For some reason, I keep having this recurring thought that with the vote so close, the election should go to a steel cage match as a tie-breaker or something.
Obviously I've been watching too much Monty Python lately.
That's funny, here in Kitchener-Waterloo, people on @Home with Rogers have reported regular port scans (21,23,80) from security.home.com or some such hostname.
Of course, apparently they're not consistent in their [performance|service|responsiveness] either, so why should they be consistent in this, right?
Interesting note on local laws: For the record, possession of lockpicks here (.ca) will generally land you with a charge of "Possession of Break-in Instrument" [CC S 351(1), indictable offense, 10 years] unless you can show beyond a reasonable inference that you weren't going to use them to commit break & enters (ie, you are a locksmith). Same goes for crowbars or any other implement that could be used to "break in".
You must be kidding. Would you have us believe that your garden variety program that computes the value of pi using a mathematical relation, and this program by Wesley that calculates pi by computing its own area, are the same? That neither (especially the latter) are creative, unique, artistic or expressive? Bullshit.
IIRC the reasoning is along the lines of comparing code to sheet music, or recipe instructions: it's a functional item in that you can play it or use it to bake cookies (respectively), but it's also a form of expression in and of itself. I personally had been waiting for a verdict like that for a long time.
On reflection, I think that I should have added a *HIPPIE MODE ON* somewhere tag up there. I'll definitely admit to being an idealist, though.
Still, in these comments there is subtext which says, "a true artist will create art even if he doesn't get paid. Anyone else has 'sold out', and is just trying to be The Man."
I didn't intentionally craft my message so as to imply that. It's great if you make a boatload of money off of your art/music/code/craftsmanship, but I do think that it's shallow and callous to pursue a career solely for the money; and it's empty and unfulfilling when you have to accept a job solely for the money. One of the reasons that I really respect Jewel is that during the first (and only) interview I ever saw, one of the fans in the studio asked her how to become famous. Her reply was along the lines of "Fame isn't what matters; if you love your art, then follow it where it leads you." [1]
With that being said, there is a very concrete difference I think that you're missing out on:
We shouldn't expect free food from chefs, free health care from doctors, free programs from programmers, nor do we label them "Sell-outs" or less than "true-professionals" if they expect/require to be paid for their work.
I love to cook. If I'm working at a restaurant and lose my job, I'm still going to whip up my excellent creations in my own kitchen. In that case, I'm cooking because I enjoy doing it. Just because I cook for free doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to cook for *you* for free. I might cook for you because I want to, or because I like to. But I'm not compelled to.
I'm not asking anyone to work for free. I'm just saying that IMO & IME, the genuine[2] artist has her own reasons for creating her art, and money isn't one of them.
That said, I think that it's beneficial for society as a whole to support (artists, doctors,...) so that they can (create art, patch people up,...) instead of wasting their talents working chips at a $FAST_FOOD_HELLHOLE or something similar. [3]
[1]My apologies; I have no exact quote, and it was a long while ago, on MuchMusic Intimate & Interactive. [2] Genuine: I use this in the sense that Kierkegaard would. [3] Capitalism isn't always the best vehicle for this - I personally think it sucks, but it seems to be the best solution that's been sucessfully implemented so far.
If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And corporations won't be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again: It's a sad fucking day for all of us if artists create their art looking only to the money they'll recieve for it. I don't know about you, but in my mind, the reason we have art is (amongst other reasons) to teach us about the human condition. It's supposed to make a difference in our lives. It's supposed to entertain and enlighten, to give perspective and change how we see the world. The pop-art $hit that's made with an eye towards getting paid sure does a half-assed job of these things - if it even manages that.
I know that artists need to get paid - everyone has to eat - but that's sure as hell not the central focus of those who I'd consider true artists.
This point was raised in the 1980s when someone proposed that a levy should be put on blank floppies & tapes to compensate the software industry for piracy -- it was thought that people would start copying more software because they'd already paid the "piracy tax".
I think it's crap that the Industry here can jump to the conclusion that all CD-R's are being used to pirate songs - I mean, it really smacks of FUD. They can piss off if they think they're going to get any revenue out of me because I want to burn a few Debian or Red Hat CD's.
On this note, a link to RMS' article The Right Way to Tax DAT is appropriate here. This essay has been mentioned in conjunction with the topic of the Canadian CD-R levy before.
Buy a product, design a solid unbiased test for it, run the test, and send us what you find. Repeat until the whole world has a clue.
It's still in the rough, but the theory runs something like this:
People are either receptive to clue, or they aren't.
By osmosis, things pass from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser concentration.[1]
Someone who has been exposed to the internet has been exposed to an environment in which some amount of clue is present.
It follows that if someone who has been exposed to the internet remains clueless, it is because they are incapable of getting a clue -- that is to say, the chance of said clueless individual being able to absorb any clue at all is insignficantly small or zero.
This being the case, repeated beatings with the clue-by-four serve only to:
annoy the clueless, and
frustrate and anger the clueful.
[1] You have to get clue from someone with greater clue than you, right? Sure can't get it from someone with less. [2] I don't sound like I've worked a help desk, do I?
All the more reason to try to get more people into the pgp/gpg boat. They can't monitor everybody. Maybe they can try to make things hard for the first few users (witness PRZ), but they can't shortlist everybody.
Once enough people are involved in something that the "Feds" don't like, all they can do is to try to make things miserable for a minority of you, and so try and dissuade the rest of the group.
So let's get more people on board, and start heading for that critical mass.
Re:Was Linux the competitor?
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 1
Funny, on the system here at work passwd isn't symlinked....
oak:/etc$ ls -alF |grep passwd
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bin auth 2803 Jun 6 13:01 passwd -rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 2427 Dec 10 1999 passwd.orig
But that's about the only thing:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Nov 23 1999 hosts ->/var/opt/K/SCO/tcp/2.1.1Eb/etc/hosts
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 Nov 23 1999 hosts.equiv ->/var/opt/K/SCO/tcp/2.1.1Eb/etc/hosts.equiv lrwxrw xrwx 1 root root 32 Nov 23 1999 inetd ->/opt/K/SCO/tcp/2.1.1Eb/etc/inetd* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 41 Nov 23 1999 inetd.conf ->/var/opt/K/SCO/tcp/2.1.1Eb/etc/inetd.conf lrwxrwx rwx 1 root root 39 Nov 23 1999 inittab ->/var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/etc/inittab lrwxrwxrw x 1 root root 39 Nov 23 1999 profile ->/var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/etc/profile lrwxrwxrw x 1 root root 38 Nov 23 1999 shadow ->/var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/etc/shadow lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 Nov 23 1999 shells ->/var/opt/K/SCO/tcp/2.1.1Eb/etc/shells lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Nov 23 1999 utmp ->/var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/etc/utmp lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Nov 23 1999 wtmp ->/var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/etc/wtmp
I never was too big on SCO...just couldn't put a finger on why.
Like you said. The author's whole argument seems to go along the lines of "bad licenses are good because they encourage people to rewrite the software under good licenses."
Sounds a lot like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.
The way that the article was phrased down at the bottom (he also cautioned against the use of unencrypted passwords) made me read two different points of view into the article:
Academic institutions should cut off all FTP and telnet-like access. This is foolish - cutting off all external access increases security, but at the cost of most of the intended functionality.
Academic institutions should replace FTP and telnet with secure alternatives. This is an intelligent and long-overdue change, as you both state.
I didn't clue into the second until I read the article over a second time. (See my post up there ^ about my school refusing to implement SSH.)
If you interpret what the author's saying in the article as "firewall in your on-campus network and deny all ftp- and telnet-like access from the outside" then the analogy makes perfect sense.
Seems that your sys-admin needs to hop on the clue-train.
Oh, believe me when I say that there's a whole lot of b0rken computer systems on campus. We see a lot of "user-obsequious" here.
Some of it has gotten better, mind -- the network maintainers do a good job implementing things that they think need to be done. It used to be nothing for the Banyan LAN to crash and be down for three days at a time. I rarely suggest things any more (like implementing SSL, or uncrippling the libraries on our servers, or...) because the people responsible ignore any and all feedback.
I'm no BOFH (and so don't know for sure), but is adding SSL to your system a big deal? Once I found the packages, I had openssl and secure replacements for telnet, telnetd, lynx, and w3m installed in (literally) 15 minutes on my linux box. (School runs Solaris(tm) though...)
By the same logic, we should remove all windows from houses (I'm referring to the pane-glass variety; I'll say nothing of the other kind.) Don't you know that they can be used to violate your privacy and access your personal possessions?
The author seems to think that taking all the windows out is a better idea then the compromise of using locks and curtains.
From the standpoint of a business you are a poor potential customer choice.
I agree with you on this point. Sheeple that will accept whatever crap a business peddles make far better customers than those who aren't willing to be fucked around and will demand the quality that they deserve. Just ask Micros~1.
IME customers go both ways - perhaps yours want whizz-bang graphics that explode off the page at them. When I was teaching a course on browsing the web with Netscape, most of the newbie-students I was teaching were overwhelmed by how loud many of the pages were. ("It's so busy" were one's exact words.)
As for hardware, running Netscape 4.0 on a P120/16MB is a painful experience. Netscape 6 is miserable. Opera is bearable but costs money. None of them are open source, and if it was my decision my Win95 install would be on the losing end of a HD reformat. I am far happier with lynx and w3m.
Lynx requires a 386 and several MB of RAM -- if old, cheap hardware is its target, why don't they support DOS on a 286 with 1MB of RAM?
I would imagine because lynx is 32-bit code. There is a browser called Bobcat, based on Lynx, that has a subset of its functionality and runs on 16-bit machines."
Don't whine to me about the situation you have chosen to put yourself in.
If you think I'm whining, that's your problem. I wouldn't be using lynx if I didn't think that I was further ahead in doing so. When I come across a page that looks a mess and fire up Netscape to view it, I seldom find that I'm rewarded with a page proportionate to the effort required. More often, the site is remarkably content-free.
My point was that it doesn't require maintaining two separate versions of a page, unless your entire site is flash or some such crap. Using Javascript for all of your nav functions just seems plain ridiculous when there are these perfectly functional things called *hyperlinks*... Lynx and other browsers that don't use scripting or plugins just ignore them. If you need to create two totally separate versions, then IMHO, you're doing it wrong.
I'd rather work on improving the functionality for the 82.8% of my users who use a recent browser than "users" who either refuse to use a decent, up to date, standards compliant browser or are robots.
1. Why lump in old browsers with ones that aren't standards compliant? Historically, Netscape and IE have been the worst for desecrating the HTML standard. Lynx adheres to the standards strictly enough that it uses special parsing modes to emulate the most common Netscape- and Microsoft-introduced screw ups necessary to make many pages useable. 2. Some people are stubborn (like me) and refuse to use K00lBrowser6.66, but others don't have a choice. (old hardware, shell account...) 3. Lynx is up to date - my build here is 2.8.3rel.1 (23 Apr 2000). 4. Why the scare quotes around "users"? Setting apart robots, or do us "luddites" not count as real "users"? =)
Why doesn't Lynx even support JavaScript yet?
Not being on the lynx-dev list, I can't say. Maybe because it would add what is perceived as too much bulk to the program, maybe because no one cares to implement it. I know I couldn't be arsed to put full java applet support in - I'll take a pass on wasting bandwidth and CPU cycles just to watch buddy's applet animate his forehead.
Say you're putting up a building. Only 0.1% of the users of your building are in wheelchairs, using crutches, or don't fit into the "able-bodied" typecast in some other way. By your argument, it certainly doesn't make economical sense to put in elevators or wheelchair ramps, does it?
As a "crusty old" lynx user, I must say that I'm thrilled by the support I'm finding here. Maybe I should start a support group. =) Seriously, what really pisses me off (whether I'm using lynx or arachne or Netscape 6.x) is the sheer ignorance of a significant number of webmasters. Not only do they assume that you have the latest (ie, most bloated) browser and plugins, they also presume that you're running windoze, have plenty of memory for new windows, and lots of screen real estate for gargantuan graphics and zillions of frames. The biggest problem, though, is that they really don't want to be told that they're shutting users out. They don't give a rat's ass. I've e-mailed at least a hundred (with calm, reasonable, and intelligible messages, unlike this post), none of whom made the slightest change to their websites as a result. I've given up. I guess they just want a page that looks good when viewed by the CEO on his T1-connected P-III 700 running Win2000 & Internet Exploiter 6. Making a page that everyone can use isn't hard, and doesn't have to be bland. Ditch the frames (unless absolutely necessary), make images, scripting, plugins, and all those other multimedia goodies all optional. (And put in ALTs for fsck's sake!)
(sigh) (PS. If you use lynx, take a look at w3m. It's an HTML pager that complements Lynx well in that it renders well the documents that lynx does poorly, and vice versa.)
THE PENTAGON. (AP) A group of terrorist sea mammals claims to have possession of the authorization codes that grant access to the US Navy's nuclear arsenal. A spokesanimal, known only as 'fLiPpOR', claims that the group will obliterate human civilization as we know it unless all water-polluting industry is immediately halted. They also demand that all natures of fishing by humans cease immediately; and further that 12 tonnes of herring be dumped into the ocean off the coast of Spain.
Problems first became apparent when the ship's monitors of the USS Portent nuclear-class submarine began to flash the message "wE bR0kE uR lAmE @$$ 'K0DEZ' - tHe d0lphInS 0wN j00!!!!#$$!!@@!" Department of Defense officials refused to comment on speculations that marginally intelligent marine animals were able to defeat their cryptography measures.
"We are tired of being pushed aside as mere 'animals'" commented an unaffiliated dolphin on conditions of anonymity. "The frustration of being labelled a 'second-rate life form' gets to all of us, and someone finally snapped."
It's only through the fan sites (and a slashdot poll) that I found out about the show and started watching it to begin with. Regardless of whether or not fuji-tv is legally within their rights, I can't in good conscience watch the show again... (sigh) Mind you, it'll solve the argument my wife and I always have - whether to watch Iron Chef(tm) or Law & Order at 10pm.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, I keep having this recurring thought that with the vote so close, the election should go to a steel cage match as a tie-breaker or something.
Obviously I've been watching too much Monty Python lately.
That's funny, here in Kitchener-Waterloo, people on @Home with Rogers have reported regular port scans (21,23,80) from security.home.com or some such hostname.
Of course, apparently they're not consistent in their [performance|service|responsiveness] either, so why should they be consistent in this, right?
Interesting note on local laws: For the record, possession of lockpicks here (.ca) will generally land you with a charge of "Possession of Break-in Instrument" [CC S 351(1), indictable offense, 10 years] unless you can show beyond a reasonable inference that you weren't going to use them to commit break & enters (ie, you are a locksmith). Same goes for crowbars or any other implement that could be used to "break in".
Not saying that it's good, just that it's there.
#include "ianal.h"
You must be kidding. Would you have us believe that your garden variety program that computes the value of pi using a mathematical relation, and this program by Wesley that calculates pi by computing its own area, are the same? That neither (especially the latter) are creative, unique, artistic or expressive? Bullshit.
I'm not sure that the court in this case is required to follow this precedent or not, but a US court has already ruled that code is protected free speech.
IIRC the reasoning is along the lines of comparing code to sheet music, or recipe instructions: it's a functional item in that you can play it or use it to bake cookies (respectively), but it's also a form of expression in and of itself. I personally had been waiting for a verdict like that for a long time.
On reflection, I think that I should have added a *HIPPIE MODE ON* somewhere tag up there. I'll definitely admit to being an idealist, though.
Still, in these comments there is subtext which says, "a true artist will create art even if he doesn't get paid. Anyone else has 'sold out', and is just trying to be The Man."
I didn't intentionally craft my message so as to imply that. It's great if you make a boatload of money off of your art/music/code/craftsmanship, but I do think that it's shallow and callous to pursue a career solely for the money; and it's empty and unfulfilling when you have to accept a job solely for the money. One of the reasons that I really respect Jewel is that during the first (and only) interview I ever saw, one of the fans in the studio asked her how to become famous. Her reply was along the lines of "Fame isn't what matters; if you love your art, then follow it where it leads you." [1]
With that being said, there is a very concrete difference I think that you're missing out on:
We shouldn't expect free food from chefs, free health care from doctors, free programs from programmers, nor do we label them "Sell-outs" or less than "true-professionals" if they expect/require to be paid for their work.
I love to cook. If I'm working at a restaurant and lose my job, I'm still going to whip up my excellent creations in my own kitchen. In that case, I'm cooking because I enjoy doing it. Just because I cook for free doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to cook for *you* for free. I might cook for you because I want to, or because I like to. But I'm not compelled to.
I'm not asking anyone to work for free. I'm just saying that IMO & IME, the genuine[2] artist has her own reasons for creating her art, and money isn't one of them.
That said, I think that it's beneficial for society as a whole to support (artists, doctors, ...) so that they can (create art, patch people up, ...) instead of wasting their talents working chips at a $FAST_FOOD_HELLHOLE or something similar. [3]
[1]My apologies; I have no exact quote, and it was a long while ago, on MuchMusic Intimate & Interactive.
[2] Genuine: I use this in the sense that Kierkegaard would.
[3] Capitalism isn't always the best vehicle for this - I personally think it sucks, but it seems to be the best solution that's been sucessfully implemented so far.
If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And corporations won't be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again: It's a sad fucking day for all of us if artists create their art looking only to the money they'll recieve for it. I don't know about you, but in my mind, the reason we have art is (amongst other reasons) to teach us about the human condition. It's supposed to make a difference in our lives. It's supposed to entertain and enlighten, to give perspective and change how we see the world. The pop-art $hit that's made with an eye towards getting paid sure does a half-assed job of these things - if it even manages that.
I know that artists need to get paid - everyone has to eat - but that's sure as hell not the central focus of those who I'd consider true artists.
This point was raised in the 1980s when someone proposed that a levy should be put on blank floppies & tapes to compensate the software industry for piracy -- it was thought that people would start copying more software because they'd already paid the "piracy tax".
I think it's crap that the Industry here can jump to the conclusion that all CD-R's are being used to pirate songs - I mean, it really smacks of FUD. They can piss off if they think they're going to get any revenue out of me because I want to burn a few Debian or Red Hat CD's.
On this note, a link to RMS' article The Right Way to Tax DAT is appropriate here. This essay has been mentioned in conjunction with the topic of the Canadian CD-R levy before.
Buy a product, design a solid unbiased test for it, run the test, and send us what you find. Repeat until the whole world has a clue.
It's still in the rough, but the theory runs something like this:
This being the case, repeated beatings with the clue-by-four serve only to:
[1] You have to get clue from someone with greater clue than you, right? Sure can't get it from someone with less.
[2] I don't sound like I've worked a help desk, do I?
For what it's worth, a comprehensive list of IPs belonging to yesmail has been posted. I haven't personally verified it.
All the more reason to try to get more people into the pgp/gpg boat. They can't monitor everybody. Maybe they can try to make things hard for the first few users (witness PRZ), but they can't shortlist everybody.
Once enough people are involved in something that the "Feds" don't like, all they can do is to try to make things miserable for a minority of you, and so try and dissuade the rest of the group.
So let's get more people on board, and start heading for that critical mass.
Funny, on the system here at work passwd isn't symlinked....
But that's about the only thing:
I never was too big on SCO...just couldn't put a finger on why.
Like you said. The author's whole argument seems to go along the lines of "bad licenses are good because they encourage people to rewrite the software under good licenses."
Sounds a lot like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.
The way that the article was phrased down at the bottom (he also cautioned against the use of unencrypted passwords) made me read two different points of view into the article:
I didn't clue into the second until I read the article over a second time. (See my post up there ^ about my school refusing to implement SSH.)
If you interpret what the author's saying in the article as "firewall in your on-campus network and deny all ftp- and telnet-like access from the outside" then the analogy makes perfect sense.
GoAT.
Seems that your sys-admin needs to hop on the clue-train.
Oh, believe me when I say that there's a whole lot of b0rken computer systems on campus. We see a lot of "user-obsequious" here.
Some of it has gotten better, mind -- the network maintainers do a good job implementing things that they think need to be done. It used to be nothing for the Banyan LAN to crash and be down for three days at a time. I rarely suggest things any more (like implementing SSL, or uncrippling the libraries on our servers, or...) because the people responsible ignore any and all feedback.
My school refuses to implement SSH as well.
I'm no BOFH (and so don't know for sure), but is adding SSL to your system a big deal? Once I found the packages, I had openssl and secure replacements for telnet, telnetd, lynx, and w3m installed in (literally) 15 minutes on my linux box. (School runs Solaris(tm) though...)
By the same logic, we should remove all windows from houses (I'm referring to the pane-glass variety; I'll say nothing of the other kind.) Don't you know that they can be used to violate your privacy and access your personal possessions?
The author seems to think that taking all the windows out is a better idea then the compromise of using locks and curtains.
From the standpoint of a business you are a poor potential customer choice.
I agree with you on this point. Sheeple that will accept whatever crap a business peddles make far better customers than those who aren't willing to be fucked around and will demand the quality that they deserve. Just ask Micros~1.
IME customers go both ways - perhaps yours want whizz-bang graphics that explode off the page at them. When I was teaching a course on browsing the web with Netscape, most of the newbie-students I was teaching were overwhelmed by how loud many of the pages were. ("It's so busy" were one's exact words.)
As for hardware, running Netscape 4.0 on a P120/16MB is a painful experience. Netscape 6 is miserable. Opera is bearable but costs money. None of them are open source, and if it was my decision my Win95 install would be on the losing end of a HD reformat. I am far happier with lynx and w3m.
Lynx requires a 386 and several MB of RAM -- if old, cheap hardware is its target, why don't they support DOS on a 286 with 1MB of RAM?
I would imagine because lynx is 32-bit code. There is a browser called Bobcat, based on Lynx, that has a subset of its functionality and runs on 16-bit machines."
Don't whine to me about the situation you have chosen to put yourself in.
If you think I'm whining, that's your problem. I wouldn't be using lynx if I didn't think that I was further ahead in doing so. When I come across a page that looks a mess and fire up Netscape to view it, I seldom find that I'm rewarded with a page proportionate to the effort required. More often, the site is remarkably content-free.
My point was that it doesn't require maintaining two separate versions of a page, unless your entire site is flash or some such crap. Using Javascript for all of your nav functions just seems plain ridiculous when there are these perfectly functional things called *hyperlinks* ... Lynx and other browsers that don't use scripting or plugins just ignore them. If you need to create two totally separate versions, then IMHO, you're doing it wrong.
I'd rather work on improving the functionality for the 82.8% of my users who use a recent browser than "users" who either refuse to use a decent, up to date, standards compliant browser or are robots.
1. Why lump in old browsers with ones that aren't standards compliant? Historically, Netscape and IE have been the worst for desecrating the HTML standard. Lynx adheres to the standards strictly enough that it uses special parsing modes to emulate the most common Netscape- and Microsoft-introduced screw ups necessary to make many pages useable. 2. Some people are stubborn (like me) and refuse to use K00lBrowser6.66, but others don't have a choice. (old hardware, shell account...) 3. Lynx is up to date - my build here is 2.8.3rel.1 (23 Apr 2000). 4. Why the scare quotes around "users"? Setting apart robots, or do us "luddites" not count as real "users"? =)
Why doesn't Lynx even support JavaScript yet?
Not being on the lynx-dev list, I can't say. Maybe because it would add what is perceived as too much bulk to the program, maybe because no one cares to implement it. I know I couldn't be arsed to put full java applet support in - I'll take a pass on wasting bandwidth and CPU cycles just to watch buddy's applet animate his forehead.
Say you're putting up a building. Only 0.1% of the users of your building are in wheelchairs, using crutches, or don't fit into the "able-bodied" typecast in some other way. By your argument, it certainly doesn't make economical sense to put in elevators or wheelchair ramps, does it?
Tyranny of the majority, anyone?
As a "crusty old" lynx user, I must say that I'm thrilled by the support I'm finding here. Maybe I should start a support group. =)
Seriously, what really pisses me off (whether I'm using lynx or arachne or Netscape 6.x) is the sheer ignorance of a significant number of webmasters. Not only do they assume that you have the latest (ie, most bloated) browser and plugins, they also presume that you're running windoze, have plenty of memory for new windows, and lots of screen real estate for gargantuan graphics and zillions of frames. The biggest problem, though, is that they really don't want to be told that they're shutting users out. They don't give a rat's ass. I've e-mailed at least a hundred (with calm, reasonable, and intelligible messages, unlike this post), none of whom made the slightest change to their websites as a result. I've given up. I guess they just want a page that looks good when viewed by the CEO on his T1-connected P-III 700 running Win2000 & Internet Exploiter 6.
Making a page that everyone can use isn't hard, and doesn't have to be bland. Ditch the frames (unless absolutely necessary), make images, scripting, plugins, and all those other multimedia goodies all optional. (And put in ALTs for fsck's sake!)
(sigh)
(PS. If you use lynx, take a look at w3m. It's an HTML pager that complements Lynx well in that it renders well the documents that lynx does poorly, and vice versa.)
THE PENTAGON. (AP) A group of terrorist sea mammals claims to have possession of the authorization codes that grant access to the US Navy's nuclear arsenal.
A spokesanimal, known only as 'fLiPpOR', claims that the group will obliterate human civilization as we know it unless all water-polluting industry is immediately halted.
They also demand that all natures of fishing by humans cease immediately; and further that 12 tonnes of herring be dumped into the ocean off the coast of Spain.
Problems first became apparent when the ship's monitors of the USS Portent nuclear-class submarine began to flash the message "wE bR0kE uR lAmE @$$ 'K0DEZ' - tHe d0lphInS 0wN j00!!!!#$$!!@@!" Department of Defense officials refused to comment on speculations that marginally intelligent marine animals were able to defeat their cryptography measures.
"We are tired of being pushed aside as mere 'animals'" commented an unaffiliated dolphin on conditions of anonymity. "The frustration of being labelled a 'second-rate life form' gets to all of us, and someone finally snapped."
I'm not sure how well-developed the thing is yet, but if it's in a workable state, would compiling some parts of your program help? (At least a bit?)
It's only through the fan sites (and a slashdot poll) that I found out about the show and started watching it to begin with.
Regardless of whether or not fuji-tv is legally within their rights, I can't in good conscience watch the show again...
(sigh)
Mind you, it'll solve the argument my wife and I always have - whether to watch Iron Chef(tm) or Law & Order at 10pm.