> I think the great untold story of the late 20th > century is how money replaced war as a way of keeping > score.
In the last decade alone: Rwanda, Kosovo, Chechnaya.
The twenty-first century has got nothing for me. Jeff Bezos is the perfect symbol of it; money uber alles, robotic greed without limits, backed with cruise missiles. The twenty-first century will be Hell on Earth.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Sorry massa I'se gwine shut up now
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Oh, I'se so sorry! SORRY massa! Sho nuff dis be an issue with world-shaking consequences, but I done fogot, I'se way too stoopid to take part in decidin de future. I just gwine back to pumpin out dat ol septic tank, an leave all de thinkin an decidin to you PhDs.
Why in God's name should a worker who has been laid off give a damn about how "U.S. as a whole" has gained so much wealth? All that increase in wealth, ALL OF IT, has gone to the top ten percent of incomes. And that worker is now out of a job. Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
"O who can ever gaze his fill," Farmer and fisherman say, "On native shore and local hill, Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand? Fathers, grandfathers stood upon this land, And here the pilgrims from our loins shall stand." So farmer and fisherman say In their fortunate heyday: But Death's soft answer drifts across Empty catch or harvest loss Or an unlucky May: The earth is an oyster with nothing in it Not to be born is the best for man The end of toil is a bailiff's order Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
"O life's too short for friends who share," Travellers think in their hearts, "The city's common bed, the air, The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach, Where incidents draw every day from each Memorable gesture and witty speech." So travellers think in their hearts Till malice or circumstance parts Them from their constant humour: And slyly Death's coercive rumour In the silence starts: A friend is the old tale of Narcissus Not to be born is the best for man An active partner in something disgraceful Change your partner, dance while you can.
"O stretch your hands across the sea," The impassioned lover cries, "Stretch them toward your harm and me. Our grass in green, and sensual our brief bed, The stream sings at its foot, and at its head The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed." So the impassioned lover cries Till his storm of pleasure dies: From the bedpost and the rocks Death's enticing echo mocks, And his voice replies: The greater the love, the more false to its object Not to be born is the best for man After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle Break the embraces, dance while you can.
"I see the guilty world forgiven," Dreamer and drunkard sing, "The ladders let down out of heaven; The laurel springing from the martyr's blood; The children skipping where the weepers stood; The lovers natural, and the beasts all good." So dreamer and drunkard sing Till day their sobriety bring: Parrotwise with death's reply From whelping fear and nesting lie, Woods and their echoes ring: The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down with the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
I know nothing about XML. What software reads XML files? Why should I use XML instead of HTML? I have several thousand pages worth of books which I have transcribed or intend to transcribe into ASCII for Project Gutenberg, and I was planning on making HTML versions of them all. But if, as you say, XML is so much better, maybe I want to make XML versions instead? Also, how does XML handle text in foreign languages, with letters with accents, text in the Greek alphabet, and all the rest of that? I would very much appreciate the input of Slashdot readers on this question. If any of you can offer suggestions or pointers, please email me at Wkiernan@concentric.net.
> I remember in particular having a tex-ified > version of the Communist Manifesto.:-))
If you liked Manifesto then I know you'll just love my forthcoming transcription of Capital, in three volumes, just shy of three thousand pages. Coming soon! OK, maybe not soon, as I'm only good for about a hundred pages a weekend, probably the middle of next year.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
> A more significant beef about PG is that it is > centralized and dominated by one person, who does > not share the philosophy of Open Source production > that most of us do. Instead of forcing individuals to > contribute to this project, why not help them set up their > own web sites to publish their own works, or other > works they have scanned?
Read the PG copyright notice, which is at the top of most PG text files. Michael Hart does not force anybody who contributes to Project Gutenberg to post his work on only his one site. PG's copyright terms are actually more liberal than the GPL. I have beta copies (not completely proofread yet) of my Project Gutenberg transcriptions on my own site:
Contributors (and anyone else, too) are allowed, by the terms of the PG copyright, to redistribute PG works on one of two conditions: either they strip off the PG copyright header, in which case they can reprint the work with no further restrictions; or otherwise, if they leave the PG copyright header on, they must contribute 20% of the profits to Project Gutenberg. Certainly that's not requiring too much of a redistributor, to ask him to strip off the PG copyright header from the top of the text file, before he uses it anyway he pleases.
And for those HTML fans who criticize PG's least-common-denominator ASCII format, many of the works in the PG library are available in both ASCII and HTML format. While I myself prefer plain text, after I finish transcribing my next two books, I'm going to fall back and make HTML versions of all the books I've done thus far. (It's going be a while; the next two books amount to a little over 3000 pages. At a hundred pages per weekend, I'm "booked" until about next June.)
I just started using Lynx on Win32 recently, and for reading pages full of text it truly does r00l. (However, right now I'm using Netscape 3.01, as I have for the last three years. Change is BAD; I'm a Luddite.) Do you read Slashdot a lot, and do you connect with a dial-up? Try changing your preferences so you get the stripped-down Slashdot with hardly any graphics; pages load in less than half the time. It's great! (Thanks for the option,/.) Well, Lynx does that to nearly every page on the web. Lynx needs to be able to do https, though, so one can use it to do on-line purchasing and stuff like that. I think I'll go visit their web page and offer that suggestion to them.
Well, obviously it's harder to make something really excellent than it is to break something. It takes a Michaelangelo to carve La Pieta, any moron who can swing a claw hammer can break it. Besides nobody says Monopolysoft is a bunch of incompetents, its just that what they want and what you or I as as end-users want are two vastly different things. Did you you ever hear the old business saw, "The customer is always right?" Not when he's a customer of a monopoly, he isn't.
I think the answer is "yes," at least I hope so. Here it is, a utility program I wrote and compiled (for a specific practical purpose, too) a couple years back:
/* NOTHING.CPP * This program does nothing at all, and returns an errorlevel of 0. * (c) 1997 Terrible Software Inc. WDK */
int main() { return 0; }
Didn't Monopolysoft buy that DOS emulator in NT from some company, Insignia Solutions or something like that, who wrote a DOS/8086 emulator for Macintosh? By the way, I like NT as a desktop OS. I have used NT for a few years now and I find it to be reasonably stable, as long as you are pretty conservative about what all you install on it. Of course it comes with a nice selection of bugs, gaps and gotchas. But compare it to Win95! or even worse, Win98! I genuinely pity all those innocent people who, knowing nothing about computers, go down to Best Buy or whatever and buy these Win98 systems in these stupid garish cases you see these days that look like transformer toys.
As I type this, on the other side of the room there's a Win95 system that belongs to one of my coworkers. It worked fine until she tried to install the AOL client on it. After the obligatory reboot, it refused to load up Win95 at all. Unfortunately she applied SCANDISK to it ("Instead of using CHKDSK, try SCANDISK instead...") Now the root directory of C: is filled to the limit with FILE????.CHK and most of her directories have just *poof* disappeared. I see this sort of thing on Win95/98 boxes all the time.
Where you say "People have REAL WORK to do" you're wrong. The only reason people go to the office and sit in front of their computers is so they, together with their employers, can enjoy that splendid Microsoft(tm) experience. And the only reason their companies's accounting departments exist is so they can collect enough money from their clients to buy cool new computer software and hardware. The exception to this is companies which make computer software or hardware themselves; they exist so that those lucky people who are allowed to buy into their IPOs can make 600 percent profit in a single day by making a phone call or two, or pressing a few keys on their computer keyboards.
Most foreign nations exist so they can gratify and glorify the United States of America. Some, a minority, which make no positive contribution to the glory of the U.S.A., exist only so the United States of America can look powerful and virtuous in comparison. Finally, humanity itself exists so that rich people will have an abundant supply of sycophants and servants.
And there's no use whatsoever for anyone to imagine that things can ever be any different. They can't, that's all; that's just the way it is!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
Your average businessman carries a briefcase, right? The one I just measured in this engineer's office next door is 18" x 13" x 4". You put the 20" display in the inside of the lid. The electronics, battery and AC adapter, together with enough padding material to protect it from both sides, shouldn't need to be more than an inch thick. The thing I dislike the most about using laptops is the way the keyboard is laid out right under the screen, but if you have a briefcase-sized package, you could fit a thin, full-sized wireless keyboard and mouse in the package (snap into brackets in the lid?). You'd still have plenty of room for the papers and stuff one usually carries in a briefcase. That's what I want, in dark brown leather; but if I had one, guessing what it would cost, I'd want to carry it around handcuffed to my wrist, like the courier in those old spy films.
Hey Katz! Welcome to Florida! Say, while you're here: if you hear firecrackers going off - those aren't firecrackers! Hit the dirt!
We have a phenomenally high murder rate down here, in part thanks to Floridians's deep love of guns, in part thanks to our legislators's even deeper love of campaign contributions from the gun-manufacturers's lobby. Tourists (in the colorful native patois we call them "victims") have been murdered inside Disney World before, as well as in every other part of our lovely state, from the rest areas of North Florida to gas stations in Miami, and you can well imagine how severely that impacts corporate profits. The business sections of the local newspapers always print a few articles whenever some punk offs a high-profile tourist (i.e. a foreigner, nobody gives a damn if, for example, an Ohioan gets whacked, we Americans are numb to this sort of thing these days). All the Chamber of Commerce types start calculating the $x-billion potential economic loss to Florida's important tourist trade, and they usually do things like fire up an ad campaign to minimize the public-relations impact of the latest murder. Anyway, in response to all that the Disney World management very reasonably stepped up the surveillance.
In Florida if you want to buy a gun from a gun dealer or a pawn shop, you have to present identification and then wait five days while the Florida Department of Law Enforcement checks to see if you might, for example, have a record of convictions for armed robbery. So far so good; but our legislature built a loophole into the law; so-called "private owners" can sell guns with no ID, no background check, and no wait period. They can do this from their houses, but that's kind of inconvenient for shoppers, so you see these big gun shows, held in public arenas such as the Manatee Civic Center, filled with dozens of booths and tables where these "private owners" practice their quaint cottage industry, legal-loophole gun-running. You can walk into one of these gun shows with the sawn-off halves of the handcuffs you escaped in still on your wrists and a pocket full of cash, and walk out with enough weaponry and ammo to keep the busiest career armed robber in supply for years - well, months, at least.
Have a nice vacation!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
PS: I always feel sorry for those poor tourists who come all the way to Florida and all they get to see are those ghastly, abominable theme parks. Katz, when you've had your fill of brightly-colored plastic, at least try to fit in a few days at one of our beaches. I don't know the Atlantic coast that well; on the Gulf side I recommend Treasure Island and Anna Maria Island. And leave your laptop behind, you won't need it at the beach.
How do you wash dishes? The answer: you hold them under the faucet and run water, a great deal of water, across them, and whatever was on the dish that you want to get rid of gets swept away in the flood.
This is my system for dealing with spam. All I do is subscribe to two or three mailing lists, which deal with interesting subjects (for me, art and economics). From these mailing lists I get about eighty emails a day. In addition to those, maybe three times a week someone sends an email directly to me, and of course every day anonymous spammers throw a few slices of spam in the mix.
Before I subscribed to those mailing lists, there were times when I'd log in to my mail server and almost all the new mail - say, four emails out of five - was spam, and like everybody else I found that quite annoying. But now if I get four or even ten spams in a day, I barely notice and I don't care.
The only downsides are: 1.) if I don't log on and download the email it piles up to an alarming height; until just now I haven't logged on to my personal account since Saturday, and I had to download over four hundred messages, and 2.) that's an awful lot of stuff to think about; from where I sit at my desk I can see three open books, face down, which I am reading to try to keep up with the the current threads on the two economics lists. Beats the Hell out of watching TV, though.
> Drop a big bomb on said machine, which is > certainly more destructive and more annoying > to an admin.
Maybe to some admins. I can't tell you how many times I've wished someone would drop a bomb on my server. Sometimes I think maybe it would be best if I weren't present at the moment of impact; but there are lots of other times when I just don't care. Yeah! A big bomb. But then I hate all these fscking computers.
What in Hell, you nitwit, are they going to arrest Torvalds for? Writing his own code? Giving it away for free? Jaywalking?
Why is this such an awful ordeal for some people to understand? When are the anti-GNU morons going to realize that if someone - Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, for example - sits down and writes an original piece of code it is HIS to dispose of? He can sell it, or give it away free, or keep it all for himself, or give it away with the GNU project restrictions on redistribution, or require users to paint themselves blue and wear a tutu before they can use it. And if any particular user, whining about the constraints on his freedom, doesn't like the license that the code's creator and owner decided to stick on the code, then that user is perfectly free to NOT USE the copyrighted code.
Besides as everyone knows it isn't good free software that's going to destroy the so-called "software industry." What's going to destroy the commercial software industry is itself, with its unending stream of defective garbage, expensive upgrades that never address the bugs, and the source code kept a deep dark secret. (I think some of these clowns are ashamed to reveal their source code for fear that people who can read source would laugh like crazy.)
Sooner or later all the rest of the businesses are going to get sick of seeing their hard-earned profits bled away by the commercial software guys, in return for software that not only breaks all the time but doesn't even meet advertised specs. Businessmen don't mind paying money for sound products, but this pointless, relentless, continually accelerating upgrade-go-round has just got to stop.
> And your local supermarket is compiling a list...
My local grocery store (Kash n Karry, Florida, U.S.A.) is compiling a list of my purchases, me specifically and stored by name. The mechanism is, they give you a little card about the size of a credit card with a unique bar code on it, specific to each customer. A bunch of popular items in the store, marked with a special tag, are on deep-discount sale - they even sell some at a loss, I think - but only for shoppers with this "Preferred Shopper Card." When you go through the checkout line, you present your card, the clerk swipes it across the scanner, and you get your one or two dollar discount. You don't have to use the card, if you don't want the discount, of course.
The clerks all subvert the system by using a generic discount card they swipe, to save themselves the trouble of asking you to produce your own card, which gives you the discount without associating your specific bar code with your purchase. I think that's kind of funny.
The kicker is, at least one grocery store I read about in the news (not Kash n Karry) has used the data mined from these "Preferred Shopper" card in a sinister manner in court. A customer sued this store after slipping on a wet floor and suffering an injury. The grocery store's lawyers presented this shopper's data; it showed that she bought a good deal of beer and wine; they attempted to elude liability by sugggesting, on the strength of this buying data, that the customer was a drunk and therefore herself responsible for her injuries.
How do you like that?
Now compared with this Real Networks business, the difference here is all in favor of the grocery store, since they openly ask you for the personal data, and you are aware that you are giving it out. (However, you might not be aware that you give out similar personalized shopping data whenever you use a check or ATM card.)
Can anyone here give us suggestions as to what ports and/or IP addresses to block on my firewall? I've installed Netscape 4.7 all over the building in its default configuration, and I would like to stop my entire company from being monitored.
I'll be watching Slashdot and also my eMail, anxiously.
It's perhaps a little too late for IDG to claim an exclusive lock on "Dummies." There's Alexander Pope's Dunciad; there's Charlie McCarthy, and then, of course we have Ronald Reagan. Dan Quuayle, and George W. Bush. So maybe IDG has a case to prevent me from publishing a book entitled, say, "Existentialism for Dummies" but obviously they don't get to own the word outright.
You know, their books aren't half bad, from what I've read in bookstores, but I downright refuse to buy a book which refers to me on the cover, in big letters, as a "dummy," any more than I would volunteer to appear as the butt of a TV show designed to profit by my humiliation, such as the Jerry Springer show. I can't understand why anyone would be willing to put up with crap like that. What gives these IDG jerks the right to talk down to me this way? I mean, kiss my ass, IDG.
...as opposed to us Americans who use third rate hacked up PROPRIETARY solutions instead of that "professionally engineered software" you were talking about, that, alas, only exists in our fantasies. Or maybe you think Office 95/97/2000 is really excellent, "professional" quality software? Then I can only assume you haven't used it professionally for any long period. Don't get me started on Windows 98.
By the way, you're supposed to sign your posts at the bottom, rather than in the "subject" field.
You've got it all wrong. The French government doesn't restrict developers, except in the sense that any client "restricts" its vendors by requiring them to supply what it, the client, wants. If a French developer wants to develop a Windows-based application either for sale or as a give-away, he is free to do so. What this law requires is that software ordered by the Fench government shall be open-source. Unless you take it as an infringement of developers's freedom when a customer is free to choose what he wants to buy, there is no restriction of a developer's "right to choose."
What this law would require is that any work done for the French government should be open-source. This is exactly the same as what your business or mine would demand if we had the clout, which we do not. Look at it this way; at my company we have thousands of valuable documents in Microsoft Word format, and thousands of CAD files in AutoCAD.DWG format; the total value of all these documents is probably over a million dollars. But both of these data formats are deep, dark secrets. What that means is that Autodesk and Microsoft have us by the balls. If Microsoft or Autodesk decide next year to raise the price of new Word or AutoCAD licenses by a factor of ten, then we will be obliged either to fork out that extortionate price so we can have access to our own data files, or to spend a great deal of time and effort translating all our company's critical data to another data format.
Why should the French government, or the U.S. government for that matter, put themselves in this fix, if they can avoid it? Now in the United States, Microsoft spends a great deal of money lobbying the government to adopt their closed, proprietary "standards," and I'd suspect that the legislators from Washington state are big supporters of their local business constituency as well. What's good for the public in general might come in conflict with what benefits wealthy special-interest groups, and in that case, guess who always loses? But even assuming that French legislators are as venal as Americans, what's in it for the French government to sacrifice their public's interests in favor of those of a foreign company?
If I were a student in a high school today, presented with this Mosaic 2000 rubbish, and if I were as itchy as I was when I really was in high school thirty years ago, I'd fake up such a pack of threatening answers that I suppose the administrators would take me for a combination of Klebold, Harris and Charles Manson, with a dash of Gavrilo Princip thrown in for variety's sake. I would not be able to restrain myself gigging those sociologist morons. No doubt the idiots grading my test would get all worked up and I might even end up in all kinds of trouble, but I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation.
On the other hand, we are all assured by one hundred percent of the mainstream news media that, despite the facts that George W. Bush is functionally illiterate, he has no meaningful positions on any major issues, he knows approximately zip about foreign policy, and all in all his sole "qualification" for the presidency is the accident of his birth, nevertheless said G.W. Bush is almost perfectly sure of winning the presidency, there's nothing anyone can do about it, and why? the main reason everybody states, is because his campaign has $37-million in cash. Now are they wrong? We'll see next fall, won't we?
Maybe sillywiz is unaffected by advertisements but it seems that the rest of us, a sizable majority of us at least, are as thoroughly hypnotized as so many automatons. Like it or dislike it, that seems to be the case.
This computer program can maybe mimic Hendrix; that sure doesn't make it the equivalent of Hendrix, any more than the fact that I can transcribe Shakespeare, or even write in a parody of his style, makes me the equivalent of Shakespeare. It takes a whole lot more to create a style out of thin air than it does to copy that style, or else my Beatles song book would render me the artistic equivalent of Lennon-McCartney.
Anyway I've suspected for decades that the majority of the pop music I hear on the radio is synthesised by computers; in fact, I find it next to impossible to believe that actual human beings had anything to do with its creation. (But I'm crabby and old.)
The commercial music industry will now be able to fire all those tempermental, substance-abusing musicians and replace them with nice, tractable, buyable machines. Profits will rise, and that's all that really matters in the U.S.A.; won't they, and their artistically numb corporate stockholders, all be delighted! Consumers of mass market music will get exactly what they want, blended as bland and homogeneous as a McDonald's milkshake; and people who want to listen to new, original music, well, for them there's MP3s and live bands in bars. As far as the musicians themselves are concerned, if they want to publicly satisfy their artistic impulse, they can go to releasing all their primitive hand-crafted wares as MP3s; and since they'll all be much poorer, they probably won't OD and croak quite so regularly. So I guess this is a real win-win-win situation.
Slashdot Mirror
> I think the great untold story of the late 20th
> century is how money replaced war as a way of keeping
> score.
In the last decade alone: Rwanda, Kosovo, Chechnaya.
The twenty-first century has got nothing for me. Jeff Bezos is the perfect symbol of it; money uber alles, robotic greed without limits, backed with cruise missiles. The twenty-first century will be Hell on Earth.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Oh, I'se so sorry! SORRY massa! Sho nuff dis be an issue with world-shaking consequences, but I done fogot, I'se way too stoopid to take part in decidin de future. I just gwine back to pumpin out dat ol septic tank, an leave all de thinkin an decidin to you PhDs.
In a pig's ass I will, you jerk.
Sincerely, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Why in God's name should a worker who has been laid off give a damn about how "U.S. as a whole" has gained so much wealth? All that increase in wealth, ALL OF IT, has gone to the top ten percent of incomes. And that worker is now out of a job. Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
A truly inspired open source work, alas ruined at last because the GPL had not been perfected yet...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
"O who can ever gaze his fill," W. H. Auden
"O who can ever gaze his fill,"
Farmer and fisherman say,
"On native shore and local hill,
Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand?
Fathers, grandfathers stood upon this land,
And here the pilgrims from our loins shall stand."
So farmer and fisherman say
In their fortunate heyday:
But Death's soft answer drifts across
Empty catch or harvest loss
Or an unlucky May:
The earth is an oyster with nothing in it
Not to be born is the best for man
The end of toil is a bailiff's order
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
"O life's too short for friends who share,"
Travellers think in their hearts,
"The city's common bed, the air,
The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach,
Where incidents draw every day from each
Memorable gesture and witty speech."
So travellers think in their hearts
Till malice or circumstance parts
Them from their constant humour:
And slyly Death's coercive rumour
In the silence starts:
A friend is the old tale of Narcissus
Not to be born is the best for man
An active partner in something disgraceful
Change your partner, dance while you can.
"O stretch your hands across the sea,"
The impassioned lover cries,
"Stretch them toward your harm and me.
Our grass in green, and sensual our brief bed,
The stream sings at its foot, and at its head
The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed."
So the impassioned lover cries
Till his storm of pleasure dies:
From the bedpost and the rocks
Death's enticing echo mocks,
And his voice replies:
The greater the love, the more false to its object
Not to be born is the best for man
After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle
Break the embraces, dance while you can.
"I see the guilty world forgiven,"
Dreamer and drunkard sing,
"The ladders let down out of heaven;
The laurel springing from the martyr's blood;
The children skipping where the weepers stood;
The lovers natural, and the beasts all good."
So dreamer and drunkard sing
Till day their sobriety bring:
Parrotwise with death's reply
From whelping fear and nesting lie,
Woods and their echoes ring:
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
The second best is a formal order
The dance's pattern, dance while you can.
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and will not stop
Dance till the stars come down with the rafters
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
I know nothing about XML. What software reads XML files? Why should I use XML instead of HTML? I have several thousand pages worth of books which I have transcribed or intend to transcribe into ASCII for Project Gutenberg, and I was planning on making HTML versions of them all. But if, as you say, XML is so much better, maybe I want to make XML versions instead? Also, how does XML handle text in foreign languages, with letters with accents, text in the Greek alphabet, and all the rest of that? I would very much appreciate the input of Slashdot readers on this question. If any of you can offer suggestions or pointers, please email me at Wkiernan@concentric.net.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I remember in particular having a tex-ified :-))
> version of the Communist Manifesto.
If you liked Manifesto then I know you'll just love my forthcoming transcription of Capital, in three volumes, just shy of three thousand pages. Coming soon! OK, maybe not soon, as I'm only good for about a hundred pages a weekend, probably the middle of next year.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain
not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain
but so that he will shake off the chain
and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
> A more significant beef about PG is that it is
> centralized and dominated by one person, who does
> not share the philosophy of Open Source production
> that most of us do. Instead of forcing individuals to
> contribute to this project, why not help them set up their
> own web sites to publish their own works, or other
> works they have scanned?
Read the PG copyright notice, which is at the top of most PG text files. Michael Hart does not force anybody who contributes to Project Gutenberg to post his work on only his one site. PG's copyright terms are actually more liberal than the GPL. I have beta copies (not completely proofread yet) of my Project Gutenberg transcriptions on my own site:
. html
http://www.con centric.net/~Wkiernan/text/Gutenberg_at_Frownland
Contributors (and anyone else, too) are allowed, by the terms of the PG copyright, to redistribute PG works on one of two conditions: either they strip off the PG copyright header, in which case they can reprint the work with no further restrictions; or otherwise, if they leave the PG copyright header on, they must contribute 20% of the profits to Project Gutenberg. Certainly that's not requiring too much of a redistributor, to ask him to strip off the PG copyright header from the top of the text file, before he uses it anyway he pleases.
And for those HTML fans who criticize PG's least-common-denominator ASCII format, many of the works in the PG library are available in both ASCII and HTML format. While I myself prefer plain text, after I finish transcribing my next two books, I'm going to fall back and make HTML versions of all the books I've done thus far. (It's going be a while; the next two books amount to a little over 3000 pages. At a hundred pages per weekend, I'm "booked" until about next June.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I just started using Lynx on Win32 recently, and for reading pages full of text it truly does r00l. (However, right now I'm using Netscape 3.01, as I have for the last three years. Change is BAD; I'm a Luddite.) Do you read Slashdot a lot, and do you connect with a dial-up? Try changing your preferences so you get the stripped-down Slashdot with hardly any graphics; pages load in less than half the time. It's great! (Thanks for the option, /.) Well, Lynx does that to nearly every page on the web. Lynx needs to be able to do https, though, so one can use it to do on-line purchasing and stuff like that. I think I'll go visit their web page and offer that suggestion to them.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Well, obviously it's harder to make something really excellent than it is to break something. It takes a Michaelangelo to carve La Pieta, any moron who can swing a claw hammer can break it. Besides nobody says Monopolysoft is a bunch of incompetents, its just that what they want and what you or I as as end-users want are two vastly different things. Did you you ever hear the old business saw, "The customer is always right?" Not when he's a customer of a monopoly, he isn't.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I think the answer is "yes," at least I hope so. Here it is, a utility program I wrote and compiled (for a specific practical purpose, too) a couple years back:
* This program does nothing at all, and returns an errorlevel of 0.
* (c) 1997 Terrible Software Inc. WDK */
int main()
{
return 0;
}
Didn't Monopolysoft buy that DOS emulator in NT from some company, Insignia Solutions or something like that, who wrote a DOS/8086 emulator for Macintosh? By the way, I like NT as a desktop OS. I have used NT for a few years now and I find it to be reasonably stable, as long as you are pretty conservative about what all you install on it. Of course it comes with a nice selection of bugs, gaps and gotchas. But compare it to Win95! or even worse, Win98! I genuinely pity all those innocent people who, knowing nothing about computers, go down to Best Buy or whatever and buy these Win98 systems in these stupid garish cases you see these days that look like transformer toys.
As I type this, on the other side of the room there's a Win95 system that belongs to one of my coworkers. It worked fine until she tried to install the AOL client on it. After the obligatory reboot, it refused to load up Win95 at all. Unfortunately she applied SCANDISK to it ("Instead of using CHKDSK, try SCANDISK instead...") Now the root directory of C: is filled to the limit with FILE????.CHK and most of her directories have just *poof* disappeared. I see this sort of thing on Win95/98 boxes all the time.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Where you say "People have REAL WORK to do" you're wrong. The only reason people go to the office and sit in front of their computers is so they, together with their employers, can enjoy that splendid Microsoft(tm) experience. And the only reason their companies's accounting departments exist is so they can collect enough money from their clients to buy cool new computer software and hardware. The exception to this is companies which make computer software or hardware themselves; they exist so that those lucky people who are allowed to buy into their IPOs can make 600 percent profit in a single day by making a phone call or two, or pressing a few keys on their computer keyboards.
Most foreign nations exist so they can gratify and glorify the United States of America. Some, a minority, which make no positive contribution to the glory of the U.S.A., exist only so the United States of America can look powerful and virtuous in comparison. Finally, humanity itself exists so that rich people will have an abundant supply of sycophants and servants.
And there's no use whatsoever for anyone to imagine that things can ever be any different. They can't, that's all; that's just the way it is!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain
not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain
but so that he will shake off the chain
and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
Your average businessman carries a briefcase, right? The one I just measured in this engineer's office next door is 18" x 13" x 4". You put the 20" display in the inside of the lid. The electronics, battery and AC adapter, together with enough padding material to protect it from both sides, shouldn't need to be more than an inch thick. The thing I dislike the most about using laptops is the way the keyboard is laid out right under the screen, but if you have a briefcase-sized package, you could fit a thin, full-sized wireless keyboard and mouse in the package (snap into brackets in the lid?). You'd still have plenty of room for the papers and stuff one usually carries in a briefcase. That's what I want, in dark brown leather; but if I had one, guessing what it would cost, I'd want to carry it around handcuffed to my wrist, like the courier in those old spy films.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Hey Katz! Welcome to Florida! Say, while you're here: if you hear firecrackers going off - those aren't firecrackers! Hit the dirt!
We have a phenomenally high murder rate down here, in part thanks to Floridians's deep love of guns, in part thanks to our legislators's even deeper love of campaign contributions from the gun-manufacturers's lobby. Tourists (in the colorful native patois we call them "victims") have been murdered inside Disney World before, as well as in every other part of our lovely state, from the rest areas of North Florida to gas stations in Miami, and you can well imagine how severely that impacts corporate profits. The business sections of the local newspapers always print a few articles whenever some punk offs a high-profile tourist (i.e. a foreigner, nobody gives a damn if, for example, an Ohioan gets whacked, we Americans are numb to this sort of thing these days). All the Chamber of Commerce types start calculating the $x-billion potential economic loss to Florida's important tourist trade, and they usually do things like fire up an ad campaign to minimize the public-relations impact of the latest murder. Anyway, in response to all that the Disney World management very reasonably stepped up the surveillance.
In Florida if you want to buy a gun from a gun dealer or a pawn shop, you have to present identification and then wait five days while the Florida Department of Law Enforcement checks to see if you might, for example, have a record of convictions for armed robbery. So far so good; but our legislature built a loophole into the law; so-called "private owners" can sell guns with no ID, no background check, and no wait period. They can do this from their houses, but that's kind of inconvenient for shoppers, so you see these big gun shows, held in public arenas such as the Manatee Civic Center, filled with dozens of booths and tables where these "private owners" practice their quaint cottage industry, legal-loophole gun-running. You can walk into one of these gun shows with the sawn-off halves of the handcuffs you escaped in still on your wrists and a pocket full of cash, and walk out with enough weaponry and ammo to keep the busiest career armed robber in supply for years - well, months, at least.
Have a nice vacation!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
PS: I always feel sorry for those poor tourists who come all the way to Florida and all they get to see are those ghastly, abominable theme parks. Katz, when you've had your fill of brightly-colored plastic, at least try to fit in a few days at one of our beaches. I don't know the Atlantic coast that well; on the Gulf side I recommend Treasure Island and Anna Maria Island. And leave your laptop behind, you won't need it at the beach.
How do you wash dishes? The answer: you hold them under the faucet and run water, a great deal of water, across them, and whatever was on the dish that you want to get rid of gets swept away in the flood.
This is my system for dealing with spam. All I do is subscribe to two or three mailing lists, which deal with interesting subjects (for me, art and economics). From these mailing lists I get about eighty emails a day. In addition to those, maybe three times a week someone sends an email directly to me, and of course every day anonymous spammers throw a few slices of spam in the mix.
Before I subscribed to those mailing lists, there were times when I'd log in to my mail server and almost all the new mail - say, four emails out of five - was spam, and like everybody else I found that quite annoying. But now if I get four or even ten spams in a day, I barely notice and I don't care.
The only downsides are: 1.) if I don't log on and download the email it piles up to an alarming height; until just now I haven't logged on to my personal account since Saturday, and I had to download over four hundred messages, and 2.) that's an awful lot of stuff to think about; from where I sit at my desk I can see three open books, face down, which I am reading to try to keep up with the the current threads on the two economics lists. Beats the Hell out of watching TV, though.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Drop a big bomb on said machine, which is
> certainly more destructive and more annoying
> to an admin.
Maybe to some admins. I can't tell you how many times I've wished someone would drop a bomb on my server. Sometimes I think maybe it would be best if I weren't present at the moment of impact; but there are lots of other times when I just don't care. Yeah! A big bomb. But then I hate all these fscking computers.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
What in Hell, you nitwit, are they going to arrest Torvalds for? Writing his own code? Giving it away for free? Jaywalking?
Why is this such an awful ordeal for some people to understand? When are the anti-GNU morons going to realize that if someone - Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, for example - sits down and writes an original piece of code it is HIS to dispose of? He can sell it, or give it away free, or keep it all for himself, or give it away with the GNU project restrictions on redistribution, or require users to paint themselves blue and wear a tutu before they can use it. And if any particular user, whining about the constraints on his freedom, doesn't like the license that the code's creator and owner decided to stick on the code, then that user is perfectly free to NOT USE the copyrighted code.
Besides as everyone knows it isn't good free software that's going to destroy the so-called "software industry." What's going to destroy the commercial software industry is itself, with its unending stream of defective garbage, expensive upgrades that never address the bugs, and the source code kept a deep dark secret. (I think some of these clowns are ashamed to reveal their source code for fear that people who can read source would laugh like crazy.)
Sooner or later all the rest of the businesses are going to get sick of seeing their hard-earned profits bled away by the commercial software guys, in return for software that not only breaks all the time but doesn't even meet advertised specs. Businessmen don't mind paying money for sound products, but this pointless, relentless, continually accelerating upgrade-go-round has just got to stop.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> And your local supermarket is compiling a list...
My local grocery store (Kash n Karry, Florida, U.S.A.) is compiling a list of my purchases, me specifically and stored by name. The mechanism is, they give you a little card about the size of a credit card with a unique bar code on it, specific to each customer. A bunch of popular items in the store, marked with a special tag, are on deep-discount sale - they even sell some at a loss, I think - but only for shoppers with this "Preferred Shopper Card." When you go through the checkout line, you present your card, the clerk swipes it across the scanner, and you get your one or two dollar discount. You don't have to use the card, if you don't want the discount, of course.
The clerks all subvert the system by using a generic discount card they swipe, to save themselves the trouble of asking you to produce your own card, which gives you the discount without associating your specific bar code with your purchase. I think that's kind of funny.
The kicker is, at least one grocery store I read about in the news (not Kash n Karry) has used the data mined from these "Preferred Shopper" card in a sinister manner in court. A customer sued this store after slipping on a wet floor and suffering an injury. The grocery store's lawyers presented this shopper's data; it showed that she bought a good deal of beer and wine; they attempted to elude liability by sugggesting, on the strength of this buying data, that the customer was a drunk and therefore herself responsible for her injuries.
How do you like that?
Now compared with this Real Networks business, the difference here is all in favor of the grocery store, since they openly ask you for the personal data, and you are aware that you are giving it out. (However, you might not be aware that you give out similar personalized shopping data whenever you use a check or ATM card.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Can anyone here give us suggestions as to what ports and/or IP addresses to block on my firewall? I've installed Netscape 4.7 all over the building in its default configuration, and I would like to stop my entire company from being monitored.
I'll be watching Slashdot and also my eMail, anxiously.
Thanks in advance, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It's perhaps a little too late for IDG to claim an exclusive lock on "Dummies." There's Alexander Pope's Dunciad; there's Charlie McCarthy, and then, of course we have Ronald Reagan. Dan Quuayle, and George W. Bush. So maybe IDG has a case to prevent me from publishing a book entitled, say, "Existentialism for Dummies" but obviously they don't get to own the word outright.
You know, their books aren't half bad, from what I've read in bookstores, but I downright refuse to buy a book which refers to me on the cover, in big letters, as a "dummy," any more than I would volunteer to appear as the butt of a TV show designed to profit by my humiliation, such as the Jerry Springer show. I can't understand why anyone would be willing to put up with crap like that. What gives these IDG jerks the right to talk down to me this way? I mean, kiss my ass, IDG.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...as opposed to us Americans who use third rate hacked up PROPRIETARY solutions instead of that "professionally engineered software" you were talking about, that, alas, only exists in our fantasies. Or maybe you think Office 95/97/2000 is really excellent, "professional" quality software? Then I can only assume you haven't used it professionally for any long period. Don't get me started on Windows 98.
By the way, you're supposed to sign your posts at the bottom, rather than in the "subject" field.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You've got it all wrong. The French government doesn't restrict developers, except in the sense that any client "restricts" its vendors by requiring them to supply what it, the client, wants. If a French developer wants to develop a Windows-based application either for sale or as a give-away, he is free to do so. What this law requires is that software ordered by the Fench government shall be open-source. Unless you take it as an infringement of developers's freedom when a customer is free to choose what he wants to buy, there is no restriction of a developer's "right to choose."
What this law would require is that any work done for the French government should be open-source. This is exactly the same as what your business or mine would demand if we had the clout, which we do not. Look at it this way; at my company we have thousands of valuable documents in Microsoft Word format, and thousands of CAD files in AutoCAD .DWG format; the total value of all these documents is probably over a million dollars. But both of these data formats are deep, dark secrets. What that means is that Autodesk and Microsoft have us by the balls. If Microsoft or Autodesk decide next year to raise the price of new Word or AutoCAD licenses by a factor of ten, then we will be obliged either to fork out that extortionate price so we can have access to our own data files, or to spend a great deal of time and effort translating all our company's critical data to another data format.
Why should the French government, or the U.S. government for that matter, put themselves in this fix, if they can avoid it? Now in the United States, Microsoft spends a great deal of money lobbying the government to adopt their closed, proprietary "standards," and I'd suspect that the legislators from Washington state are big supporters of their local business constituency as well. What's good for the public in general might come in conflict with what benefits wealthy special-interest groups, and in that case, guess who always loses? But even assuming that French legislators are as venal as Americans, what's in it for the French government to sacrifice their public's interests in favor of those of a foreign company?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If I were a student in a high school today, presented with this Mosaic 2000 rubbish, and if I were as itchy as I was when I really was in high school thirty years ago, I'd fake up such a pack of threatening answers that I suppose the administrators would take me for a combination of Klebold, Harris and Charles Manson, with a dash of Gavrilo Princip thrown in for variety's sake. I would not be able to restrain myself gigging those sociologist morons. No doubt the idiots grading my test would get all worked up and I might even end up in all kinds of trouble, but I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
On the other hand, we are all assured by one hundred percent of the mainstream news media that, despite the facts that George W. Bush is functionally illiterate, he has no meaningful positions on any major issues, he knows approximately zip about foreign policy, and all in all his sole "qualification" for the presidency is the accident of his birth, nevertheless said G.W. Bush is almost perfectly sure of winning the presidency, there's nothing anyone can do about it, and why? the main reason everybody states, is because his campaign has $37-million in cash. Now are they wrong? We'll see next fall, won't we?
Maybe sillywiz is unaffected by advertisements but it seems that the rest of us, a sizable majority of us at least, are as thoroughly hypnotized as so many automatons. Like it or dislike it, that seems to be the case.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
This computer program can maybe mimic Hendrix; that sure doesn't make it the equivalent of Hendrix, any more than the fact that I can transcribe Shakespeare, or even write in a parody of his style, makes me the equivalent of Shakespeare. It takes a whole lot more to create a style out of thin air than it does to copy that style, or else my Beatles song book would render me the artistic equivalent of Lennon-McCartney.
Anyway I've suspected for decades that the majority of the pop music I hear on the radio is synthesised by computers; in fact, I find it next to impossible to believe that actual human beings had anything to do with its creation. (But I'm crabby and old.)
The commercial music industry will now be able to fire all those tempermental, substance-abusing musicians and replace them with nice, tractable, buyable machines. Profits will rise, and that's all that really matters in the U.S.A.; won't they, and their artistically numb corporate stockholders, all be delighted! Consumers of mass market music will get exactly what they want, blended as bland and homogeneous as a McDonald's milkshake; and people who want to listen to new, original music, well, for them there's MP3s and live bands in bars. As far as the musicians themselves are concerned, if they want to publicly satisfy their artistic impulse, they can go to releasing all their primitive hand-crafted wares as MP3s; and since they'll all be much poorer, they probably won't OD and croak quite so regularly. So I guess this is a real win-win-win situation.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net