Linux, and more specifically for Window Maker. However, it doesn't stop there... I stole the animated desktops from Afterstep and put them in WM, editing them and picking different ones and throwing on extra parameters to tailor the behavior. I have menus mapped to fkeys so I can use my one-button mouse comfortably. I have four different kinds of xterm (all aterms!) fired off menu selections that have fkeys, all borderless minimalist purist rectangles that can be meta-dragged, or closed with F3 (window properties) or F4- xkill on a button! The rectangles have no titlebar or resize bar and come in black on white, white on black, black text on transparent and white text on transparent. I made icons for all of them in the GIMP. I am, it would appear, a damned good, creative, virtual interior decorator. *grin* What does this mean? Well, for starters, it means I am interested enough in my virtual home to want to make it my own- on a structural level as well as eyecandy, evidenced by the minimal term-rects and the evolving method of managing everything. I love Window Maker because it seems especially suited to this sort of adaptation. I was telling my friend that you could have a fkey that invisibly fired a menu option that ran a _script_ that launched your aterm under a different name for every day of the week, letting you have it automatically be a different background color for each day. Only an hour later did I realise that you could make it a different transparent tint for every day of the week. Granted, you have to control the root window's decoration to be able to get away with such tints- like running the Sonar theme which is _very_ suited to transparent terms and a personal favorite (the only theme I use regularly that I didn't create myself)- but then that's the point isn't it? This sort of work is a weird hybrid between interface design, GFX and a touch of programming or at least scripting- and it could become roughly as valid a job as real interior decorating- most people wouldn't even consider it, but then you visit some places and go 'whoooa!' and it turns out Somebody Did It, some person was _hired_ to create the effect and it wasn't always the homeowner. The same thing could happen on the desktop (with Linux, much less plausibly with any other OS I know of, and I'm a Mac dude;) ) The flip side of this issue is something I've written an essay about- at what point do virtual spaces become personal property, and what civil liberties apply? If I write to Bill Gates and ask him for a can opener, and he mails me one, the can opener does not emit a small bomb which explodes and blows up all my other appliances. If he sells me a house, the house does not extend a robotic arm and smash up my previous house, dumping the shattered rubble into a dumpster. These things would be considered criminal and real world stuff doesn't work that way (at least with can openers). However, if I ask him for a movie viewer, it is extremely likely that what he gives me will at least 'put the other movie viewers into the closet' (seize control of linking procedures like Internet Config) and in some cases even fight me, repeatedly changing settings if I dare to change things back. In the worst case, installing of OSes, there is a real danger that what Bill provides will seek out other disk drives, and if it does not find data it understands, reformat them, obliterating my property. Why is this not illegal? A failure in imagination. Computers are new enough that not everyone accepts that their contents are property. A home is a physical object and it's hard to see how a buncha bits can equate to a coffee table when the fact is, one can spend a comparable time and effort just setting up a computer to be an appealing environment. Nobody has permission to smash up your coffee table at random, but virtual 'coffee tables', arrangements of preferences or clever scripts you make to do things, are not given the same protection, especially when they are uses of existing software that some other software needs configured differently. The tendency is to assume 'Well, of course you want me to nuke your prefs so you can see this amazing new program!'. I don't think that's defensible, but computer virtual space is such a fledgeling concept that few people have made that connection. Even stuff like PGP is about protecting a person's communication- it isn't about protecting the state of your applications menu or what icons go where on the desktop. Some communities, like Mac users, have grown up with a different tradition- Macs tend to be very user-centric in this respect and will leave icons and things where you left them, making it a very high priority to retain the virtual space in the condition you left it- though even there you see troubles, and once you get beneath the surface, the condition of your software ceases to be your property- even the Apple Menu, very user-editable, is routinely messed with by installers, or software (speech recognition) will insist on having something there whether you want it there or not. I think that of all OSes, Linux has the best shot at delivering genuine virtual property and the right to maintain the state of one's own computer unmolested by vendors. But it would help if more people understood the issues involved.
For low power you're basically looking at the 603e- I'm not sure what they have of more recent lineage which is comparable to the 603 but I do know that I raised the issue of really low-cost Macs a long time ago, believing that 68040s were cheaper than PowerPC. Turns out they are not because PPC was where the volume was. By the same token, I wouldn't assume 68K is lower power than PPC- I'll grant that it seems possible it could be, but I wouldn't automatically conclude it was. I don't actually know what Coldfire is- is this some sort of StrongArm-ish thing? The thing to remember about PPCs is that they aren't much like Pentia- they don't consume anywhere near as much power and they are less of a disposable part (I saw a fellow on a mailing list today, talking about celerons and overclocking, who basically gave computer parts a lifespan of a couple years before replacement- something I find hard to understand, though it's possible he _didn't_ mean 'then it burns up from normal use') Either Coldfire or the PPC runs on a lot less power than modern x86, but that doesn't mean the PPC uses that much more:)
After all, it does look like Jon is using this as yet another means of self-aggrandizement. This time it's arguably such a worthy cause that he should be doing it, but isn't it true that these are posted unde JonKatz? Therefore there already IS a way to filter it. Turn off Katz and you won't have to be drowned in it. Filtering Katz is not a statement that you don't care about the youth of today. It's just a way to get the gasbag to shut up, and most people can do more in their own back yards than Katz does with a thousand gassy essays. Self-espression != taking action. All too often it's just windy words (aka 'word, word, word')
It looks like they are _both_ bound by the constraints of the x86 architecture, and that's what this is all about. Why should that surprise anybody? I'd be more surprised if AMD was able to _significantly_ beat Intel designs. I'd also be surprised if Intel was able to _significantly_ beat AMD designs, or their own designs from last year. For crying out loud, haven't you PC guys been eating the same dog meat for ten years? Even if it's terrific don't you get a little sick of the lack of variety? Especially now that billions of dollars have been spent to work out _all_ the big wins in the designs so there is nothing left but piddly little gains at phenomenal cost. More than ever I'm happy I've been using PPC- now that's something I'd like to keep available, in all its 32 register, general purpose vector (128 bit) processing unit, 1 meg of cache glory. What do you think would happen if the industry put the same amount of energy behind that as it does behind x86? Yeah- it'd zip right past x86 and you'd be buying PII-like daughtercard things with _sixteen_ or _thirty-two_ PPCs all on the same die- and you'd have to run Linux (or Solaris or something) because NT or MacOS don't _scale_ to that extent yet! Instead most people want to eat the same dog food over and over, even when they have to _replace_ their RAM, their MB etc anyway (you'd think that would tip them off). Linux runs _quite_ nicely on PPC and you don't have to give money to Apple directly to do it- homebuild something, buy older powermacs used (top of the line ones from a couple years back) and get ones that can be upgraded to G3 simply and easily (i.e. most of them, by now). That or wait around forever for somebody to make PC PPC mobos while _you_ keep eating old dog food because you don't see anybody making new recipes, which they won't as long as you and everybody else are still gobbling up the old dog food as fast as they can make it. I hope PPC (or Alpha, or *fill in blank*) _does_ end up stomping all over x86. But if it does not, I don't regret for a second that I was willing to try it and see. I _like_ the way my PPCs work. I was able to get some frags on q3test against G3 guys and I only have a 200Mhz 604e on a slow bus! (unsupported, and running the Mesa libs) PPC is _so_ underestimated. (ok, end rant. phew.)
The small shop I work at (as a Mac tech, moving in the direction of being able to handle Linux professionally) is a VAR, and we sell PCs. We are currently trying to fill a gap by making PCs (with little but the PC, keyboard and mouse and RAM and HD inside) available for under three hundred dollars. Supply your own monitor and whatever else you want. It looks like we should be able to do this fairly effectively.... The Microsoft tax (reckoned as cost TO US) is MORE THAN HALF the cost of the PC, and that's for a minimal legal version of Win95 only... We are going to look into Linux for these insanely cheap ol' PC boxes (486es they are, it's all about lowest possible cost and _our_ ability to set them up in useful condition for uneducated buyers who only want to type letters etc). Using Linux would _halve_ our cost, and we figure we can knock a _hundred_ dollars off the cost of the PC making it under _two_ hundred dollars- and sell them with the understanding that we can't turn people into linux users by waving a magic wand. We can and will, however, figure out a way to install linux onto such minimal boxes, with whatever we can come up with for functionality. Probably be console only (we got 8M of ram to work with, that's it! And a couple hundred megs of HD). I have no idea if this is going to work, or if any price-sensitive customers will go for Linux. I just know that the MS tax is OVER HALF of our cost for a physical box- and this is ludicrous, and whether or not people have the cojones to buy them we WILL be offering linux because we're trying to get computing into the hands of people who can't afford it, and it's just ludicrous that MORE THAN HALF our cost is MS tax. Does that seem reasonable? It's the end result of what's been happening. Who knew? And this is for an older version of Win95 that is much deprecated- in other words, it's a very inadequate offering considering it's more than doubling the cost of the PC. With that in mind, seeing as we're going to be selling some with Windows anyway, I see _no_ reason we (the shop) shouldn't get to pick among different Windows vendors for this very obsolete product. _Why_ shouldn't we get to pay $30 or so like Compaq, considering that we only want an older version anyway? Hell, man, you can download MacOS 7.5 for _nothing_, and buy system 8.1 for thirty bucks _legally_, and of course you can make your own Linux distribution all you want. It's only _Windows_ that can still demand a monopolistic price from little guys like us- and from Compaq, any time they start acting like they're running the show- and that sort of thing is what got us in this mess that we're still utterly in, every time we pay MS more than the cost of the hardware just to get a PC with Windows to customers. Well *ahem* screw that! It would be a sick joke if it wasn't real. The instant I figured out what we the shop were doing and what that _meant_, what we were paying as a grassroots VAR, I went 'LINUX!'. We will advertise it prominently and will discount _more_ than the Windows tax is even costing us (in efforts to be able to claim a startlingly low starting price;) ) and we will try to get a 'luserfriendly' Linux install happening, even if the memory and disk constraints force us to have console only. It's just outrageous. And MS can't punish us much more than they already are- we're getting no breaks whatsover on VAR pricing. We're almost buying _retail_ for crying out loud. It bites.
That's absolutely right. I was so damaged by high school I tried to kill myself! It took _years_ to heal from all that, especially because I didn't realise it WAS NOT the real world. It's been a long hard road learning that lesson. But now, I have self-respect and know who I am and where I have value, and you know what? I may have faults, but there are ways in which I'm just _better_ than the people I felt so less than in high school. Honest to God, when you quit taking High School and the whole High School perspective seriously, it gets better. There are whole areas of human experience (slashdotters of all people should know this already!) in which the high school In Crowd will always be _losers_. Your popularity with the football team will never help you write a line of code. In FACT, it will not help you run a business worth a damn either if all you know to do is schmooze. In other words, know yourself, learn, and DITCH the high school values as quick as you can, or you'll be somebody's half-bright employee all your fscking life! I can't overemphasize this. Far from being the golden key to life and happiness, that whole high school in crowd thing is the biggest obstacle to success and fame you could ever have! Be _grateful_ that crowd are wasting their lives by complacently acting like royalty _now_ in a protected, artificial environment with Mom and Dad paying the bills. They, not the geek crowd, will be hurting in ten years, or singin' 'Glory Days' in dingy bars wondering what the hell happened. 'Nuff said.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking the more extreme forms of Kanner autism. :) 'open content', it's time for me to share some of my reality for the betterment of the community. After all, a _lot_ of Asperger people (or other stuff like ADD, see below) are hackers...
I'm a fellow traveler- I have Asperger's syndrome (I'm one of the many _adult_ Asperger people out there who fell through the cracks in childhood and just had to wing it)
When you read accounts from someone who's experienced this 'can't-cope' or if you've had a taste of it yourself, then it's easy to get a little more specific about what is going on. It's not really so much that the center of personality is so _weak_- what's happening is basically that the sensory input is being set nice -256 or so! o_O
(For those who haven't gotten that far, 'nice' sets priority levels, and the high negative numbers set a process to very high priority, nearly locking out everything else- another telling similarity is that userland doesn't typically get to nice processes to such levels, only root gets to set negative numbers and users are normally restrained to setting processes to _lower_ values- i.e. 'forgetting' the process and having the computer pay less attention to it!)
With that understood, it should be easier to imagine what it's like having a sensory input set to unbearably high priority. I'm not Kanner-type autistic but I _have_ had experience with this- when I was a kid we had cats (I still identify with cats powerfully) and at times they had fleas. I developed a horror of having fleas in my bed biting me when I had to sleep- and I'd end up unable to sleep whether or not there were any fleas, because _touch_ would become so intolerably acute for me that I would be feeling individual thread-ends or grains of sand, all over, with the intensity of flea bites or crawling insects (normally a much more intrusive input!)
I've seen many reports that sight and sound etc. can be this intrusive as well, so I wanted to try and clarify it a little
Surely the serious geek mousepad is the 3M one. How can you not have a 'precision mousing surface' and specialty wristrest gelfilled support when you _know_ since it's 3M they invented every material in the thing from scratch, just to do it right... 3M are unbeatable for chemicals and materials, and this just confirms it. I bet it improves Q3 scores too. >;) :)
On a less serious note, I have a calculator watch
This is the 90s. Musicians _already_ have to go on tour _and_ pay for their own promotion _and_ merchandising and do that all themselves and still won't make any money. ;P ;)
If you are really _serious_ about business _and_ play brilliant music you might be able to be self-supporting through it, but 2/3 of your work will be running the business.
What do you think this is, the 60s or something?
Me, I have two mp3s up. I produced an album with good pop songs years ago but couldn't get anywhere with it. As soon as I have the technical capability, I'll be finding a way to release the whole album freely as mp3, as I have nothing to lose. I hope eventually to be burning CDs and selling those over the net- that isn't likely to be self-supporting either but it could be a nice source of pocket change- I am a damn good engineer and the CDs would sound markedly better than the mp3s.
Another point is that this poverty-stricken situation is rather liberating musically- it doesn't matter if my music fits a mold (like the pop-ready album I recorded). I could put out singles rather than try and accumulate entire albums. I could put out long experimental musical pieces that'd never ever be played on the radio. ever
I can't even be angry at the RIAA. They have done nothing for me, ever. They've done nothing for the musicians I listen to either- if you're educated you know that the industry is a damned slaughterhouse and musicians are the cattle. That just is, there's no changing it from the inside under these conditions. So I am grateful I _didn't_ try so hard to make it on their terms. I'll be happier and very possibly make more money by doing it on my terms.
Here, have some mp3 instrumentals (due to lack of money and RAM for editing these are sections of longer pieces, and they are likely to be remixed in future to make them even better)
TreacherousCretins.mp3
ExtendedPlay.mp3
Hey, _I_ thought of doing that. :) homesteading. I rent my apartment (and am moving 'cause the building's being sold out from under me- sucks) but I _own_ airwindows.com :) and hey- it's in the high rents! ;)
I didn't bother doing that....
I _shall_ do that! *pin*
Ahhh
I sympathize with your viewpoint: I just would like to mention that bad PR is not an accurate litmus test for problems. If, as it appears, Mindcraft made a concerted effort to destroy Linux performance, then their results are not a broadly useful indicator of problem areas needing immediate attention, and efforts to 'fix' these 'problems' are to some extent wheelspinning, attempts to cover for pathological situations that wouldn't normally happen. :) :)
If somebody beats you in a race by tying your leg to your opposite arm and putting warm oatmeal in your ear that you're forbidden to spill, then the thing to do is not to try valiantly to get better at hopping on one leg with an ear full of warm oatmeal. It's more useful to continue training for more normal races, and kicking up a fuss anytime someone approaches you again with warm oatmeal
This is what happened. Except for the oatmeal, which is metaphorical in this case
Hey, don't look at _me_, I'm not anonymous ;) ;) ) that delivers high gloss with low resources for use with little client computers like 486es. :) ) running console programs such as pine and pico and lynx, perhaps both vi and emacs also there for visiting unix guru friendliness :) and maybe whatever Netscape seems most feasible given ram constraints. :)
My personal agenda is this: I am determined to put together a minimal distribution, probably an unholy perversion of RH and Slackware (
This is assuming that there will be a steady supply of NOS (new old stock) PCs from earlier days, at prices under $100. At the shop I work at we are already experimenting with this and can sell PCs without monitor for $150, $100 less than with Windows. The trick is, we have to get Linux into a distribution that is completely turnkey (I'm wondering if we can use that for a name- Turnkey Linux) and installs into a completely preconfigured system, possibly through entering stuff in the installer or a 'post-install wizard' such as Apple's taken to including too.
It also has to be _very_ flashy or luxurious, and should be a clean break from Windows-like ways of doing things. People always say it has to look and work like Windows, but I'm completely unconvinced you can sell something on the basis of it's being 'like' a chief competitor, but not enough like it to be useful as such. It's gotta be different- real different- I'm thinking a carefully set up Window Maker with many workspaces, heavy use of aterms (my pet term
Target hardware is 8M ram, maybe 270M HD, 24 of which should be swap- we are running 16 and it is not too happy with it.
Musts include a set of desktop pictures/themes for WM (preferably changed independently), a means for actuating the aterms either white on black, black on white, or transparent using black or white lettering (means == tile or shell one-word alias for the rather long CLI invocation), and menu support for xlock -inroot with a selection of screensaver decorations that run pretty well without sucking too much precious CPU power- even though this is supposed to _look_ almost infinitely cooler and more desirable and modern than Windows, it has to be able to run on a 486/33, that being our target.
Wish us luck! I bet there are also projects like this aiming to make the custom dist as much _like_ Windows as possible. We are going to make it quite different. It should be possible to make a dist more user friendly than windows- that isn't really such a daunting task. It's like trying to make something cleaner than mud
Come to think of it, aren't we missing something?
Benches should be realworld, and should be created from a budget with labor costs included at full industry rates (no free labor! no Linus-labor _or_ teams of Softies working for free!).
BUT! Granted that, then the bench should be the amount of work done over the course of a month, with any maintenance billed at full rates.
I'm picturing a vanilla linux box, set up properly, sitting unattended and chugging along while an NT box puts in spurts of blinding activity interspersed with falling over and being repaired by $100 an hour MCSEs >:)
I already gave some good benches in an earlier thread, including an active server page one.
It's so very easy- simply have all benches measured by 'Amount of (x) per $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000'. Possibly Linux would have difficulty at $10,000, but maybe an Alpha could be used or something. The point is, we _want_ to measure everything by realworld dollars. The fact that linux is free is not _our_ problem, nor is it the problem of linux deployers. To be fair, have any and all Linux tech support used in the test charge their full hourly rate (no freebies)- and have the NT techs charge their full hourly rate (NO FREEBIES!).
What, I ask you, could be fairer? If you like you could also extend this testing paradigm to $50,000 and $100,000 price points. The linux side could talk Beowulf servers, but remember time spent setting it up _would_ be paid for as well- what could be fairer?
They are very serious for getting computers into peoples' hands for under $300. Or under $200. Or under $100...
Cuts into your premium Windows-based price structure a little, doesn't it? >:)
Yarbles.
I am _personally_ taking an interest in working out how to devise a linux distribution (probably off Slackware) that provides a really high-gloss but low overhead CLIENT computer for novice computer users. It will have all the eye candy, but do a lot with terms and console programs running in tricked-out terms. It will probably also have extensive development libraries- depends on how much space there is.
Why?
Because the shop I work at is selling new-old-stock (NOS) PCs and we can sell a Linux box for a _hundred_ dollars cheaper than the Windows box. Even the most inadequate legitimate Windows we can get costs us more than all the hardware put together! We are being given no consideration by Microsoft, we are getting _no_ special treatment or help, and we have nothing to lose at this point.
You, sir, talk like 'astroturf'- and you'd better go back to your boss and tell him, 'We can't keep people from running us into the ground on cheap operating systems! The real grass roots are deserting us over cost issues and they can sell for half the cost of our OEMs!' and then you better desperately try to subvert all the standards at once for all the good it will do (it will only hasten the collapse, go for it).
What can I say? YOU LOSE. Nothing makes that clearer to me than our shop paying over HALF Windows tax on _seriously_ low cost computing. We want to hype linux and to be able to legitimately claim a _seriously_ low price for our entry PC- but if we didn't want to hype linux we could sell the linux box for ten dollars LESS than the Windows box AND make FIFTY PERCENT more on it besides! Do you understand this, or is it too frightening to face? Recent remarks from Steve Ballmer about how people will inevitably pay more money for quality (*LOL* worked good for Apple all those years eh?) suggest that you guys are _not_ facing this.
It's this simple. YOU LOSE. Thank you for playing, it's been fun watching you corrupt the whole industry and turn it into completely commoditized incompatible unreliable garbage, and now that you have been beaten at your own game and can't even pretend to undercut what's currently going down, don't let the door hit you in the butt on your way out.
Try to be a good loser, for loser you shall be.
Altogether 35 errors found. Only 25 errors are listed below.
Warning (1/1): is missing.
Warning (22/1): The attribute "TOPMARGIN" is not defined for the tag .
Warning (22/1): The attribute "LEFTMARGIN" is not defined for the tag .
Warning (78/1): In the tag the value of the attribute "WIDTH" must be quoted.
Warning (78/75): In the tag the value of the attribute "WIDTH" must be quoted.
Error (87/48): In the tag the attribute "BORDER" is not allowed.
Warning (87/48): The attribute "WIDTH" is not defined for the tag .
Warning (87/48): The attribute "HEIGHT" is not defined for the tag .
Warning (95/197): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted.
Warning (95/197): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted.
Warning (95/586): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted.
Warning (95/586): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted.
Warning (95/772): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted.
Warning (96/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted.
Warning (96/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted.
Warning (96/206): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted.
Warning (97/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted.
Warning (97/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted.
Warning (97/210): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted.
Warning (98/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted.
Warning (98/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted.
Warning (98/204): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted.
Warning (99/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted.
Warning (99/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONCLICK" must be quoted.
Warning (99/211): In the tag the value of the attribute "HREF" must be quoted.
Warning (100/38): In the tag the value of the attribute "ONMOUSEDOWN" must be quoted.
Error (104/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values.
Error (105/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values.
Error (106/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values.
Error (107/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values.
Error (113/1): The start tag for can't be found.
Error (114/24): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values.
Error (119/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (120/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (128/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (129/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (142/1): must not contain block level tags like
Error (148/1): The start tag for can't be found.
Error (148/8): The start tag for can't be found.
Error (150/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (152/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (159/1): must not contain block level tags like
Error (165/8): The start tag for can't be found.
Error (167/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (169/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (178/8): The start tag for can't be found.
Error (180/1): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (182/5): The tag is not part of HTML 3.2.
Error (184/8): The start tag for can't be found.
Error (190/1): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" must only contain absolute pixel values.
If it's a G* making use (granted, this wasn't IBM's baby, but still) of the AltiVec registers, then it's basically allowing extensive general purpose operations on effectively 128-bit general purpose registers. The application to anything 3D is quite obvious, and there could easily be other applications (the _compilers_ get to use these registers anytime they want to, and there aren't really fancy rules apart from the sheer word (sentence? ;) ) size of the registers, so compilers don't have to be superlatively fancy to do stuff with this. At the least it's free parallel operations in a basic way, and there are some very big win situations as I understand it- some guy got (I think) a matrix blur going several _hundred_ times faster than non-Altivec.
A game console _would_ be the ideal introduction for this. I wonder if Nintendo are expecting Altivec. Certainly the most obvious use is 3D graphics- particularly with respect to complicated geometries- what with modern cards stuff isn't particularly fill-bound, it's all more and more complicated and fluid geometries now.
Actually, in advertising, this is a great way to completely fail to sell product to people :) ad people like David Ogilvy rebelled against that 'great unwashed' concept long ago. Ogilvy, in the '50s or '60s- "The customer is not a dummy. She is your wife."
Ogilvy made a _lot_ of money treating consumers like intelligent people who can read. In general, if you treat people like a bunch of easily manipulated suckers, any effectiveness you have will be obliterated by a massive backlash effect. In one study (Ogilvy also pioneered actually _researching_ advertising effectiveness), a stupid and annoying advertising campaign that cost millions actually _reduced_ the number of sales of the product that previously wasn't being advertised! That should serve as a warning.
Heck, I am completely into Window Maker, and in that you _always_ doubleclick tiles to launch them. I just think this is incredibly superior to singleclick for actions/launches. Singleclick turns the GUI into a minefield with stuff that can go off unexpectedly. Doubleclicking is totally easy and separates selection from activation very effectively and I agree with the Window Maker people- the last I heard there weren't even _plans_ to add activation on singleclick to WM tiles, because basically this is just wrong and steps on the select/drag functionality. So there ;)
The remark about "almost no reason for a current Windows, Mac or Amiga user to use the Linux desktop" irritated me. I'm a current Mac user and I _like_ Linux for what it is. I am not asking for office programs and I am not asking for a desktop (Clarisworks and MacOS Finder do both those things better than anything I've seen elsewhere). Instead I like letting Linux be what it is, and I run Window Maker with such an individualised way of setting it up that it's almost a totally novel interface. No desktop and in fact I also have a lot of stuff running without titlebars or resizebars, but zoomable by keyboard shortcuts. I don't _want_ Linux to be just exactly like the MacOS I already have, and I sure don't want it to be more like Windows. Why can't you just let me do it my way? ;) I guess my point is that I feel this wish for Office and desktops is incredibly stupid. Who has been putting subliminal messages in everybody's subconscious that desktops are the final pinnacle of evolution and there's no other way to do anything? Wait, let me guess, starts with an 'Ap' and ends some years later with a 'ft' ;)
Wait- you _do_ just let me do it my way, because it's linux and nobody can _stop_ me from inventing my own way around it. Nevermind
That's been _done_. Fine. I even like it and (regarding the 'Ap' version) happily use it. Let's be willing to develop new stuff for Linux, shall we, and not squander the amazing freedom from influence, the amazing opportunity, by frantically making it just like everything else?
Damn straight! That is absolutely right.
My approach to generating airwindows.com is to put _structural_ markup in the data files. In other words, I have pages with text information (and inline HTML if I like) on them, and the first two lines are header lines in a special format which gives the title and a summary of the page. These two headers turned out to be enough for my purposes, but others might find use for more elaborate headers. The point is, the headers don't go into the HTML, they are used to direct the _tool_ that's generating the HTML, and can produce more intelligent references to the page from other pages, or give fine-grained control over the whole structure of the resulting site.
I'll repeat the key phrase beause it's so right and worth repeating-
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
That could be done on the fly by Perl scripts like slashdot, or it can be done on your own machine whereupon you just re-upload all the pages or whichever set of pages is affected by the most recent update- but the auto-generating is a must.
An example (not live on the web yet)- I use iCab as a browser. It has a smily-frowny face feature (invariably frowny) regarding HTML compliance as stated in the page. If the page has errors, iCab makes a frowny and can give you an error report telling you what errors were found.
I went to my site with this tool, and found that it was giving lots of errors. This was partly because I'm doing HTML 3.2, on purpose, and am not enthusiastic about HTML 4 at all. I went into SiteBot and started changing code. After adding a comment that tells browsers the site is 3.2, most errors went away as the code _was_ correct HTML for 3.2, but there were a few details, a table tag that Netscape accepted that wasn't technically legal, minor stuff. I edited Sitebot's code some more and fixed that too, and rebuilt the site.
There are 384 items in the airwindows.com folder. That equates to somewhat less than 180 pages all told. _All_ were fixed by the changes, effortlessly. With a pure text editor you'd at least be composing massive search and replaces- and God knows what you'd have to deal with in a WYSIWYG, it'd be really ugly. Instead, the data is separate and the whole site is ready, next time I add new content and re-upload it, to switch to total HTML compliance and alert browsers to exactly what sort of parsing it will be needing.
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
Period.
What about when you're maintaining a site with over 100 pages? I'm sorry- even in this reply it is plain that FrontPage has its priorities wrong. Rename an image? How about adding a page in a category and having all the related pages seamlessly update to include the new link. How about a timestamp with creation and modification dates for pages to give a time context to the content you're providing? How about taking inline graphics and transparently adding size tags to help browsers lay out quicker? I don't believe FrontPage is good enough, and it certainly isn't good enough to handle airwindows.com. It'd be a Sisyphean task maintaining a site like that with such a tool.
Instead I use Sitebot for the job. Stands to reason, after all I wrote it. It's a Mac program, but since the source is GPLed and online, anyone who wants to take any or all of it and make a Linux program out of it is quite welcome to do so.
At any rate, when you talk about elegant handling of site management, I have to laugh, because _none_ of the WYSIWYG tools _or_ a plain text editor is really up to the task. I use Sitebot, and Slashdot uses perl scripts, and any really serious site with a lot of content is _forced_ to use something suitable, otherwise it just won't be possible to manage the site at all. This means scripting or some form of site compiling- sitebot is more the latter and works from a directory structure on my hard disk. You can also use stuff like Frontier or Slashdot's perl scripts to dynamically generate the pages from a collection of data.
That data is not HTML, and this is the key point you're missing. It's just not feasible to have your actual data be in HTML. Instead it needs to be something editable and workable which is _turned_ into HTML as needed, producing HTML pages that are either disposable (Slashdot's generate-on-the-fly pages) or freely replaceable (my SiteBot's output, overwritten every time I run the bot- the original data is never touched.)
Do you understand this yet? 20 pages is _nothing_. 20 pages is corporate HTML art wankery-ville. Try 200 or 2000 and see how you do. At a certain point you hit a paradigm shift. Do you think news.com uses FrontPage? They, too, are using some custom software. Hell, man, even MSNBC is not using FrontPage. FRONTPAGE IS NOT SERIOUS, and to some extent neither is a standalone text editor all by itself- when you start dealing with really _demanding_ web tasks, it becomes specialized software, and the data you feed it might well be handled in a text editor- or you could be generating the data in a word processor and having the software translate the styling to HTML. But you won't be using FrontPage: it is inadequate.
You're taking a shortsighted view, Jon, but you've really hit on something here, and I'd like to encourage that if I may. ;) )
I just had a guest over, for the sole purpose of showing him my Linux dualboot. He actually never saw the Mac side- he's seen those before, nothing special. Instead I was showing him all that was resident in Linux- the scope of possibility there.
On airwindows.com (and you better believe I snapped up the dotcom address- it was a primary motivator for my homesteading that domain when I did), I have desktop backgrounds and tiles and titlebars for Linux, and more specifically for Window Maker. However, it doesn't stop there...
I stole the animated desktops from Afterstep and put them in WM, editing them and picking different ones and throwing on extra parameters to tailor the behavior. I have menus mapped to fkeys so I can use my one-button mouse comfortably. I have four different kinds of xterm (all aterms!) fired off menu selections that have fkeys, all borderless minimalist purist rectangles that can be meta-dragged, or closed with F3 (window properties) or F4- xkill on a button! The rectangles have no titlebar or resize bar and come in black on white, white on black, black text on transparent and white text on transparent. I made icons for all of them in the GIMP.
I am, it would appear, a damned good, creative, virtual interior decorator. *grin*
What does this mean? Well, for starters, it means I am interested enough in my virtual home to want to make it my own- on a structural level as well as eyecandy, evidenced by the minimal term-rects and the evolving method of managing everything. I love Window Maker because it seems especially suited to this sort of adaptation. I was telling my friend that you could have a fkey that invisibly fired a menu option that ran a _script_ that launched your aterm under a different name for every day of the week, letting you have it automatically be a different background color for each day. Only an hour later did I realise that you could make it a different transparent tint for every day of the week. Granted, you have to control the root window's decoration to be able to get away with such tints- like running the Sonar theme which is _very_ suited to transparent terms and a personal favorite (the only theme I use regularly that I didn't create myself)- but then that's the point isn't it?
This sort of work is a weird hybrid between interface design, GFX and a touch of programming or at least scripting- and it could become roughly as valid a job as real interior decorating- most people wouldn't even consider it, but then you visit some places and go 'whoooa!' and it turns out Somebody Did It, some person was _hired_ to create the effect and it wasn't always the homeowner. The same thing could happen on the desktop (with Linux, much less plausibly with any other OS I know of, and I'm a Mac dude
The flip side of this issue is something I've written an essay about- at what point do virtual spaces become personal property, and what civil liberties apply? If I write to Bill Gates and ask him for a can opener, and he mails me one, the can opener does not emit a small bomb which explodes and blows up all my other appliances. If he sells me a house, the house does not extend a robotic arm and smash up my previous house, dumping the shattered rubble into a dumpster. These things would be considered criminal and real world stuff doesn't work that way (at least with can openers). However, if I ask him for a movie viewer, it is extremely likely that what he gives me will at least 'put the other movie viewers into the closet' (seize control of linking procedures like Internet Config) and in some cases even fight me, repeatedly changing settings if I dare to change things back. In the worst case, installing of OSes, there is a real danger that what Bill provides will seek out other disk drives, and if it does not find data it understands, reformat them, obliterating my property.
Why is this not illegal? A failure in imagination. Computers are new enough that not everyone accepts that their contents are property. A home is a physical object and it's hard to see how a buncha bits can equate to a coffee table when the fact is, one can spend a comparable time and effort just setting up a computer to be an appealing environment. Nobody has permission to smash up your coffee table at random, but virtual 'coffee tables', arrangements of preferences or clever scripts you make to do things, are not given the same protection, especially when they are uses of existing software that some other software needs configured differently. The tendency is to assume 'Well, of course you want me to nuke your prefs so you can see this amazing new program!'. I don't think that's defensible, but computer virtual space is such a fledgeling concept that few people have made that connection. Even stuff like PGP is about protecting a person's communication- it isn't about protecting the state of your applications menu or what icons go where on the desktop.
Some communities, like Mac users, have grown up with a different tradition- Macs tend to be very user-centric in this respect and will leave icons and things where you left them, making it a very high priority to retain the virtual space in the condition you left it- though even there you see troubles, and once you get beneath the surface, the condition of your software ceases to be your property- even the Apple Menu, very user-editable, is routinely messed with by installers, or software (speech recognition) will insist on having something there whether you want it there or not.
I think that of all OSes, Linux has the best shot at delivering genuine virtual property and the right to maintain the state of one's own computer unmolested by vendors. But it would help if more people understood the issues involved.
For low power you're basically looking at the 603e- I'm not sure what they have of more recent lineage which is comparable to the 603 but I do know that I raised the issue of really low-cost Macs a long time ago, believing that 68040s were cheaper than PowerPC. Turns out they are not because PPC was where the volume was. :)
By the same token, I wouldn't assume 68K is lower power than PPC- I'll grant that it seems possible it could be, but I wouldn't automatically conclude it was. I don't actually know what Coldfire is- is this some sort of StrongArm-ish thing? The thing to remember about PPCs is that they aren't much like Pentia- they don't consume anywhere near as much power and they are less of a disposable part (I saw a fellow on a mailing list today, talking about celerons and overclocking, who basically gave computer parts a lifespan of a couple years before replacement- something I find hard to understand, though it's possible he _didn't_ mean 'then it burns up from normal use')
Either Coldfire or the PPC runs on a lot less power than modern x86, but that doesn't mean the PPC uses that much more
After all, it does look like Jon is using this as yet another means of self-aggrandizement. This time it's arguably such a worthy cause that he should be doing it, but isn't it true that these are posted unde JonKatz? Therefore there already IS a way to filter it. Turn off Katz and you won't have to be drowned in it.
Filtering Katz is not a statement that you don't care about the youth of today. It's just a way to get the gasbag to shut up, and most people can do more in their own back yards than Katz does with a thousand gassy essays. Self-espression != taking action. All too often it's just windy words (aka 'word, word, word')
It looks like they are _both_ bound by the constraints of the x86 architecture, and that's what this is all about. Why should that surprise anybody? I'd be more surprised if AMD was able to _significantly_ beat Intel designs. I'd also be surprised if Intel was able to _significantly_ beat AMD designs, or their own designs from last year.
For crying out loud, haven't you PC guys been eating the same dog meat for ten years? Even if it's terrific don't you get a little sick of the lack of variety? Especially now that billions of dollars have been spent to work out _all_ the big wins in the designs so there is nothing left but piddly little gains at phenomenal cost.
More than ever I'm happy I've been using PPC- now that's something I'd like to keep available, in all its 32 register, general purpose vector (128 bit) processing unit, 1 meg of cache glory. What do you think would happen if the industry put the same amount of energy behind that as it does behind x86? Yeah- it'd zip right past x86 and you'd be buying PII-like daughtercard things with _sixteen_ or _thirty-two_ PPCs all on the same die- and you'd have to run Linux (or Solaris or something) because NT or MacOS don't _scale_ to that extent yet!
Instead most people want to eat the same dog food over and over, even when they have to _replace_ their RAM, their MB etc anyway (you'd think that would tip them off).
Linux runs _quite_ nicely on PPC and you don't have to give money to Apple directly to do it- homebuild something, buy older powermacs used (top of the line ones from a couple years back) and get ones that can be upgraded to G3 simply and easily (i.e. most of them, by now). That or wait around forever for somebody to make PC PPC mobos while _you_ keep eating old dog food because you don't see anybody making new recipes, which they won't as long as you and everybody else are still gobbling up the old dog food as fast as they can make it.
I hope PPC (or Alpha, or *fill in blank*) _does_ end up stomping all over x86. But if it does not, I don't regret for a second that I was willing to try it and see. I _like_ the way my PPCs work. I was able to get some frags on q3test against G3 guys and I only have a 200Mhz 604e on a slow bus! (unsupported, and running the Mesa libs) PPC is _so_ underestimated. (ok, end rant. phew.)
The small shop I work at (as a Mac tech, moving in the direction of being able to handle Linux professionally) is a VAR, and we sell PCs. ;) ) and we will try to get a 'luserfriendly' Linux install happening, even if the memory and disk constraints force us to have console only.
We are currently trying to fill a gap by making PCs (with little but the PC, keyboard and mouse and RAM and HD inside) available for under three hundred dollars. Supply your own monitor and whatever else you want. It looks like we should be able to do this fairly effectively....
The Microsoft tax (reckoned as cost TO US) is MORE THAN HALF the cost of the PC, and that's for a minimal legal version of Win95 only...
We are going to look into Linux for these insanely cheap ol' PC boxes (486es they are, it's all about lowest possible cost and _our_ ability to set them up in useful condition for uneducated buyers who only want to type letters etc). Using Linux would _halve_ our cost, and we figure we can knock a _hundred_ dollars off the cost of the PC making it under _two_ hundred dollars- and sell them with the understanding that we can't turn people into linux users by waving a magic wand. We can and will, however, figure out a way to install linux onto such minimal boxes, with whatever we can come up with for functionality. Probably be console only (we got 8M of ram to work with, that's it! And a couple hundred megs of HD).
I have no idea if this is going to work, or if any price-sensitive customers will go for Linux. I just know that the MS tax is OVER HALF of our cost for a physical box- and this is ludicrous, and whether or not people have the cojones to buy them we WILL be offering linux because we're trying to get computing into the hands of people who can't afford it, and it's just ludicrous that MORE THAN HALF our cost is MS tax. Does that seem reasonable? It's the end result of what's been happening. Who knew? And this is for an older version of Win95 that is much deprecated- in other words, it's a very inadequate offering considering it's more than doubling the cost of the PC.
With that in mind, seeing as we're going to be selling some with Windows anyway, I see _no_ reason we (the shop) shouldn't get to pick among different Windows vendors for this very obsolete product. _Why_ shouldn't we get to pay $30 or so like Compaq, considering that we only want an older version anyway? Hell, man, you can download MacOS 7.5 for _nothing_, and buy system 8.1 for thirty bucks _legally_, and of course you can make your own Linux distribution all you want. It's only _Windows_ that can still demand a monopolistic price from little guys like us- and from Compaq, any time they start acting like they're running the show- and that sort of thing is what got us in this mess that we're still utterly in, every time we pay MS more than the cost of the hardware just to get a PC with Windows to customers.
Well *ahem* screw that! It would be a sick joke if it wasn't real. The instant I figured out what we the shop were doing and what that _meant_, what we were paying as a grassroots VAR, I went 'LINUX!'. We will advertise it prominently and will discount _more_ than the Windows tax is even costing us (in efforts to be able to claim a startlingly low starting price
It's just outrageous. And MS can't punish us much more than they already are- we're getting no breaks whatsover on VAR pricing. We're almost buying _retail_ for crying out loud. It bites.
'nuff said, again. >;)
That's absolutely right. I was so damaged by high school I tried to kill myself! It took _years_ to heal from all that, especially because I didn't realise it WAS NOT the real world. It's been a long hard road learning that lesson. But now, I have self-respect and know who I am and where I have value, and you know what? I may have faults, but there are ways in which I'm just _better_ than the people I felt so less than in high school.
Honest to God, when you quit taking High School and the whole High School perspective seriously, it gets better. There are whole areas of human experience (slashdotters of all people should know this already!) in which the high school In Crowd will always be _losers_.
Your popularity with the football team will never help you write a line of code. In FACT, it will not help you run a business worth a damn either if all you know to do is schmooze. In other words, know yourself, learn, and DITCH the high school values as quick as you can, or you'll be somebody's half-bright employee all your fscking life! I can't overemphasize this. Far from being the golden key to life and happiness, that whole high school in crowd thing is the biggest obstacle to success and fame you could ever have! Be _grateful_ that crowd are wasting their lives by complacently acting like royalty _now_ in a protected, artificial environment with Mom and Dad paying the bills. They, not the geek crowd, will be hurting in ten years, or singin' 'Glory Days' in dingy bars wondering what the hell happened.
'Nuff said.