Not what you can get them to buy. If you have a product that people actually *need*, they will buy it. For example, if I don't buy food for a day, I really, really notice that I need food, so I go and buy some. If you need to pay for someone's attention in order to get them to buy your product, chances are that your product isn't something they really need.
My point here is that I have trouble getting worked up about how people have trouble getting other people to buy junk they don't need. Maybe they'll clue in and start producing something useful instead.
This allows you to type on 1/2 of the keyboard? Anyway, your point is well taken - I could easily do a hack to let my mother do mirror-image typing on the right half of her existing keyboard. Thanks for the reality check.:')
This is really cool, but the first thing that comes to mind as an application for it is my mother, who had a stroke a few years back and lost the use of her left hand. So this keyboard would make a lot of sense for her, because typing on a full-sized keyboard is actually hard for her. Unfortunately, it's handed - it would work nicely with the left hand, but not so nicely with the right hand.:'(
This is not to say that it's a bad thing - just that it would be cool if they came out with a mirror image version for righties.
The nice lucite apple keyboards seem to be highly susceptible to key swapping, as is the keyboard on the Apple Titanium. I haven't tried swapping the keys on my Sony VAIO yet.
My girlfriend had a real problem with RSI on her wrists. She switched to Dvorak and things got a lot better.
WRT mechanical typewriters and ae, rt, io, etc, if you type on a mechanical typewriter, you'll see that it's actually quite hard to type two keys with adjacent fingers of the same hand in quick succession. One would have to take a close look at a very old mechanical typewriter, or maybe read the patent application, to figure out why QWERTY was chosen.
The thing that makes an operating system or application successful, at least by my definition, is whether or not people are using it. The problem with boycotting non-free platforms is that it closes down a channel for acquiring new users. In the case of a GUI like OpenMotif, I'm not sure how much this matters, but I can tell you that if it were an application, I'd be disappointed.
I provide support for a small Dharma group that does a lot of work translating texts from Tibetan to English. As a consequence, almost everybody in the group has a computer. We even have an IS policy: everybody has to run Windows. (Needless to say, I did not set this policy!:')
We have an additional problem - we have all vowed to behave ethically, even to people who are not behaving ethically towards us. A consequence of this is that I have to be very careful about how I copy software. Even though we aren't exactly rolling in cash, I won't pirate software.
This gives me a nice in for showcasing the good qualities of free software. I grabbed a copy of abiword the other day and installed it on one of the nuns' computers, and she was really excited - it's a free piece of software that can read Word documents and can be used for real work. So she doesn't have to spend $300 on a copy of Word. Furthermore, because the software is open source, and already supports Unicode, I am pretty sure I can modify it to support Tony Duff's GPL'd Tibetan fonts that the Trace Foundation recently released.
So this means that we can ship a free, WYSIWYG Tibetan word processor along with all the Tibetan documents we'll be sending around. This is *very* exciting. It's also good for the Free Software community, because it means that lots of people are suddently going to start using a piece of Free Software. They'll be running it on Windows at first, but as time goes on I'm hoping to wean our group off of Windows and onto Linux or NetBSD.
The end result: more market share for Open Source software. The cause: Open Source software for Windows. We'll see what happens...
The "free" in free software refers to freedom, not free of charge. You are free to copy the software. That's free. If you want high-quality, responsive support (i.e., not what you get on the free mailing list), you may be asked to pay for it. Does RedHat ship you CDs for free? No, but they do let you download the software for free. Same deal with ISC, only the thing for which we charge may turn out to be different. *shrug*
BIND 4 and BIND 8 are widely acknowledged, not only by people outside of ISC, but by people inside of ISC, as a maintenance nightmare. This is why the ISC rewrote BIND 9 from scratch. So if you want to do a code fork, I think it would be better to start from, e.g., BIND 9 than BIND 4/8. But I really hope that there won't be a code fork.
With respect to monoculture, there are at least four DNS server implementations out there - BIND 4/8, BIND 9, djbdns and Microsoft. If you're afraid of the BIND monoculture and you're running BIND 8, you do have alternatives. Personally I run BIND 9 on my alpha, which takes care of the monoculture issue for me.:')
With respect to questioning Paul's motivation, please think carefully. Paul and the ISC are supporting BIND 8, even though we have a code base that's much more supportable in BIND 9, because he knows that not everybody can just up and switch to BIND 9 right away.
It's a lot of extra trouble to support BIND 8. Nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to pay for it. You heard from the guy at Mandrake - he's offended that anybody would even suggest that they could contribute monetarily to the maintenance of BIND 8. Despite this, when problems crop up with BIND 8, we do our best to fix them in a timely manner, with a very good track record so far.
I don't know if the proposed revenue stream will amount to enough to hire an engineer, but maybe it will. As far as I can see it (and I'm not an insider on this because I'm a DHCP hacker, not a BIND hacker), the proposal doesn't change when problems will be announced to the public. Paul was quoted in this article as saying that the ISC was interacting with vendors through a private channel (CERT) about this bug - just not a very handy private channel.
Even so, the CERT advisory andthe fixed versions of BIND 4 and 8 came out before the BugTraq advisory. You can argue about whether or not the ISC did the right thing in not announcing the exploit on BugTraq before there was a fix, but what the ISC did looks pretty ethical to me, and it looks like the Open Source community got a pretty good deal.
Naturally I'm a bit biased, but frankly after all the work I put into ISC software, and all the work I know Paul puts into it, not to mention the work all the other ISC people do, it's kind of sad to see how willing folks are to accept the idea that we're rotten incompetent villains out to make a fast buck at the expense of our peers.
I really have trouble believing that a Linux+Apache combination is that slow. Think about it: a day is 86400 seconds. So that means that at worst, they're handling one hit every four seconds, and at best one hit about every.86 seconds. This is a really unbelievable amount of time to spend serving one hit on a static web page - it's pretty unbelievable even if you have a huge DB query going on for every hit. If these numbers were accurate, it would indeed be cause for embarrassment, but I doubt that they are.
I don't want to accuse Dell of malfeasance, but if they really benchmarked these numbers, they must have badly misconfigured Apache. My guess is that they had Apache doing reverse DNS lookups on every query, and the queries all had to time out because there was no name server responding to them. That's the only way I can imagine that you could get such bad numbers.
It depends on why you're helping them. Going out and actually seeing people in need face to face and then helping them with things they need is a powerful experience. Sitting in a back office somewhere hacking PERL scripts pretty much isn't. Both have value. I'd suggest that if you're interested, you give both a try and *then* draw some conclusions.
...that needs some help getting spanish language software set up so that the kids can learn to use computers. They also need help setting up the computers in a safe power environment - mexican power isn't very stable. If you're seriously interested, send me email. Please don't just ping me out of curiousity - if everybody does that it'll take more time than me just helping them on my own...:'}
Actually, LISP has been used in a commercial environment. Remember the discussion about Natural Language patents the other day? Well, my former employer, Natural Language, Inc., had a complete english language interpreter. You could type in a query, and it would grok the query, spit it back in english in its own words, generate an SQL query from the english, do the query, and print the result either as a table or, if the result was a single value, as an english sentence.
It was unbelievably cool. It was written in their own variant of MACLISP that they'd written, complete with a compiler that produced C code. Apparently the product is still available in some form from Microsoft (sigh), and I assume it's still written in LISP, so I would say that LISP is in fact a language that's used to develop commercial products.
This natural language interpreter could obviously have been written in C, but whether it could have been gotten to market in time to be of any use is entirely questionable. LISP's ability to manipulate strings of data (not strings of text) in a free and easy way is what enabled that application - without this, it would have been theoretically possible but not practically possible.
What you don't see much, and rightly so, is stuff written in LISP that would be better written in C. You also don't see a lot of programs that, while they would be easier to write in LISP than in C, aren't a lot easier to write in LISP than in C. IMHO, that's too bad, because it means that a lot of geeks that could benefit, as I did, from being exposed to LISP never have that opportunity.
Re:Why is LISP superior?
on
RMS The Coder
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· Score: 5
Some reasons I can think of off the top of my head:
LISP has a completely regular syntax (well, let's say Scheme, since there are some disgusting hacks in Common Lisp). PERL has a syntax from Hell.
LISP does stupid stuff for you - for example, you don't have to keep track of garbage, as you do with C. Perl doesn't garbage collect either (AFAIK), but it does at least have automatic memory allocation.
LISP has a very different typing model from either PERL or C - every object has the potential to have any possible type. Lists are first-class objects, so you don't have to write yet another stupid list traversal routine every time you want to make a list of things, and you can build trees out of lists. This turns out to be very powerful once you understand it, but it's a little hard to wrap your brain around at first.
Unfortunately, in order to really appreciate the power (and the shortcomings) of LISP, you have to learn it - I can't really make a point-for-point comparison here that would convince you of anything. And anybody who claims LISP is a panacea is wrong - it just makes a very different set of tradeoffs than PERL or C.
I would suggest actuallty trying to write some code in raw Scheme, not emacs LISP, that does some sort of interesting data structure manipulation, preferably recursively. Maybe pick up a copy of SICP, The Little Schemer or The Seasoned Schemer.
This very discussion in which we are all participating would not have been possible without the Internet. Widely available accounts that have not been processed by the pablum generating news media are possible because of the Internet. Whether you like Jon Katz or not, the Internet is having an effect on the information that people can get about situations like this.
I don't really know what this protest was about, personally, because I heard of it for the first time today here on slashdot, but I am happy to have had access to the eyewitness accounts, and they will affect how I read news stories about this that I encounter in the mainstream media, so he's clearly not completely wrong.
And is not making corrections likewise void of self-nature?
No, I'm sure that particular thing exists from its own side.:')
I'd never heard prajna paramita translated as heart of wisdom before, although that makes some sense. I'd thought that the translation was the ultimate wisdom, or perfection of wisdom. Sigh. So what's the word-for-word translation of Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya? The translation I have here says "The Lady of Conquest, the Exalted Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom."
BTW, if you're interested in english translations of the ACIP texts, you can find some of them, particularly including the Diamond Cutter Sutra, in the courses that are available at the ACI web site.
It's not a matter of prejudice at all. More a matter of history. We're taught at ACI that the reason it's called the Diamond Cutter Sutra, and not just the Diamond Sutra, is because while diamond is the closest thing to emptiness that one can encounter when experiencing deceptive reality, it isn't even close to the ultimate reality.
I've only studied Tibetan Buddhism seriously, so I don't really know what non-Tibetan lineages call the Sutra. However, I do know how my lineage represents the history of the Sutra, and that's what I'm talking about here.
BTW, bear in mind that there are actually quite a few Tibetan lineages, not just one. My teacher's lineage is Gelugpa, which is the same lineage that His Holiness the Dalai Lama comes from. The other lineages, Tibetan or otherwise, aren't "wrong" - they just have different approaches to Buddhism that work well for different practitioners.
The idea of a prejudiced Buddhist is kind of sad - one of the first things we're taught is how utterly stupid it is to ever judge someone else. I wish I were better able to take this lesson to heart, but regardless of my success at avoiding judging others, I think it's something that all Buddhists of all lineages should keep in mind with respect to other lineages, Buddhist or not.
When I tried to follow the suggested link, I got a certificate warning. The certificate appears to have been signed by Verisign, but the version of Netscape I'm running (4.5) doesn't recognize it. Anybody know what's going on here?
Of course, the title is empty of any nature of its own, so maybe I shouldn't be making corrections...:')
The Diamond Cutter Sutra is one of the main Buddhist teachings on Emptiness. You can get it in Tibetan, along with a lot of other Buddhist texts in Tibetan at The Asian Classics Input Project. Yes, that's right, it's available on the web, and also in CD form. Ain't technology wonderful?
"Everybody" wants to do this kind of stuff. If you approach an established group wanting in, you're likely to be their gofer, rather than getting to do Cool Stuff. If you want to do Cool Stuff, get a 500Mhz PIII, find some like-minded folk (there are plenty in NYC) and just do it. Film the Rare Glitch Project or something. Once you've proven you can do something and gotten something screened at an indie film festival, then it will be much easier to get in the door of an established house if that's still what you want.
I say this not as an expert on the film industry, BTW, but as an accidental expert on publishing, in which talented newbies face a similar set of problems.
Yes, this is a problem. The mozilla team is apparently aware of it, too, because they've come out with a book (or someone has - I shouldn't presume it was the mozilla team itself) that describes everything you need to know about the project.
Yah, open source is hard to get up to speed on, but in fact if you start doing it, you'll find that it's often easier than you think, and the more you do it, the quicker you can come up to speed the next time. So don't be shy - jump in and go for it!
Re:FTP (this doesn't match my experience)
on
SuSE Coming on DVD
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· Score: 1
My experience installing off a CD in my DVD-ROM drive is that it's remarkably fast. Possibly you aren't getting good throughput from your CD-ROM drive for some reason. DVDs are almost an order of magnitude more dense than CDs, so I would expect an even higher transfer rate from a DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
My point here is that I have trouble getting worked up about how people have trouble getting other people to buy junk they don't need. Maybe they'll clue in and start producing something useful instead.
This allows you to type on 1/2 of the keyboard? Anyway, your point is well taken - I could easily do a hack to let my mother do mirror-image typing on the right half of her existing keyboard. Thanks for the reality check. :')
This is not to say that it's a bad thing - just that it would be cool if they came out with a mirror image version for righties.
The nice lucite apple keyboards seem to be highly susceptible to key swapping, as is the keyboard on the Apple Titanium. I haven't tried swapping the keys on my Sony VAIO yet.
WRT mechanical typewriters and ae, rt, io, etc, if you type on a mechanical typewriter, you'll see that it's actually quite hard to type two keys with adjacent fingers of the same hand in quick succession. One would have to take a close look at a very old mechanical typewriter, or maybe read the patent application, to figure out why QWERTY was chosen.
Hee hee! That's a good one - I'll have to see what she thinks of it. :')
I provide support for a small Dharma group that does a lot of work translating texts from Tibetan to English. As a consequence, almost everybody in the group has a computer. We even have an IS policy: everybody has to run Windows. (Needless to say, I did not set this policy! :')
We have an additional problem - we have all vowed to behave ethically, even to people who are not behaving ethically towards us. A consequence of this is that I have to be very careful about how I copy software. Even though we aren't exactly rolling in cash, I won't pirate software.
This gives me a nice in for showcasing the good qualities of free software. I grabbed a copy of abiword the other day and installed it on one of the nuns' computers, and she was really excited - it's a free piece of software that can read Word documents and can be used for real work. So she doesn't have to spend $300 on a copy of Word. Furthermore, because the software is open source, and already supports Unicode, I am pretty sure I can modify it to support Tony Duff's GPL'd Tibetan fonts that the Trace Foundation recently released.
So this means that we can ship a free, WYSIWYG Tibetan word processor along with all the Tibetan documents we'll be sending around. This is *very* exciting. It's also good for the Free Software community, because it means that lots of people are suddently going to start using a piece of Free Software. They'll be running it on Windows at first, but as time goes on I'm hoping to wean our group off of Windows and onto Linux or NetBSD.
The end result: more market share for Open Source software. The cause: Open Source software for Windows. We'll see what happens...
The "free" in free software refers to freedom, not free of charge. You are free to copy the software. That's free. If you want high-quality, responsive support (i.e., not what you get on the free mailing list), you may be asked to pay for it. Does RedHat ship you CDs for free? No, but they do let you download the software for free. Same deal with ISC, only the thing for which we charge may turn out to be different. *shrug*
With respect to monoculture, there are at least four DNS server implementations out there - BIND 4/8, BIND 9, djbdns and Microsoft. If you're afraid of the BIND monoculture and you're running BIND 8, you do have alternatives. Personally I run BIND 9 on my alpha, which takes care of the monoculture issue for me. :')
With respect to questioning Paul's motivation, please think carefully. Paul and the ISC are supporting BIND 8, even though we have a code base that's much more supportable in BIND 9, because he knows that not everybody can just up and switch to BIND 9 right away.
It's a lot of extra trouble to support BIND 8. Nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to pay for it. You heard from the guy at Mandrake - he's offended that anybody would even suggest that they could contribute monetarily to the maintenance of BIND 8. Despite this, when problems crop up with BIND 8, we do our best to fix them in a timely manner, with a very good track record so far.
I don't know if the proposed revenue stream will amount to enough to hire an engineer, but maybe it will. As far as I can see it (and I'm not an insider on this because I'm a DHCP hacker, not a BIND hacker), the proposal doesn't change when problems will be announced to the public. Paul was quoted in this article as saying that the ISC was interacting with vendors through a private channel (CERT) about this bug - just not a very handy private channel.
Even so, the CERT advisory andthe fixed versions of BIND 4 and 8 came out before the BugTraq advisory. You can argue about whether or not the ISC did the right thing in not announcing the exploit on BugTraq before there was a fix, but what the ISC did looks pretty ethical to me, and it looks like the Open Source community got a pretty good deal.
Naturally I'm a bit biased, but frankly after all the work I put into ISC software, and all the work I know Paul puts into it, not to mention the work all the other ISC people do, it's kind of sad to see how willing folks are to accept the idea that we're rotten incompetent villains out to make a fast buck at the expense of our peers.
I don't want to accuse Dell of malfeasance, but if they really benchmarked these numbers, they must have badly misconfigured Apache. My guess is that they had Apache doing reverse DNS lookups on every query, and the queries all had to time out because there was no name server responding to them. That's the only way I can imagine that you could get such bad numbers.
It depends on why you're helping them. Going out and actually seeing people in need face to face and then helping them with things they need is a powerful experience. Sitting in a back office somewhere hacking PERL scripts pretty much isn't. Both have value. I'd suggest that if you're interested, you give both a try and *then* draw some conclusions.
...that needs some help getting spanish language software set up so that the kids can learn to use computers. They also need help setting up the computers in a safe power environment - mexican power isn't very stable. If you're seriously interested, send me email. Please don't just ping me out of curiousity - if everybody does that it'll take more time than me just helping them on my own... :'}
It was unbelievably cool. It was written in their own variant of MACLISP that they'd written, complete with a compiler that produced C code. Apparently the product is still available in some form from Microsoft (sigh), and I assume it's still written in LISP, so I would say that LISP is in fact a language that's used to develop commercial products.
This natural language interpreter could obviously have been written in C, but whether it could have been gotten to market in time to be of any use is entirely questionable. LISP's ability to manipulate strings of data (not strings of text) in a free and easy way is what enabled that application - without this, it would have been theoretically possible but not practically possible.
What you don't see much, and rightly so, is stuff written in LISP that would be better written in C. You also don't see a lot of programs that, while they would be easier to write in LISP than in C, aren't a lot easier to write in LISP than in C. IMHO, that's too bad, because it means that a lot of geeks that could benefit, as I did, from being exposed to LISP never have that opportunity.
- LISP has a completely regular syntax (well, let's say Scheme, since there are some disgusting hacks in Common Lisp). PERL has a syntax from Hell.
- LISP does stupid stuff for you - for example, you don't have to keep track of garbage, as you do with C. Perl doesn't garbage collect either (AFAIK), but it does at least have automatic memory allocation.
- LISP has a very different typing model from either PERL or C - every object has the potential to have any possible type. Lists are first-class objects, so you don't have to write yet another stupid list traversal routine every time you want to make a list of things, and you can build trees out of lists. This turns out to be very powerful once you understand it, but it's a little hard to wrap your brain around at first.
Unfortunately, in order to really appreciate the power (and the shortcomings) of LISP, you have to learn it - I can't really make a point-for-point comparison here that would convince you of anything. And anybody who claims LISP is a panacea is wrong - it just makes a very different set of tradeoffs than PERL or C.I would suggest actuallty trying to write some code in raw Scheme, not emacs LISP, that does some sort of interesting data structure manipulation, preferably recursively. Maybe pick up a copy of SICP, The Little Schemer or The Seasoned Schemer.
I don't really know what this protest was about, personally, because I heard of it for the first time today here on slashdot, but I am happy to have had access to the eyewitness accounts, and they will affect how I read news stories about this that I encounter in the mainstream media, so he's clearly not completely wrong.
No, I'm sure that particular thing exists from its own side. :')
I'd never heard prajna paramita translated as heart of wisdom before, although that makes some sense. I'd thought that the translation was the ultimate wisdom, or perfection of wisdom. Sigh. So what's the word-for-word translation of Arya Bhagavati Prajnya Paramita Hirdaya? The translation I have here says "The Lady of Conquest, the Exalted Sutra on the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom."
BTW, if you're interested in english translations of the ACIP texts, you can find some of them, particularly including the Diamond Cutter Sutra, in the courses that are available at the ACI web site.
...think about it...
For shame. Think of all the bad karma you'd collect by killing those poor little naugas for their hides, and to bind a book of holy scripture? :')
I've only studied Tibetan Buddhism seriously, so I don't really know what non-Tibetan lineages call the Sutra. However, I do know how my lineage represents the history of the Sutra, and that's what I'm talking about here.
BTW, bear in mind that there are actually quite a few Tibetan lineages, not just one. My teacher's lineage is Gelugpa, which is the same lineage that His Holiness the Dalai Lama comes from. The other lineages, Tibetan or otherwise, aren't "wrong" - they just have different approaches to Buddhism that work well for different practitioners.
The idea of a prejudiced Buddhist is kind of sad - one of the first things we're taught is how utterly stupid it is to ever judge someone else. I wish I were better able to take this lesson to heart, but regardless of my success at avoiding judging others, I think it's something that all Buddhists of all lineages should keep in mind with respect to other lineages, Buddhist or not.
I'm only slightly surprised to find another ACI person here - it makes sense to me that Mahayana Buddhists would tend to be attracted to Open Source!
When I tried to follow the suggested link, I got a certificate warning. The certificate appears to have been signed by Verisign, but the version of Netscape I'm running (4.5) doesn't recognize it. Anybody know what's going on here?
The Diamond Cutter Sutra is one of the main Buddhist teachings on Emptiness. You can get it in Tibetan, along with a lot of other Buddhist texts in Tibetan at The Asian Classics Input Project. Yes, that's right, it's available on the web, and also in CD form. Ain't technology wonderful?
I say this not as an expert on the film industry, BTW, but as an accidental expert on publishing, in which talented newbies face a similar set of problems.
Yah, open source is hard to get up to speed on, but in fact if you start doing it, you'll find that it's often easier than you think, and the more you do it, the quicker you can come up to speed the next time. So don't be shy - jump in and go for it!
My experience installing off a CD in my DVD-ROM drive is that it's remarkably fast. Possibly you aren't getting good throughput from your CD-ROM drive for some reason. DVDs are almost an order of magnitude more dense than CDs, so I would expect an even higher transfer rate from a DVD.