Re:Doesn't it say something about society?
on
AdCritic To Return
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· Score: 5, Interesting
You know it's funny. I think I see things more or less the way you do -- I've got a TV just because the VCR wouldn't work without one, but I never ever have the compulsion to watch any of the broadcast shows anymore. I'd much rather sit and read a copy of AdBusters:)And yet, my fiance does have some shows that she likes to watch, and I do catch bits and pieces of it.
AND IT ALL SUCKS.
All of it, that is, except for the commercials. It's so strange to me. All the sitcoms are boring, banal ripoffs of one another. All the dramas this year seem to be about people that work with cadavers and, well, there you go. The news is little better than supermarket tabloids (the "news magazines" are probably worse if only because they pretend to be better than what they are), and I'm really starting to find Jay Leno's stubbornly middlebrow idea of entertainment deeply offensive. How can anyone actually enjoy this crap? I used to like Jay Leno, now I just want to strangle the fucker. Another Clinton joke? Let it go man, just fuckin' let it go.
And yet mixed in with the crappy entertainment and quote-unquote news are these little fifteen second masterpieces, with clever writing, brilliant cinematrography and effects, and better music than anything available on the radio. Nevermind the fact that it's all brilliantly crafted to make you CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME -- it also happens to be the only thing on broadcast television that is brilliant. Full stop.
Why isn't there a commercial station on the radio playing the techno & indie rock & jazz you hear in car commercials these days? Why are the only clever examples of wordplay & wittiness (and, again, more good music) in Apple commercials?
I mean, you're right that there's something seriously disturbing about this inversion: the networks always did try to make the shows just interesting enough to keep the audience watching commercials, but now they're making the commercials themselves far more interesting than the shows. I should be rebelling against that, as a card-carrying, Nader-voting, NPR-listening, anti-consumerist liberal. But I can't help it.
If it wasn't for the clever commercials, I'd want to leave the house every time my fiance turns the television on. As it is, I just sit and use the computer or read a book, and look up whenever the commericals come back on. Part of me dies every time this happens...but part of me likes it, too.
the old "I send you this file in order to have your advice" virus...
Damn that makes me feel old. I'm enough of an old timer to remember when that was the current scourge of the net! We had to carry our over-full bitbuckets back to the ISP (upsteam both ways, of course) in order to get rid of the damn thing. Now these young whippersnappers with their newfangled-- </joke loses steam and evaporates abruptly/>
I seem to remember reading last fall that OSX 10.2 would be released at around the one year anniversary. So, now that the time has arrived, do we have any idea how soon such a release will be available, and what it will include?
In my [pipe] dreams, I imagine that it'll bring Aqua the speed & usability enhancements that it sorely needs (OSX is a huge step forward architecturally from OS9, but it's a huge step backwards in terms of interface usability & refinement...). In reality, I'd be happy with incremental improvements like a fixed/updated Perl, better Samba support, and a Finder that was just a bit less glacial. Good thing I'm comfortable with the command line -- I feel bad with anyone stuck with having to solely use the Aqua Finder...:/
Typoes, if you think of it as a theoretical third-declension noun, as English generally does.
Ok, I was just skimming over my old Latin I book and thought -o <--> -is looked like it might work, but then it's not like I speak the language fluently or anything. Far from it:)
Incidentally, the "genera" poster was making fun of you for confusing "genus" and "genius" in your original post.
Notice that too, didja? Thanks, it wasn't obvious or anything...:)
You know, now that you mention it my brother (now a college junior) did exactly this in high school. I forget what the impetus for it was -- I'll have to ask next time I see him -- but he and a classmate did a presentation on the physics of the Simpsons in the form of a lesson to younger students. At first I thought it was a little silly (in a good way mind you:), but it seems like he made all the same sorts of points that you did: the show has been around forever, and has all kinds of good references to scientific & mathematical material in there.
Still, my favorite "damn the writers of the Simpsons are over-educated genuses" gag is from one of the old Halloween episodes, in which they re-created Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." If you'll recall, the bird in that show was drawn with Bart's head, so Bart = Raven. Look up the name Bart in a baby book and you'll find that it's the nickname for one of two longer names: Bartholemew, and (much less commonly of course) Bartram (or is it Bertram? I forget the spelling, it's been a while now...). And if you look up Bartram, you'll find that it's an Old English word referring to a person that handles...ravens. [Kind of the same way that a falconer is a person that keeps & takes care of falcons, a ravener or "bartram" is a person that keeps ravens.] Now this is more than a little esoteric, and it could well be a coincidence (they had to get Bart in there somewhere, right?), but considering how often little gags like this crop up my bet is that it was deliberate. And my guess is that, of all the millions of people that watch the Simpsons, and of all the dozens that know how to speak Old English, there had to be no more than a handful of people that watched that episode, got the joke, realized that millions of others would have totally missed it, and laughed their damn heads off....:)
Ever since I came across that, I've come to believe more and more strongly that Simpsons is our modern day Shakespeare. This gag is at least on par with Hamlet's "country matters" line in cleverness, and they manage to do it all the time. Will the show be remembered for as long or as fondly as Shakespeare? Who knows, but it could well happen and I wouldn't be surprised at all.
I seriously doubt that any complex system such as evolution could ever be simulated with perfect accuracy. More likely, we can get to the point where likely outcomes can be guessed but the paths that lead to them will probably always be a surprise to us.
Check out the article on artificial societies from the current (April 2002) issue of Atlantic Monthly. I was thinking of submitting it to Slashdot anyway, but it particularly relates to this discussion too. The header blurb is:
The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail--but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work
The article goes on to discuss many applications of this technique. None of them are specifically about genetic evolution, though one does analyze the settlement patterns of a pre-Columbian society in the American southwest, and the computed simulation, given information about climate patterns and so on, does roughly mimic what the archaeological record suggests really happened to the Anasazi.
The interesting thing is that the simulations, including this one, are really not much more sophisticated than Conway's famous "life" AI experiments -- they take a couple of crude populations and set up trivial rules, and then run with them until a pattern emerges. In spite of how crude these simulations are, the parallels to the observed world can be striking, suggesting that such simulations can be used to understand evolution, historical trends, racism, genocide, economics, etc.
Ahh, interesting. At my old job, they were pumping Citrix Metaframe from NT servers to an ActiveX or Java Applet running on remote web clients. Whenever we had to debug connection problems, you could do so by pulling the old "telnet termserver.company.com $ts_port" trick and watching the handshake it sent back. If all was well, it would start printing "ICAICAICAICAICA..." trying to establish an ICA session for Citrix. Apparently Citrix and Term Server must be using the same protocol...
Basically, it looks at the headlines on Yahoo/Reuters, and finds sentences that scan as 5/7/5, and uses Perl cleverness to present them as a little news haikus (or senryu, if you wanna be picky). It's great stuff:
Today: Commonwealth Group Blasts Zimbabwe Poll
but defended by separate observer groups from South Africa
Also today: Amnesty Charges U.S. Violated Rights of Detainees
possible suspects connected to the attacks including their right
My last birthday (Feb 4): Saudi Proposed Saddam Overthrow to US - Prince:
we agree upon the various issues that we agree upon
Christmas, 2001: Deep emotion, little joy in Bethlehem Christmas:
Palestinians without the special permits very bad this year
Sept 10 2001: Belarus Opposition Demands New Vote, Plans Rally:
We do not agree with the official result RE RUN UNLIKELY
June 1 2001: Bridgestone says some Ford Explorers defective:
I am just here to say what needs to be said I am not here
I'm hooked:)
They have archives going back to the beginning of 2001, with only a few holes (e.g. the days after September 11), and they talk about how they are doing everything. Bonus points: you can have the haiku headlines mailed to you automagically every day. I just hope they have the bandwidth (etc) to withstand Slashdot....
You can do bash or tcsh in cygwin (along with, I suppose, a few hundred other things) (not all shells, of course). If this guy wants to use tcsh, no problem, he can have it. Bash is great, I agree, but it isn't the only good shell out there. Tcsh is a great choice too:)
As I pointed out myself (well, indirectly I guess), I use VNC on OSX more or less every day. I like it, for the most part, but, well, it's lightweight and it feels lightweight. It's easy to find small clients for almost any platform -- that's a huge plus. You can run it over SSH for instant encryption, and that's another plus.
But the protocol VNC uses is just weird -- as near as I can tell, the client sends raw keystrokes & mouse positions and clicks and so on, and the remote server sends raw bitmaps. The division of labor there between the client, the server, and the strain on the network is far from optimal (but it makes the cross platform stuff possible, so I'm not knocking it). As I understand things, X11 deals with these issues by having the remote "client" send vector data to the local "server", which handles all the drawing work. If you can compare it, protocols like HTTP take this even further by having the client pass parameters to the server, which parses them and sends back, essentally, html "source code" to the browser which figures out what to do with everything it gets. In both X11 and HTTP, you trade low network burden for high network throughput, while VNC does almost no work on the client end and tries to cram lots of data back & forth across the wire -- and since bandwidth is usually a bigger bottleneck than CPU or RAM power, it's not such a great use of available resources.
And this is why I'm wondering how this protocol works. Is it an older protocol in newer clothing? (I read the posts about it being a new version of an old Apple program, but that just shunts the question: how did *it* work?) Is it related to X11, or some kind of NeXT technology? Is it related to SNMP or NetInfo? Or is it just VNC with a snazzy interface? As interesting as it looks, I wouldn't spend the money on it before being able to learn more about it...
Is this really going to be better than the combination of ssh and vnc? I realize that those by themsleves have drawbacks -- remote Aqua is definitely a kludge, but it is a workable kludge and I do use it almost every day -- but will this be so much better as to justify the price?
As a generic desktop system, Aqua as dazzling. As a Unix, it's also disappointing. No built-in remote display mechanism before this? No virtual desktops? Everything is so big in Aqua that it would be nice to be able to spread things out a bit.
Something makes me think that both of those issues could be addressed at the same time. Yes you could route around it by running X11, but...meh, that doesn't really address the problem at all here. This looks like it could be a slick application, but can it allow someone to (say) access their Mac from someone else's PC? What software needs to be running on the client & server, and for that matter what work takes place on the client & server? How sensitive is it to bandwidth bottlenecks, and how secure is it? Is it based on any kind of Open protocols? I found a BSD based client for NT Terminal Server today, which is exactly the sort of tool that I like to see about. Could there be BSD/Linux/Win32 clients for this protocol?
Anyway, this certainly has my imagination, but we'll see if it's worth the price. I would have hoped this was the sort of functionality that they'd just throw in with OSX-Server, maybe charging a fee for bundles of clients, but hey I don't work for Apple and I don't work in marketing, so...
Yes: coping with the flood of information available on the internet within a time frame that any mere mortal could digest. As a mere mortal, I don't have time to keep up with all the Usenet feeds & mailing list discussions about all the fields I'm interested in, and the amount of digital information is growing way faster than anyone can keep up with, ever. Tools like Google help you find specific needles in the information haystack, but search engines really need to be complemented by other tools that can tell you more about the haystack itself (how big, what color, what's in it, what's it smell like, etc). That way you can choose what haystacks -- to keep strangling the metaphor -- you want to spend the time looking for your own needles in.
There was a trend a few months to a year ago where members of some discussion groups were producing summaries of each week's traffic, but it proved to be so much thankless work that they have all quit by now. Every week these people would have to spend hours sifting through hundreds of messages and manually distilling it down to one hyperlinked document of perhaps a few hundred words, or a couple of pages long if printed. For the thanks they got in return -- and people did appreciate all the work, but you can't eat thanks -- it just wasn't worth it for any of them to keep doing these manual summaries. Even if they were being paid, it's not the sort of work most people want to be doing in the first place.
Finding a system that could programmatically produce a periodic summary -- even if a crude one -- of what was discussed on one of these groups would be a great tool. And no, I'm not willing to pay an assistant to summarize Usenet for me, and no I don't think it's something that any one assistant could do alone anyeay. But I would be willing to have, say, a cron job that on mondays gave me a summary of the Linux kernel lists, on Tuesdays gave me a report on what's up with Perl6, on Wednesdays told me what security issues have been news lately, on Thursdays...you get the idea.
In order to be able to summarize these aggregates of documents, you'll have to start with smaller ones. You could play it in both directions: from the messages up level, you could reduce each posting to a sentence or less , while from a threads down level you could figure out what topics seemed to be hot and go for key ideas from messages within the main threads. Bonus points for a system that could recognize citations (if what poster A said was important enough for poster B to quote it, then maybe that quote should end up in the summary) or, Google-style, place emphasis on traffic pattens, linkages, etc.
As several people have noted, this is all a big, hard problem to solve, and there would be real uses for it if anyone could put it all together. Would we be willing to pay for such a service? I dunno, depends how good it is I guess. But if it really could reduce Usenet, web logs, mailing lists, and hey maybe even some normal web sites down into a small handful of roughly accurate documents that could be read over a cup of coffee each morning, then yeah I think that would be a valuable thing.
Sorry no, just citing rumors that I hear, articles hinting at it, notes in tech books saying "don't use Jet, it's being deprecated", etc. I haven't seen any "from the horse's mouth" notes about this though, nor clear reports from tech news sites or anything like that. Sorry.
Oh don't feel so bad for Netscape. Now that they've killed off Be, everything you're seeing here is being cannibalized from BFS's corpse. Microsoft had time to kill off both birds with however many stones were necessary...:/
You know, for all the journalistic puff pieces that came out last year comparing WinXP to MacOSX, I never saw one that seemed to realize that these systems had been in more or less closed development for years, and couldn't possibly have been cross-pollinating as much as the writers seemed to be saying. OSX, of course, draws heavily from NEXTstep for obvious reasons. Much more interesting to me is, in my opinion, the way that Windows seems to be evolving in the direction that BeOS once stood.
If you take a look at the XP interface, it feels (to me at least) a lot like a candied up BeOS -- a lot of the icons have a similar look, there's the grouped taskbar items a la the BeOS tracker, etc. And seeing as BeOS has been around for years, it makes a lot more sense that the Microsoft engineers would have been able to start reimplementing ideas like this by this point.
And now we start seeing articles like this one, and it becomes clear that just as the XP interface has started to resemble BeOS, the XP native filesystem is starting to resemble BFS. This isn't the first time in recent months that we've seen reports of this -- not long ago there were articles saying that MS wanted to ditch Access and it's Jet engine (or whatever it runs now), and turn the SQLServer engine into the core of the next generation filesystem. This is of course exactly what Be wanted to do, but couldn't due to performance constraints, so they went with the scaled back object oriented system instead. Hey look at that, now we hear that Microsoft is also going with an OO-FS instead of a full SQL-FS.
Microsoft already ran Be out of the market, and are rightfully getting sued now for doing so. I wonder if Be would be willing to use this increasingly familiar evolution for Windows as evidence that Microsoft wanted to eliminate their strongest OS competition while ripping off all their good ideas. As much as it's vindicating to see that BeOS's best features will live on in new versions of Windows, I'd rather have the chance to see the original around today...
Well yeah, but if you read Pudge's whole press release on this, the point isn't just that MacPerl has been brought up to date, but that MacPerl is now substantially in sync with the Perl available for other platforms. Patches needed to get Perl working well on Macs have been merged back into the same tree as standard Perl, and it should be build cleanly with free compilers now. As a result, it should be easy to keep MacPerl and regular Perl in sync more or less from now on (unless Perl6 screws things up again, but that shouldn't be a problem I would think).
Also, note that 5.6.1 is the current stable version, while 5.7.3 is the current unstable branch. Obviously.7.3 is a higher value, but it's still considered an experimental code branch. You can't take a jab at MacPerl for just switching to 5.6.1 unless you also want to take a jab at RedHat, who also made the upgrade to 5.6.1 this week. Upgrading MacPerl to 5.7.3 might not be worth the effort, as 5.8.0 is scheduled to come out this spring (and we're likely to see several more 5.7.n releases between now and then). If 5.8 comes out and MacPerl doesn't keep up, *then* you can complain, but for now MacPerl has (finally!) reached Parity with the main branch.
1. We all seem to know that AOL on Wintel utilizes the Microsoft rendering engine. What does AOL for MacOS use?
I can't give a completely technical answer to this one, but I do know that for both OS9 , your Mac's system folders end up containing a whole slew of MS specific code:
% ls/System\ Folder/Extensions/MS\ Library\ Folder/ total 2568
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 112644 Mar 25 1998 MS C++ Library (PPC)
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 189123 Mar 25 1998 MS Container Lib (PPC)
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 611367 Mar 25 1998 MS Internet Library (PPC)
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 119930 Mar 25 1998 MS Preferences Library PPC
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 33232 Mar 25 1998 MS Variant Lib (PPC)
I thought I came across similar stuff on the OSX directories, but a quick search isn't turning up anything obviously originating from MS. Presumably it's all just part of the Internet Explorer app, and not (obviously?) exported as a globally available library.
Also note that the Mac versions of IE are for the most part a completely separate codebase from the Win32 versions, with different developers and everything. There is some cross-pollination between the two branches, but not to the point where you can consider them to be identical. The Mac version has some very nice features that still haven't made their way to the Windows branch, and it has other features (auto-virus mode comes to mind:) that still haven't been exported to Macland yet.
2. Has AOL ever used a rendering engine for either platform other than the one(s) used now?
Can't address the Mac on this one, but as another commenter noted, AOL first tried to ignore the web, then it tried to implement support for it in a very broken way. The browser for AOL 3 or so was really bad -- probably (in my opinion) to get AOL users to think that the web wasn't worth all the hype, and that they should stick to AOL (that and, to be fair, it was probably just difficult to get a solid browser put together quickly, which would explain why they went on to just embed IE and then later buy out Netscape).
3. If AOL has switched in the past, what was the motivation then?
As noted, their inittial attempts to get a browser within the AOL client were just really, really awful. Their web client crashed all the time, couldn't render things, felt slower than the rest of the AOL service, etc. (Note that, apparently at around this time, AOL switched to HTTP as their main internal network protocol, instead of whatever propietary protocol AOL was using before that. Thus going to the web from within AOL meant having to do some kind of protocol translation to make it work, so this made the service degrade even beyond the poor quality of the browser they were offering at the time. Citation for this is in "Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", where he talks about what a surprisingly good webserver AOLServer is, noting that it has been tuned to support the millions of concurrent AOL users...)
Anyway, as noted by another commenter and in great detail in the MS antitrust Findings of Fact document, AOL entered a contract where they would use IE for five (?) years in return for a guaranteed place on the Windows desktop (and no longer having to devote resources to coming up with a viable browser of their own), and MS would get instant access to AOL's millions of users. AOL hedged their bets for the future by buying out Netscape, but they kept IE around even after the contract expired in the hope that MS would allow some sort of new agreement along the lines of the earlier one. As it has become clear that MS doesn't feel they need to co-exist with AOL anymore, AOL in turn seems to be considering playing their Netscape trump card now -- "if you don't need us then we don't need you either."
Sooner or later I assume they will -- must -- switch to Netscape: otherwise they will have wasted their investment in that company and continued to support their biggest rival in the process. The more interesting question to me is whether they really are willing to switch to some kind of [Red Hat based?] AOLinux. Part of me really wants to see this happen -- it would be nice to see some significant competition to MS on the shelves at BestBuy and Circuit City (above & beyond Apple's 5%, where you can even find that in the first place). But at the same time, I'm not comfortable with the idea that everything on their machines -- from the kernel up to the user level AOL client -- would have been bolted together as a monolithic whole by one corporation. Even if the guts are open source, I'm sure that the high level stuff would certainly be proprietary. Macintosh can claim to be internally open too, but the more interesting high level stuff is still proprietary. On a hypothetical AOLinux, you're only likely to have as much access to the Linux stuff as their high level interface allows you to have, and seeing as this is AOL we're talking about, I can't see them giving you much access there. At least MacOSX gives you the Terminal to work with (and through that, all the BSD subsystem). What will AOLinux let you use? If this goes the way I'm fearing it could, it could be at least as bad as the current Windows situation, because it would mean that of the three systems you'd be able to buy at that Circuit City -- AOLinux, Mac, and Windows -- all three would be for the most part vertically integrated, with one vendor supplying the bulk of the user and system level software on each platform. This could serve to Balkanize each sub-market, and I'm not clear who if anyone would gain by such a situation, aside from *maybe* those three vendors.
I'm not the first one to point this out to you here, but it bears emphasizing: nearly all of the tools you describe were born on Unix, but they are not confined to Unix. If you're the sort of sociopath that enjoys working with Emacs (kidding!:), then it is readily available for Win32. With Cygwin or the GNU for DOS book (et al) you can install pretty much all the standard Unix command line utilities you want, including the various command shells. So as nice as these tools are -- and I agree, they are great -- your point that this guy has to ditch everything and move to Linux to get it all falls a little flat.
Moreover, the original poster said (which I found a little confusing) that he's not a programmer, but that he needs to be able to work with these kinds of development tools on Windows. Maybe he's involved in testing or documentation, I don't know. But the fact remains that he has explicitly said he's working in a Windows environment, so that's really what he needs to be looking at here. If the code he's doing needs to interact with COM, MFC, ActiveX, etc, then how productive is it going to be to switch to a platform where all of these things are available -- at best -- only in emulation though Wine? Yeech that sounds ugly. Wouldn't it make *a lot* more sense to work on the target platform if possible, especially if that's where he's starting from to begin with?
This kind of axe-grinding, sneering, condescending advocacy is exactly what Linux doesn't need. Yes, it has a lot of nice properties, and is worthy on it's own merits. No, it isn't a drop-in replacement for different, properitary technologies, and in some cases that's a good thing. You seem so impressed by all these tools: hasn't anyone ever told you that you need to match the right tool to the right job?
SLASHDOT sells out to the MAN -- YOW!
on
Ikeya-Zhang Cometh
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· Score: 2, Funny
First this Slashdot subscription nonsense, no we get thinly disguised Ikea ads being passed off as "astronomy news". Yeah right Michael, we aren't gonna fall for that one...
As I understand it, Matt Wright has indicated that he doesn't have much interest in updating his old software anymore, so "official" bugfixes are unlikely to be forthcoming. As another commenter noted, the NMS group is working on a suite of dropin replacements for each of the scripts that Matt wrote years ago, and among them is a very good replacement for FormMail.pl. These newer scripts are being developed with security and robustness in mind from the ground up.
Even in cases where it might be safer & more efficient to use libraries from CPAN, the NMS group has deliberately decided to not make use of these libraries, so that novice devlopers could make use of these more reliable scripts without having to perform any configuration more advanced than setting a few variables and writing a little bit of HTML (which, presumably, they'll be more comfortable with anyway).
Exploits like this are exactly why people should migrate the old Matt Wright code to NMS, which can be dropped in and up & running very quickly. It's easy, and it's much safer. It's the right thing to do.
That, or replace the script with the drop-in replacements being offered by NMS. The scripts they're developing, including one that does FormMail.pl's job, are professionally developed versions of Matt Wright's scripts but with much better security & robustness, while not requiring you to install any other libraries or do any setup more advanced than setting a few variables at the top of the script. Good stuff.
Of the two previous ( slash current ) recipients of the grant, the first was a college professor -- not a student -- who used the patronage to travel the world teaching Perl to people, and the second had been a gainfully employed member of a search engine company who is going to be using his grant year to work on Perl6's core engine. It's not exactly that they were unemployable...:)
Slashdot Mirror
AND IT ALL SUCKS.
All of it, that is, except for the commercials. It's so strange to me. All the sitcoms are boring, banal ripoffs of one another. All the dramas this year seem to be about people that work with cadavers and, well, there you go. The news is little better than supermarket tabloids (the "news magazines" are probably worse if only because they pretend to be better than what they are), and I'm really starting to find Jay Leno's stubbornly middlebrow idea of entertainment deeply offensive. How can anyone actually enjoy this crap? I used to like Jay Leno, now I just want to strangle the fucker. Another Clinton joke? Let it go man, just fuckin' let it go.
And yet mixed in with the crappy entertainment and quote-unquote news are these little fifteen second masterpieces, with clever writing, brilliant cinematrography and effects, and better music than anything available on the radio. Nevermind the fact that it's all brilliantly crafted to make you CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME -- it also happens to be the only thing on broadcast television that is brilliant. Full stop.
Why isn't there a commercial station on the radio playing the techno & indie rock & jazz you hear in car commercials these days? Why are the only clever examples of wordplay & wittiness (and, again, more good music) in Apple commercials?
I mean, you're right that there's something seriously disturbing about this inversion: the networks always did try to make the shows just interesting enough to keep the audience watching commercials, but now they're making the commercials themselves far more interesting than the shows. I should be rebelling against that, as a card-carrying, Nader-voting, NPR-listening, anti-consumerist liberal. But I can't help it.
If it wasn't for the clever commercials, I'd want to leave the house every time my fiance turns the television on. As it is, I just sit and use the computer or read a book, and look up whenever the commericals come back on. Part of me dies every time this happens ...but part of me likes it, too.
Damn that makes me feel old. I'm enough of an old timer to remember when that was the current scourge of the net! We had to carry our over-full bitbuckets back to the ISP (upsteam both ways, of course) in order to get rid of the damn thing. Now these young whippersnappers with their newfangled-- </joke loses steam and evaporates abruptly />
In my [pipe] dreams, I imagine that it'll bring Aqua the speed & usability enhancements that it sorely needs (OSX is a huge step forward architecturally from OS9, but it's a huge step backwards in terms of interface usability & refinement...). In reality, I'd be happy with incremental improvements like a fixed/updated Perl, better Samba support, and a Finder that was just a bit less glacial. Good thing I'm comfortable with the command line -- I feel bad with anyone stuck with having to solely use the Aqua Finder... :/
Anything else on people's wishlists for 10.2?
Notice that too, didja? Thanks, it wasn't obvious or anything... :)
Wiseass :)
Still, my favorite "damn the writers of the Simpsons are over-educated genuses" gag is from one of the old Halloween episodes, in which they re-created Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." If you'll recall, the bird in that show was drawn with Bart's head, so Bart = Raven. Look up the name Bart in a baby book and you'll find that it's the nickname for one of two longer names: Bartholemew, and (much less commonly of course) Bartram (or is it Bertram? I forget the spelling, it's been a while now...). And if you look up Bartram, you'll find that it's an Old English word referring to a person that handles ...ravens. [Kind of the same way that a falconer is a person that keeps & takes care of falcons, a ravener or "bartram" is a person that keeps ravens.] Now this is more than a little esoteric, and it could well be a coincidence (they had to get Bart in there somewhere, right?), but considering how often little gags like this crop up my bet is that it was deliberate. And my guess is that, of all the millions of people that watch the Simpsons, and of all the dozens that know how to speak Old English, there had to be no more than a handful of people that watched that episode, got the joke, realized that millions of others would have totally missed it, and laughed their damn heads off.... :)
Ever since I came across that, I've come to believe more and more strongly that Simpsons is our modern day Shakespeare. This gag is at least on par with Hamlet's "country matters" line in cleverness, and they manage to do it all the time. Will the show be remembered for as long or as fondly as Shakespeare? Who knows, but it could well happen and I wouldn't be surprised at all.
I tell ya, these celbrities are smarter than any of us previously thought!
Check out the article on artificial societies from the current (April 2002) issue of Atlantic Monthly. I was thinking of submitting it to Slashdot anyway, but it particularly relates to this discussion too. The header blurb is:
The article goes on to discuss many applications of this technique. None of them are specifically about genetic evolution, though one does analyze the settlement patterns of a pre-Columbian society in the American southwest, and the computed simulation, given information about climate patterns and so on, does roughly mimic what the archaeological record suggests really happened to the Anasazi.
The interesting thing is that the simulations, including this one, are really not much more sophisticated than Conway's famous "life" AI experiments -- they take a couple of crude populations and set up trivial rules, and then run with them until a pattern emerges. In spite of how crude these simulations are, the parallels to the observed world can be striking, suggesting that such simulations can be used to understand evolution, historical trends, racism, genocide, economics, etc.
Ahh, interesting. At my old job, they were pumping Citrix Metaframe from NT servers to an ActiveX or Java Applet running on remote web clients. Whenever we had to debug connection problems, you could do so by pulling the old "telnet termserver.company.com $ts_port" trick and watching the handshake it sent back. If all was well, it would start printing "ICAICAICAICAICA..." trying to establish an ICA session for Citrix. Apparently Citrix and Term Server must be using the same protocol...
/me is amazed that "the" ntk replied to his post -- so will this show up in next weeks need to know? :)
Basically, it looks at the headlines on Yahoo/Reuters, and finds sentences that scan as 5/7/5, and uses Perl cleverness to present them as a little news haikus (or senryu, if you wanna be picky). It's great stuff:
I'm hooked :)
They have archives going back to the beginning of 2001, with only a few holes (e.g. the days after September 11), and they talk about how they are doing everything. Bonus points: you can have the haiku headlines mailed to you automagically every day. I just hope they have the bandwidth (etc) to withstand Slashdot....
You can do bash or tcsh in cygwin (along with, I suppose, a few hundred other things) (not all shells, of course). If this guy wants to use tcsh, no problem, he can have it. :)
Bash is great, I agree, but it isn't the only good shell out there. Tcsh is a great choice too
But the protocol VNC uses is just weird -- as near as I can tell, the client sends raw keystrokes & mouse positions and clicks and so on, and the remote server sends raw bitmaps. The division of labor there between the client, the server, and the strain on the network is far from optimal (but it makes the cross platform stuff possible, so I'm not knocking it). As I understand things, X11 deals with these issues by having the remote "client" send vector data to the local "server", which handles all the drawing work. If you can compare it, protocols like HTTP take this even further by having the client pass parameters to the server, which parses them and sends back, essentally, html "source code" to the browser which figures out what to do with everything it gets. In both X11 and HTTP, you trade low network burden for high network throughput, while VNC does almost no work on the client end and tries to cram lots of data back & forth across the wire -- and since bandwidth is usually a bigger bottleneck than CPU or RAM power, it's not such a great use of available resources.
And this is why I'm wondering how this protocol works. Is it an older protocol in newer clothing? (I read the posts about it being a new version of an old Apple program, but that just shunts the question: how did *it* work?) Is it related to X11, or some kind of NeXT technology? Is it related to SNMP or NetInfo? Or is it just VNC with a snazzy interface? As interesting as it looks, I wouldn't spend the money on it before being able to learn more about it...
As a generic desktop system, Aqua as dazzling. As a Unix, it's also disappointing. No built-in remote display mechanism before this? No virtual desktops? Everything is so big in Aqua that it would be nice to be able to spread things out a bit.
Something makes me think that both of those issues could be addressed at the same time. Yes you could route around it by running X11, but ...meh, that doesn't really address the problem at all here. This looks like it could be a slick application, but can it allow someone to (say) access their Mac from someone else's PC? What software needs to be running on the client & server, and for that matter what work takes place on the client & server? How sensitive is it to bandwidth bottlenecks, and how secure is it? Is it based on any kind of Open protocols? I found a BSD based client for NT Terminal Server today, which is exactly the sort of tool that I like to see about. Could there be BSD/Linux/Win32 clients for this protocol?
Anyway, this certainly has my imagination, but we'll see if it's worth the price. I would have hoped this was the sort of functionality that they'd just throw in with OSX-Server, maybe charging a fee for bundles of clients, but hey I don't work for Apple and I don't work in marketing, so...
</rambling>
There was a trend a few months to a year ago where members of some discussion groups were producing summaries of each week's traffic, but it proved to be so much thankless work that they have all quit by now. Every week these people would have to spend hours sifting through hundreds of messages and manually distilling it down to one hyperlinked document of perhaps a few hundred words, or a couple of pages long if printed. For the thanks they got in return -- and people did appreciate all the work, but you can't eat thanks -- it just wasn't worth it for any of them to keep doing these manual summaries. Even if they were being paid, it's not the sort of work most people want to be doing in the first place.
Finding a system that could programmatically produce a periodic summary -- even if a crude one -- of what was discussed on one of these groups would be a great tool. And no, I'm not willing to pay an assistant to summarize Usenet for me, and no I don't think it's something that any one assistant could do alone anyeay. But I would be willing to have, say, a cron job that on mondays gave me a summary of the Linux kernel lists, on Tuesdays gave me a report on what's up with Perl6, on Wednesdays told me what security issues have been news lately, on Thursdays ...you get the idea.
In order to be able to summarize these aggregates of documents, you'll have to start with smaller ones. You could play it in both directions: from the messages up level, you could reduce each posting to a sentence or less , while from a threads down level you could figure out what topics seemed to be hot and go for key ideas from messages within the main threads. Bonus points for a system that could recognize citations (if what poster A said was important enough for poster B to quote it, then maybe that quote should end up in the summary) or, Google-style, place emphasis on traffic pattens, linkages, etc.
As several people have noted, this is all a big, hard problem to solve, and there would be real uses for it if anyone could put it all together. Would we be willing to pay for such a service? I dunno, depends how good it is I guess. But if it really could reduce Usenet, web logs, mailing lists, and hey maybe even some normal web sites down into a small handful of roughly accurate documents that could be read over a cup of coffee each morning, then yeah I think that would be a valuable thing.
Sorry no, just citing rumors that I hear, articles hinting at it, notes in tech books saying "don't use Jet, it's being deprecated", etc. I haven't seen any "from the horse's mouth" notes about this though, nor clear reports from tech news sites or anything like that. Sorry.
Oh don't feel so bad for Netscape. Now that they've killed off Be, everything you're seeing here is being cannibalized from BFS's corpse. Microsoft had time to kill off both birds with however many stones were necessary... :/
If you take a look at the XP interface, it feels (to me at least) a lot like a candied up BeOS -- a lot of the icons have a similar look, there's the grouped taskbar items a la the BeOS tracker, etc. And seeing as BeOS has been around for years, it makes a lot more sense that the Microsoft engineers would have been able to start reimplementing ideas like this by this point.
And now we start seeing articles like this one, and it becomes clear that just as the XP interface has started to resemble BeOS, the XP native filesystem is starting to resemble BFS. This isn't the first time in recent months that we've seen reports of this -- not long ago there were articles saying that MS wanted to ditch Access and it's Jet engine (or whatever it runs now), and turn the SQLServer engine into the core of the next generation filesystem. This is of course exactly what Be wanted to do, but couldn't due to performance constraints, so they went with the scaled back object oriented system instead. Hey look at that, now we hear that Microsoft is also going with an OO-FS instead of a full SQL-FS.
Microsoft already ran Be out of the market, and are rightfully getting sued now for doing so. I wonder if Be would be willing to use this increasingly familiar evolution for Windows as evidence that Microsoft wanted to eliminate their strongest OS competition while ripping off all their good ideas. As much as it's vindicating to see that BeOS's best features will live on in new versions of Windows, I'd rather have the chance to see the original around today...
Also, note that 5.6.1 is the current stable version, while 5.7.3 is the current unstable branch. Obviously .7.3 is a higher value, but it's still considered an experimental code branch. You can't take a jab at MacPerl for just switching to 5.6.1 unless you also want to take a jab at RedHat, who also made the upgrade to 5.6.1 this week. Upgrading MacPerl to 5.7.3 might not be worth the effort, as 5.8.0 is scheduled to come out this spring (and we're likely to see several more 5.7.n releases between now and then). If 5.8 comes out and MacPerl doesn't keep up, *then* you can complain, but for now MacPerl has (finally!) reached Parity with the main branch.
I can't give a completely technical answer to this one, but I do know that for both OS9 , your Mac's system folders end up containing a whole slew of MS specific code:
% ls /System\ Folder/Extensions/MS\ Library\ Folder/
total 2568
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 112644 Mar 25 1998 MS C++ Library (PPC)
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 189123 Mar 25 1998 MS Container Lib (PPC)
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 611367 Mar 25 1998 MS Internet Library (PPC)
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 119930 Mar 25 1998 MS Preferences Library PPC
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris unknown 33232 Mar 25 1998 MS Variant Lib (PPC)
I thought I came across similar stuff on the OSX directories, but a quick search isn't turning up anything obviously originating from MS. Presumably it's all just part of the Internet Explorer app, and not (obviously?) exported as a globally available library.
Also note that the Mac versions of IE are for the most part a completely separate codebase from the Win32 versions, with different developers and everything. There is some cross-pollination between the two branches, but not to the point where you can consider them to be identical. The Mac version has some very nice features that still haven't made their way to the Windows branch, and it has other features (auto-virus mode comes to mind :) that still haven't been exported to Macland yet.
Can't address the Mac on this one, but as another commenter noted, AOL first tried to ignore the web, then it tried to implement support for it in a very broken way. The browser for AOL 3 or so was really bad -- probably (in my opinion) to get AOL users to think that the web wasn't worth all the hype, and that they should stick to AOL (that and, to be fair, it was probably just difficult to get a solid browser put together quickly, which would explain why they went on to just embed IE and then later buy out Netscape).As noted, their inittial attempts to get a browser within the AOL client were just really, really awful. Their web client crashed all the time, couldn't render things, felt slower than the rest of the AOL service, etc. (Note that, apparently at around this time, AOL switched to HTTP as their main internal network protocol, instead of whatever propietary protocol AOL was using before that. Thus going to the web from within AOL meant having to do some kind of protocol translation to make it work, so this made the service degrade even beyond the poor quality of the browser they were offering at the time. Citation for this is in "Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", where he talks about what a surprisingly good webserver AOLServer is, noting that it has been tuned to support the millions of concurrent AOL users...)
Anyway, as noted by another commenter and in great detail in the MS antitrust Findings of Fact document, AOL entered a contract where they would use IE for five (?) years in return for a guaranteed place on the Windows desktop (and no longer having to devote resources to coming up with a viable browser of their own), and MS would get instant access to AOL's millions of users. AOL hedged their bets for the future by buying out Netscape, but they kept IE around even after the contract expired in the hope that MS would allow some sort of new agreement along the lines of the earlier one. As it has become clear that MS doesn't feel they need to co-exist with AOL anymore, AOL in turn seems to be considering playing their Netscape trump card now -- "if you don't need us then we don't need you either."
Sooner or later I assume they will -- must -- switch to Netscape: otherwise they will have wasted their investment in that company and continued to support their biggest rival in the process. The more interesting question to me is whether they really are willing to switch to some kind of [Red Hat based?] AOLinux. Part of me really wants to see this happen -- it would be nice to see some significant competition to MS on the shelves at BestBuy and Circuit City (above & beyond Apple's 5%, where you can even find that in the first place). But at the same time, I'm not comfortable with the idea that everything on their machines -- from the kernel up to the user level AOL client -- would have been bolted together as a monolithic whole by one corporation. Even if the guts are open source, I'm sure that the high level stuff would certainly be proprietary. Macintosh can claim to be internally open too, but the more interesting high level stuff is still proprietary. On a hypothetical AOLinux, you're only likely to have as much access to the Linux stuff as their high level interface allows you to have, and seeing as this is AOL we're talking about, I can't see them giving you much access there. At least MacOSX gives you the Terminal to work with (and through that, all the BSD subsystem). What will AOLinux let you use? If this goes the way I'm fearing it could, it could be at least as bad as the current Windows situation, because it would mean that of the three systems you'd be able to buy at that Circuit City -- AOLinux, Mac, and Windows -- all three would be for the most part vertically integrated, with one vendor supplying the bulk of the user and system level software on each platform. This could serve to Balkanize each sub-market, and I'm not clear who if anyone would gain by such a situation, aside from *maybe* those three vendors.
Moreover, the original poster said (which I found a little confusing) that he's not a programmer, but that he needs to be able to work with these kinds of development tools on Windows. Maybe he's involved in testing or documentation, I don't know. But the fact remains that he has explicitly said he's working in a Windows environment, so that's really what he needs to be looking at here. If the code he's doing needs to interact with COM, MFC, ActiveX, etc, then how productive is it going to be to switch to a platform where all of these things are available -- at best -- only in emulation though Wine? Yeech that sounds ugly. Wouldn't it make *a lot* more sense to work on the target platform if possible, especially if that's where he's starting from to begin with?
This kind of axe-grinding, sneering, condescending advocacy is exactly what Linux doesn't need. Yes, it has a lot of nice properties, and is worthy on it's own merits. No, it isn't a drop-in replacement for different, properitary technologies, and in some cases that's a good thing. You seem so impressed by all these tools: hasn't anyone ever told you that you need to match the right tool to the right job?
;)
Even in cases where it might be safer & more efficient to use libraries from CPAN, the NMS group has deliberately decided to not make use of these libraries, so that novice devlopers could make use of these more reliable scripts without having to perform any configuration more advanced than setting a few variables and writing a little bit of HTML (which, presumably, they'll be more comfortable with anyway).
Exploits like this are exactly why people should migrate the old Matt Wright code to NMS, which can be dropped in and up & running very quickly. It's easy, and it's much safer. It's the right thing to do.
That, or replace the script with the drop-in replacements being offered by NMS. The scripts they're developing, including one that does FormMail.pl's job, are professionally developed versions of Matt Wright's scripts but with much better security & robustness, while not requiring you to install any other libraries or do any setup more advanced than setting a few variables at the top of the script. Good stuff.
Of the two previous ( slash current ) recipients of the grant, the first was a college professor -- not a student -- who used the patronage to travel the world teaching Perl to people, and the second had been a gainfully employed member of a search engine company who is going to be using his grant year to work on Perl6's core engine. It's not exactly that they were unemployable... :)