...is covered the latest edition of NOW magazine (an independent free weekly in Toronto). The opening paragraphs of the article read:
It didn't take b'nai brith very long on Tuesday, mere hours after the horror struck New York, to oil its spin machine. The group, whose timing is shameless, issued "an urgent alert" to security officials, warning them about possible terrorist supporters making their way to Canada for a pro-Palestinian demonstration taking place Saturday (September 15) in Montreal."Today's terrorist attacks have emphasized the vulnerability of all democratic states in the face of the ruthless agenda of terrorist groups, those who fund them and those who provide them with logistic and moral support," says the press release, neatly tying mass murder at the World Trade Centre to protest against the Israeli occupation.
Talk about guilt by association. The idea that thousands of terrorist symps were rushing across the border to carry placards at Concordia University was certainly news to Jewish and Arab peace activists who have worked together on the demo for a month now and have diligently outlawed the burning of the Israeli flag and speeches that incite hatred.
Once again, the story appears in full here.
Certain movie genres that only mix in zero-G
on
Movies in Space?
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· Score: 1
I hear that zero-G manufacturing will be useful for mixing substances that don't mix when in Earth gravity. Maybe that's the idea: put a movie studio in space to fuse movie genres that wouldn't go together in our gravity well!
Merchant Ivory kung-fu chick flicks, here we come!
The question remains: why aren't they simply calling it Delphi for Linux? After all, they didn't come up with different names for JBuilder for each OS...
With a tenth of the U.S. population and the vast majority of Canadians living within a hundred miles of the U.S. border, it's much easier to set up the infrastructure for Cable, DSL and telecommunications in general. That's why cable TV flourished in Canada much sooner that it did in the U.S.; it's also why it's relatively painless to get cable or DSL service here too.
Yup, we're submitting Swarmcast as an example of "good" P2P to the EFF. We're pretty tight with them; Cindy Cohn, the EFF's Legal Director & Senior Staff Attorney, is on our Technical Advisory Board.
It's not like a leather-clad BP is gonna stroll into the HP boardroom with James Brown blaring ("i can dig codin! i can dig debuggin'! But i can't dig, back- back-stabbin!"), and shoot up the joint for "Payback".
Hmmm...short hair, denim jeans and black t-shirt. Have you not seen "Queer as Folk" on TV? That's "the uniform" in many gay locales such as San Francisco's Castro district or Toronto's Church and Wellesley "Village".
But really, both styles -- Nautica Preppy and Jeans and black tees -- are just fine. Pick the one that works for you.
I remember seeing ads for that app in good old Creative Computing. The magazine ads had a woman in a flowing white dress standing on a bridge over a creek, all shot in soft focus (actually, blurry focus). It was called The Last One after the fact that it was supposed to be the last program ever written by a human. (And you thought there was hubris in the dot-com world now!)
There's a consulting group in the UK that still does something Last One-related, but AFAIK, the program is merely just a footnote in history (and a couple of links in Google).
I notice a lot of people seem to be saying that a satellite TV signal running through their property is in effect theirs to do what they will. These people must be the Devil Incarnate to any kid who's accidentally popped a fly ball onto their lawn.
Would these people have the same cavalier attitude with their private cell-phone calls, their packets on a wireless network or their baby monitors, since their signals most likely pass through other people's property? How about if those signals passed through a corporation's office? How about if those signals passed through government property? Given the strong privacy and crypto bent that most/. readers have, I doubt it.
This kind of back-and-forth battle is between Hughes and some crackers today, imagine a time in the very near future where 802.11 wireless networking and P2P file-sharing and communication are mainstream. Suddenly everyone's a broadcaster as well as a receiver, and everyone's signals cross a lot of backyard. The "back yard" argument may not be as compelling to a lot of people anymore.
Monday: Hmmm, I'm getting a bit shaggy -- time for one of those free haircuts we get as part of our office perks!
Tuesday: (looking in the mirror) -- Hmmm, perhaps I oughta telecommute until this grows out...
Re:Does the Patent Office Know?
on
The First Mouse
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· Score: 1
In addition to solving legal problems such as silly patents, keeping detailed records on anything neat you do also has the benefit of helping you understand (or even remember) what you did months or years later! Over time, most of us have probably had some really cool ideas that have fallen by the wayside due to other commitments or the fact that technology wasn't "there" yet. Having notes and actually going through then from time to time can remind you of forgotten projects that may suddenly be applicable today.
I remember thinking during the original iBook announcement, "if only they came in lime green." Glad to see that they finally are!
Geek reason to buy the iBook:
I have a second-rev tangerine iBook with extra RAM and a third-party 12GB drive so I can run both MacOS and Yellow Dog Linux. It's proven to be my favourite Python development machine, thanks to some great software (MacPython and BBEdit), the AirPort and great battery life. The improvements in features and price make it even nicer.
Even geekier reason to buy the iBook:
This cartoon goes out to the guy whose.sig reads "Asking a girl out is like trying to figure out sqrt(pi) using Roman numerals."
TV is responsible for starting many fashion trends, but AFAIK, it's only stopped one -- herringbone tweed. It does a wicked razzle-dazzle on TV. A friend of mine, whose band recently made a TV appearance, purposely had the band dress up in herringbone and horizontal pinstripes as a little prank.
I guess it's because it's an issue that's near and dear to their hearts. They are artists, after all. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that they thought various technical debates -- say, KDE vs. Gnome or Linux vs. Windows vs. MacOS vs. BeOs -- were non-issues created by people obsessed over licensing issues and software design.
There's a time and place for getting colour matches as close as possible. When you're trying to choose something based on colour, you'll probably want as close a match as possible (that's why they print J. Crew catalogs on good paper). If I were reading a news story with photos, colour matching would be less crucial, but it would be bad if the colours were completely off. In the case of the colours being way off on some Slashdot discussions, it's annoying but not so bad unless the colour combo rendered the aricles unreadable. The necessity of sweating over the details depends on the application and judicious use of the mantra, "the best is the enemy of the good." If I had a deadline, I wouldn't sweat over the fact that the about box's graphics weren't the exactly correct shade.
I do like it that some people concentrate on getting detail right. Take various GUIs. The icon redraw when opening a folder with a large number of files in the MacOS and in KDE and Gnome is much faster than in Windows 98. I won't even get into the garishly unsubtle choices in the Windows palette (even in 32-bit colour, you're stuck with the Win palette for colouring icons). Nothing major, but enough to give the feel that there's some shoddy construction under Windows' hood. Sometimes the little things do count.
I'm glad we have people who care about good design and aesthetics -- I'm all for beauty as long as functionality is not sacrificed, and I think it may be harmful in the long run if beauty is sacrificed on the altar of functionality. Bring on the iMac, the Terayon cable modem, the Vaio, Korg synths and Nokia phones. They work well, and they look good too.
There's evidence to back up your statement: Statmarket.com, a subscription service that provides browser stats based on samples culled from sites that user their server stats technology, used to be free about a year ago. Even back then, their stats seemed to indicate that the prevalent setup for machines was 800*600 and 16-bit colour.
A friend who works at a certain on-line bookstore in Canada says that Wrox believes that it lends a more personal touch to otherwise dry books and that they also believe that geeks like to see other geeks on the cover of geek books.
Personally, I would like to see airbrush van art make its comeback by appearing on Wrox press books. Keep on truckin'!
First, congrats on winning the award. Hopefully the giggling will have subsided by the time you return to work, because if it hasn't, we'll have to lock you in quiet room so we can get work done.
mouthbeef also brought up an interesting point that's been debated back and forth in/. (as well as just about everywhere you turn these days): file sharing. Apparently, there's been a fair bit of concern amongst writers about their work getting copied and passed around on the net. A few have considered firing up their legal war machines, and mouthbeef had this to say on his site...
I know it's bad form to use this podium as a bully pulpit, but there is one thing I want to say:
There's been a lot of hand-wringing this year about electronic piracy. Here's how I see it: When someone spends their unpaid work-days converting your work to electronic format, when that person passes it around the network, recommending it -- well, that's pretty close to the kind of publicity writers wish their publishers would spring for.
More than anything else, our writerly priority has to be figuring out how to make money off of that dynamic.
More than anything else, we need to figure out how to stop suing these amateur publicists and put them on the payroll.
I suspect that many who are unfamilar with the programs and terminology associated with various unixen such as vi, linux and g++ are not necessarily in it for the money; it just means you haven't been exposed to those terms yet. After all, we were all newbies once.
As for the use of console-based editors such as vi and emacs, that's a matter of personal preference. While I'm ready to dive into emacs as needed, today's large class libraries and practicing reuse make it practical to use and IDE that features things like class explorers, and that "Intellisense" feature that tells you what the properties and methods of the object you're using are.
I do agree with your take on the compiler -- as long as you're handing in ANSI C++ (and getting the assignment right, of course), it shouldn't matter which compiler you're using. However, for the beginner, I'd recommend C++Builder over MSVC or vi as the editing environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Stephenson also popularized the use of the term "avatar" as the user's on-line representation.
Merchant Ivory kung-fu chick flicks, here we come!
The question remains: why aren't they simply calling it Delphi for Linux? After all, they didn't come up with different names for JBuilder for each OS...
With a tenth of the U.S. population and the vast majority of Canadians living within a hundred miles of the U.S. border, it's much easier to set up the infrastructure for Cable, DSL and telecommunications in general. That's why cable TV flourished in Canada much sooner that it did in the U.S.; it's also why it's relatively painless to get cable or DSL service here too.
Yup, we're submitting Swarmcast as an example of "good" P2P to the EFF. We're pretty tight with them; Cindy Cohn, the EFF's Legal Director & Senior Staff Attorney, is on our Technical Advisory Board.
2. Porn + iSmell might be pretty cool, but I can already see somebody coming up with an appropriate scent for the obligatory goatse.cx link.
3. Don't you think that it'll all devolve into a smell-script kiddie contest to make the worst smell ever?
Japan - "Cool girls": Snotty, preppy uniformed schoolgirls. England - "Sloan Rangers": Snotty, preppy uniformed schoolgirls.
Japan: All your base are belong to us
England: Right about now the funk soul brother / check it out now, the funk soul brother
Japan - Food that seems strange at first, but is actually delicious once you try it. England - Uh...
Hmmm...short hair, denim jeans and black t-shirt. Have you not seen "Queer as Folk" on TV? That's "the uniform" in many gay locales such as San Francisco's Castro district or Toronto's Church and Wellesley "Village".
But really, both styles -- Nautica Preppy and Jeans and black tees -- are just fine. Pick the one that works for you.
...damn, is the fan noisy!
Let me play devil's advocate, Perl-style...
s/Python/Linux/
s/Objective C/NeXTSTep/
s/Perl/Windows/
There's a consulting group in the UK that still does something Last One-related, but AFAIK, the program is merely just a footnote in history (and a couple of links in Google).
Would these people have the same cavalier attitude with their private cell-phone calls, their packets on a wireless network or their baby monitors, since their signals most likely pass through other people's property? How about if those signals passed through a corporation's office? How about if those signals passed through government property? Given the strong privacy and crypto bent that most /. readers have, I doubt it.
This kind of back-and-forth battle is between Hughes and some crackers today, imagine a time in the very near future where 802.11 wireless networking and P2P file-sharing and communication are mainstream. Suddenly everyone's a broadcaster as well as a receiver, and everyone's signals cross a lot of backyard. The "back yard" argument may not be as compelling to a lot of people anymore.
Tuesday: (looking in the mirror) -- Hmmm, perhaps I oughta telecommute until this grows out...
In addition to solving legal problems such as silly patents, keeping detailed records on anything neat you do also has the benefit of helping you understand (or even remember) what you did months or years later! Over time, most of us have probably had some really cool ideas that have fallen by the wayside due to other commitments or the fact that technology wasn't "there" yet. Having notes and actually going through then from time to time can remind you of forgotten projects that may suddenly be applicable today.
Geek reason to buy the iBook:
I have a second-rev tangerine iBook with extra RAM and a third-party 12GB drive so I can run both MacOS and Yellow Dog Linux. It's proven to be my favourite Python development machine, thanks to some great software (MacPython and BBEdit), the AirPort and great battery life. The improvements in features and price make it even nicer.
Even geekier reason to buy the iBook:
This cartoon goes out to the guy whose .sig reads "Asking a girl out is like trying to figure out sqrt(pi) using Roman numerals."
TV is responsible for starting many fashion trends, but AFAIK, it's only stopped one -- herringbone tweed. It does a wicked razzle-dazzle on TV. A friend of mine, whose band recently made a TV appearance, purposely had the band dress up in herringbone and horizontal pinstripes as a little prank.
There's a time and place for getting colour matches as close as possible. When you're trying to choose something based on colour, you'll probably want as close a match as possible (that's why they print J. Crew catalogs on good paper). If I were reading a news story with photos, colour matching would be less crucial, but it would be bad if the colours were completely off. In the case of the colours being way off on some Slashdot discussions, it's annoying but not so bad unless the colour combo rendered the aricles unreadable. The necessity of sweating over the details depends on the application and judicious use of the mantra, "the best is the enemy of the good." If I had a deadline, I wouldn't sweat over the fact that the about box's graphics weren't the exactly correct shade.
I do like it that some people concentrate on getting detail right. Take various GUIs. The icon redraw when opening a folder with a large number of files in the MacOS and in KDE and Gnome is much faster than in Windows 98. I won't even get into the garishly unsubtle choices in the Windows palette (even in 32-bit colour, you're stuck with the Win palette for colouring icons). Nothing major, but enough to give the feel that there's some shoddy construction under Windows' hood. Sometimes the little things do count.
I'm glad we have people who care about good design and aesthetics -- I'm all for beauty as long as functionality is not sacrificed, and I think it may be harmful in the long run if beauty is sacrificed on the altar of functionality. Bring on the iMac, the Terayon cable modem, the Vaio, Korg synths and Nokia phones. They work well, and they look good too.
There's evidence to back up your statement: Statmarket.com, a subscription service that provides browser stats based on samples culled from sites that user their server stats technology, used to be free about a year ago. Even back then, their stats seemed to indicate that the prevalent setup for machines was 800*600 and 16-bit colour.
Personally, I would like to see airbrush van art make its comeback by appearing on Wrox press books. Keep on truckin'!
mouthbeef also brought up an interesting point that's been debated back and forth in /. (as well as just about everywhere you turn these days): file sharing. Apparently, there's been a fair bit of concern amongst writers about their work getting copied and passed around on the net. A few have considered firing up their legal war machines, and mouthbeef had this to say on his site...
I couldn't have said it better myself!As for the societal structures demanding that women stay at home while men be breadwinners, oh yes, they're still around.
* Of course, this was when RAM sizes were much, much smaller than today...
As for the use of console-based editors such as vi and emacs, that's a matter of personal preference. While I'm ready to dive into emacs as needed, today's large class libraries and practicing reuse make it practical to use and IDE that features things like class explorers, and that "Intellisense" feature that tells you what the properties and methods of the object you're using are.
I do agree with your take on the compiler -- as long as you're handing in ANSI C++ (and getting the assignment right, of course), it shouldn't matter which compiler you're using. However, for the beginner, I'd recommend C++Builder over MSVC or vi as the editing environment.