This highlights what we already know: the prospects for survival are best at certain positions. At both the system and galaxy level, there's a band, a certain range of distances away from the center, where things are best. At the system level this has to do with the amount of energy reaching you from the primary; whereas, at the galaxy level, it has to do with things like the overall density in star systems per cubic whatever. There are other reasons at the galactic level why the same band is best -- e.g., the concentration of relatively heavy elements at certain distances from the galactic core. There are also other positional factors, such as whether you're in one of the spiral arms or between them, whether there are larger planets further out in your system to broom up loose asteroids within the eccliptic, and of course the size of your own planet. (There are also of course non-positional factors, such as the amounts of various elements and compounds, most notably liquid water.) Earth is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the band, at both the system and galaxy level.
So anyway, as I was saying, magnetars are more common closer to the galactic core, and pretty sparse out here, so we're fairly safe from that particular threat. Also, a supernova is fairly unlikely in this general vicinity, as vicinities go.
> the lines between code and simple markup are getting very blurry, > especially with things like Java, Java script, flash and such becoming > more and more integral to site for base functionality.
Java, javascript, and Flash, are active, i.e., they are program, not markup, not mere data. HTML, XHTML, and XML are markup, i.e., a type of data. There is no blur here. (If you want to see a blurry line between the two, look at things such as Befunge. But most computer languages are designed to keep the distinction clear, and the major web technologies are in that category.)
I understand what you're saying about data integrity, but viewing data in a different fashion than was intended is really not at all the same thing as security breach. It is a problem, but it is a different *kind* of problem.
HTML has always been designed and intended so that old browsers could make a decent stab at displaying new data by simply ignoring the parts they don't understand. It's called "graceful degredation", and it has been a design feature of HTML since before there was Netscape. XHTML will make it possible to support *partial* degredation, e.g., at some point in the future (fifty-odd years from now, when we finally decide it's okay to lose the ability to view legacy invalid HTML3 content), browsers will be able to require a document to be *wellformed* but not choke if it contains elements or attributes that the browser does not understand. That way you know you're not parsing it in a fundamentally incorrect fashion (because wellformedness gives you that), but you can still gracefully degrade specific features you don't support.
Everybody knew those were fundamentally a bad idea in the first place.
I read "international domain names" and was thinking of anything in the two-character-tld space (.us,.uk, and so forth), but this is talking about *unicode* domain names, which is a whole nother animal.
> I keep on thinking that it would be nice to write a Slashdot->news program, > but I've never found time to do it.
Gnus used to come with a backend called nnslashdot, but it hasn't worked for a while; slashdot changed something slightly that broke it, and it never quite got fixed, for some reason.
> People are always saying how great the gmail interface is, but I don't > see how that can be
The people who say this are comparing it to Yahoo! mail and Hotmail and their ilk. And, indeed, compared to those interfaces, Gmail's interface *is* great, in the sense that it doesn't suck nearly as horribly. Even if you compare it to some of the worse mailreaders, e.g., Outlook Express and Thunderbird, it doesn't seem completely horrible. Where it starts seriously suffering is if you compare it to *featureful* mailreaders (e.g., Gnus) or to *user-friendly* ones (e.g., Pegasus Mail). It cannot compete on those terms.
> Plus, that's not actually what Infocom did, for the similar reason that > 128K game saves wouldn't have been acceptable back then.
Okay, I admit, I oversimplified, because I didn't want to discuss the finer points of the z-machine memory model. Technically, they only dumped the bottom portion of memory, the read/write portion, or in some cases the vm (essentially) binarily diffed the in-memory game against the copy on tape or disk or cartridge or whatever. But these are implementation details; the fundamental essense of the approach is what I said in the first place.
> Interpreting broken code is a security weakness.
Only if it's active code (i.e., a program or script or what-have-you). So, for example, attempting to execute broken Javascript would be dangerous.
However, HTML is markup, and attempting to handle broken markup (assuming you only handle it _as_ markup) is not dangerous from a security perspective. The greater danger is that people will get in the habit of writing broken markup, which will result in imprecisely-documented rendering behavior, which could change from version to version, unintentionally, due to seemingly-unrelated changes in the rendering engine. But that's a *social* danger, not a technical one. There's no greater technical danger inherent in rendering broken HTML than there is compliant HTML, from a security perspective.
It is, however, harder to do and less necessary. FWIW, the slashdot rendering issue is more related to highly-suboptimal markup than anything flawed per se. (Not that/. is strictly validatable; it's not -- but that is not the cause of the bug in question, as far as I am aware.)
Infocom's approach to the save-game feature was simple and effective: dump the entire game -- variables, code, objects, constant data, everything -- from memory to a big fat binary file. This is not the most efficient save-game mechanism in terms of savegame filesize, and if your game application is quite large (as most are today) the save and restore process could take several seconds (so, you'll want a progress bar), but it has a couple of advantages:
1. It's easy to get right, easy to debug, easy to test.
2. It doesn't matter what kind of objects or data structures your code
uses; you can use objects, lexical closures, continuations, whatever,
it won't matter: it all gets thrown in the binary file, so it all
comes back out when you restore.
The virtual machine that Infocom developed, called the z-machine, is still in use to this day in the hobbyist interactive-fiction community, and they're still using this method for saving and restoring games, even though the code for the games is written in a different language now (a language called Inform which was developed by a hobbyist for this purpose). All the game code has to do to effect a save or restore is to issue an opcode, and the VM does the rest.
Is there a particular reason you don't want to discuss it in public?
> the wonderful thing about WSH is the COM objects
Sure, okay, but how is it *as a language*?
> Want to query an ADODB datasource? Go nuts. Want to post form data to a > webpage and parse the results? No problem. Futz with your Exchange > mailboxes? Easy. Deal with Active Directory? Good old ADSI. And so on.
There are modules on the CPAN for all of those things, of course, and they are obviously useful, but you've answered a somewhat different question from the one I meant to ask. You're talking about specific applications for it, and I was talking about *general* usefulness of a language, the ability to solve *arbitrary* problems easily. If all of its power comes from the ability to interface with extant apps, it would only be able to do the things your extant apps can do (albeit, somewhat more automatically). How is it when you need it to do something *on its own*, something for which you don't have an application?
Perl has, to put it mildly, geek mindshare out the royal wazootie. Windows is the *only* major operating system left that *doesn't* ship with it. It's used so much on Linux that most major distributions consider it part of their non-optional must-install core. There are *dozens* of applications on my desktop that require it. In short, it gets *used*. It gets used quite a lot.
When was the last time you downloaded a Windows application and discovered it was written at least partly in WSH?
Microsoft would do well to partner with ActiveState and ship a Windows that includes Perl OOTB. It would significantly improve the overall attractiveness (to computer geeks and technical types) of their product.
Sure, people who think "Microsoft XP" is their web browser (or possibly their internet service provider, if there's even a difference between those two things) would never notice or care, but those aren't the people Microsoft is currently fighting to keep and worried they might lose.
If Perl is unsavory to Microsoft for some reason, pick another one -- Python, Ruby, heck, they have the resources to roll their own, or buy one. WSH has no mindshare and isn't cutting it with the geeks, and the lack of good geeky tools is one of the main reasons geeks are jumping ship, a trend Microsoft ought to show serious interest in counteracting. Retaining computer-savvy users means the less knowledgeable users can get help from friends and relatives and coworkers, and that ought to be worth some investment in bundling geeky tools. It's not even the developers we're talking about here; developers will do the 100-yard belly crawl nekked over broken glass to develop for your platform if that's where the users are. It's free tech support we're talking about, really.
A large percentage of home users will buy whatever software their tech-savvy friend/nephew/whatever recommends and shows them how to use, especially if said geek is willing to fix it occasionally when something goes wrong. I have half a dozen people a month ask me what brand and model of computer to buy. What happens if I start saying, "Get an iMac"? I don't, but what if I did? I could single-handedly quintuple the number of Apple users in this small town in half a year. Do you see where I'm going with this? I'm not unusual. Many geeks are in this kind of situation. No computer vendor can afford to ignore computer geeks. You don't have to base every decision on them (indeed, that's worse), but you can't ignore them either.
I don't rightly know, in detail, but I do know that I've never seen a single example of someone in an unrelated discussion (about, say, how to solve some arbitrary problem) pop in with a Windows Scripting Host solution. You see that all the time with Perl, frequently with PHP, sometimes with Python or Lisp, *occasionally* with Visual Basic,... once I saw someone post a Ruby solution in an unrelated discussion, and a couple of times I've even seen AppleScript solutions posted. All of these unless I am quite mistaken are much less widely distributed than WSH, but you hear about people actually *using* them. And it's not that people don't talk about Windows solutions, because you hear about people using batch files from time to time, and registry hacks with pretty good frequencybut I've never heard boo about WSH, except in the occasional security bulletin, and that doesn't count.
For all I know, maybe it's a great, flexible, general-purpose language, and all it's lacking is mindshare, but I was talking here about ways to make Windows appeal to geeks more, so mindshare is pretty important. Maybe what WSH needs most is for more online tutorials and discussion forum posts to talk about doing this or that with it.
We've been hearing a lot about the new command-line features that Longhorn is planned to have. What other geek-appeal features is Microsoft working on, to help Windows compete with Linux on the tech-savvy user's desktop? Will Longhorn finally ship with a better text editor than Notepad? DOS used to come with BASIC and later QBasic; are there any plans to include a flexible and powerful general-purpose scripting language, such as ActivePerl? What else does Microsoft have up its sleeve to appeal to people who might otherwise seek alternatives?
Yes, because the GTO lets you automate the process much more completely. You don't have to do most of the work of going yourself; the GTO does it for you (once you put the gas in the tank and do all the other necessary things to get it to start, learn a bit of lisp, et cetera).
The GTO also has more accessories. You can install a cupholder, a dashboard clock, fuzzy dice, whatever floats your boat. If you want to go all out, you can turn it into a stretch limo complete with a pool.
> Someone had to write Viper to make Emacs work as well as vi?
No, someone wrote viper so they could run vi on Emacs. Comparing Emacs to vi is like comparing apples to an orange GTO. The apples are smaller and lighter-weight, and you can throw them ever so much faster.
66 sounded better to the marketing people than 67. Easier to say. Plus, everyone knows that if you double 33 you get 66. If you like, think of it as truncating instead of rounding.
The user experience has improved a *LOT*. I *remember* what it used to be like, waiting for programs to load off a 5.25" floppy, and it's *WAY* better now. I *remember* what switching between three applications did on a 386SX with Windows 3 and 1MB of RAM, and it's *WAY* better now.
So, one place the cycles have gone is straight into making the user wait less.
The other place they've gone, obviously, is into features. I remember when an "advanced" feature in a word processing program was scalable fonts, or a spell checker that took 30+ seconds to go through a one-page document. Today we take OOo's frames and tables and autospellcheck for granted and wish it did paren-matching and had a better UI for rotating objects. These are things even some desktop publishing apps didn't have in the 80s, and now we expect every word processing app to have them.
What hasn't improved is the general level of computer literacy in the end-user population at large.
The parent is more likely thinking of _Atlanta Nights_, which was submitted to PublishAmerica. PublishAmerica _claims_ to be a traditional publisher, to review submitted manuscripts for quality, and so forth, but in actuality they will "publish" anything, if by "publish" you mean "print". They don't do any of the *other* things a publisher would normally do, such as edit or promote.
> Didn't the same thing happen a few years ago with the people on one usenet > group submitting intentionally bad manuscripts to some company and get > most of them published?
You may be thinking of Atlanta Nights, which was submitted to PublishAmerica. I ran into that story accidentally last week, when I was checking to see what sort of publisher PublishAmerica is, as a result of having someone out of the blue send me email at work recommending a book for the collection. (I work at a public library.) The author is not from around here, so she's probably mailing every library she can find on the web, hoping to get the book noticed. It's unlikely to work for her even if the book is good, since most libraries only purchase books through a small number of suppliers with whom they have existing accounts, such as Baker & Taylor, Emory Pratt, and so forth. These suppliers are unlikely to stock anything from a Print-on-Demand source and even more unlikely to stock anything that can't be returned if it doesn't sell. Needless to say, I didn't write up the book, and even if I had, it would have been unlikely to end up in the library collection.
You can't even sign up for a Paypal account without a credit card. This, incidentally, impacts people in the US too, if we don't have a credit card or, possibly due to having done a Google search on Paypal first and turned up a hillion jillion horror stories, are unwilling to give Paypal access to our full line of credit. I'm in the former category: I'm one of those curmudgeons who refuses to have a credit card. There are a plethora of reasons for this: I receive more junk mail from the credit card industry than all other industries combined, for one thing, and so I'm not willing to support them. Additionally, I view credit cards as a fundamentally bad idea, because they make it very convenient and easy to spend money you obviously cannot afford to spend, because you don't have it. I've seen entirely too many people get a credit card "for emergencies" and three or four years later be so deep in debt they will probably never regain their financial independence. For every person with the personal discipline and self-control to keep the thing paid off, there are nine people who can't, and so they ruin their lives. As far as I'm concerned, credit cards *create* emergencies.
(This is quite similar in principle to the recreational use of addictive substances; theoretically, you can safely use safe amounts of them at home on weekends, but in practice you get addicted and ruin your life.)
Then there are the userous interest rates that credit cards charge (rates that IMO ought not even to be legal) and the desceptive tactics they use. Just the other day I saw a credit card advertisement touting a 0% fixed APR for the first twelve billing cycles and a 9.something% APR after that, but the fine print said that the APRs are not guaranteed, that fixed APRs may become variable, and so forth, completely nullifying the large, bold-faced wording. For practical purposes, that's false advertising. I'm not interested in doing business with any company that pulls that sort of schenanighan. They can stick their card into a choice bodily orifice: I don't want one, now or ever.
It does bother me that so many OSS projects use Paypal and/or credit cards as their primary system for receiving donations. Paypal is IMO a very poor choice, and credit cards are little better. At minimum, they should accept personal checks. You can't even buy Firefox on a CD at the Mozilla store without owning a major credit card.
> I'm not sure about an individual object being an instance of two classes > without an intervening class, but the distinction probably makes no real > difference.
I can assure you that it makes a real and important difference for a lot of Inform code. Having an object that is a member of several classes is a very common thing in Inform, because it is common to have classes that are entirely orthogonal to one another. If you had to declare a fooplusbar class every time you wanted to make an object derive from two classes foo and bar, and a fooplusbarplusbaz class whenever you wanted to derive an object from three classes, and so on, a huge mess would result.
Indeed. The way I see it, Apple is selling the 1.25GHz model for $500 or the 1.42GHz model for $600, but they have the same 256MB of RAM, so unless the 40GB hard drive is too small for you but the extra 40GB bump to 80 makes it enough, you'd get more bang for your buck buying the $500 model and spending the extra hundred on RAM. In my experience, most people who can fill up a 40GB drive will fill up an 80GB one almost as fast, because they're doing something drive-space-intensive, such as huge amounts of digital photography. My Linux and Windows partitions together don't add to 40GB, even though the Windows partition includes complete copies of everything from three other, older partitions from the previous system. (i.e., I've got up to five copies of numerous applications installed -- or even more, if I've got extra old versions of things like Mozilla and OpenOffice sitting around that I haven't bothered to remove). I'm a grade-A packrat: I've got *all* the email I've sent or received since 1995, including quite a significant amount of spam; I've got every document I've ever created, every photo I've ever scanned on my mom's scanner, the.xcf versions of every one I've ever edited at all, huge amounts of stuff I've downloaded over the years,... in short, I delete almost nothing. The 25GB Linux partition is 15% empty still, and the Windows partition is only 15GB total (albeit, that one's close to full).
So I'd definitely say the $500 model is the better deal. RAM is the main thing that would be a worthwhile upgrade, and the $600 model has the same amount of that. Get the $500 model and spend the extra hundred on RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
This highlights what we already know: the prospects for survival are best
at certain positions. At both the system and galaxy level, there's a band,
a certain range of distances away from the center, where things are best.
At the system level this has to do with the amount of energy reaching you
from the primary; whereas, at the galaxy level, it has to do with things
like the overall density in star systems per cubic whatever. There are
other reasons at the galactic level why the same band is best -- e.g., the
concentration of relatively heavy elements at certain distances from the
galactic core. There are also other positional factors, such as whether
you're in one of the spiral arms or between them, whether there are larger
planets further out in your system to broom up loose asteroids within the
eccliptic, and of course the size of your own planet. (There are also of
course non-positional factors, such as the amounts of various elements and
compounds, most notably liquid water.) Earth is pretty much smack dab in
the middle of the band, at both the system and galaxy level.
So anyway, as I was saying, magnetars are more common closer to the galactic
core, and pretty sparse out here, so we're fairly safe from that particular
threat. Also, a supernova is fairly unlikely in this general vicinity, as
vicinities go.
They're talking about when it was _observed_, not when it _happened_.
> the lines between code and simple markup are getting very blurry,
> especially with things like Java, Java script, flash and such becoming
> more and more integral to site for base functionality.
Java, javascript, and Flash, are active, i.e., they are program, not markup,
not mere data. HTML, XHTML, and XML are markup, i.e., a type of data. There
is no blur here. (If you want to see a blurry line between the two, look at
things such as Befunge. But most computer languages are designed to keep
the distinction clear, and the major web technologies are in that category.)
I understand what you're saying about data integrity, but viewing data in
a different fashion than was intended is really not at all the same thing as
security breach. It is a problem, but it is a different *kind* of problem.
HTML has always been designed and intended so that old browsers could make
a decent stab at displaying new data by simply ignoring the parts they don't
understand. It's called "graceful degredation", and it has been a design
feature of HTML since before there was Netscape. XHTML will make it possible
to support *partial* degredation, e.g., at some point in the future (fifty-odd
years from now, when we finally decide it's okay to lose the ability to view
legacy invalid HTML3 content), browsers will be able to require a document to
be *wellformed* but not choke if it contains elements or attributes that the
browser does not understand. That way you know you're not parsing it in a
fundamentally incorrect fashion (because wellformedness gives you that), but
you can still gracefully degrade specific features you don't support.
Everybody knew those were fundamentally a bad idea in the first place.
.uk, and so forth), but this is talking about
I read "international domain names" and was thinking of anything in the
two-character-tld space (.us,
*unicode* domain names, which is a whole nother animal.
> I keep on thinking that it would be nice to write a Slashdot->news program,
> but I've never found time to do it.
Gnus used to come with a backend called nnslashdot, but it hasn't worked for
a while; slashdot changed something slightly that broke it, and it never quite
got fixed, for some reason.
> People are always saying how great the gmail interface is, but I don't
> see how that can be
The people who say this are comparing it to Yahoo! mail and Hotmail and their
ilk. And, indeed, compared to those interfaces, Gmail's interface *is* great,
in the sense that it doesn't suck nearly as horribly. Even if you compare it
to some of the worse mailreaders, e.g., Outlook Express and Thunderbird, it
doesn't seem completely horrible. Where it starts seriously suffering is if
you compare it to *featureful* mailreaders (e.g., Gnus) or to *user-friendly*
ones (e.g., Pegasus Mail). It cannot compete on those terms.
> Plus, that's not actually what Infocom did, for the similar reason that
> 128K game saves wouldn't have been acceptable back then.
Okay, I admit, I oversimplified, because I didn't want to discuss the finer
points of the z-machine memory model. Technically, they only dumped the
bottom portion of memory, the read/write portion, or in some cases the vm
(essentially) binarily diffed the in-memory game against the copy on tape
or disk or cartridge or whatever. But these are implementation details;
the fundamental essense of the approach is what I said in the first place.
> Interpreting broken code is a security weakness.
/. is strictly validatable; it's not -- but that
Only if it's active code (i.e., a program or script or what-have-you). So,
for example, attempting to execute broken Javascript would be dangerous.
However, HTML is markup, and attempting to handle broken markup (assuming you
only handle it _as_ markup) is not dangerous from a security perspective. The
greater danger is that people will get in the habit of writing broken markup,
which will result in imprecisely-documented rendering behavior, which could
change from version to version, unintentionally, due to seemingly-unrelated
changes in the rendering engine. But that's a *social* danger, not a technical
one. There's no greater technical danger inherent in rendering broken HTML
than there is compliant HTML, from a security perspective.
It is, however, harder to do and less necessary. FWIW, the slashdot
rendering issue is more related to highly-suboptimal markup than anything
flawed per se. (Not that
is not the cause of the bug in question, as far as I am aware.)
Maybe it's because Debian operates in a temporal bubble displaced from the
rest of the time-space continuum by 2-3 years.
Infocom's approach to the save-game feature was simple and effective: dump
the entire game -- variables, code, objects, constant data, everything -- from
memory to a big fat binary file. This is not the most efficient save-game
mechanism in terms of savegame filesize, and if your game application is quite
large (as most are today) the save and restore process could take several
seconds (so, you'll want a progress bar), but it has a couple of advantages:
1. It's easy to get right, easy to debug, easy to test.
2. It doesn't matter what kind of objects or data structures your code
uses; you can use objects, lexical closures, continuations, whatever,
it won't matter: it all gets thrown in the binary file, so it all
comes back out when you restore.
The virtual machine that Infocom developed, called the z-machine, is still
in use to this day in the hobbyist interactive-fiction community, and they're
still using this method for saving and restoring games, even though the code
for the games is written in a different language now (a language called
Inform which was developed by a hobbyist for this purpose). All the game
code has to do to effect a save or restore is to issue an opcode, and the
VM does the rest.
> When robots have this "unpredictability" tell me not to worry!
You don't have to worry until the robots get Genuine People Personalities.
> If you want to take this off list
Is there a particular reason you don't want to discuss it in public?
> the wonderful thing about WSH is the COM objects
Sure, okay, but how is it *as a language*?
> Want to query an ADODB datasource? Go nuts. Want to post form data to a
> webpage and parse the results? No problem. Futz with your Exchange
> mailboxes? Easy. Deal with Active Directory? Good old ADSI. And so on.
There are modules on the CPAN for all of those things, of course, and they
are obviously useful, but you've answered a somewhat different question from
the one I meant to ask. You're talking about specific applications for it,
and I was talking about *general* usefulness of a language, the ability to
solve *arbitrary* problems easily. If all of its power comes from the
ability to interface with extant apps, it would only be able to do the
things your extant apps can do (albeit, somewhat more automatically). How
is it when you need it to do something *on its own*, something for which
you don't have an application?
Perl has, to put it mildly, geek mindshare out the royal wazootie. Windows
is the *only* major operating system left that *doesn't* ship with it. It's
used so much on Linux that most major distributions consider it part of their
non-optional must-install core. There are *dozens* of applications on my
desktop that require it. In short, it gets *used*. It gets used quite a lot.
When was the last time you downloaded a Windows application and discovered
it was written at least partly in WSH?
Microsoft would do well to partner with ActiveState and ship a Windows that
includes Perl OOTB. It would significantly improve the overall attractiveness
(to computer geeks and technical types) of their product.
Sure, people who think "Microsoft XP" is their web browser (or possibly their
internet service provider, if there's even a difference between those two
things) would never notice or care, but those aren't the people Microsoft is
currently fighting to keep and worried they might lose.
If Perl is unsavory to Microsoft for some reason, pick another one -- Python,
Ruby, heck, they have the resources to roll their own, or buy one. WSH has
no mindshare and isn't cutting it with the geeks, and the lack of good geeky
tools is one of the main reasons geeks are jumping ship, a trend Microsoft
ought to show serious interest in counteracting. Retaining computer-savvy
users means the less knowledgeable users can get help from friends and
relatives and coworkers, and that ought to be worth some investment in
bundling geeky tools. It's not even the developers we're talking about here;
developers will do the 100-yard belly crawl nekked over broken glass to
develop for your platform if that's where the users are. It's free tech
support we're talking about, really.
A large percentage of home users will buy whatever software their tech-savvy
friend/nephew/whatever recommends and shows them how to use, especially if
said geek is willing to fix it occasionally when something goes wrong. I
have half a dozen people a month ask me what brand and model of computer to
buy. What happens if I start saying, "Get an iMac"? I don't, but what if
I did? I could single-handedly quintuple the number of Apple users in this
small town in half a year. Do you see where I'm going with this? I'm not
unusual. Many geeks are in this kind of situation. No computer vendor can
afford to ignore computer geeks. You don't have to base every decision on
them (indeed, that's worse), but you can't ignore them either.
> What's wrong with Windows Scripting Host?
... once I saw someone post a Ruby
I don't rightly know, in detail, but I do know that I've never seen a single
example of someone in an unrelated discussion (about, say, how to solve some
arbitrary problem) pop in with a Windows Scripting Host solution. You see
that all the time with Perl, frequently with PHP, sometimes with Python or
Lisp, *occasionally* with Visual Basic,
solution in an unrelated discussion, and a couple of times I've even seen
AppleScript solutions posted. All of these unless I am quite mistaken are
much less widely distributed than WSH, but you hear about people actually
*using* them. And it's not that people don't talk about Windows solutions,
because you hear about people using batch files from time to time, and
registry hacks with pretty good frequencybut I've never heard boo about
WSH, except in the occasional security bulletin, and that doesn't count.
For all I know, maybe it's a great, flexible, general-purpose language, and
all it's lacking is mindshare, but I was talking here about ways to make
Windows appeal to geeks more, so mindshare is pretty important. Maybe what
WSH needs most is for more online tutorials and discussion forum posts to
talk about doing this or that with it.
We've been hearing a lot about the new command-line features that Longhorn
is planned to have. What other geek-appeal features is Microsoft working on,
to help Windows compete with Linux on the tech-savvy user's desktop? Will
Longhorn finally ship with a better text editor than Notepad? DOS used to
come with BASIC and later QBasic; are there any plans to include a flexible
and powerful general-purpose scripting language, such as ActivePerl? What
else does Microsoft have up its sleeve to appeal to people who might
otherwise seek alternatives?
> But you can go much faster in a GTO.
Yes, because the GTO lets you automate the process much more completely. You
don't have to do most of the work of going yourself; the GTO does it for you
(once you put the gas in the tank and do all the other necessary things to
get it to start, learn a bit of lisp, et cetera).
The GTO also has more accessories. You can install a cupholder, a dashboard
clock, fuzzy dice, whatever floats your boat. If you want to go all out,
you can turn it into a stretch limo complete with a pool.
> Someone had to write Viper to make Emacs work as well as vi?
No, someone wrote viper so they could run vi on Emacs. Comparing Emacs to
vi is like comparing apples to an orange GTO. The apples are smaller and
lighter-weight, and you can throw them ever so much faster.
No, Emacs is an operating system. Viper is a vi clone that runs on Emacs.
66 sounded better to the marketing people than 67. Easier to say. Plus,
everyone knows that if you double 33 you get 66. If you like, think of
it as truncating instead of rounding.
The user experience has improved a *LOT*. I *remember* what it used to be like,
waiting for programs to load off a 5.25" floppy, and it's *WAY* better now.
I *remember* what switching between three applications did on a 386SX with
Windows 3 and 1MB of RAM, and it's *WAY* better now.
So, one place the cycles have gone is straight into making the user wait less.
The other place they've gone, obviously, is into features. I remember when
an "advanced" feature in a word processing program was scalable fonts, or a
spell checker that took 30+ seconds to go through a one-page document. Today
we take OOo's frames and tables and autospellcheck for granted and wish it
did paren-matching and had a better UI for rotating objects. These are things
even some desktop publishing apps didn't have in the 80s, and now we expect
every word processing app to have them.
What hasn't improved is the general level of computer literacy in the end-user
population at large.
> Isn't that some kind of vi clone?
You're thinking of viper. Emacs is the platform it runs on. HTH.HAND.
The parent is more likely thinking of _Atlanta Nights_, which was submitted to
PublishAmerica. PublishAmerica _claims_ to be a traditional publisher, to
review submitted manuscripts for quality, and so forth, but in actuality they
will "publish" anything, if by "publish" you mean "print". They don't do any
of the *other* things a publisher would normally do, such as edit or promote.
> Didn't the same thing happen a few years ago with the people on one usenet
> group submitting intentionally bad manuscripts to some company and get
> most of them published?
You may be thinking of Atlanta Nights, which was submitted to PublishAmerica.
I ran into that story accidentally last week, when I was checking to see what
sort of publisher PublishAmerica is, as a result of having someone out of the
blue send me email at work recommending a book for the collection. (I work at
a public library.) The author is not from around here, so she's probably
mailing every library she can find on the web, hoping to get the book noticed.
It's unlikely to work for her even if the book is good, since most libraries
only purchase books through a small number of suppliers with whom they have
existing accounts, such as Baker & Taylor, Emory Pratt, and so forth. These
suppliers are unlikely to stock anything from a Print-on-Demand source and
even more unlikely to stock anything that can't be returned if it doesn't
sell. Needless to say, I didn't write up the book, and even if I had, it
would have been unlikely to end up in the library collection.
You can't even sign up for a Paypal account without a credit card. This,
incidentally, impacts people in the US too, if we don't have a credit card
or, possibly due to having done a Google search on Paypal first and turned
up a hillion jillion horror stories, are unwilling to give Paypal access to
our full line of credit. I'm in the former category: I'm one of those
curmudgeons who refuses to have a credit card. There are a plethora of
reasons for this: I receive more junk mail from the credit card industry
than all other industries combined, for one thing, and so I'm not willing
to support them. Additionally, I view credit cards as a fundamentally bad
idea, because they make it very convenient and easy to spend money you
obviously cannot afford to spend, because you don't have it. I've seen
entirely too many people get a credit card "for emergencies" and three or
four years later be so deep in debt they will probably never regain their
financial independence. For every person with the personal discipline and
self-control to keep the thing paid off, there are nine people who can't,
and so they ruin their lives. As far as I'm concerned, credit cards
*create* emergencies.
(This is quite similar in principle to the recreational use of addictive
substances; theoretically, you can safely use safe amounts of them at home
on weekends, but in practice you get addicted and ruin your life.)
Then there are the userous interest rates that credit cards charge (rates
that IMO ought not even to be legal) and the desceptive tactics they use.
Just the other day I saw a credit card advertisement touting a 0% fixed APR
for the first twelve billing cycles and a 9.something% APR after that, but
the fine print said that the APRs are not guaranteed, that fixed APRs may
become variable, and so forth, completely nullifying the large, bold-faced
wording. For practical purposes, that's false advertising. I'm not
interested in doing business with any company that pulls that sort of
schenanighan. They can stick their card into a choice bodily orifice:
I don't want one, now or ever.
It does bother me that so many OSS projects use Paypal and/or credit cards
as their primary system for receiving donations. Paypal is IMO a very poor
choice, and credit cards are little better. At minimum, they should accept
personal checks. You can't even buy Firefox on a CD at the Mozilla store
without owning a major credit card.
> I'm not sure about an individual object being an instance of two classes
> without an intervening class, but the distinction probably makes no real
> difference.
I can assure you that it makes a real and important difference for a lot of
Inform code. Having an object that is a member of several classes is a very
common thing in Inform, because it is common to have classes that are
entirely orthogonal to one another. If you had to declare a fooplusbar
class every time you wanted to make an object derive from two classes foo
and bar, and a fooplusbarplusbaz class whenever you wanted to derive an
object from three classes, and so on, a huge mess would result.
Indeed. The way I see it, Apple is selling the 1.25GHz model for $500 or the .xcf versions of every one I've ever edited at all, ... in short, I
1.42GHz model for $600, but they have the same 256MB of RAM, so unless the
40GB hard drive is too small for you but the extra 40GB bump to 80 makes it
enough, you'd get more bang for your buck buying the $500 model and spending
the extra hundred on RAM. In my experience, most people who can fill up a
40GB drive will fill up an 80GB one almost as fast, because they're doing
something drive-space-intensive, such as huge amounts of digital photography.
My Linux and Windows partitions together don't add to 40GB, even though the
Windows partition includes complete copies of everything from three other,
older partitions from the previous system. (i.e., I've got up to five copies
of numerous applications installed -- or even more, if I've got extra old
versions of things like Mozilla and OpenOffice sitting around that I haven't
bothered to remove). I'm a grade-A packrat: I've got *all* the email I've
sent or received since 1995, including quite a significant amount of spam;
I've got every document I've ever created, every photo I've ever scanned on
my mom's scanner, the
huge amounts of stuff I've downloaded over the years,
delete almost nothing. The 25GB Linux partition is 15% empty still, and
the Windows partition is only 15GB total (albeit, that one's close to full).
So I'd definitely say the $500 model is the better deal. RAM is the main
thing that would be a worthwhile upgrade, and the $600 model has the same
amount of that. Get the $500 model and spend the extra hundred on RAM.