In other words, rather than take a gamble and hope that the relationship doesn't fall apart, give her a crappy gift and leave no doubt?
Rather than second guess the intentions of a couple I've never met, I'm willing to take this at face value for now. If this guy wants to buy his girlfriend a laptop for a gift, who are we to recommend otherwise? For all we know, he's paying for the trip as well, so making a big deal about the laptop may be a misplaced concern.
My advice would just be to not make a surprise out of this. Giving someone a computer is like giving someone a puppy: it may look cute in the store, but in the end the recipient is going to have to be the one feeding and watering and taking this thing to the vet when it gets sick. Not you, or at least, not necessarily you. She's going to have to want it, so make sure that she does.
As much as I would like to have a new Apple laptop, I would never get one for my fiance -- she hates Macs. She's very happy with WindowsXP, and it's pointless to try to change her mind. What's more important to you: the "geek cred" of her computer, or her happiness?
Just make sure that, whatever you get for her, it's something that she'll be happy with. This is not the best situation to spring it as a surprise for her:-)
Is it safe to assume that the command line version for other platforms will take similar URLs? The presumed OSX version at ftp://alien.ssl.berkeley.edu/pub/setiathome-3.08.p owerpc-apple-darwin1.2.tar, and the presumed WinNT version at http://wcarchive.cdrom.com/pub/setiathome/setiatho me-3.03.i386-winnt-cmdline.exe, both don't work yet. (I got these urls by hand editing the links on the Unix download page to replace 3.03 with 3.08, so I'm assuming that the new versions will be consistent with what was already there.) Maybe these links will work by the time you read this, but as of now (2:30 pm EST) they haven't been updated yet.
Most of them are April Fools hoaxes, but not a. "The Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff" (10) was from February 1708, while "Augusta National Goes Public" (91) was from May 1990. A lot of the others don't mention a month, and while of course April Fools Day is implied by all of them, it's possible that some of the others are from other parts of the year as well.
Given that, the towering achievement of the crop circle & sasquatch hoaxsters is so overwhelming that they deserved at least an honorable mention, if not their own slots on the list.
But then, when lists like this come out (top 100 hoaxes, top 100 movies of all time, etc) there's always some crank with other ideas...:-)
Any "top 100 hoaxes" list that omits crop circles has a major hole in it. So many people refuse to accept the obvious on this one even years after the people that first did it fessed up -- and for that matter the same is true of Sasquatch & the guy who took the prank to his grave last year, only to have his family spill the joke.
Not that anyone believed them anyway.
The human capacity to believe ludicrous shit is truly amazing:-)
What's so bad about CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd ed? It came out in 2000, four years after the first edition, and covers, in no particular order:
CGI.pm
templates (including HTML::Template and Mason
Javascript
security issues (taint mode, use strict, use warnings, etc)
email
persistence (from text & DBM files to DBI & SQL)
XML
dynamic image generation
debugging & architecture issues
My only gripes are that mod_perl is given short shrift (a chapter on getting standard CGI scripts to work under Apache::Registry would have been nice), and that coverage of templates could have been fleshed out a bit more (I like HTML::Template, but both Mason & Template Toolkit seem to be more popular -- and Mason gets little more than a mention while T::T really wasn't mentioned at all). An XML-RPC / SOAP section might have been nice too, but that really is pretty recent.
The book is still an excellent, competent overview of the topic though. Books written this well don't age badly, and while the books you list are also good ones, for someone trying to learn CGI it makes more sense to me to recommend a CGI specific book. Given the choice between this book and, say, Matt Wright's code, there's simply no question which is better.
Nowhere does the article submission mention X11 itself. Was this dismissed out of hand for some reason? As far as I'm concerned, the biggest (and maybe only) strength of X-Windows is the remote display capabilities that are either unavailable or an expensive add-on for other graphical systems.
Was plain old X11 even considered? If it was, and it didn't meet the criteria, then in what way was it found lacking? Too heavy for a 56k dialup connection? I didn't think it was any worse than Citrix there, but I could be wrong about that. You should be able to get a secure connection via SSH tunneling, and that connection can be compressed if necessary -- there is copious documentation for all this, so I won't repeat how to set it up here, but it's very commonly done.
The biggest "obstacle" I can think of is that people will need the X11 server software on their end, but again this isn't a very big deal: there are free versions for Windows (Cygwin and MacOSX (Apple's X11 beta, XDarwin), and of course it is the standard graphical layer for Linux & related systems.
So really, what needs to happen if you go forward with this idea is for some work to go into packaging it up for students & faculty to use, and giving enough training to show how to get going with it. There are a lot of resources out there that can be relied upon, should the state choose to take this path. It sounds to me like what you need most is for someone to make the pitch to those who are making the decisions.
Ignore what the online web archives say -- my reefknot folder has a full 25 messages from 2003 in there, and another fifty or so since I subscribed in Sept 2002, so the seem to be at least partially incomplete.
Moreover, I work with one of the core developers, and am pretty sure that she doesn't feel ReefKnot is dead, it's just hibernating:-)
There is interest in keeping the project going, but well work and all that nonsense has gotten in the way. If public momentum starts to build back up then things could start going again with the core developers (including any interested new ones).
I personally [not speaking for my employer yadda yadda yadda] would like to see more web sites start offering iCal feeds of some of the material they publish, such as listings for concerts, movies, and tv shows. If ReefKnot could evolve into something that could support that, I'd be happy to help out with the effort.
No, actually iCal is a fairly old file format (not sure how old, but a few years anyway I think) and Apple's iCal.app is a new application built around that file format. Libraries for working with iCal, such as Perl's Date::ICal & Net::ICal, have been around since at least 2001, under the development of the Reefknot calendaring project.
Why Apple gave their application the exact same name as the format I don't know, but in any case the release of the Apple application just gave the iCal format a higher profile than it used to have -- but they certainly didn't invent it all by themselves.:-)
The closest thing I know of is the ReefKnot project, which is among other things responsible for Perl's iCal parsing libraries. The project is kind of stalled, but if you're interested in getting involved feel free to download the software (all of which should also be on CPAN) and subscribe to the developer's and users mailing lists. They're kind of idle these days, but I'm sure any new Slashdot users will kick up a little surge in chatter -- hopefully enough to start making progress again.
I'm personally not clear if Reefknot is meant to be a self-contained iCalendar server, or if it's meant to provide the libraries that can be embedded in an Apache/mod_perl server (the latter makes a bit more sense to me -- that way you can get WebDAV support from mod_dav, Apache's built in authentication mechanisms, etc -- but I'm not sure if that's accurate). In any case though, it gives you some substantial building blocks to start with & use as you see fit. Obviously a more cohesive package would be a nice thing, but that's why the project needs to get moving again:-)
Re:A brave new continent for domain name squatting
on
The EU Gets .eu
·
· Score: 1
Googling for Archboutefeu returns only 20 hits or so, nearly all of which seem to just be random copies of/usr/dict/words etc online. Weird.
On a guess, I tried deleting "arch-" and got some more results, including:
Boutefeu
(Boute"feu) n. [F.; bouter to thrust, put + feu fire.] An incendiary; an inciter of quarrels. [Obs.]
Animated by . . . John à Chamber, a very boutefeu, . . . they entered into open rebellion. Bacon.
And another page suggests that "Boutefeu chinois" means "Chinese Fireball".
So at a guess, boutefeu must mean an inflammatory person, and an archboutefeu must be the worst of all such people.
A troll on a site like Slashdot.fr, in other words:-)
A brave new continent for domain name squatting
on
The EU Gets .eu
·
· Score: 1
% grep 'eu$'/usr/share/dict/words
adieu
alpieu
archboutefeu
asideu
eheu
eu
farleu
feu
leu
lieu
Lleu
masdeu
milieu
purlieu
subfeu
tereu
zakkeu
Not many of these really jump out at me as an English speaker, but a lot of them seem to be derived from French -- implying that Francophones could possibly have a lot of words with a "-eu" suffix.
"Archboutefeu" is a cool sounding word. What does it mean?
% dict archboutefeu
No definitions found for "archboutefeu"
Any French speakers able to translate that word, or any of these for that matter? The only "obvious" ones to me are 'adieu", "lieu", and "milieu" -- everything else is, well, Greek to me.:-)
The funny thing is that this formula actually plays into Godel's theorem, not against it. Yay incompleteness:)
Re:Doublespeak
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Unfortunately, I for one am not optimistic about the post war rebuilding chances being anything like Japan & Germany were. Both of those lands are more or less ethnicly homogenous (roughly with Germany, very much so with Japan), and they have a strong sense of national identity. They wanted to rebuild.
Iraq on the other hand was a chunk of land arbitrarily carved off the side of the crumbling Ottoman Empire -- for centuries it had been under the control of what is now Turkey. There are three major ethnic groups with no particular mutual loyalty. If it weren't for the Ba'ath party and Hussein's iron fist, the country probably would have falled apart decades ago. And even Hussein wouldn't have been able to remain in power for so long if it weren't for US support over the decades to prop up his regime as a bulwark against Iran.
In short, with Hussein gone there will be nothing holding Iraq together, and a lot of tensions pulling it apart.
So what then are the post war possibilities? Long term US military occupation to hold the country together? We could be there for decades. Spin down our involvement over time? If we leave the country weaker than it is today, it could end up being carved into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions by its neighbors -- Iran may invade the south to protect its own stability, just as Turkey may invade the north for similar reasons. The middle could either remain independent & feeble, or be absorbed by a neighbor.
So many things can go wrong. This is going to be a fucking nightmare for decades. When your kids ask why we're constantly occupying chunks of the middle east, and why we're constantly worried about new terrorist incidents, why nobody can afford to buy gasoline anymore, etc -- remind them that this was the night it all started.:-(
The only thing with that site is that mixed in with the gems you come across, there's also a lot of really bad advice given.
Just to go with my personal pet peeve, I have yet to ever encounter a good reason for an average OSX user to enable the root account, nevermind log in and noodle around as root. Not when sudo is available. And yet a large fraction of the tips given go something like:
turn on the root account, if you haven't already
log out and log back in again as root
run this command: $foo
log back in as yourself
When really that should be reduced to:
run this command: sudo $foo
That common example comes up all the time, but you also see things like Perl code that doesn't do what it's supposed to, over-elaborate ways to get some Unix thing installed when you can gloss over most of that with Fink, etc.
I've still got the site bookmarked, and I visit it occasionally, but I've come to so distrust the quality of the advice given that I barely ever visit it anymore. There's still a lot of great stuff there, don't get me wrong, ut be sure to scrutinize what you read: there's often a better way to do things than what is suggested.
Nitpick -- the plural of "exegesis" is "exegeses", just as the plural of "apocalypse" is "apocalypses". Or at least, that's how Damian is writing it:-)
And chances aren't bad that the next Exegesis will be coming soon, and the next Apocalypse will be soon after that. According to Dan Sugalski's use.perl.org journal, the core Perl6 team has been making good progress lately. As he writes in the 20 Feb journal entry:
Once the Apocalypse is out, I expect that Damian'll get the Exegesis out in a few weeks, with the Synopsis either following or preceding, depending on how the tides and moon phases work out. We'll see there.
From the later comments in that entry, it sounds like the next Apocalypse / Exegesis / Synopsis will deal with Perl6's object system. It's not clear how much progress was made there though. It took a long time to get from the last Exegesis to today's Apocalypse (core developers all out of work, etc), but hopefully this means things will get moving again now.
In 1900, it was felt that physics was "mature", and that most of the tough theoretical problems had been sorted out.
Then, in the opening years of the twentieth century, Einsten published his special & general theories of relativity, and various researches began contributing to the model that has come to be called quantum mechanics.
And the more these were studied, the more it was realized that we have a long, long way to go.
Today, the big push is toward uniting relativity & quantum mechanics, and the general feeling is that once again we're on the cusp of having it all figured out.
But, like then, there are now some niggling problems that are having a hell of a time being accomodated in the standard frameworks. Will a resolution come? Maybe. Hopefully. But the fact of the matter is, at this point nobody knows if we're just one creative insight away from the whole thing unravelling, or at least being superceded by a revolutionary new framework.
The point is, that accepted boundaries are a funny thing, and you never know when some unexpected innovation will catapult everyone to a higher plateau.
You say that browsers are essentially mature, but that's not how I read the situation. With the "standard" browsers -- that being IE and, well okay that's it -- I see highly refined stagnation. The browser is very good now, but there really haven't been any breakthrough features in the past couple of versions. On the other hand, all of the fringe browsers -- Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc -- are tinkering with this tabs idea, which seems to be a whole new way to navigate through a multi-dimensional information space in a more or less manageable way. Each of the implementations of this idea is a little different from the others at this point, and I don't yet think we've seen the point where things are settling down into conventions the way much of the rest of the browser interface has done. I for one am still hoping to see a browser that makes clever use of OSX's drawers interface, for example, and if Safari doesn't do it maybe someone else can build it on top of KHTML or Gecko.
Innovation may well be a too easily invoked term. I personally cringe whenever I hear it come out of a Microsoft spokesperson or advertisement. And yet you can't discount it. Maybe browsers today are like how physics was in 1900 -- stable, but on the cusp of something greater than before. I look at things like tabs, xml-rpc, soap, Watson/Sherlock on OSX, Vindigo on PDAs, small scale browsers for cell phones & PDA, etc, and I can't help but think that at least one of these clever ideas will bubble up & disrupt the current trend towards mainsteam browser stagnation.
You can't say that it can't happen. It can. And just maybe, it will.
61 INT. DR. SCO'S VOLCANO LAIR - MAIN ROOM Dr. SCO at his table with Frau, Scott, and Number Two.
DR. SCO Get me the President of the IBM.
The PRESIDENT appears on Dr. SCO's video screen with his BOARD MEMBERS behind him.
62 INT. OVAL OFFICE (SPLIT SCREEN)
PRESIDENT Dr. SCO, what do you want?
DR. SCO Not what I want Mr. President, but I will receive. In 12 hours I will destroy your industry with a giant patent.
Dr. SCO reveals a giant patent. Minix-me is humping it like a dog.
DR. SCO OK, Minix-me, why don't you and the patent get a frickin' room. Honestly. [ to President ] I will destroy another major distribution every hour- that is, unless you pay me- [ SNAP ZOOM ] One hundred billion dollars!
The President and his advisors LAUGH.
PRESIDENT Dr. SCO that's more than the entire US economy for 2002.
DR. SCO Don't play games with me. Your UNIX will disappear if I don't receive [ SNAP ZOOM ] One hundred billion dollars!
His advisors LAUGH.
PRESIDENT That much money simply doesn't exist. I don't think 100 billion is even a number. It's like saying I want a kajillion bajillion dollars. [ His advisors LAUGH. ]
DR. SCO Come on, Mr. President... [ SNAP ZOOM ] "Show me the money!"
Dr. SCO looks around smugly. No one laughs.
PRESIDENT What?
[ SNAP ZOOM ]
DR. SCO "Show me the money!"
He looks around again, expectantly.
PRESIDENT I'm sorry, I don't understand.
DR. SCO You know, kwan? Show me the money? No? Nothing?
SCOTT It's 2003. That movie stopped being a cultural buzzword 30 years ago, ass. They don't know what you're talking about.
DR. SCO Right. OK, see if you understand this: give me the money or I'm going to blow you to frickin' bits, OK?
The President and his advisors MURMUR.
PRESIDENT But-
DR. SCO[ making 'stop' gesture ] Talk to the hand!
Dr. SCO signs off.
with thanks to whoever posted this script, and with great annoyance at whoever decided that Slashdot posts with low average line lengths are a bad thing, and so need to be offset by pointless filler like this to bring up the average -- apologies while I pad this just a little more, and please feel free to disregard this last paragraph so that the average line count goes above, apparently, 30. Two things you can apparently never include in this news for nerds sites: program code (you can talk about open source, but you can't share it here!) and, apparently, movie scripts. Go figure.... Anyway, this should be enough padding, pretend this whole last paragraph is wrapped in a <!-- sorry --> block:-)
So let me get this straight -- while the US Gulf Coast from Mobile through New Orleans and west is celebrating the drunken debauchery of Mardi Gras, and while Rio de Janerio is celebrating the even more wild debauchery of Carnival...the English are observing "let's eat pancakes day"? How dreadfully boring.
Kind of like, say, OpenOffice? If Adobe can sue an open source project to stop calling it's illustration software "KIllistrator", then surely that's sufficient precedent for Microsoft to go after OOo for the name of their business productivity software. The name is obviously meant to be confused with the original, just as Lindows is. I personally thought that the KIllustrator case was a stretch, but they ended up losing their case. If that wasn't defensible then these surely can't be either.
What's with the naming schemes of these open source projects anyway? There's the common perception that they seldom offer any innovation in interface design -- they just re-implement successful commercial products more cheaply. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but surely they could at least try to differentiate their names, if the whole point of the software is usually to be as non-differentiated from the original as possible -- as is the case in Lindows emulation of Windows or OOo's emulation of Office. Differentiating on terms of licensing and software development model isn't going to impress anyone that doesn't already read Slashdot regularly.
RMS's rants about "freedom" must seem completely baffling to average people that have ever been subjected to them, but still the mindset is prevalent. And baffling. Free & open source software will never come to "dominate" as long as we're letting companies like Microsoft set the pace, in both software quality & features and in all that distasteful branding & marketing that most FOSS efforts have such a hard time with.
And if everyone has to pay some amount (per message? per kilobyte? details need to be worked out, but in principle this isn't totally unreasonable) but nobody wants to pay a lot ("what, you mean this digital nothing costs a dime when i could have sent a post card for a quarter?"), then all of a sudden the problem has been reduced to an well known & difficult one: micropayments.
You can maybe peg some of these costs into a subscription scheme -- most people have to be subscribing somewhere to get access to email -- but that breaks down in a lot of ways. People using business email accounts aren't exactly paying now, but businesses are unlikely to [a] charge their own users for email throughput (are they?) or [b] restrict users from emailing to certain addresses (would they?). People using free webmail accounts aren't going to be interested in paying, but the companies providing the service if they had to handle a surcharge for each mail one of their users produced. There are obviously wrinkles in the subscription model, but the problems aren't quite as bad as they are for broader applications of that idea (subscribing to sites like Salon, for example). Still, the problems are there, and possibly a major impediment.
So you're back to micropayments, a familiar issue to a lot of people at this point. Can they work? Can they make any money? Is the point, in this context, even to make money, or do we just want to prevent other people from being able to make money this way -- and if that's the case, this isn't exactly fair, is it? We'd be punishing everyone for the actions of a small group, because no one has managed to come up with a more imaginitive solution, perhaps with good reason, but hopefully with great reluctance as well.
In spite of about every other post so far, Macs *do* die from time to time.
I've got an rev. b iMac (the almost-original bondi blue style) with a dead monitor. As near as I can tell the electronics are all fine, but without a working display it won't boot. I'd love to get it running again, minimallly as a "hidden in the closet" server, or better still by finding someone with another dead iMac with a working display where I could merge the parts together into one working machine.
But since just fixing it doesn't seem feasible (a new CRT has been quoted to me for around $500, so that's not an option), and I haven't been able to find anyone for the "franken-mac" idea, my fiance has been trying to get me to throw it away instead, and sooner or later I'm sure she'll have her way on this one.
If it comes to that though, rather than toss it in the trash, I'd rather pay a service like this to recycle it if I could -- the toxins in modern PCs are *nasty* and worth trying to recycle or dispose of properly. Tossing it in a dumpster really isn't the best idea, as a major recent reports (and several related news articles) have highlighted:
There's a reason that the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" has the terms in that order. It's better to re-collect the production materials to be used in new products than to throw things away & need more raw resources, but it's better to stretch out the lifespan of existing products before giving them up for scrap at all. Even beyond that through, it's better to consume less at the outset than to stretch out the life of things that you maybe didn't need *or* recycle.
So yeah, it's better to reuse that old working Mac, but when the time comes to give it up -- and that time *will* come, sooner or later -- then it's better to dispose of it responsibly. Recycling isn't necessarily a very clean option, as the report in that last URL illustrates, so the longer you can avoid that the better.
And if anyone in the Boston area has an old iMac with, say, a dead motherboard, let me know:-)
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, rather than take a gamble and hope that the relationship doesn't fall apart, give her a crappy gift and leave no doubt?
Rather than second guess the intentions of a couple I've never met, I'm willing to take this at face value for now. If this guy wants to buy his girlfriend a laptop for a gift, who are we to recommend otherwise? For all we know, he's paying for the trip as well, so making a big deal about the laptop may be a misplaced concern.
My advice would just be to not make a surprise out of this. Giving someone a computer is like giving someone a puppy: it may look cute in the store, but in the end the recipient is going to have to be the one feeding and watering and taking this thing to the vet when it gets sick. Not you, or at least, not necessarily you. She's going to have to want it, so make sure that she does.
As much as I would like to have a new Apple laptop, I would never get one for my fiance -- she hates Macs. She's very happy with WindowsXP, and it's pointless to try to change her mind. What's more important to you: the "geek cred" of her computer, or her happiness?
Just make sure that, whatever you get for her, it's something that she'll be happy with. This is not the best situation to spring it as a surprise for her :-)
If you're tempted to do something like this at work, be aware that your cow-orkers may make fun of you over this. Be ready to defend your Trekliness if fighting breaks out. And by all means, if you do respond to any teasing for your devotion to all things Trek, please make sure that your cow-orkers know who to forward the mail to. The world will thank you :-)
Is it safe to assume that the command line version for other platforms will take similar URLs? The presumed OSX version at ftp://alien.ssl.berkeley.edu/pub/setiathome-3.08.p owerpc-apple-darwin1.2.tar, and the presumed WinNT version at http://wcarchive.cdrom.com/pub/setiathome/setiatho me-3.03.i386-winnt-cmdline.exe, both don't work yet. (I got these urls by hand editing the links on the Unix download page to replace 3.03 with 3.08, so I'm assuming that the new versions will be consistent with what was already there.) Maybe these links will work by the time you read this, but as of now (2:30 pm EST) they haven't been updated yet.
Given that, the towering achievement of the crop circle & sasquatch hoaxsters is so overwhelming that they deserved at least an honorable mention, if not their own slots on the list.
But then, when lists like this come out (top 100 hoaxes, top 100 movies of all time, etc) there's always some crank with other ideas... :-)
Not that anyone believed them anyway.
The human capacity to believe ludicrous shit is truly amazing :-)
My only gripes are that mod_perl is given short shrift (a chapter on getting standard CGI scripts to work under Apache::Registry would have been nice), and that coverage of templates could have been fleshed out a bit more (I like HTML::Template, but both Mason & Template Toolkit seem to be more popular -- and Mason gets little more than a mention while T::T really wasn't mentioned at all). An XML-RPC / SOAP section might have been nice too, but that really is pretty recent.
The book is still an excellent, competent overview of the topic though. Books written this well don't age badly, and while the books you list are also good ones, for someone trying to learn CGI it makes more sense to me to recommend a CGI specific book. Given the choice between this book and, say, Matt Wright's code, there's simply no question which is better.
Was plain old X11 even considered? If it was, and it didn't meet the criteria, then in what way was it found lacking? Too heavy for a 56k dialup connection? I didn't think it was any worse than Citrix there, but I could be wrong about that. You should be able to get a secure connection via SSH tunneling, and that connection can be compressed if necessary -- there is copious documentation for all this, so I won't repeat how to set it up here, but it's very commonly done.
The biggest "obstacle" I can think of is that people will need the X11 server software on their end, but again this isn't a very big deal: there are free versions for Windows (Cygwin and MacOSX (Apple's X11 beta, XDarwin), and of course it is the standard graphical layer for Linux & related systems.
So really, what needs to happen if you go forward with this idea is for some work to go into packaging it up for students & faculty to use, and giving enough training to show how to get going with it. There are a lot of resources out there that can be relied upon, should the state choose to take this path. It sounds to me like what you need most is for someone to make the pitch to those who are making the decisions.
I think that name is already taken by another color, actually...
Does it matter? There are a thousand ways to die on Earth as well. So what? It's a banal observation.
But hey if you name-check the popular scifi authors then I guess it qualifies as a "5" post, dullness be damned. Yay Slashdot....
:-)
Ignore what the online web archives say -- my reefknot folder has a full 25 messages from 2003 in there, and another fifty or so since I subscribed in Sept 2002, so the seem to be at least partially incomplete.
Moreover, I work with one of the core developers, and am pretty sure that she doesn't feel ReefKnot is dead, it's just hibernating :-)
There is interest in keeping the project going, but well work and all that nonsense has gotten in the way. If public momentum starts to build back up then things could start going again with the core developers (including any interested new ones).
I personally [not speaking for my employer yadda yadda yadda] would like to see more web sites start offering iCal feeds of some of the material they publish, such as listings for concerts, movies, and tv shows. If ReefKnot could evolve into something that could support that, I'd be happy to help out with the effort.
Why Apple gave their application the exact same name as the format I don't know, but in any case the release of the Apple application just gave the iCal format a higher profile than it used to have -- but they certainly didn't invent it all by themselves. :-)
I'm personally not clear if Reefknot is meant to be a self-contained iCalendar server, or if it's meant to provide the libraries that can be embedded in an Apache/mod_perl server (the latter makes a bit more sense to me -- that way you can get WebDAV support from mod_dav, Apache's built in authentication mechanisms, etc -- but I'm not sure if that's accurate). In any case though, it gives you some substantial building blocks to start with & use as you see fit. Obviously a more cohesive package would be a nice thing, but that's why the project needs to get moving again :-)
On a guess, I tried deleting "arch-" and got some more results, including:
And another page suggests that "Boutefeu chinois" means "Chinese Fireball".
So at a guess, boutefeu must mean an inflammatory person, and an archboutefeu must be the worst of all such people.
A troll on a site like Slashdot.fr, in other words :-)
Not many of these really jump out at me as an English speaker, but a lot of them seem to be derived from French -- implying that Francophones could possibly have a lot of words with a "-eu" suffix.
"Archboutefeu" is a cool sounding word. What does it mean?
Any French speakers able to translate that word, or any of these for that matter? The only "obvious" ones to me are 'adieu", "lieu", and "milieu" -- everything else is, well, Greek to me. :-)
The funny thing is that this formula actually plays into Godel's theorem, not against it. Yay incompleteness :)
Iraq on the other hand was a chunk of land arbitrarily carved off the side of the crumbling Ottoman Empire -- for centuries it had been under the control of what is now Turkey. There are three major ethnic groups with no particular mutual loyalty. If it weren't for the Ba'ath party and Hussein's iron fist, the country probably would have falled apart decades ago. And even Hussein wouldn't have been able to remain in power for so long if it weren't for US support over the decades to prop up his regime as a bulwark against Iran.
In short, with Hussein gone there will be nothing holding Iraq together, and a lot of tensions pulling it apart.
So what then are the post war possibilities? Long term US military occupation to hold the country together? We could be there for decades. Spin down our involvement over time? If we leave the country weaker than it is today, it could end up being carved into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions by its neighbors -- Iran may invade the south to protect its own stability, just as Turkey may invade the north for similar reasons. The middle could either remain independent & feeble, or be absorbed by a neighbor.
So many things can go wrong. This is going to be a fucking nightmare for decades. When your kids ask why we're constantly occupying chunks of the middle east, and why we're constantly worried about new terrorist incidents, why nobody can afford to buy gasoline anymore, etc -- remind them that this was the night it all started. :-(
Here's hoping that history proves me wrong....
Just to go with my personal pet peeve, I have yet to ever encounter a good reason for an average OSX user to enable the root account, nevermind log in and noodle around as root. Not when sudo is available. And yet a large fraction of the tips given go something like:
- turn on the root account, if you haven't already
- log out and log back in again as root
- run this command: $foo
- log back in as yourself
When really that should be reduced to:That common example comes up all the time, but you also see things like Perl code that doesn't do what it's supposed to, over-elaborate ways to get some Unix thing installed when you can gloss over most of that with Fink, etc.
I've still got the site bookmarked, and I visit it occasionally, but I've come to so distrust the quality of the advice given that I barely ever visit it anymore. There's still a lot of great stuff there, don't get me wrong, ut be sure to scrutinize what you read: there's often a better way to do things than what is suggested.
You think if they have Benjamin Franklin spinning in his grave fast enough, they'll be able to power an internal combustion engine with it?
And chances aren't bad that the next Exegesis will be coming soon, and the next Apocalypse will be soon after that. According to Dan Sugalski's use.perl.org journal, the core Perl6 team has been making good progress lately. As he writes in the 20 Feb journal entry:
From the later comments in that entry, it sounds like the next Apocalypse / Exegesis / Synopsis will deal with Perl6's object system. It's not clear how much progress was made there though. It took a long time to get from the last Exegesis to today's Apocalypse (core developers all out of work, etc), but hopefully this means things will get moving again now.
Then, in the opening years of the twentieth century, Einsten published his special & general theories of relativity, and various researches began contributing to the model that has come to be called quantum mechanics.
And the more these were studied, the more it was realized that we have a long, long way to go.
Today, the big push is toward uniting relativity & quantum mechanics, and the general feeling is that once again we're on the cusp of having it all figured out.
But, like then, there are now some niggling problems that are having a hell of a time being accomodated in the standard frameworks. Will a resolution come? Maybe. Hopefully. But the fact of the matter is, at this point nobody knows if we're just one creative insight away from the whole thing unravelling, or at least being superceded by a revolutionary new framework.
The point is, that accepted boundaries are a funny thing, and you never know when some unexpected innovation will catapult everyone to a higher plateau.
You say that browsers are essentially mature, but that's not how I read the situation. With the "standard" browsers -- that being IE and, well okay that's it -- I see highly refined stagnation. The browser is very good now, but there really haven't been any breakthrough features in the past couple of versions. On the other hand, all of the fringe browsers -- Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc -- are tinkering with this tabs idea, which seems to be a whole new way to navigate through a multi-dimensional information space in a more or less manageable way. Each of the implementations of this idea is a little different from the others at this point, and I don't yet think we've seen the point where things are settling down into conventions the way much of the rest of the browser interface has done. I for one am still hoping to see a browser that makes clever use of OSX's drawers interface, for example, and if Safari doesn't do it maybe someone else can build it on top of KHTML or Gecko.
Innovation may well be a too easily invoked term. I personally cringe whenever I hear it come out of a Microsoft spokesperson or advertisement. And yet you can't discount it. Maybe browsers today are like how physics was in 1900 -- stable, but on the cusp of something greater than before. I look at things like tabs, xml-rpc, soap, Watson/Sherlock on OSX, Vindigo on PDAs, small scale browsers for cell phones & PDA, etc, and I can't help but think that at least one of these clever ideas will bubble up & disrupt the current trend towards mainsteam browser stagnation.
You can't say that it can't happen. It can. And just maybe, it will.
with thanks to whoever posted this script, and with great annoyance at whoever decided that Slashdot posts with low average line lengths are a bad thing, and so need to be offset by pointless filler like this to bring up the average -- apologies while I pad this just a little more, and please feel free to disregard this last paragraph so that the average line count goes above, apparently, 30. Two things you can apparently never include in this news for nerds sites: program code (you can talk about open source, but you can't share it here!) and, apparently, movie scripts. Go figure.... Anyway, this should be enough padding, pretend this whole last paragraph is wrapped in a <!-- sorry --> block :-)
No wonder our ancestors emigrated :-)
What's with the naming schemes of these open source projects anyway? There's the common perception that they seldom offer any innovation in interface design -- they just re-implement successful commercial products more cheaply. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but surely they could at least try to differentiate their names, if the whole point of the software is usually to be as non-differentiated from the original as possible -- as is the case in Lindows emulation of Windows or OOo's emulation of Office. Differentiating on terms of licensing and software development model isn't going to impress anyone that doesn't already read Slashdot regularly.
RMS's rants about "freedom" must seem completely baffling to average people that have ever been subjected to them, but still the mindset is prevalent. And baffling. Free & open source software will never come to "dominate" as long as we're letting companies like Microsoft set the pace, in both software quality & features and in all that distasteful branding & marketing that most FOSS efforts have such a hard time with.
Get out there and invent something! :)
You can maybe peg some of these costs into a subscription scheme -- most people have to be subscribing somewhere to get access to email -- but that breaks down in a lot of ways. People using business email accounts aren't exactly paying now, but businesses are unlikely to [a] charge their own users for email throughput (are they?) or [b] restrict users from emailing to certain addresses (would they?). People using free webmail accounts aren't going to be interested in paying, but the companies providing the service if they had to handle a surcharge for each mail one of their users produced. There are obviously wrinkles in the subscription model, but the problems aren't quite as bad as they are for broader applications of that idea (subscribing to sites like Salon, for example). Still, the problems are there, and possibly a major impediment.
So you're back to micropayments, a familiar issue to a lot of people at this point. Can they work? Can they make any money? Is the point, in this context, even to make money, or do we just want to prevent other people from being able to make money this way -- and if that's the case, this isn't exactly fair, is it? We'd be punishing everyone for the actions of a small group, because no one has managed to come up with a more imaginitive solution, perhaps with good reason, but hopefully with great reluctance as well.
I've got an rev. b iMac (the almost-original bondi blue style) with a dead monitor. As near as I can tell the electronics are all fine, but without a working display it won't boot. I'd love to get it running again, minimallly as a "hidden in the closet" server, or better still by finding someone with another dead iMac with a working display where I could merge the parts together into one working machine.
But since just fixing it doesn't seem feasible (a new CRT has been quoted to me for around $500, so that's not an option), and I haven't been able to find anyone for the "franken-mac" idea, my fiance has been trying to get me to throw it away instead, and sooner or later I'm sure she'll have her way on this one.
If it comes to that though, rather than toss it in the trash, I'd rather pay a service like this to recycle it if I could -- the toxins in modern PCs are *nasty* and worth trying to recycle or dispose of properly. Tossing it in a dumpster really isn't the best idea, as a major recent reports (and several related news articles) have highlighted:
There's a reason that the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" has the terms in that order. It's better to re-collect the production materials to be used in new products than to throw things away & need more raw resources, but it's better to stretch out the lifespan of existing products before giving them up for scrap at all. Even beyond that through, it's better to consume less at the outset than to stretch out the life of things that you maybe didn't need *or* recycle.
So yeah, it's better to reuse that old working Mac, but when the time comes to give it up -- and that time *will* come, sooner or later -- then it's better to dispose of it responsibly. Recycling isn't necessarily a very clean option, as the report in that last URL illustrates, so the longer you can avoid that the better.
And if anyone in the Boston area has an old iMac with, say, a dead motherboard, let me know :-)