Amending the Constitution requires ratification by the legislatures of 3/4 of the several states. Ratifying a treaty, I believe, requires only 2/3 of the Senate alone. Not exactly comparable. If you wanted to end-run the current Constitution, these twisty little passages are not alike.
Re:Not the only choice
on
Bash Cookbook
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· Score: 1
I guess this topic's dead but: yeah, I tried it briefly and stuck to bash. Zsh was just really overcomplicated for me in what seemed like a "frilly" way. I'm willing to entertain the notion that I didn't give it a fair shake but I just didn't see anything I had to have - I can usually beat bash into submission and make it do what I want. For instance, I find my bash colors simpler and more readable than your zsh example, though I define the colors instead of having the shell do it for me:
where my background is black, the brackets are green, the @ is white, the username/hostname is blue, the date is magenta, and the working directory is yellow, the colon is white (and the underscore represents the cursor where everything typed is gray), and commands are separated by at least one blank line.
In my 'set' output, I get 132 lines of variables (many of which are mine - including the colors since I don't bother to clean up the assignments), I use a truncated ~/.bash_completion that takes it to 587, and babble my own functions down to line 1013. So I'm more guilty of cluttering the environment than bash is and, also, coming from a DOS mentality, I *still* revel in being able to have a gigantic environment, so it doesn't bother me either way.
Bash doesn't have associative arrays, but it has indexed arrays and awk has associative arrays. Etc. etc. I'm not saying bash is a perfect shell (by any stretch) or that zsh is a bad one. I just find bash more comfortable and think I might have felt the same way about ksh if that'd been my first *nix shell and would probably still feel the same way about zsh. (Except that ksh also has associative arrays, so I'd probably be slightly less interested in zsh.) (IOW, I'm more likely to switch to ksh than zsh, though I don't see ever switching to either.)
"Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets 235 mpg...the entire vehicle weighs in at 660 pounds."
VW is bringing new meaning to the phrase "squish you like a Bug".;)
I was also struck by this: "My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine..."
In the days of batch programming, which costs zillions of dollars and which you waited long hours/days for, you'd damn well better have thought out what you were going to "enter into your machine". These days, with cheap interactive personal computers that are always around, it becomes much easier to take an incremental trial-and-error approach, with unlimited code/compile/debug cycles and so, yeah, there's nothing fully thought out and set down with pencil on paper to document. Literate programming isn't very RAD at all.;)
So I agree with what you say but it's not just 'lazy unthinking kids these days'; it may be related to the different technology producing different methodology. I feel Knuth's 'zeitgeist' is better, but today's is understandable, all things considered.
Microsoft - for many employees who decide they'd be a very small extraneous fish in a very large pond at Google or the cavalry to the rescue at Microsoft. At Google, everyone higher up would be better than them; nowhere to go. At Microsoft, obviously no one knows anything about search or the web - nowhere to go but up.
There are a million arguments against this viewpoint and I'm not sure I'd want to hire anyone who adopted it but some people would see it that way and they'd apparently be Microsoft's kind of people.
Basically, MS has no mindshare or momentum at all, as far as I can see. Making a few key acquisitions (individual people or entire companies), rolling out any marginally successful product, *getting talked about in the media*, doing *anything* towards getting to at least #2 first, will make becoming #1 easier than just being stuck in the mire.
But I will grant that it had earlier occurred to me that some of the best Yahoo people, faced with a disrupted Yahoo or working at MS, would jump to Google, as you say. I just don't think it's quite the slamdunk it might seem.
Web development is not my forte, so excuse any ignorance, but as a user of the web, I have to be interested and curious. Didn't we sort of stumble into an html that eventually became a mishmash of structural and presentational elements and then decide that this was a mistake and split it out into a(n ideally) purely structural html4 and have css for the presentation? But isn't html5 a mishmash of (textual) structual elements and gui applications elements (in essence, a different, not especially textual/document sort of "presentation")?
I mean, isn't this what javascript and whatnot is for - and javascript can be disabled. I understand there are advantages with client-side input validation and so on, but this just seems like a mess to me, and a mess that can't be turned off. Seems like html/css/$app_lang should be the model rather than this html5 with css.
I have an old-fashioned "the web is the global library" textual/document-centric view of the web, so I'm sure I'm missing out on understanding the interactive Web 2.0 applications goodness and I'm just trying to get a handle on what's going on.
There's a much better review Spinrad did later in the November 1985 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, called "Books Into Movies". Can't find it online, but it was on the occasion of Dune, and Spinrad uses those two (and 2010) to create a 'literal-missing-the-boat vs. spiritually-faithful-while-adapting-to-a-completel y-different-medium' argument, while arguing that the *point* of Androids is the comparison between human and android, and saying that it's an essentially spiritual distinction.
"However they did it, Scott and Peeples did precisely right that which Lynch did so precisely wrong."
"Lynch had been mechanically faithful to Herbert's apparatus to the point of excruciation and so he ended up with everything but the real story, whereas Scott and Peeples threw out most of Dick's novelistic apparatus, replaced it with creative cinematic apparatus of their own, and so, by chopping down the necessary trees, attained a clear vision of the forest..."
"...But when the dying replicant Roy Baty, who moments before was slowly relishing the sadistic death he had been in the process of inflicting on Deckard in vengeance for Deckard's cold extermination of his comrades, reaches out his hand and saves Deckard's life after visible consideration at death's door, Blade Runner achieves the ultimate in true faithfulness to the novel."
Now, whether you agree with Spinrad's full tilt argument or not, I think he's quite correct that there's a lot of the book in the movie, though it's presented in different terms.
I just installed the Inferno virtual machine on my Windows box last night because I didn't want to gunk up my Linux and BSD boxes. Plan9 is a sort of Unix the Next Generation, to continue the Star Trek motif. Sam - dunno, haven't got that deeply into it yet, but I gather it's 'sed, the Next Generation' - an editing command set. Oberon (again with the odd synchronicity, as I installed Oberon on my 486 before it died back when) is basically an academic operating system in which everything on the screen was both a display of information and a command interface. 9P seems to be a sort of protocol for communication that relies on the "everything's a file" thing being carried to its ultimate conclusion. Plan9 is kind of conceived as a distributed system in which there's no real distinction between 'local' and 'remote' because *everything* can be mounted and accessed from wherever. Mouse chording is simply a really annoying mechanism whereby you might hold a mouse button while pressing a key. A middle-click, hold, keystroke, and release, is distinct from a middle-click.
As far as the editor itself, Pike compares to Emacs in the sense that it's a shell, file manager, window manager and editor (and more) all rolled into one. It's also kind of like running vim with 'Sexplore', only - again - much more thoroughgoing. Except he makes the distinction that Emacs is bound to the 'teletype' concept and era. Plan9 is heavily GUI-oriented and mouse based. However, it's GUI in the sense of windowed text and clickability, not in the sense of pretty icons. It's more like every text object is a sort of icon. But there's no 'pictographic' icon that doesn't *say* anything.
So, yeah - distributed networked next-generation GUI mouse Unix. Sort of. And the editor is an all-in-one interface.
Unfortunately, Plan9 is actually nothing new. It's like Unix guys seeing a mouse and saying 'Oooh, look what Zog do' and going overboard, while retaining a kind of X11R4 look'n'feel. And, being a vim user and keyboard-centric and whatnot, myself, I find it interesting in a sort of theoretical sense, but not anything genuinely usable or even the right direction to go.
*My* question is, what does this Windows editor port do that I didn't do last night by just installing Inferno? It was a simple thing to do and gives me rio, acme, and so on and so forth. Also, Plan9 from User Space has been available to Linux and BSD users for quite awhile, AFAIK.
Sorry if this is a bit breathless and incoherent, but hopefully more detailed than the technobabble writeup. And, as I say, it's still pretty new to me. That's just my rough perception of things.
2006? 2007? Try *ever*. I used to buy Sony tapes because they were pretty good. Had some Sony headphones I *loved*. Some bands I liked were on Sony. But I am
NEVER
buying
a Sony product
AGAIN.
Ever since this RIAA crap, I've never bought a CD. I'm a music *fiend* but I don't contribute to these companies. This industry. And now I won't be buying any Sony *anything*.
Somewhere, somewhen, somehow, one of these companies that does stuff like this needs to be *destroyed*. They don't need to see their billion-dollar profits dip a fraction of a percent for a quarter. They need to go *under*. Then the other companies can contemplate doing their evil and say, "You know, Company X used to make a billion dollars a year but then did something stupid and now they *don't exist*. Let's not do that."
Until then, they're going to keep doing it and apologizing and doing it. BOHICA? No thanks, not me.
Are people *really* consumers? Are you addicts? "Oh, I gave up Sony for a year to teach 'em a proper lesson, but now I gotta get my Sony fix."
What does Joe "Consumer" look like? What DOES HE LOOK LIKE? Does he look like a bitch?"
--- *&^$^( Why does it default to HTML? And why do you never preview when you *need* to? Once more, with proper plain text.
2006? 2007? Try *ever*. I used to buy Sony tapes because they were pretty good. Had some Sony headphones I *loved*. Some bands I liked were on Sony. But I am
NEVER
buying
a Sony product
AGAIN.
Ever since this RIAA crap, I've never bought a CD. I'm a music *fiend* but I don't contribute to these companies. This industry. And now I won't be buying any Sony *anything*.
Somewhere, somewhen, somehow, one of these companies that does stuff like this needs to be *destroyed*. They don't need to see their billion-dollar profits dip a fraction of a percent for a quarter. They need to go *under*. Then the other companies can contemplate doing their evil and say, "You know, Company X used to make a billion dollars a year but then did something stupid and now they *don't exist*. Let's not do that."
Until then, they're going to keep doing it and apologizing and doing it. BOHICA? No thanks, not me.
Are people *really* consumers? Are you addicts? "Oh, I gave up Sony for a year to teach 'em a proper lesson, but now I gotta get my Sony fix."
What does Joe "Consumer" look like? What DOES HE LOOK LIKE? Does he look like a bitch?"
"Also, your customer will be none to impressed with the product quality."
True, if the product they were shipping was just buggy crap, but I didn't mean it quite that way - more in the sense that it's a quality product that simply takes a bit of effort. If the buyer (the company) just downloads a bunch of source packages, does "configure && make && make install" and the operating just jumps out and writes itself down and there are never any problems at all, why would they pay a company to package it for them? But if the kernel doesn't have a stable branch and Gnome takes a few minor miracles to build and gconf is capable of locking things down in an enterprise fashion but isn't thoroughly documented, then there's a reason to buy a service contract. The buyer feels like they're getting something. So I agree it's largely insurance and peace of mind but imagine a Jetson's kind of future where cars *couldn't* crash - how many insurance companies would stay in business? (Answer: all of them, because they would keep the laws requiring insurance on the books anyway, but that's drifting off topic. *g*) Rhetorically, the answer would be none.
So there's a kind of mid-point: they may make money by the premiums minus the cost of accidents, so they may desire fewer accidents rather than more, but only to a point, because they require *some* in order to have a reason to exist at all. Besides which, the premiums are basically conditioned on the number of accidents: higher accident rate; higher premiums; equal profits. But, either way, *some* accidents are required in this model.
But, as I say, this is just armchair theorizing - thanks for the reply and sorry I wasn't able to get back sooner.
As some others have noted, depending on your definition of 'major', Slackware *only* ships KDE. I think the *why* is more enlightening: Patrick is one guy - not a giant corporation. It's too much of a pain for him to support. So flip this around: the big corporations (Novell, Red Hat) *can* support Gnome and their *users* have a harder time managing it - if a distro uses Gnome as its default desktop, its users are going to *need* more support and the distro is going to make more money in 'services'. Install KDE and far fewer people will need assistance.
There are all kinds of other issues I know - mono and so on - and it's not as simple as I make out. But I think it's an important and overlooked ingredient. If the software is free and the only way you make money is support, you want a *difficult* product that *requires* a lot of support.
(Disclaimer: Slackware user ironically currently in KDE, but I usually use fvwm and hate both KDE and Gnome.;) And I'm not involved in enterprise, so I'm just hypothesizing.)
Re:Yes I read TFA, but
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
Dumbass GNU 'long option', admittedly but
--max-depth=n
Print the total for a directory (or file, with the -a flag) only
if it is n or fewer levels below the command line argument;
--max-depth=0 is the same as the -s flag. (New in file-
utils-4.0.)
Babbling generally on the topic, I personally hate Linux systems insofar as they are SysV RedHatists, but I don't much care for BSD, either due to things like support, CLI familiarity (shift+pgup, scroll-lock+pgup kind of trivial things), and so on. I'm happiest with Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, etc. - the combination of BSD-flavored Linux is the best for me. An integrated toolkit without those assinine references to the 'complete documentation' being available as an info document (none of my boxes have info installed) is appealing, too, though, and something you can't get without a genuine BSD.
Arch is not a spinoff of a Slackware. It's derived from Crux mostly, though I believe Judd Vinet (main maintainer) built it as an LFS system. It does have some Slack flavor, though.
(I'm a confirmed Slacker but I do have Arch on this box and it's probably the most palatable second choice of all distros for me. Still no 'genetic' relationship to Slack, though.)
I believe parent was discounting Slack and Arch on 'social responsibility, community spirit' grounds (whatever those may have to do with server or desktop quality) because Slackers (and Archers) tend not to be overly hung up on GNU dogma and Slack is largely a one-man show and Arch's community is small as yet, though growing.
Not sure there was a point of 'originality' there, since SuSE and Mandrake (at least) are spinoffs, themselves.
There is *one* thing he's right about. Phrases like this made me think of it: "The worst part is that it is self afflicted [sic]. The more structured and democratic of these collaborating groups give themselves guidelines and this is where things can go wrong."
A big point in favor of Linux that many advocates stress is that Linux is not owned by a company and can't be bought or sold or taken away. Leaving aside how realistic that may be, even if we accept that it is a 'democracy', Linux can be corrupted and ruined by the malicious impulses or stupidity of the 'opinion makers' and the 'followers'.
In other words, Drepper is unfit for his position on technical grounds (constant breakage) and on social grounds (constant flames) and on political grounds (he would corrupt the democracy of open source and turn it into a fascist uniformity bent on world domination). Based on his own comments, that last is unfortunately no hyperbole.
Linux and open source users do need to beware of their own prevalent attitudes or risk ruining the thing they claim to support. And giving Drepper any more influence or authority would be an example of that. This is *not* the kind of person who should be maintaining such a critical component. Those godless AIX users are trying to put flouride in the water and take his manly essence.
If this seems 'ad hominem', it's because it is - it's specifically my point. But it applies to everyone - if technical excellence and freedom are really what we're about, we have to pursue technical excellence and freedom. We cannot cut corners because it's too hard and 'force people to be free' because it's 'in their best interests'.
"...we are better off without people like him in the open source world."
In a sense my whole post is in agreement with this but I'd modify it to say 'without people like him *shaping policy* in the open source world'. He serves as an excellent cautionary example and, as such, has his use in the open source world.
I've only read a bit into it - obviously any detailed post is going to be a while in coming - but it looks good so far. As someone who's spent a lot of time using Slack and a lot of time trying to help people out at LQ with Slack, I can't tell you how nice it is to have the opportunity to say 'Read the Book' instead of 'Read the Book. It's a little (ahem) outdated, but still pretty useful in places'.
Forgive me if this has come up a zillion times already since, while I knew of the project, I hadn't followed it closely - any plans to maybe place it in a restricted wiki context to quickly fold in updates and *keep* it updated with 2.1s and 2.2s or do we risk several more years before a 3.0?
Anyway - it's really nice to see this and hopefully will help ease others into the use of the fantastic distro.
Some good stuff in previous posts about aliasing DOS commands to translation messages and commenting the.bashrc to be helpful.
Additionally, make *sure* their home, end, backspace, delete keys work properly. I'm not sure if we're talking pure command line or xterm (it's more an issue with some distros and xterms) but it's a hell of a lot to figure out when it's busted and a hell of a pain for a Windows user. It's not exclusively a shell issue but relates to the CLI experience.
And I'd recommend *not* aliasing 'rm' to 'rm -i' because they're going to get sloppy and be really annoyed when they move to a box that doesn't have that set up and wipe stuff out.
Set up their pager with something nice like 'export LESS="-eFMRXj12"' (well, it's nice to me).
Stuff like 'shopt -s checkwinsize cmdhist extglob histappend histverify [etc]' - histverify is cool for new people not popping off the wrong command by accident when they're playing with the cool history tricks.
Basically, keep it simple - avoid extremely dangerous things like giving them a fuzzy concept of 'rm' and enable not-particularly-dangerous things like 'histverify'. But make sure things like their keyboard and display work like they expect - most important thing. Then just give some hints and enable them to explore for themselves.
If you had been following best practice and surfing the web as a normal user, a dirty hacker could still run code, but they could not wipe out your system without first gaining root.
A system which I can easily reinstall, unlike the personal data which, while it should be backed up, can't be relied on to be backed up every minute and shouldn't be accessed by someone else regardless. Root makes sense on a multi-user system from a sysadmin's point of view where the integrity of the system is paramount. A single user in his home has different priorities - his personal data is paramount - and he's just as owned from one account as the other.
And as far as mistakes, I've run DOS and Windows for years without borking the system (I rarely have need to be doing dangerous things on those systems) and I've run Linux for years without borking the system though I've come closer because Linux constantly forces me into the sensitive guts. But I can just as easily screw up in the minute I'm root as I could in the hours I'm not. A mistake takes a split-second. And having 2 accounts and having to have a 'whoami' command actually *introduces* confusion. I've got two very different prompts now with a bright red YOU ARE ROOT but, in my early days, I issued countless commands thinking I was me when I'd left an xterm up as root or forgotten which virtual console I was on.
And it tends to produce a "let's try this - I'm a regular user and nothing can go *really* wrong" attitude. In other words, you can catch yourself becoming *sloppier* as a regular user, which is actually bound to *carry over* as root.
Lastly, 'root' has horrible granularity.
But I still run my Linux system as Joe User. Just saying.
I don't know what rock I've been living under but I wasn't familiar with him or it - found several good links and you're absolutely right - fantastic stuff. Thanks very much for that.
I hate 'mod parent up' posts - feels a little too close to me2! but, seriously - I think the Gutenberg project is one of *the* most significant projects on the net - or off the net, for that matter. It's too bad they are so severely hampered (as we all are) by ever-lengthening copyrights on hundred-year old out-of-print works they'd like to make available to the world. If someone would help them out and also put some muscle into fighting these extensions that might even allay my ever-deepening suspicions of Google. (I can say that because I want the *parent* modded up.);)
ObDisclaimer - not affiliated with Gutenberg.
For reasons, I suppose I find having mail and web integrated makes more sense for the way I use the net. I like the way mozilla handles its options better. I *love* Gashu's 'lo-fi' theme and I'm pretty sure it's moz-only. Very spare and plain and tasteful and leaves a lot of browsing real estate.
But it's not really a reason. I was late coming to the net - used an offline DOS box for years before - and was one of those 'hit the blue thing' surfers. I got sick of it simultaneous with hearing something about Mozilla 1.0. I downloaded it and fell in love. It opened up what felt like a more 'real' web to me. I've used it ever since. I simply don't *want* anything else. When I switched to Linux shortly thereafter, *everything* was different - except mozilla. When I was googling and poring through TLDP, no matter how frazzled I was with Linux problems, I was always 'home' in my browser. Firefox just doesn't feel like home and never will. Reminds me a little too much of the browser I left, if anything.
There's just a few apps that I mesh with and moz is one.
You can never use anything as a definitive resource. Any research requires multiple resources and the wikipedia strikes me (not a devout reader, but I've looked at it a few times and worked on another wiki) as an extremely valuable resource. It's far more a positive than a negative as an element in the 'research armory'. Any single source is a bad thing, in principle.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's his comic book? Buckaroo Banzai had a comic book.
Amending the Constitution requires ratification by the legislatures of 3/4 of the several states. Ratifying a treaty, I believe, requires only 2/3 of the Senate alone. Not exactly comparable. If you wanted to end-run the current Constitution, these twisty little passages are not alike.
I guess this topic's dead but: yeah, I tried it briefly and stuck to bash. Zsh was just really overcomplicated for me in what seemed like a "frilly" way. I'm willing to entertain the notion that I didn't give it a fair shake but I just didn't see anything I had to have - I can usually beat bash into submission and make it do what I want. For instance, I find my bash colors simpler and more readable than your zsh example, though I define the colors instead of having the shell do it for me:
I create a ~/.pscolors:
so the relevant parts of ~/.bashrc are only:
which results in:
where my background is black, the brackets are green, the @ is white, the username/hostname is blue, the date is magenta, and the working directory is yellow, the colon is white (and the underscore represents the cursor where everything typed is gray), and commands are separated by at least one blank line.
In my 'set' output, I get 132 lines of variables (many of which are mine - including the colors since I don't bother to clean up the assignments), I use a truncated ~/.bash_completion that takes it to 587, and babble my own functions down to line 1013. So I'm more guilty of cluttering the environment than bash is and, also, coming from a DOS mentality, I *still* revel in being able to have a gigantic environment, so it doesn't bother me either way.
Bash doesn't have associative arrays, but it has indexed arrays and awk has associative arrays. Etc. etc. I'm not saying bash is a perfect shell (by any stretch) or that zsh is a bad one. I just find bash more comfortable and think I might have felt the same way about ksh if that'd been my first *nix shell and would probably still feel the same way about zsh. (Except that ksh also has associative arrays, so I'd probably be slightly less interested in zsh.) (IOW, I'm more likely to switch to ksh than zsh, though I don't see ever switching to either.)
"Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets 235 mpg...the entire vehicle weighs in at 660 pounds."
VW is bringing new meaning to the phrase "squish you like a Bug". ;)
I was also struck by this: "My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine..."
;)
In the days of batch programming, which costs zillions of dollars and which you waited long hours/days for, you'd damn well better have thought out what you were going to "enter into your machine". These days, with cheap interactive personal computers that are always around, it becomes much easier to take an incremental trial-and-error approach, with unlimited code/compile/debug cycles and so, yeah, there's nothing fully thought out and set down with pencil on paper to document. Literate programming isn't very RAD at all.
So I agree with what you say but it's not just 'lazy unthinking kids these days'; it may be related to the different technology producing different methodology. I feel Knuth's 'zeitgeist' is better, but today's is understandable, all things considered.
Microsoft - for many employees who decide they'd be a very small extraneous fish in a very large pond at Google or the cavalry to the rescue at Microsoft. At Google, everyone higher up would be better than them; nowhere to go. At Microsoft, obviously no one knows anything about search or the web - nowhere to go but up.
There are a million arguments against this viewpoint and I'm not sure I'd want to hire anyone who adopted it but some people would see it that way and they'd apparently be Microsoft's kind of people.
Basically, MS has no mindshare or momentum at all, as far as I can see. Making a few key acquisitions (individual people or entire companies), rolling out any marginally successful product, *getting talked about in the media*, doing *anything* towards getting to at least #2 first, will make becoming #1 easier than just being stuck in the mire.
But I will grant that it had earlier occurred to me that some of the best Yahoo people, faced with a disrupted Yahoo or working at MS, would jump to Google, as you say. I just don't think it's quite the slamdunk it might seem.
Well, that's what it seemed like to me, too, but I wasn't sure if that wasn't just my angle of vision. Thanks for the reply.
Web development is not my forte, so excuse any ignorance, but as a user of the web, I have to be interested and curious. Didn't we sort of stumble into an html that eventually became a mishmash of structural and presentational elements and then decide that this was a mistake and split it out into a(n ideally) purely structural html4 and have css for the presentation? But isn't html5 a mishmash of (textual) structual elements and gui applications elements (in essence, a different, not especially textual/document sort of "presentation")?
I mean, isn't this what javascript and whatnot is for - and javascript can be disabled. I understand there are advantages with client-side input validation and so on, but this just seems like a mess to me, and a mess that can't be turned off. Seems like html/css/$app_lang should be the model rather than this html5 with css.
I have an old-fashioned "the web is the global library" textual/document-centric view of the web, so I'm sure I'm missing out on understanding the interactive Web 2.0 applications goodness and I'm just trying to get a handle on what's going on.
*SPOILER WARNING* (to a 25 year-old classic movie)
l y-different-medium' argument, while arguing that the *point* of Androids is the comparison between human and android, and saying that it's an essentially spiritual distinction.
http://www.rot13.org/~dpavlin/br_review.html
There's a much better review Spinrad did later in the November 1985 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, called "Books Into Movies". Can't find it online, but it was on the occasion of Dune, and Spinrad uses those two (and 2010) to create a 'literal-missing-the-boat vs. spiritually-faithful-while-adapting-to-a-complete
"However they did it, Scott and Peeples did precisely right that which Lynch did so precisely wrong."
"Lynch had been mechanically faithful to Herbert's apparatus to the point of excruciation and so he ended up with everything but the real story, whereas Scott and Peeples threw out most of Dick's novelistic apparatus, replaced it with creative cinematic apparatus of their own, and so, by chopping down the necessary trees, attained a clear vision of the forest..."
"...But when the dying replicant Roy Baty, who moments before was slowly relishing the sadistic death he had been in the process of inflicting on Deckard in vengeance for Deckard's cold extermination of his comrades, reaches out his hand and saves Deckard's life after visible consideration at death's door, Blade Runner achieves the ultimate in true faithfulness to the novel."
Now, whether you agree with Spinrad's full tilt argument or not, I think he's quite correct that there's a lot of the book in the movie, though it's presented in different terms.
Holy synchronicity Batman.
I just installed the Inferno virtual machine on my Windows box last night because I didn't want to gunk up my Linux and BSD boxes. Plan9 is a sort of Unix the Next Generation, to continue the Star Trek motif. Sam - dunno, haven't got that deeply into it yet, but I gather it's 'sed, the Next Generation' - an editing command set. Oberon (again with the odd synchronicity, as I installed Oberon on my 486 before it died back when) is basically an academic operating system in which everything on the screen was both a display of information and a command interface. 9P seems to be a sort of protocol for communication that relies on the "everything's a file" thing being carried to its ultimate conclusion. Plan9 is kind of conceived as a distributed system in which there's no real distinction between 'local' and 'remote' because *everything* can be mounted and accessed from wherever. Mouse chording is simply a really annoying mechanism whereby you might hold a mouse button while pressing a key. A middle-click, hold, keystroke, and release, is distinct from a middle-click.
As far as the editor itself, Pike compares to Emacs in the sense that it's a shell, file manager, window manager and editor (and more) all rolled into one. It's also kind of like running vim with 'Sexplore', only - again - much more thoroughgoing. Except he makes the distinction that Emacs is bound to the 'teletype' concept and era. Plan9 is heavily GUI-oriented and mouse based. However, it's GUI in the sense of windowed text and clickability, not in the sense of pretty icons. It's more like every text object is a sort of icon. But there's no 'pictographic' icon that doesn't *say* anything.
So, yeah - distributed networked next-generation GUI mouse Unix. Sort of. And the editor is an all-in-one interface.
Unfortunately, Plan9 is actually nothing new. It's like Unix guys seeing a mouse and saying 'Oooh, look what Zog do' and going overboard, while retaining a kind of X11R4 look'n'feel. And, being a vim user and keyboard-centric and whatnot, myself, I find it interesting in a sort of theoretical sense, but not anything genuinely usable or even the right direction to go.
*My* question is, what does this Windows editor port do that I didn't do last night by just installing Inferno? It was a simple thing to do and gives me rio, acme, and so on and so forth. Also, Plan9 from User Space has been available to Linux and BSD users for quite awhile, AFAIK.
Sorry if this is a bit breathless and incoherent, but hopefully more detailed than the technobabble writeup. And, as I say, it's still pretty new to me. That's just my rough perception of things.
2006? 2007? Try *ever*. I used to buy Sony tapes because they were pretty good. Had some Sony headphones I *loved*. Some bands I liked were on Sony. But I am
NEVER
buying
a Sony product
AGAIN.
Ever since this RIAA crap, I've never bought a CD. I'm a music *fiend* but I don't contribute to these companies. This industry. And now I won't be buying any Sony *anything*.
Somewhere, somewhen, somehow, one of these companies that does stuff like this needs to be *destroyed*. They don't need to see their billion-dollar profits dip a fraction of a percent for a quarter. They need to go *under*. Then the other companies can contemplate doing their evil and say, "You know, Company X used to make a billion dollars a year but then did something stupid and now they *don't exist*. Let's not do that."
Until then, they're going to keep doing it and apologizing and doing it. BOHICA? No thanks, not me.
Are people *really* consumers? Are you addicts? "Oh, I gave up Sony for a year to teach 'em a proper lesson, but now I gotta get my Sony fix."
What does Joe "Consumer" look like? What DOES HE LOOK LIKE? Does he look like a bitch?"
--- *&^$^( Why does it default to HTML? And why do you never preview when you *need* to? Once more, with proper plain text.
2006? 2007? Try *ever*. I used to buy Sony tapes because they were pretty good. Had some Sony headphones I *loved*. Some bands I liked were on Sony. But I am NEVER buying a Sony product AGAIN. Ever since this RIAA crap, I've never bought a CD. I'm a music *fiend* but I don't contribute to these companies. This industry. And now I won't be buying any Sony *anything*. Somewhere, somewhen, somehow, one of these companies that does stuff like this needs to be *destroyed*. They don't need to see their billion-dollar profits dip a fraction of a percent for a quarter. They need to go *under*. Then the other companies can contemplate doing their evil and say, "You know, Company X used to make a billion dollars a year but then did something stupid and now they *don't exist*. Let's not do that." Until then, they're going to keep doing it and apologizing and doing it. BOHICA? No thanks, not me. Are people *really* consumers? Are you addicts? "Oh, I gave up Sony for a year to teach 'em a proper lesson, but now I gotta get my Sony fix." What does Joe "Consumer" look like? What DOES HE LOOK LIKE? Does he look like a bitch?"
"Also, your customer will be none to impressed with the product quality."
True, if the product they were shipping was just buggy crap, but I didn't mean it quite that way - more in the sense that it's a quality product that simply takes a bit of effort. If the buyer (the company) just downloads a bunch of source packages, does "configure && make && make install" and the operating just jumps out and writes itself down and there are never any problems at all, why would they pay a company to package it for them? But if the kernel doesn't have a stable branch and Gnome takes a few minor miracles to build and gconf is capable of locking things down in an enterprise fashion but isn't thoroughly documented, then there's a reason to buy a service contract. The buyer feels like they're getting something. So I agree it's largely insurance and peace of mind but imagine a Jetson's kind of future where cars *couldn't* crash - how many insurance companies would stay in business? (Answer: all of them, because they would keep the laws requiring insurance on the books anyway, but that's drifting off topic. *g*) Rhetorically, the answer would be none.
So there's a kind of mid-point: they may make money by the premiums minus the cost of accidents, so they may desire fewer accidents rather than more, but only to a point, because they require *some* in order to have a reason to exist at all. Besides which, the premiums are basically conditioned on the number of accidents: higher accident rate; higher premiums; equal profits. But, either way, *some* accidents are required in this model.
But, as I say, this is just armchair theorizing - thanks for the reply and sorry I wasn't able to get back sooner.
As some others have noted, depending on your definition of 'major', Slackware *only* ships KDE. I think the *why* is more enlightening: Patrick is one guy - not a giant corporation. It's too much of a pain for him to support. So flip this around: the big corporations (Novell, Red Hat) *can* support Gnome and their *users* have a harder time managing it - if a distro uses Gnome as its default desktop, its users are going to *need* more support and the distro is going to make more money in 'services'. Install KDE and far fewer people will need assistance.
;) And I'm not involved in enterprise, so I'm just hypothesizing.)
There are all kinds of other issues I know - mono and so on - and it's not as simple as I make out. But I think it's an important and overlooked ingredient. If the software is free and the only way you make money is support, you want a *difficult* product that *requires* a lot of support.
(Disclaimer: Slackware user ironically currently in KDE, but I usually use fvwm and hate both KDE and Gnome.
Dumbass GNU 'long option', admittedly but
--max-depth=n
Print the total for a directory (or file, with the -a flag) only
if it is n or fewer levels below the command line argument;
--max-depth=0 is the same as the -s flag. (New in file-
utils-4.0.)
Babbling generally on the topic, I personally hate Linux systems insofar as they are SysV RedHatists, but I don't much care for BSD, either due to things like support, CLI familiarity (shift+pgup, scroll-lock+pgup kind of trivial things), and so on. I'm happiest with Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, etc. - the combination of BSD-flavored Linux is the best for me. An integrated toolkit without those assinine references to the 'complete documentation' being available as an info document (none of my boxes have info installed) is appealing, too, though, and something you can't get without a genuine BSD.
Arch is not a spinoff of a Slackware. It's derived from Crux mostly, though I believe Judd Vinet (main maintainer) built it as an LFS system. It does have some Slack flavor, though.
(I'm a confirmed Slacker but I do have Arch on this box and it's probably the most palatable second choice of all distros for me. Still no 'genetic' relationship to Slack, though.)
I believe parent was discounting Slack and Arch on 'social responsibility, community spirit' grounds (whatever those may have to do with server or desktop quality) because Slackers (and Archers) tend not to be overly hung up on GNU dogma and Slack is largely a one-man show and Arch's community is small as yet, though growing.
Not sure there was a point of 'originality' there, since SuSE and Mandrake (at least) are spinoffs, themselves.
There is *one* thing he's right about. Phrases like this made me think of it: "The worst part is that it is self afflicted [sic]. The more structured and democratic of these collaborating groups give themselves guidelines and this is where things can go wrong."
A big point in favor of Linux that many advocates stress is that Linux is not owned by a company and can't be bought or sold or taken away. Leaving aside how realistic that may be, even if we accept that it is a 'democracy', Linux can be corrupted and ruined by the malicious impulses or stupidity of the 'opinion makers' and the 'followers'.
In other words, Drepper is unfit for his position on technical grounds (constant breakage) and on social grounds (constant flames) and on political grounds (he would corrupt the democracy of open source and turn it into a fascist uniformity bent on world domination). Based on his own comments, that last is unfortunately no hyperbole.
Linux and open source users do need to beware of their own prevalent attitudes or risk ruining the thing they claim to support. And giving Drepper any more influence or authority would be an example of that. This is *not* the kind of person who should be maintaining such a critical component. Those godless AIX users are trying to put flouride in the water and take his manly essence.
If this seems 'ad hominem', it's because it is - it's specifically my point. But it applies to everyone - if technical excellence and freedom are really what we're about, we have to pursue technical excellence and freedom. We cannot cut corners because it's too hard and 'force people to be free' because it's 'in their best interests'.
"...we are better off without people like him in the open source world."
In a sense my whole post is in agreement with this but I'd modify it to say 'without people like him *shaping policy* in the open source world'. He serves as an excellent cautionary example and, as such, has his use in the open source world.
I've only read a bit into it - obviously any detailed post is going to be a while in coming - but it looks good so far. As someone who's spent a lot of time using Slack and a lot of time trying to help people out at LQ with Slack, I can't tell you how nice it is to have the opportunity to say 'Read the Book' instead of 'Read the Book. It's a little (ahem) outdated, but still pretty useful in places'.
Forgive me if this has come up a zillion times already since, while I knew of the project, I hadn't followed it closely - any plans to maybe place it in a restricted wiki context to quickly fold in updates and *keep* it updated with 2.1s and 2.2s or do we risk several more years before a 3.0?
Anyway - it's really nice to see this and hopefully will help ease others into the use of the fantastic distro.
Some good stuff in previous posts about aliasing DOS commands to translation messages and commenting the .bashrc to be helpful.
Additionally, make *sure* their home, end, backspace, delete keys work properly. I'm not sure if we're talking pure command line or xterm (it's more an issue with some distros and xterms) but it's a hell of a lot to figure out when it's busted and a hell of a pain for a Windows user. It's not exclusively a shell issue but relates to the CLI experience.
And I'd recommend *not* aliasing 'rm' to 'rm -i' because they're going to get sloppy and be really annoyed when they move to a box that doesn't have that set up and wipe stuff out.
Set up their pager with something nice like 'export LESS="-eFMRXj12"' (well, it's nice to me).
Stuff like 'shopt -s checkwinsize cmdhist extglob histappend histverify [etc]' - histverify is cool for new people not popping off the wrong command by accident when they're playing with the cool history tricks.
Basically, keep it simple - avoid extremely dangerous things like giving them a fuzzy concept of 'rm' and enable not-particularly-dangerous things like 'histverify'. But make sure things like their keyboard and display work like they expect - most important thing. Then just give some hints and enable them to explore for themselves.
If you had been following best practice and surfing the web as a normal user, a dirty hacker could still run code, but they could not wipe out your system without first gaining root.
A system which I can easily reinstall, unlike the personal data which, while it should be backed up, can't be relied on to be backed up every minute and shouldn't be accessed by someone else regardless. Root makes sense on a multi-user system from a sysadmin's point of view where the integrity of the system is paramount. A single user in his home has different priorities - his personal data is paramount - and he's just as owned from one account as the other.
And as far as mistakes, I've run DOS and Windows for years without borking the system (I rarely have need to be doing dangerous things on those systems) and I've run Linux for years without borking the system though I've come closer because Linux constantly forces me into the sensitive guts. But I can just as easily screw up in the minute I'm root as I could in the hours I'm not. A mistake takes a split-second. And having 2 accounts and having to have a 'whoami' command actually *introduces* confusion. I've got two very different prompts now with a bright red YOU ARE ROOT but, in my early days, I issued countless commands thinking I was me when I'd left an xterm up as root or forgotten which virtual console I was on.
And it tends to produce a "let's try this - I'm a regular user and nothing can go *really* wrong" attitude. In other words, you can catch yourself becoming *sloppier* as a regular user, which is actually bound to *carry over* as root.
Lastly, 'root' has horrible granularity.
But I still run my Linux system as Joe User. Just saying.
He couldn't be bothered to link it; you couldn't be bothered to paste it. You're even. Apathy, apathy, everywhere and not a Jolt to drink. ;)
I don't know what rock I've been living under but I wasn't familiar with him or it - found several good links and you're absolutely right - fantastic stuff. Thanks very much for that.
I hate 'mod parent up' posts - feels a little too close to me2! but, seriously - I think the Gutenberg project is one of *the* most significant projects on the net - or off the net, for that matter. It's too bad they are so severely hampered (as we all are) by ever-lengthening copyrights on hundred-year old out-of-print works they'd like to make available to the world. If someone would help them out and also put some muscle into fighting these extensions that might even allay my ever-deepening suspicions of Google. (I can say that because I want the *parent* modded up.) ;)
ObDisclaimer - not affiliated with Gutenberg.
For reasons, I suppose I find having mail and web integrated makes more sense for the way I use the net. I like the way mozilla handles its options better. I *love* Gashu's 'lo-fi' theme and I'm pretty sure it's moz-only. Very spare and plain and tasteful and leaves a lot of browsing real estate.
But it's not really a reason. I was late coming to the net - used an offline DOS box for years before - and was one of those 'hit the blue thing' surfers. I got sick of it simultaneous with hearing something about Mozilla 1.0. I downloaded it and fell in love. It opened up what felt like a more 'real' web to me. I've used it ever since. I simply don't *want* anything else. When I switched to Linux shortly thereafter, *everything* was different - except mozilla. When I was googling and poring through TLDP, no matter how frazzled I was with Linux problems, I was always 'home' in my browser. Firefox just doesn't feel like home and never will. Reminds me a little too much of the browser I left, if anything.
There's just a few apps that I mesh with and moz is one.
You can never use anything as a definitive resource. Any research requires multiple resources and the wikipedia strikes me (not a devout reader, but I've looked at it a few times and worked on another wiki) as an extremely valuable resource. It's far more a positive than a negative as an element in the 'research armory'. Any single source is a bad thing, in principle.