What a disappointment Lycos has become. I remember when it was a project of the CS department at Carnegie-Mellon, when it was without competition as the best place to find information on the Internet. Since they went commercial, they've gone down the tubes. (I don't believe that has to happen when you've gone commercial, but it sure did happen to Lycos.)
Those of you who are saying that you understand what Lycos is doing don't convince me. Lycos asserts on its "don't go to Infoseek" page that it's the best search engine around. Why don't they just cut the crap and prove it with quality? To me, that means giving the user what he or she asked for.
To: feedback@amazon.com Subject: Stop lying about "1-Click"
Dear Madam or Sir,
I am a prior customer of Amazon, and also software developer for business Web sites. Today I had a visceral reaction when I read that Amazon is filing lawsuits because of a patent on "1-Click". You may be able to fool a lot of people, but you can't fool those of us who work in this industry. The idea that Amazon has a prior claim to technology that stores and re-uses cutomer information is one of the most brazenly dishonest things I've ever heard. You're lying, and you know it.
Cease and desist from this nonsense, or I will most certainly never buy any products from you again.
Just yesterday I experienced a good examples of the kind of craziness Alan Cox is describing. A colleague asked me a question about LaTeX, which he said he was using on one of our Suns. My boss, listening in, said he should quit using LaTeX and start using a "real" document format. "In this country," he said (we're in Germany), "there is a de facto document format, and it's called.doc!"
Now my boss is not your everyday PHB -- he's pretty clueful on technical matters, in fact, and didn't mean that this is a good situation, but just a fact of life, albeit an unfortunate one. I can see what he means, but nevertheless I've been muttering to myself with anger ever since that conversation. This so-called document standard (he's talking about MS Word, in case you didn't get it), is a secret! And not only that, the secret gets changed, secretly, at least once a year, so you have to shell out hundreds year after year, just to keep using the "standard"!
I think this exemplifies just what Alan is saying. It's simply crazy that businesses put up with such a situation. In any traditional manufacturing business, no vendor could ever get away with it, and yet millions of businesses tolerate this kind of treatment with their office software, paying billions for nothing and all the while insisting that they're being economically rational.
I know that back in the 60's and 70's it was quite real that members of the SDS would have files with the FBI. But the early civil rights movement and the Vietnam war with draft were more intense issues perhaps, and Hoover's FBI was different.
My father attended Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH in the early 60's, and organized a campus group to fight the in loco parentis rules that were in effect at the time. They had a "demerit" system for misbehaving students. You got twenty demerits, say, if you weren't in your dorm room with your pajamas on and under the bedcovers with your slippers next to the bed at 11:00 PM. There were people who went into every room to check up. If you got too many demerits, you had to spend a Saturday afternoon cleaning up the quad or something.
So my dad and a few other people campaigned to put an end to all this, and the authorities flipped. Especially after he started publically speaking out in favor of people like Martin Luther King. They sent letters to the parents of the students involved, saying "Dear Mr. & Mrs. Soandso, your son or daughter has joined a Communist-affiliated organization."
Back in the days of Hoover, the TLA's probably really did think they could keep files on every would-be radical, but they probably don't waste their time with it any more.
There was a German film last year called 23, which despite a few technical inaccuracies gave a compelling portrayal of a notorious group of crackers in Hannover in the late 1980's. The story centers on the life and death of Karl Koch, who together with a few friends broke into some US military and intelligence computers and sold what they found to the KGB. Koch (played outstandingly by August Diehl) fell into a spiral of drug abuse and paranoia -- he was convinced that the Illuminati were controlling him (hence the title "23") and saw conspiracies all around. His obsessions eventually destroyed him.
Slashdotters might object that this sort of thing feeds irrational fears about the bad guys with modems. But the film made the point that the media wildly exaggerates this stuff -- the info leaked to the KGB was almost completely harmless, and yet was portrayed as huge data hijack. Also, some of Koch's friends served as technical advisers and evidently helped it get a fairly accurate "feel" of what they were doing.
I think most of you would like it a lot. But alas, the movie business being what it is, there will probably never be a version in English or any other langugae about a paranoid, drug-addicted suicidal hacker.
The reason for the G4 problems is they can't build them fast enbough because demand is so high. Other companies would love to have such problems.
As I remember it, Apple started heading into bad times a few years ago when they began having problems delivering PowerMacs. That was the start of a downward spiral from which they almost didn't recover. Back then, I thought the same thing you're saying now -- if the only problem is that demand is too high to meet quickly enough, then it's not much of a problem and will solve itself quickly. But that's now it happened. Loyal customers were alienated and went to other platforms, some of them never to return.
If CodeWarrior needs better source conrol in the IDE, why don't they just integrate it with CVS? CVS is an excellent package, and Metrowerks doesn't need to re-invent the wheel. And CVS has established itself as first choice for open source projects -- on some projects, there's no other way to participate in code development. If Metrowerks makes you work with something else, it'll just cause headaches.
With emacs, interaction with CVS is no problem. And speaking of emacs, is there any compelling reason why I should get the CodeWarrior for Linux and quit using emacs? Don't get me wrong, I'm familiar with CW on MacOS and I know it's very good. But so is emacs, and I don't see why I should abandon one for the other on Unix.
The locale system has been a standard component of Unix systems for a long time. I don't know AmigaOS, but I'll bet a yuan that it's exactly the same thing. Unless the developers of AmigaOS came up with something completely different and called it "locale", which would have been very foolish.
Locale creates a layer of abstraction that allows you to work with character types, alphabetic sort order, and representations of numbers, dates and currency. So you don't have to know that in German, 'ä' is an alphanumeric that gets sorted after 'a' and before 'b', the decimal point is a comma, and the day of the month comes before the month sepatated by a dot. You just set your locales to 'de', and the system functions do it all correctly.
But those are only some of the problems surrounding I18N. Locale doesn't and can't solve them all. Setting up a non-US keyboard after installation, for example, is always a problem, and it's not covered very well by existing documentation.
To a large extent, I agree with Katz' argument, but let me use Pat Buchanan as an example to illustrate what I think Katz is missing.
Buchanan wants to be president of the United States, and has a better shot at it than most of the rest of us. So as responsible citizens, we not only have a right but a duty to reach a conclusion such as this: because of the views he has expressed, Pat Buchanan must never become president.
Note that I didn't say that he should be allowed to think what he does about World War Two, or say what he thinks. But the views of a candidate about history may be the best guide there can be to understanding what he will decide in the future, and in a democracy we all have a responsibility to assess those views.
Imagine if Buchanan had been president in 1939-1941. I for one am convinced that if he had acted as he says would have, he would have made the most catastrophically awful decisions any president has ever made this century, perhaps in all of our history. Mankind suffered enough as it is during World War Two, but I am certain that there would have been far more misery and death, and a great deal less freedom, had we followed Buchanan's advice.
Chances are, the next president will not face a situation as dramatic and deadly as the Second World War. But then again, maybe he or she will. And even the less historic decisions that presidents have to make require clear judgment. Now we know that Buchanan doesn't have it.
Am I abridging his freedom of speech by saying so? Certainly not. He can keep on saying whatever he wants to say about any event in history. But I can keep saying that he shouldn't be president, too.
You may disagree with my conclusions about Buchanan, and you do have that right. You may even find my views abonimable, and you have the right to say so in the next post, if you want to. You do not abridge my freedom of speech just by exercising yours.
This moderator has dropped the ball. Now I'm going to have to go meta-moderating for hours until I find this mark-down to mark it "Unfair".
Maybe this guy has got it completely wrong. I certainly have my doubts about what he said. Maybe you passionately disagree with him. Nevertheless, nothing about that post was flamebait. On the contrary, he gave a string of concrete arguments for his position, and is completely polite throughout the post.
I give it an "Interesting". If you don't agree with him, post and tell us why. But follow this guy's example of a measured statement backed up by arguments.
If you are looking for a 'black box' to put your data in be aware that Oracle, even at only 40G of data, requires some heavy administration at times. You may want to consider MySql for an easier ride on admin.
That's quite true (but see my other post about shortcomings of MySQL). I can't help the original poster much because I have no experience with PostGres, but I can tell you that while Oracle is very powerful, the learning curve is very steep, and you'll need a skilled, experienced DBA to really get all of its benefits to work for you.
I have found few things in the world more frustrating than Oracle documentation, not because there's not enough of it, but because you can't see the forest for the trees. The first time I had to administer an Oracle DB I was overwhelmed, and there was almost nothing there to help you learn how to just get started. By now, I feel relatively comfortable with Oracle, but it's taken months of practice.
Now if you are going to use oracle, you should use partitions directly. It just bypasses the filesystem and uses the disk in raw mode.
I have my doubts whether there is any application that really needs to go to that much trouble. You can indeed speed up your I/O that way (and Oracle is I/O-bound), but you make administration significantly more difficult -- so much that it's hardly worth it. There are many ways to squeeze more performance out of your Oracle application that don't sacrifice the ease of administration over the filesystem. IIRC even Oracle has advised against using raw devices, for this very reason.
Uhm, we use MySQL at my company for some projects, but not for projects where we need a DB that is "mission critical" and "very robust". For those needs we go to Oracle.
The lack of referential integrity has already been mentioned. Far more critical is the lack of transactions! The ability to roll back is indispensible in a sensitive application. Also, Oracle has vastly more sophisticated tools for backup than MySQL has -- another essential element of mission-critical DB administration.
Oracle is bloated and expensive, and I certainly don't recommend it unless you really do need it. But sometimes you do.
Quick searches for "Pez" at Lycos, Altavista and Google yield a number of private pages by Pez fans and dispenser collectors ("PEZheads") -- "What's New in the World of Pez", "Dale's House of Pez", "Planet Pez", "Museum of Pez Memoribilia" and on and on. There's dozens of them. That's not too surprising -- any hobby, no matter how weird, has got a home page somewhere. And a lot of these pages have "pez" in the Meta-tags.
I am astonished at the idea that Pez might actually prosecute these people. I can't see how they'd have a case, since they're not appropriating the term to sell a product, they're just using it to help the other PEZheads find them. The problem, of course, is that when you get a threatening letter from a lawyer, you're going to have to fight back at great expense, or cave in.
But worst of all, these are people who like this company and buy its products! "Prosecute to the full extent of the law", they say. They're threatening to ruin their most loyal customers, on legal grounds that may be wholly spurious! There may be a worse way for a company to shoot itself in the foot, but right now I can't think of any. Imagine the David v. Goliath stories in the press about a stunned PEZhead under attack from the company he thought he loved. Have these people lost their minds?
... that reruns of Monty Python are one of the main sources of information that many of us Yanks have about British culture? I was a bit shocked once when I realized that when I think about British accents, humor, mannerisms and interests, I am constantly imagining John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and all the rest.
Now that may not be quite so bad. Python was often satire, and satire is at its best when it has something truthful at its core. The Brits could probably do much worse than have Monty Python as the peephole into their world.
But if I were a Brit I would worry about people who don't realize how completely over the top it all was. Would you like an image of your countrymen as constantly shrieking, dirty-minded and daft? Think of the accents, for example. It wasn't until I visited England myself when I realized that the Pythons were often absurdly exaggerating regional accents from around the country, like a northerner in the US who imitates a southerner by talking like Gomer Pyle. How many of us Yanks believe that Brits really talk like that, all the time?
I live in Germany now, and am occasionally irritated at people who get their ideas about Americans from movies and television series. Do any of you Brits ever tired of foreigners who want to impress you by reciting the spam sketch and showing off their silly walk?
"That's not an argument, it's contradiction!" "No it isn't!" "Yes it is!" "No it
isn't!" "Yes it is!"
You attacked me viciously, personally, and in public.
All right then, so far so good for ESR, not so good for Bruce. Eric has strong grievances, and Bruce ought to do what he can to reconcile them.
After this, however, ESR has lost me.
That's not constructive criticism. Constructive criticism would have been avoiding a flamewar -- coming to OSI and Apple privately with your concerns.
This is a peculiar definition of "constructive criticism", and I don't buy it. To criticize constructively, you must offer positive solutions to whatever it is you're criticizing. Nothing about it requires privacy. To be sure, "starting a flamewar" is not constructive, but a constructive debate can certainly be carried out in public.
Surely the advocate of open source software does not expect all dissent to remain behind closed doors?
That's what I can't forgive -- and won't.
You won't? Not ever? No matter what he does?
If Bruce Perens spends the next, say, twenty-five years begging for forgiveness, you'll still be pissed off at him nonetheless?
You've gotta kidding me. That's irrational, Eric, unnecessarily stubborn, and not worthy of much respect. I think your writings on open source software have been excellent and are undiminished, but this does not become you.
I print a lot of stuff out, and I have bought quite a few books for computer docs, such as the various O'Reilly volumes. I have a colleague who can't understand why I do that. "Books", he once told me, "are so superfluous."
I cannot agree. What I despise about reading at the monitor is trying to look at two different things that don't fit on one screen. If you scroll to the one place, you can't see the other; and hence you can't easily compare a definition with its application, can't easily compare a figure with its explanation, can't easily compare a function API with the sample code. You're constantly scrolling up, trying to remember what it says up there, then scrolling back down, and trying to remember what the hell you were just looking at. Usually you can't scroll to exactly the same spot on one try, so you waste considerable time fine-tuning your scroll.
Opening two windows to the two spots you want to read isn't necessarily good enough either, because usually one window obscures the other, so you can still only see one passage at a time. You could narrow the windows and place them side by side, or split a window in half, but that reduces the space you have to display your two passages, and they may be too big for that to be workable.
With printed pages, the problem is easily solved. You jam your thumb in where one passage appears, and your index finger in where the other one is, and flip back and forth. Piece a cake.
Slashdot Mirror
What a disappointment Lycos has become. I remember when it was a project of the CS department at Carnegie-Mellon, when it was without competition as the best place to find information on the Internet. Since they went commercial, they've gone down the tubes. (I don't believe that has to happen when you've gone commercial, but it sure did happen to Lycos.)
Those of you who are saying that you understand what Lycos is doing don't convince me. Lycos asserts on its "don't go to Infoseek" page that it's the best search engine around. Why don't they just cut the crap and prove it with quality? To me, that means giving the user what he or she asked for.
Do you think that "bio" technologies for authentication -- fingerprints, retinal scans and the like -- are really feasible for widespread use?
When Applied Cryptography was published, CAST was looking very promising but was still very new. How IYO has CAST held up since then?
Bruce, thanks very much for making cryptography so much more accessible to us all.
You wrote in Applied Cryptography that IDEA was your "favorite" symmetric cipher at the time. Is that still true today?
I don't want any evil hackers possessing my computer, you know ...
To: feedback@amazon.com
Subject: Stop lying about "1-Click"
Dear Madam or Sir,
I am a prior customer of Amazon, and also software developer for business Web sites. Today I had a visceral reaction when I read that Amazon is filing lawsuits because of a patent on "1-Click". You may be able to fool a lot of people, but you can't fool those of us who work in this industry. The idea that Amazon has a prior claim to technology that stores and re-uses cutomer information is one of the most brazenly dishonest things I've ever heard. You're lying, and you know it.
Cease and desist from this nonsense, or I will most certainly never buy any products from you again.
Regards,
....
Just yesterday I experienced a good examples of the kind of craziness Alan Cox is describing. A colleague asked me a question about LaTeX, which he said he was using on one of our Suns. My boss, listening in, said he should quit using LaTeX and start using a "real" document format. "In this country," he said (we're in Germany), "there is a de facto document format, and it's called .doc!"
Now my boss is not your everyday PHB -- he's pretty clueful on technical matters, in fact, and didn't mean that this is a good situation, but just a fact of life, albeit an unfortunate one. I can see what he means, but nevertheless I've been muttering to myself with anger ever since that conversation. This so-called document standard (he's talking about MS Word, in case you didn't get it), is a secret! And not only that, the secret gets changed, secretly, at least once a year, so you have to shell out hundreds year after year, just to keep using the "standard"!
I think this exemplifies just what Alan is saying. It's simply crazy that businesses put up with such a situation. In any traditional manufacturing business, no vendor could ever get away with it, and yet millions of businesses tolerate this kind of treatment with their office software, paying billions for nothing and all the while insisting that they're being economically rational.
I know that back in the 60's and 70's it was quite real that members of the SDS would have files with the FBI. But the early civil rights movement and the Vietnam war with draft were more intense issues perhaps, and Hoover's FBI was different.
My father attended Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH in the early 60's, and organized a campus group to fight the in loco parentis rules that were in effect at the time. They had a "demerit" system for misbehaving students. You got twenty demerits, say, if you weren't in your dorm room with your pajamas on and under the bedcovers with your slippers next to the bed at 11:00 PM. There were people who went into every room to check up. If you got too many demerits, you had to spend a Saturday afternoon cleaning up the quad or something.
So my dad and a few other people campaigned to put an end to all this, and the authorities flipped. Especially after he started publically speaking out in favor of people like Martin Luther King. They sent letters to the parents of the students involved, saying "Dear Mr. & Mrs. Soandso, your son or daughter has joined a Communist-affiliated organization."
Back in the days of Hoover, the TLA's probably really did think they could keep files on every would-be radical, but they probably don't waste their time with it any more.
There was a German film last year called 23, which despite a few technical inaccuracies gave a compelling portrayal of a notorious group of crackers in Hannover in the late 1980's. The story centers on the life and death of Karl Koch, who together with a few friends broke into some US military and intelligence computers and sold what they found to the KGB. Koch (played outstandingly by August Diehl) fell into a spiral of drug abuse and paranoia -- he was convinced that the Illuminati were controlling him (hence the title "23") and saw conspiracies all around. His obsessions eventually destroyed him.
Slashdotters might object that this sort of thing feeds irrational fears about the bad guys with modems. But the film made the point that the media wildly exaggerates this stuff -- the info leaked to the KGB was almost completely harmless, and yet was portrayed as huge data hijack. Also, some of Koch's friends served as technical advisers and evidently helped it get a fairly accurate "feel" of what they were doing.
I think most of you would like it a lot. But alas, the movie business being what it is, there will probably never be a version in English or any other langugae about a paranoid, drug-addicted suicidal hacker.
The reason for the G4 problems is they can't build them fast enbough because demand is so high. Other companies would love to have such problems.
As I remember it, Apple started heading into bad times a few years ago when they began having problems delivering PowerMacs. That was the start of a downward spiral from which they almost didn't recover. Back then, I thought the same thing you're saying now -- if the only problem is that demand is too high to meet quickly enough, then it's not much of a problem and will solve itself quickly. But that's now it happened. Loyal customers were alienated and went to other platforms, some of them never to return.
Apple needs to solve this problem pronto.
If CodeWarrior needs better source conrol in the IDE, why don't they just integrate it with CVS? CVS is an excellent package, and Metrowerks doesn't need to re-invent the wheel. And CVS has established itself as first choice for open source projects -- on some projects, there's no other way to participate in code development. If Metrowerks makes you work with something else, it'll just cause headaches.
With emacs, interaction with CVS is no problem. And speaking of emacs, is there any compelling reason why I should get the CodeWarrior for Linux and quit using emacs? Don't get me wrong, I'm familiar with CW on MacOS and I know it's very good. But so is emacs, and I don't see why I should abandon one for the other on Unix.
The article says that the interview will run on BBC Two on Sunday at 8pm (UK Slashdotters take note).
I get BBC World. Anyone have any idea whether it will be on there?
I18N is not slang, but a well-established abbreviation for internationalization (a is L10N for localization).
The Mozilla site has a pretty good introduction to the goals and problems of I18N and L10N.
The locale system has been a standard component of Unix systems for a long time. I don't know AmigaOS, but I'll bet a yuan that it's exactly the same thing. Unless the developers of AmigaOS came up with something completely different and called it "locale", which would have been very foolish.
Locale creates a layer of abstraction that allows you to work with character types, alphabetic sort order, and representations of numbers, dates and currency. So you don't have to know that in German, 'ä' is an alphanumeric that gets sorted after 'a' and before 'b', the decimal point is a comma, and the day of the month comes before the month sepatated by a dot. You just set your locales to 'de', and the system functions do it all correctly.
But those are only some of the problems surrounding I18N. Locale doesn't and can't solve them all. Setting up a non-US keyboard after installation, for example, is always a problem, and it's not covered very well by existing documentation.
"Quer" is horizontal and "schraeg" is diagonal. So a "Querstrich" is a horizontal stroke, or a hyphen. Alles klar?
Schraegstrich Punkt
Although many Germans just say "slash" for "slash" (and "backslash" for "backslash").
Wanna hire us as your provider. %^D
To a large extent, I agree with Katz' argument, but let me use Pat Buchanan as an example to illustrate what I think Katz is missing.
Buchanan wants to be president of the United States, and has a better shot at it than most of the rest of us. So as responsible citizens, we not only have a right but a duty to reach a conclusion such as this: because of the views he has expressed, Pat Buchanan must never become president.
Note that I didn't say that he should be allowed to think what he does about World War Two, or say what he thinks. But the views of a candidate about history may be the best guide there can be to understanding what he will decide in the future, and in a democracy we all have a responsibility to assess those views.
Imagine if Buchanan had been president in 1939-1941. I for one am convinced that if he had acted as he says would have, he would have made the most catastrophically awful decisions any president has ever made this century, perhaps in all of our history. Mankind suffered enough as it is during World War Two, but I am certain that there would have been far more misery and death, and a great deal less freedom, had we followed Buchanan's advice.
Chances are, the next president will not face a situation as dramatic and deadly as the Second World War. But then again, maybe he or she will. And even the less historic decisions that presidents have to make require clear judgment. Now we know that Buchanan doesn't have it.
Am I abridging his freedom of speech by saying so? Certainly not. He can keep on saying whatever he wants to say about any event in history. But I can keep saying that he shouldn't be president, too.
You may disagree with my conclusions about Buchanan, and you do have that right. You may even find my views abonimable, and you have the right to say so in the next post, if you want to. You do not abridge my freedom of speech just by exercising yours.
This moderator has dropped the ball. Now I'm going to have to go meta-moderating for hours until I find this mark-down to mark it "Unfair".
Maybe this guy has got it completely wrong. I certainly have my doubts about what he said. Maybe you passionately disagree with him. Nevertheless, nothing about that post was flamebait. On the contrary, he gave a string of concrete arguments for his position, and is completely polite throughout the post.
I give it an "Interesting". If you don't agree with him, post and tell us why. But follow this guy's example of a measured statement backed up by arguments.
If you are looking for a 'black box' to put your data in be aware that Oracle, even at only 40G of data, requires some heavy administration at times. You may want to consider MySql for an easier ride on admin.
That's quite true (but see my other post about shortcomings of MySQL). I can't help the original poster much because I have no experience with PostGres, but I can tell you that while Oracle is very powerful, the learning curve is very steep, and you'll need a skilled, experienced DBA to really get all of its benefits to work for you.
I have found few things in the world more frustrating than Oracle documentation, not because there's not enough of it, but because you can't see the forest for the trees. The first time I had to administer an Oracle DB I was overwhelmed, and there was almost nothing there to help you learn how to just get started. By now, I feel relatively comfortable with Oracle, but it's taken months of practice.
Now if you are going to use oracle, you should use partitions directly. It just bypasses the filesystem and uses the disk in raw mode.
I have my doubts whether there is any application that really needs to go to that much trouble. You can indeed speed up your I/O that way (and Oracle is I/O-bound), but you make administration significantly more difficult -- so much that it's hardly worth it. There are many ways to squeeze more performance out of your Oracle application that don't sacrifice the ease of administration over the filesystem. IIRC even Oracle has advised against using raw devices, for this very reason.
Uhm, we use MySQL at my company for some projects, but not for projects where we need a DB that is "mission critical" and "very robust". For those needs we go to Oracle.
The lack of referential integrity has already been mentioned. Far more critical is the lack of transactions! The ability to roll back is indispensible in a sensitive application. Also, Oracle has vastly more sophisticated tools for backup than MySQL has -- another essential element of mission-critical DB administration.
Oracle is bloated and expensive, and I certainly don't recommend it unless you really do need it. But sometimes you do.
Quick searches for "Pez" at Lycos, Altavista and Google yield a number of private pages by Pez fans and dispenser collectors ("PEZheads") -- "What's New in the World of Pez", "Dale's House of Pez", "Planet Pez", "Museum of Pez Memoribilia" and on and on. There's dozens of them. That's not too surprising -- any hobby, no matter how weird, has got a home page somewhere. And a lot of these pages have "pez" in the Meta-tags.
I am astonished at the idea that Pez might actually prosecute these people. I can't see how they'd have a case, since they're not appropriating the term to sell a product, they're just using it to help the other PEZheads find them. The problem, of course, is that when you get a threatening letter from a lawyer, you're going to have to fight back at great expense, or cave in.
But worst of all, these are people who like this company and buy its products! "Prosecute to the full extent of the law", they say. They're threatening to ruin their most loyal customers, on legal grounds that may be wholly spurious! There may be a worse way for a company to shoot itself in the foot, but right now I can't think of any. Imagine the David v. Goliath stories in the press about a stunned PEZhead under attack from the company he thought he loved. Have these people lost their minds?
Now that may not be quite so bad. Python was often satire, and satire is at its best when it has something truthful at its core. The Brits could probably do much worse than have Monty Python as the peephole into their world.
But if I were a Brit I would worry about people who don't realize how completely over the top it all was. Would you like an image of your countrymen as constantly shrieking, dirty-minded and daft? Think of the accents, for example. It wasn't until I visited England myself when I realized that the Pythons were often absurdly exaggerating regional accents from around the country, like a northerner in the US who imitates a southerner by talking like Gomer Pyle. How many of us Yanks believe that Brits really talk like that, all the time?
I live in Germany now, and am occasionally irritated at people who get their ideas about Americans from movies and television series. Do any of you Brits ever tired of foreigners who want to impress you by reciting the spam sketch and showing off their silly walk?
All right then, so far so good for ESR, not so good for Bruce. Eric has strong grievances, and Bruce ought to do what he can to reconcile them.
After this, however, ESR has lost me.
This is a peculiar definition of "constructive criticism", and I don't buy it. To criticize constructively, you must offer positive solutions to whatever it is you're criticizing. Nothing about it requires privacy. To be sure, "starting a flamewar" is not constructive, but a constructive debate can certainly be carried out in public.
Surely the advocate of open source software does not expect all dissent to remain behind closed doors?
You won't? Not ever? No matter what he does?
If Bruce Perens spends the next, say, twenty-five years begging for forgiveness, you'll still be pissed off at him nonetheless?
You've gotta kidding me. That's irrational, Eric, unnecessarily stubborn, and not worthy of much respect. I think your writings on open source software have been excellent and are undiminished, but this does not become you.
I print a lot of stuff out, and I have bought quite a few books for computer docs, such as the various O'Reilly volumes. I have a colleague who can't understand why I do that. "Books", he once told me, "are so superfluous."
I cannot agree. What I despise about reading at the monitor is trying to look at two different things that don't fit on one screen. If you scroll to the one place, you can't see the other; and hence you can't easily compare a definition with its application, can't easily compare a figure with its explanation, can't easily compare a function API with the sample code. You're constantly scrolling up, trying to remember what it says up there, then scrolling back down, and trying to remember what the hell you were just looking at. Usually you can't scroll to exactly the same spot on one try, so you waste considerable time fine-tuning your scroll.
Opening two windows to the two spots you want to read isn't necessarily good enough either, because usually one window obscures the other, so you can still only see one passage at a time. You could narrow the windows and place them side by side, or split a window in half, but that reduces the space you have to display your two passages, and they may be too big for that to be workable.
With printed pages, the problem is easily solved. You jam your thumb in where one passage appears, and your index finger in where the other one is, and flip back and forth. Piece a cake.
Don't ever take my paper away.