I work daily with humongous text files. I have found no other editor that performs as well when you work with text files that are in several gigabytes range.
Not in Debian (or maybe all of Linux?) it doesn't.
Sorry, I view that link you gave as less of a bug report than a Twit Alert. Seriously, when was the last time you ran across a 2.7 GB file of nulls and thought of it as a text file to be edited?
The relevant section of the Vim docs explains that the maximum length of a line and the maximum number of lines per file depends on the local size of long integers, typically 32 bits. So if your box is limited to 2G lines per file and 2GB per line, is it any wonder there's an error message upon encountering 2.7 GB of nulls?
This evening I edited a 3.1 GB text file (generated from the dictionaries on my Ubuntu 8.04.2, AKA Debian Linux box) without any problems at all. 334M lines of text, averaging what, 9 characters per line? So to run into vim's limit I'd have to be editing close to 20 GB of dictionary words. Or for 90-character log file line lengths, somewhere in the vicinity of 200 GB of text.
So. no, I don't think that special case of a null file warrants real-world concern.
"sed" - could work, but why bother if vim works? Personally, I can never remember the sed syntax.
*sputters* You can't remember the sed syntax? It's the same as vi.
Mostly likely, if you're editting a several gig text file, you're doing bulk edits, not single edits. ala:
:%s/hamburger/cheeseburger/g
A perfectly good point, unfortunately marred by the remarks that follow.
Mostly likely, if you're editting a several gig text file, you're doing bulk edits, not single edits.
You're assuming conditions not previously specified. What if the poster only changes hamburger to cheeseburger depending on the values of relish and pickle on nearby lines? Are you one of those manly men who use sed to repair mismatched braces in your source files?
My point being that if the previous posters in the subthread find vim satisfactory for the problems they're thinking of, it might be because they understand their typical problems better than you do.
And since vi is just a fancy tui on top of ed, you already know sed.
Why bother? Just because vi can edit large files, it's still painfully slow. Large and/or many edits are very slow to apply and undo. The same commands executed in sed can be done order of magnitude faster.
Yes, if they're bulk edits. But it depends on the context. The last time I looked through the sed man pages I missed the part that covered "query changes" and "undo".
Finally, your experiences with the performance of vi are pretty much irrelevant to a thread on vim. I just used vim on a 3.1 GB text file this evening in a test. Loading and saving the file took a while, but once the file had loaded moving from one end to another, searching for strings, making edits, etc. were pretty damn fast. Not appreciably slower than I've experienced with 100k text files, in other words.
Others have remarked on the dubious idea of equating a decline in watching television with a "cognitive surplus" that will transform society.
My pet peeve lies with Shirky's Web 2.0 presentation and his taking huge licenses with history. He starts off a claim about the importance of gin in helping Brits get over their future shock at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and links it to his point thusly:
"And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders -- a lot of things we like -- didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset."
One big problem with that assessment is that the chronology doesn't fit his thesis. Municipal public libraries, for example, started appearing in the US and UK in the early 1600s -- a century and a half before the Industrial Revolution. The British gin boom had a lot to do with tax policies and occurred at least a generation before the IR. And if by elected leaders he means an elected head of state (the House of Commons idea had been around long before the IR), it seems a tenuous link at best. The US Constitution is in roughly the same time frame as the start of the IR, but the new country was hardly overwhelmed with and reacting to issues of industrialization.
My conclusion: if he has such a loose grasp of history, why should I give any credence to his take on the future?
We're not going to be truly mobile until we can carry our devices everywhere, into every city and *populated* area in the country/world, and use them without having to worry about signal strength.
And that's only going to happen when the wireless carriers wake up and realize they are holding back adoption of expensive services by failing to provide the infrastructure capable of handling the load and servicing the areas of demand.
Verizon has probably already looked at the situation and realized it's not cost-effective for them to compete for small holes in their coverage -- especially if the holes are covered by another carrier (presumably the GSM alternative you mentioned). Companies make money by efficiently grabbing the low-hanging fruit or (sometimes) by charging a premium to serve a niche market.
When I moved in with my girlfriend, I discovered I was a half block from usable service for my carrier. Rather than switch to her carrier or continue bitching about mine, I eventually just stopped using my mobile phone -- and if anything my quality of life improved. YMMV.
Some of us just aren't meant to part of a mob, no matter how smart or hip Rheingold claims it is.
Speaking of the normal mode, I often prefer that to the page layout. OO doesn't have it.
You must be basing your comments on an older version of OO. If you toggle View/Print Layout, you'll find yourself in our beloved "normal" view.
The OO 2.0 betas make page layout the default on opening docs. I personally find this a minor vexation but understand it being a good choice for many other users. And pressing <Alt-V><Enter> when I first open a document hasn't proven a particular hardship.
By contrast, there's only one thing that I think makes more sense in OpenOffice, which is page layout in the format menu instead of the file menu. However, even that only makes sense from the view of the application itself, and the fact that it violates the conventions of *every other application I can think of that has page setup* sorta outweighs that.
So you're saying that if all the other kids jump off a cliff...;-)
Read Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky
I agree with your general point. For this topic area (programming, that is) I'd suggest Sklansky's Theory of Poker to be more relevant and, well, more theoretical.
The point of bluffing is to convince the other players that you ARE bluffing when you've actually got a good hand.
Mmm, no. Bluffing is a deception tool, and you're describing just one use of it.
In a no-limit hold'em tournament situation, as the parent article describes, toward the end the blinds are so high that you're forced to bluff from late position just to steal those blinds and avoid losing ground. In those situations you can have a passable drawing hand but you'd really just as soon other players not call.
It's one thing to offer improvements -- another choice -- on existing ways of doing things, and quite another to insist on replacing them entirely.
Go visit the Archy/THE site and click on the link for the "technical documentation." Then ask yourself why -- on a freaking Website fer chrissakes! -- you're presented with an embedded straight text document that shuns links and anchors and instead offers the advice that you can navigate by searching for the section heading titles. This is progress?
That's the fundamental problem with Raskin's approach: he consistently pretends that people don't already have skills and investments in the existing infrastructure. Adobe is going to completely reengineer their products so they're available for Archy users? Gimme a freaking break!
Finally, while skimming the puff piece on the funding, I realized how truly bizarre the logic was to find this on Slashdot. It was as if the editors were saying, "Hey, if Linus had gotten a big corporate grant back when he was a student, then Linux would have really become popular!"
Seems the neocons and religious-zealot-conservatives are just using this as a way of stealing the party away from the original republicans who wanted government out of these issues.
OK, I'm stumped. How does a ban on federal funding for new stem cell lines amount to government intruding into these areas?
After all, the classic "original" Republican line has been that abortion is a matter for states and individuals to decide, not the federal government. How is a policy that puts the onus for new stem cell lines on states and private companies so different?
Curious. So you think because Le Guin was more original she has less of an obligation to protect her work? Le Guin is the one who raised the issue of responsibility to the work in the first place. So far as I can tell, when it came to actions she was happy to cash the check and snipe afterwards.
So why do creative people let their worlds be perverted by publishers and movie makers?
Funny thing. Le Guin writes this Slate piece and spends far more time complaining about the producers not sharing her political agenda than she does addressing any narrative changes. She ends it, however, with the admonishment that freedom includes responsibility. In other words, the producers should have made a miniseries closer to her work and wishes. It doesn't describe her efforts, if any, to retain control of derived works.
Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling -- who wrote her first book on the dole and had no leverage when she signed her first contracts -- was vociferous in protecting how her book was adapted to the screen.
Le Guin might be a better wordsmith, but when it comes to the artistic integrity of protecting one's vision Rowling is miles ahead.
I don't think there will be any changes on this front until this administration is out of office, no matter how much evidence is presented. It's quite unfortunate.
Blaming Bush is political masturbation. You're conveniently forgetting that Clinton wouldn't bring the Kyoto treaty to the Senate when he had the chance -- because it would have seen a landslide defeat. No American politician is going to vote for something that will lose jobs for his/her constituents while giving Chinese competitors a pass.
Politics is about what's possible. Everytime the American left forgets that and veers too far from the center, they get their asses handed to them in an election. Ditto for the right, although they've been less guilty of this in the last decade than the left.
The problem is that if a voting machine is programmed to cheat, it is easy enough to fake a paper receipt.
Wrong. When I voted in Nevada this past election, the machine printed a receipt that I could inspect, but not access. That receipt was deposited in a lock box so that a paper recount could be conducted later if necessary.
That's not how it works with some other state's voting systems, but I'm hard-pressed to understand how Nevada's system is more prone to election fraud than previous, non-computer methods.
Tyler
Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh
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Jef Raskin On The Mac
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· Score: 2, Informative
From what I've read, the closest would probably be those Royale PDAs. He was proposing a simple to use machine that run a small, fixed, set of applications.
Perhaps, but the Canon Cat was the closest product to his vision -- it was his baby.
Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical
Well, if by GUI you mean bit-mapped graphics, then the Canon Cat had a GUI. But I think most people would look askance at calling it a GUI when only one quarter of the WIMP set was used. And character-based menus for applications had been around for a while by then.
Here's how a Cat evangelist describes the interface Raskin thought was optimal:
"The Cat's user interface made this computer unique when compared to other computers. The user interface was based on a simple text editor in which all data was seen as a long stream of text broken into pages. Special keyboard keys allowed the user to invoke various functions. An extra key titled "Use Front" acted as a control key...."
"When you powered on the Cat you were presented with a display that looked like a typewriter with a sheet of paper. Black characters appeared on a white background. A ruler bar appeared at the bottom of the screen...."
"The Leap keys also controlled text selection (indicated by hilighting), deletion, copying, and moving. If the selected text was a mathematical formula one keystroke with a special key calculated the mathematical result and the answer appeared on the screen with a dotted underline overlaying the original formula. If the selected text was a computer program written in either FORTH or 68000 assembly language, then a special key let you execute the program (I don't think many Cat users did any Cat programming). You performed mail merges by selecting columnar text data and pressing another special key. Repetitive command sequences could be automated by assigning commands and text strings to the Cat's numeric keys. One special key let you dial a selected telephone number either for voice or modem communications. Data received from the built-in modem flowed into your text as if you had typed it...."
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Raskin's idea of the ideal user interface boiled down to a souped-up typewriter. Calling it a GUI seems overly charitable.
And don't get me started on the lunacy -- still popular with some Forth programmers -- that you don't really need a file system or file format compatiblity with other computers. Arghh!
A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.
Are you freakin' nuts? What Raskin wanted to create in the original Macintosh project was, essentially, the Canon Cat. No mouse, no GUI, no 32-bit CPU. In short, an information appliance rather than a computer, and something no one would ever recognize as a Macintosh. He lost a power struggle with Jobs early on, when his Mac team was a half-dozen people, and left Apple.
I think history has pretty much spoken on the viability of his design choices, especially the relative success of the Cat vs the Mac's GUI. Ask yourself this, if those leap keys were such a breakthrough in the UI, why hasn't something analogous caught on in the last two decades?
As a last option, if you have a closet, or can make a large enough storage cabinet for your dorm, get a 'long' kvm extension and only have the mouse, keyboard and monitor sitting on the desk, everything else tucked away. Just make sure that the closet does not get too hot, and do not throw dirty clothes and stuff on top of your electronics. So it isn't the best gaming option? So what. you are looking for a peaceful way to get some sleep.
Geez, that's a lot of work. If this guy is so light sensative, why not just recommend he sleep in the closet to avoid those nasty photons? It works great for road noise too!
Sometimes Amazon actually does have the cheapest price (once shipping is figured in)
-- who knew? And those random quotes from Rabindranath Tagore are cool too.
Actually I would say that it's a good example of media presenting it as something science can't explain.
It's a news story, not refereed article. (You can tell because no subscription was required to read it.) What do you expect, a "fair and balanced" reporter's statement that no scientists have presented replicatable explanations -- but they could if they really wanted to?
If you read the article you may note that they have no citations from any of the billion of scientist who are apparently there.
"Citations"? When was the last time you read a scientific article by reputable scientists saying, effectively, "Here's something a lot of people have witnessed and it beats the shit out of us what's happening"?
Certainly, the news that 1/6 of the world's population have become scientists and are visiting this tiny village should be covered in something like Demographics Journal. But even if that article were accepted for publication, the delays mean we won't be able to read about it for another year or two. Thank Sagan we can read authoritative, unrefereed Web sites to get the real story that the news media are afraid to print!
What these people do is a good way to sell more papers.
What more scientific way of refuting data than by impuning the methods of the reporters? I mean, aside from the Sokal and Lomborg affairs, we all know that scientists publish for the purist of motives, right?
Demon-haunted science bigots is more like it. Feh!
Reviewing the list of contributors, it's interesting to note that some of them had already stopped programming back when they were interviewed. So why should we listen to them opine about software development techniques today?
My pet peeve on the list would have to be Jef Raskin, who's far better at self-promotion than actually coding. Had people actually listened to his ideas in the early days of the Macintosh project, they would have delivered a machine without a mouse or other features most people associate with the Mac. (As Andy Hertzfeld puts it, he's not the father of the Macintosh so much as the eccentric uncle.)
However, if you want to hear him repeat the same things he's been saying for the last 20 years, he'll be keynoting the Desktop Linux Summit.
No doubt he'll be beating the horse's skeleton that mice, icons, and the windowing interface are what's holding Linux back on the desktop. (MacOS X be damned!) Using those special "leap" keys that made the Canon Cat so successful, now that's the future!
LUCASFILM REVEALS DETAILS ON NEW "SUPER-TRILOGY" DVD SET
Mill Valley, CA (Reuters) -- Scarcely had the awards celebrations ended for "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" when word leaked on a revised and extended version of the classic film trilogy. It has been confirmed that George Lucas and his wizards have signed up to produce a new, "kid-friendly" version of the fantasy set in Middle Earth. Preliminary work has already begun, and industry experts expect the DVDs to be available in time for the Christmas shopping season.
"Parents should love this new DVD set," enthused Penny Wise, a Lucas spokesperson. "We've toned down the scary parts to make it more acceptable for younger viewers. And test audiences have told us the new, streamlined plot is more understandable."
Critics are already complaining about changes to the story and characters. "We know what we're doing," Wise counters. "We feel we have an excellent grasp of what Tolkien would have created, had he been a contemporary screenwriter instead of a Cambridge don. While George (Lucas) admires the original books, the new version will become 'canon' for the current generation of children." Informed that Tolkien taught at Oxford, not Cambridge, Wise sniffs. "Whatever."
GOLLUM UPGRADED
Perhaps the most controversial change to the epic is a new, "improved" Gollum character. "With all due respect to Andy (Serkis)," an insider explains, "his character was just too scary for our target audience. Robin (Williams) brings a whole new dimension to Gollum. Some of his scenes are hysterically funny!"
And what about early reports that Eddie Murphy had been signed for the role of Gollum? "I can't comment on the particulars of his deal," says another source. "But Eddie was definitely on board with the Gollum revisions. Everybody loved making him portly with floppy ears."
When quizzed on the terms of Murphy's leaving the project, insiders refuse to comment. There are persistent reports that Murphy bolted over a recurring line of dialog: "Meesa loves the precious!"
MORE UPBEAT ENDING
Other changes in the works:
* As homage to Chuck Jones (of cartoon fame), Gandalf's fall into the balrog pit is now punctuated by a moment's teetering on the edge, followed by a barely audible cry of "Mother" as he falls into darkness.
* In his greatly-truncated final scene, Boromir now sheaths his sword, sticks out his chin, and taunts the orc leader, "Take your best shot!"
* Trimming both running time and violence, the new finale features all the creatures of Middle Earth -- humans, elves, hobbits, and orcs -- joining hands and singing to celebrate the destruction of the ring. An alternate version of the tune will be available on the audio CD, sung by Celine Dion.
Other aspects of the new project could not be confirmed at deadline. Groundbreaking ceremonies are expected this fall on a new "Mount Doom Adventure" ride at Walt Disney World in Florida.
Peter Jackson, the famous director of the original films, could not be reached for comment. Officially, he is in seclusion working on his "King Kong" project. His publicist refused to comment on reports the director had taken to drinking heavily.
Note to editors: story embargoed until April 1, 2004
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Same topic, slightly different rules
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Debugging
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· Score: 1
Several posters have pointed out useful rules that didn't make the book authors list, such as comparison with a known good example or explaining the problem to someone else.
It's also worth noting that some of this terrain has also been codified into the "Universal Troubleshooting Process" here.
The article refers to a forthcoming IDC report, which specifically differentiates between the server and desktop markets.
Also, assuming they keep to their previous methodology, they'll be reporting on their estimates of machines that shipped with Linux already installed. This obviously underreports overall Linux market share, discounting people who convert new or old machines to either Linux or dual-boot status.
Someone in Bush's whitehouse compromises an agent whose mission involves intercepting terrorists trying to buy weapons of mass destruction, compromising a front company set up by the CIA for such purpose, and you think it is the same thing.
Geez, there are so many assumptions in that statement, it's hard to know where to begin.
1. "Someone in Bush's whitehouse" -- Unproven. Until the investigation reaches a conclusion on that point, you're jumping ahead of the facts.
2. "compromises an agent" -- Reports have indicated it was common knowledge in the Beltway cocktail circuit who Wilson's wife was, which is hardly the mark of Jane Bond, covert agent. Since Plame and Wilson have two young children, it is not unreasonable for a gossip to conclude she's staying in the country to care for them. That assumption alone, or direct proof that Plame hadn't left the country in 5 years, would clear anyone of legal liability. You can't be disclosed as a secret agent if you're not keeping it a secret or going abroad anymore.
3. "whose mission involves intercepting terrorists trying to buy weapons of mass destruction": The last time I checked, no one at CIA had confirmed anything about her duties. Novak has indicated that the CIA didn't wave him off the story when he called to confirm, nor did they state lives would be endangered.
In short, nothing's been proven, including the supposition that a crime has been committed. And given the way reporters guard their sources, it's unlikely anything will be proven unless the leaker decides to confess.
Tyler
Re:A nit on the "dead white males" section...
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Human Accomplishment
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· Score: 1
...but nearly every achievement can probably be traced back to the man's mother and her wise care and raising of him. Man affects the present. It is the teaching of the mother in the home that affects the future.
OK, so every time I run into some shiftless SOB who isn't accomplishing anything with his life, I can blame his mother for the results, right?
Since people who accomplish a great deal are vastly outnumbered by those who don't, it sounds like you're really trashing the mothers of the world. That's harsh, man.
Slashdot Mirror
I work daily with humongous text files. I have found no other editor that performs as well when you work with text files that are in several gigabytes range.
Not in Debian (or maybe all of Linux?) it doesn't.
Sorry, I view that link you gave as less of a bug report than a Twit Alert. Seriously, when was the last time you ran across a 2.7 GB file of nulls and thought of it as a text file to be edited?
The relevant section of the Vim docs explains that the maximum length of a line and the maximum number of lines per file depends on the local size of long integers, typically 32 bits. So if your box is limited to 2G lines per file and 2GB per line, is it any wonder there's an error message upon encountering 2.7 GB of nulls?
This evening I edited a 3.1 GB text file (generated from the dictionaries on my Ubuntu 8.04.2, AKA Debian Linux box) without any problems at all. 334M lines of text, averaging what, 9 characters per line? So to run into vim's limit I'd have to be editing close to 20 GB of dictionary words. Or for 90-character log file line lengths, somewhere in the vicinity of 200 GB of text.
So. no, I don't think that special case of a null file warrants real-world concern.
Tyler
"sed" - could work, but why bother if vim works? Personally, I can never remember the sed syntax.
*sputters* You can't remember the sed syntax? It's the same as vi.
Mostly likely, if you're editting a several gig text file, you're doing bulk edits, not single edits. ala:
A perfectly good point, unfortunately marred by the remarks that follow.
Mostly likely, if you're editting a several gig text file, you're doing bulk edits, not single edits.
You're assuming conditions not previously specified. What if the poster only changes hamburger to cheeseburger depending on the values of relish and pickle on nearby lines? Are you one of those manly men who use sed to repair mismatched braces in your source files?
My point being that if the previous posters in the subthread find vim satisfactory for the problems they're thinking of, it might be because they understand their typical problems better than you do.
And since vi is just a fancy tui on top of ed, you already know sed.
Why bother? Just because vi can edit large files, it's still painfully slow. Large and/or many edits are very slow to apply and undo. The same commands executed in sed can be done order of magnitude faster.
Yes, if they're bulk edits. But it depends on the context. The last time I looked through the sed man pages I missed the part that covered "query changes" and "undo".
Finally, your experiences with the performance of vi are pretty much irrelevant to a thread on vim. I just used vim on a 3.1 GB text file this evening in a test. Loading and saving the file took a while, but once the file had loaded moving from one end to another, searching for strings, making edits, etc. were pretty damn fast. Not appreciably slower than I've experienced with 100k text files, in other words.
Tyler
Others have remarked on the dubious idea of equating a decline in watching television with a "cognitive surplus" that will transform society.
My pet peeve lies with Shirky's Web 2.0 presentation and his taking huge licenses with history. He starts off a claim about the importance of gin in helping Brits get over their future shock at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and links it to his point thusly:
One big problem with that assessment is that the chronology doesn't fit his thesis. Municipal public libraries, for example, started appearing in the US and UK in the early 1600s -- a century and a half before the Industrial Revolution. The British gin boom had a lot to do with tax policies and occurred at least a generation before the IR. And if by elected leaders he means an elected head of state (the House of Commons idea had been around long before the IR), it seems a tenuous link at best. The US Constitution is in roughly the same time frame as the start of the IR, but the new country was hardly overwhelmed with and reacting to issues of industrialization.
My conclusion: if he has such a loose grasp of history, why should I give any credence to his take on the future?
Tyler
Verizon has probably already looked at the situation and realized it's not cost-effective for them to compete for small holes in their coverage -- especially if the holes are covered by another carrier (presumably the GSM alternative you mentioned). Companies make money by efficiently grabbing the low-hanging fruit or (sometimes) by charging a premium to serve a niche market.
When I moved in with my girlfriend, I discovered I was a half block from usable service for my carrier. Rather than switch to her carrier or continue bitching about mine, I eventually just stopped using my mobile phone -- and if anything my quality of life improved. YMMV.
Some of us just aren't meant to part of a mob, no matter how smart or hip Rheingold claims it is.
Tyler
Speaking of the normal mode, I often prefer that to the page layout. OO doesn't have it.
You must be basing your comments on an older version of OO. If you toggle View/Print Layout, you'll find yourself in our beloved "normal" view.
The OO 2.0 betas make page layout the default on opening docs. I personally find this a minor vexation but understand it being a good choice for many other users. And pressing <Alt-V><Enter> when I first open a document hasn't proven a particular hardship.
By contrast, there's only one thing that I think makes more sense in OpenOffice, which is page layout in the format menu instead of the file menu. However, even that only makes sense from the view of the application itself, and the fact that it violates the conventions of *every other application I can think of that has page setup* sorta outweighs that.
So you're saying that if all the other kids jump off a cliff... ;-)
Tyler
Read Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky
I agree with your general point. For this topic area (programming, that is) I'd suggest Sklansky's Theory of Poker to be more relevant and, well, more theoretical.
Tyler
The point of bluffing is to convince the other players that you ARE bluffing when you've actually got a good hand.
Mmm, no. Bluffing is a deception tool, and you're describing just one use of it.
In a no-limit hold'em tournament situation, as the parent article describes, toward the end the blinds are so high that you're forced to bluff from late position just to steal those blinds and avoid losing ground. In those situations you can have a passable drawing hand but you'd really just as soon other players not call.
Tyler
It's one thing to offer improvements -- another choice -- on existing ways of doing things, and quite another to insist on replacing them entirely.
Go visit the Archy/THE site and click on the link for the "technical documentation." Then ask yourself why -- on a freaking Website fer chrissakes! -- you're presented with an embedded straight text document that shuns links and anchors and instead offers the advice that you can navigate by searching for the section heading titles. This is progress?
That's the fundamental problem with Raskin's approach: he consistently pretends that people don't already have skills and investments in the existing infrastructure. Adobe is going to completely reengineer their products so they're available for Archy users? Gimme a freaking break!
Finally, while skimming the puff piece on the funding, I realized how truly bizarre the logic was to find this on Slashdot. It was as if the editors were saying, "Hey, if Linus had gotten a big corporate grant back when he was a student, then Linux would have really become popular!"
Oh wait... never mind.
Tyler
Seems the neocons and religious-zealot-conservatives are just using this as a way of stealing the party away from the original republicans who wanted government out of these issues.
OK, I'm stumped. How does a ban on federal funding for new stem cell lines amount to government intruding into these areas?
After all, the classic "original" Republican line has been that abortion is a matter for states and individuals to decide, not the federal government. How is a policy that puts the onus for new stem cell lines on states and private companies so different?
TylerCurious. So you think because Le Guin was more original she has less of an obligation to protect her work? Le Guin is the one who raised the issue of responsibility to the work in the first place. So far as I can tell, when it came to actions she was happy to cash the check and snipe afterwards.
TylerFunny thing. Le Guin writes this Slate piece and spends far more time complaining about the producers not sharing her political agenda than she does addressing any narrative changes. She ends it, however, with the admonishment that freedom includes responsibility. In other words, the producers should have made a miniseries closer to her work and wishes. It doesn't describe her efforts, if any, to retain control of derived works.
Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling -- who wrote her first book on the dole and had no leverage when she signed her first contracts -- was vociferous in protecting how her book was adapted to the screen.
Le Guin might be a better wordsmith, but when it comes to the artistic integrity of protecting one's vision Rowling is miles ahead.
Tyler
Blaming Bush is political masturbation. You're conveniently forgetting that Clinton wouldn't bring the Kyoto treaty to the Senate when he had the chance -- because it would have seen a landslide defeat. No American politician is going to vote for something that will lose jobs for his/her constituents while giving Chinese competitors a pass.
Politics is about what's possible. Everytime the American left forgets that and veers too far from the center, they get their asses handed to them in an election. Ditto for the right, although they've been less guilty of this in the last decade than the left.
TylerWrong. When I voted in Nevada this past election, the machine printed a receipt that I could inspect, but not access. That receipt was deposited in a lock box so that a paper recount could be conducted later if necessary.
That's not how it works with some other state's voting systems, but I'm hard-pressed to understand how Nevada's system is more prone to election fraud than previous, non-computer methods.
TylerFrom what I've read, the closest would probably be those Royale PDAs. He was proposing a simple to use machine that run a small, fixed, set of applications.
Perhaps, but the Canon Cat was the closest product to his vision -- it was his baby.
Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical
Well, if by GUI you mean bit-mapped graphics, then the Canon Cat had a GUI. But I think most people would look askance at calling it a GUI when only one quarter of the WIMP set was used. And character-based menus for applications had been around for a while by then.
Here's how a Cat evangelist describes the interface Raskin thought was optimal:
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Raskin's idea of the ideal user interface boiled down to a souped-up typewriter. Calling it a GUI seems overly charitable.
And don't get me started on the lunacy -- still popular with some Forth programmers -- that you don't really need a file system or file format compatiblity with other computers. Arghh!
Tyler
A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.
Are you freakin' nuts? What Raskin wanted to create in the original Macintosh project was, essentially, the Canon Cat. No mouse, no GUI, no 32-bit CPU. In short, an information appliance rather than a computer, and something no one would ever recognize as a Macintosh. He lost a power struggle with Jobs early on, when his Mac team was a half-dozen people, and left Apple.
Viz, www.folklore.org
I think history has pretty much spoken on the viability of his design choices, especially the relative success of the Cat vs the Mac's GUI. Ask yourself this, if those leap keys were such a breakthrough in the UI, why hasn't something analogous caught on in the last two decades?
Tyler
As a last option, if you have a closet, or can make a large enough storage cabinet for your dorm, get a 'long' kvm extension and only have the mouse, keyboard and monitor sitting on the desk, everything else tucked away. Just make sure that the closet does not get too hot, and do not throw dirty clothes and stuff on top of your electronics. So it isn't the best gaming option? So what. you are looking for a peaceful way to get some sleep.
Geez, that's a lot of work. If this guy is so light sensative, why not just recommend he sleep in the closet to avoid those nasty photons? It works great for road noise too!
Tyler
it's hard to beat good ol' AddAll.
Sometimes Amazon actually does have the cheapest price (once shipping is figured in) -- who knew? And those random quotes from Rabindranath Tagore are cool too.
Tyler
Actually I would say that it's a good example of media presenting it as something science can't explain.
It's a news story, not refereed article. (You can tell because no subscription was required to read it.) What do you expect, a "fair and balanced" reporter's statement that no scientists have presented replicatable explanations -- but they could if they really wanted to?
If you read the article you may note that they have no citations from any of the billion of scientist who are apparently there.
"Citations"? When was the last time you read a scientific article by reputable scientists saying, effectively, "Here's something a lot of people have witnessed and it beats the shit out of us what's happening"?
Certainly, the news that 1/6 of the world's population have become scientists and are visiting this tiny village should be covered in something like Demographics Journal. But even if that article were accepted for publication, the delays mean we won't be able to read about it for another year or two. Thank Sagan we can read authoritative, unrefereed Web sites to get the real story that the news media are afraid to print!
What these people do is a good way to sell more papers.
What more scientific way of refuting data than by impuning the methods of the reporters? I mean, aside from the Sokal and Lomborg affairs, we all know that scientists publish for the purist of motives, right?
Demon-haunted science bigots is more like it. Feh!
Tyler
Reviewing the list of contributors, it's interesting to note that some of them had already stopped programming back when they were interviewed. So why should we listen to them opine about software development techniques today?
My pet peeve on the list would have to be Jef Raskin, who's far better at self-promotion than actually coding. Had people actually listened to his ideas in the early days of the Macintosh project, they would have delivered a machine without a mouse or other features most people associate with the Mac. (As Andy Hertzfeld puts it, he's not the father of the Macintosh so much as the eccentric uncle.)
However, if you want to hear him repeat the same things he's been saying for the last 20 years, he'll be keynoting the Desktop Linux Summit. No doubt he'll be beating the horse's skeleton that mice, icons, and the windowing interface are what's holding Linux back on the desktop. (MacOS X be damned!) Using those special "leap" keys that made the Canon Cat so successful, now that's the future!
Tyler
Why have we let America get so far behind?
It's only a few time zones. What's the big deal?
You do realize Nokia is based in Finland, right?
Tyler
LUCASFILM REVEALS DETAILS ON NEW "SUPER-TRILOGY" DVD SET
Mill Valley, CA (Reuters) -- Scarcely had the awards celebrations ended for "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" when word leaked on a revised and extended version of the classic film trilogy. It has been confirmed that George Lucas and his wizards have signed up to produce a new, "kid-friendly" version of the fantasy set in Middle Earth. Preliminary work has already begun, and industry experts expect the DVDs to be available in time for the Christmas shopping season.
"Parents should love this new DVD set," enthused Penny Wise, a Lucas spokesperson. "We've toned down the scary parts to make it more acceptable for younger viewers. And test audiences have told us the new, streamlined plot is more understandable."
Critics are already complaining about changes to the story and characters. "We know what we're doing," Wise counters. "We feel we have an excellent grasp of what Tolkien would have created, had he been a contemporary screenwriter instead of a Cambridge don. While George (Lucas) admires the original books, the new version will become 'canon' for the current generation of children." Informed that Tolkien taught at Oxford, not Cambridge, Wise sniffs. "Whatever."
GOLLUM UPGRADED
Perhaps the most controversial change to the epic is a new, "improved" Gollum character. "With all due respect to Andy (Serkis)," an insider explains, "his character was just too scary for our target audience. Robin (Williams) brings a whole new dimension to Gollum. Some of his scenes are hysterically funny!"
And what about early reports that Eddie Murphy had been signed for the role of Gollum? "I can't comment on the particulars of his deal," says another source. "But Eddie was definitely on board with the Gollum revisions. Everybody loved making him portly with floppy ears."
When quizzed on the terms of Murphy's leaving the project, insiders refuse to comment. There are persistent reports that Murphy bolted over a recurring line of dialog: "Meesa loves the precious!"
MORE UPBEAT ENDING
Other changes in the works:
* As homage to Chuck Jones (of cartoon fame), Gandalf's fall into the balrog pit is now punctuated by a moment's teetering on the edge, followed by a barely audible cry of "Mother" as he falls into darkness.
* In his greatly-truncated final scene, Boromir now sheaths his sword, sticks out his chin, and taunts the orc leader, "Take your best shot!"
* Trimming both running time and violence, the new finale features all the creatures of Middle Earth -- humans, elves, hobbits, and orcs -- joining hands and singing to celebrate the destruction of the ring. An alternate version of the tune will be available on the audio CD, sung by Celine Dion.
Other aspects of the new project could not be confirmed at deadline. Groundbreaking ceremonies are expected this fall on a new "Mount Doom Adventure" ride at Walt Disney World in Florida.
Peter Jackson, the famous director of the original films, could not be reached for comment. Officially, he is in seclusion working on his "King Kong" project. His publicist refused to comment on reports the director had taken to drinking heavily.
Note to editors: story embargoed until April 1, 2004
-30-
Several posters have pointed out useful rules that didn't make the book authors list, such as comparison with a known good example or explaining the problem to someone else.
It's also worth noting that some of this terrain has also been codified into the "Universal Troubleshooting Process" here.
Tyler
The article refers to a forthcoming IDC report, which specifically differentiates between the server and desktop markets.
Also, assuming they keep to their previous methodology, they'll be reporting on their estimates of machines that shipped with Linux already installed. This obviously underreports overall Linux market share, discounting people who convert new or old machines to either Linux or dual-boot status.
Tyler
Someone in Bush's whitehouse compromises an agent whose mission involves intercepting terrorists trying to buy weapons of mass destruction, compromising a front company set up by the CIA for such purpose, and you think it is the same thing.
Geez, there are so many assumptions in that statement, it's hard to know where to begin.
1. "Someone in Bush's whitehouse" -- Unproven. Until the investigation reaches a conclusion on that point, you're jumping ahead of the facts.
2. "compromises an agent" -- Reports have indicated it was common knowledge in the Beltway cocktail circuit who Wilson's wife was, which is hardly the mark of Jane Bond, covert agent. Since Plame and Wilson have two young children, it is not unreasonable for a gossip to conclude she's staying in the country to care for them. That assumption alone, or direct proof that Plame hadn't left the country in 5 years, would clear anyone of legal liability. You can't be disclosed as a secret agent if you're not keeping it a secret or going abroad anymore.
3. "whose mission involves intercepting terrorists trying to buy weapons of mass destruction": The last time I checked, no one at CIA had confirmed anything about her duties. Novak has indicated that the CIA didn't wave him off the story when he called to confirm, nor did they state lives would be endangered.
In short, nothing's been proven, including the supposition that a crime has been committed. And given the way reporters guard their sources, it's unlikely anything will be proven unless the leaker decides to confess.
Tyler
OK, so every time I run into some shiftless SOB who isn't accomplishing anything with his life, I can blame his mother for the results, right?
Since people who accomplish a great deal are vastly outnumbered by those who don't, it sounds like you're really trashing the mothers of the world. That's harsh, man.
Tyler