Well, David Fincher had only directed Madonna videos ("Express Yourself" and a few others) before doing "Alien 3" (an ok but not great movie) followed by "Seven" and "The Game" (two of my all-time favorites), so I wouldn't dismiss someone on that basis alone.
Also, Russell Mulcahy, who did Highlander, had a ten-year career directing Duran Duran videos before that (including "Union of the Snake" and "Wild Boys".)
It's hard to imagine them doing the book justice, but the videos I've seen by that director ("Come to Daddy", "Windowlicker", and "Frozen") have been pretty cool.
Johnny Mnemonic was horrible (it had its moments, but overall, it was horrible), and it doesn't bode well that this is from the same studio.
I think the movie that most captured the Gibson spirit was Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days. And it did so without even using cyberspace, or being set far in the future. Absolutely brilliant movie.
(I've never seen/. eat an HREF before. Wierd. The link (obviously) doesn't work, and Deja can't the post. The Gods of computing seem to be cranky today.)
Well it seems to be (mostly) fixed now. There is still a length limit, but it's higher. For the record, that Emacs timeline I mentioned is "> here .
If you know what you're doing, and spend the time to do the proper research on companies you're investing in, there's no reason to pay someone else for advice.
And if you know what you're doing, you'll never need to buy software, you'll just write your own. And if you know what you're doing, you'll never need to take your car into the shop, you'll just fix it yourself.
Not everybody wants to be a full-time trader. Not everybody wants to spend their time being a slave to their money, and thinking about it all day. Some people just want to hire someone who knows what they are doing, and then ignore everything but the bottom line: ``how many pizzas can I buy today?''
Because the people who are "making money for you" are also trying to make money for themselves. They have a vested interest in getting you to invest in funds their companies manage as well as stocks that their companies hold.
Well of course you have to follow the money. Most brokers get paid per transaction, but there are other financial consultants whose fee is a percentage of the value of the portfolio they are managing for you. Therefore, they make more money if the value of your portfolio goes up: their incentive is tied to you making more money, which is exactly the right thing.
As far as IRC vs AIM, I believe IRC could easily alienate the average computer user. Sure the network of servers is better than all of the servers being concentrated in AOL, but they don't care about that; what they care about is the simpler interface.
Sure, but you're talking about the user interface, not the protocol. The UI has exactly nothing to do with whether it's IRC or AIM on the wire underneath.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how Jabber works (the info on the web site is extremely sparse) but from what I can tell, it's very server-centric. If I have to use a Jabber-specific server, I'm not interested at all. I think that's a losing approach. What I still want to see is a single client that speaks all extant protocols, without making me, the user, get bogged down in the details.
Sorry if I've misunderstood what Jabber is all about; but if I've gotten it wrong, you should probably try and clarify this on the web site, because it's really hard to tell what your architecture and goals are, and why.
I also don't understand why anyone would use AIM instead of IRC, except for the reasons of ``my new computer came with AIM and not IRC'' or ``my friends all use AIM and not IRC.'' The latter of which a multi-protocol client solves nicely.
I guess it doesn't surprize me that AOL would request the removal of the logo from this IM, but what purpose does that really serve?
Trademark law is a funny thing. If they want to maintain their trademark on this or that, they have to pursue all ``violations'' of it. If someone can show that they haven't enforced their trademark rights, they can lose the mark.
Of course there's no reason AOL couldn't grant particular projects a royalty-free license to use their marks, if they wanted, but they would only do that if they had a good reason to.
I've heard good things about Python, but I just can't get past the fact that horizontal whitespace is syntactically significant. That's just insane.
I just wish Sun hadn't screwed the pooch with Java. It's a good language; if only they hadn't saddled it with so much other baggage (political and technical.)
I wouldn't count the lisp psuedocompiler as a "real" compiler, either.
Then you have some funny definition of the word "compiler" that the rest of the world doesn't share. You seem to think that compilers targetted at virtual machines are not "real" compilers, but that compiler targetted at hardware machines are.
Ok, so I've got gcc, and it's emitting x86 code. Now I execute that code in an x86 emulator. Is gcc suddenly not a "real" compiler?
Now turn it around: I've got a compiler targetted at a virtual machine (the Emacs byte-code engine, the Java VM, whatever.) You say it's not a "real" compiler. Now someone builds a chip that executes that instruction set directly. Now suddenly, magically, it's a "real" compiler again?
Shades of Schrodinger's Cat! You can't know whether it is or isn't a compiler until you open the box?
The original Emacs WAS written by RMS, as a set of macros for the TECO editor.
Something of an oversimplification, as the original EMACS didn't run in stock TECO -- it required a special version of TECO that had the ability to address the full screen. Also, Guy Steele reportedly had a lot to do with that first version.
Gosling came laong after and didn't have a true LISP, only "mock" lisp.
What does "true lisp" mean? Mocklisp was definitely a lisp dialect, albeit an even crummier one than elisp.
Gosling's contribution was the first version of Emacs that ran on Unix. It was also, I believe, the first version that was extended by a language other than the one in which it was written (C, Mocklisp.)
The first Emacs that was extensible using Lisp was Multics Emacs, by Bernie Greenberg.
I wrote up an Emacs timeline a while back, that I posted to comp.emacs. You can find it in DejaNews at http://www.deja.com/%3Ddnc/%5BST_rn%3Dps%5D/msgid. xp?MID=%3C36E42FA1.46F8E7B8@mozilla.org% 3E . (I don't know why Slashdot is changing that HREF to point to a different place -- anyway, if the URL above doesn't work (looks like it wrapped too, arrrgh!), search for ``emacs timeline.'')
Lisp is among the worst languages ever invented for medium or large programs, due to the inability of humans to read and write it easily.
On what do you base this insane statement? What is your basis for comparison? C?
Lisp is the single easiest language to learn, teach, or write. And this is in large part the reason for its bad reputation -- since it's easy to write, it's easy for people who have no clue to come up with something that barely works. (Whereas someone of a comparatively low skill level, faced with accomplishing the same task in C, probably won't ever get it to compile -- so you don't get to even see how crummy their C code is.)
Java is interesting in that it slips under the radar of the anti-Lisp bigots by being, essentially, a Lisp dialect with C's abhorrent syntax and bondage-and-discipline approach to data typing grafted on. An interesting hack -- giving up ease-of-use in order to get the rest of what Lisp brings to the party to be more widely accepted.
At least one source of email addresses seems to have been to grep the Red Hat distribution sources for email addresses, because some folks got in on the offer sent to addresses used only in xscreensaver modules!
See? Write screen savers, get in on IPOs. Who said screen savers were useless.
Too bad E*Trade is involved, though -- E*Trade SUCKS. Completely unusable site, and I've been trying to fucking close my account with them for months -- they just won't do it. There's no way to do it on the web site, if you email them they say you have to do it in writing, and when I ask them in writing, they keep sending my letters back to me. It seems that the only way they can keep customers is to make it impossible for anyone to cease being a customer.
I didn't even ask to be a customer in the first place, if you wanted to participate in Netscape's Employee Stock Purchase Program, you had to use E*Trade, there was no other option.
QuickTime is [...] the cheapest streaming media solution other than Java,
Now Java is a ``Streaming Media Solution.'' Excuse me? What the hell is that supposed to mean? The only ``streaming media'' I've ever seen Java do has been the equivalent of server-push, or GIF89 animations.
my mom was a typist, she typed all day on manual typewriters. The hammer hits the paper from the force the key is hit.. no electric power or anything. Those things take at least 5 times more force then a computer keyboard but nobody she knew ever was diagnosed with CTS...
Well one reason for that is that they probably would have just called it arthritis or something.
But another theory for this is that manual typewriters happen to be better for you than computer keyboards, both because of the force with which you have to hit the keys (causing different muscle groups to be used) and because of the longer distance your fingers have to travel (causing more extension, instead of a series of very short repetitions.) Also, the way they were angled, coupled with the distance you had to move your hands, meant that you really just couldn't slouch.
Supporting this theory is the history of the telegraph operators: they tended to have exactly the kinds of problems we're seeing today with computer users. Think about how you'd hit a telegraph key -- it's much more like the way we type today, than the way one would type on a manual.
Also, if your mom was a typist, she was probably trained to do so, and probably had better posture as a result.
3. Take Advil before you type. This won't solve the problem, but it will lessen the pain.
This is insane advice! Hiding the symptom is only going to hurt you, it doesn't make the problem go away.
Also, over-use of ibuprofin is bad for you: while it reduces swelling, it also inhibits growth of cartilage, and is now believed to cause liver damage in large doses or over long periods of time (along with acetominophen, AKA Tylenol.)
Don't be an idiot. If it hurts, go to a doctor and get it fixed.
Another easy-fix is a foam pad: I'd reccomend the gel-filled ones.
No. If you're leaning on your hands or wrists or elbows while typing, you're typing wrong, and you're going to hurt yourself.
5. If your wrists really hurt, go to the pharmacy and buy wrist braces. Wear them while you sleep at night (but no more than that). This will keep your wrists still at night and avoid inflammation from sleeping positions.
Depending on what's wrong with you, this could be good advice, or very bad advice.
If the problem is muscle strain, wrist braces can help by giving the muscles a rest, and time to rebuild themselves. But If you wear them for too long, you'll cause the opposite problem: the muscles will atrophy from lack of use.
I've noticed that holding down a mouse button and moving the mouse around at the same time cause the most discomfort.
I also find it harder to do: drawing lines with the mouse down is harder than drawing them with the mouse up, for example. TrackPoints (those eraser nubby thingies) are much better for this, both because you don't have to keep lifting and moving your hand, and also because you can operate the motion with one hand while holding the buttons down with the other.
Too bad they seem to only exist on laptops, which have the worst keyboards in the world.
If we have to use pointing devices, then why don't we have a sensor on the screen that watches eye movements and moves the pointer on the screen accordingly? I heard about this technology 10 years ago from somebody at IBM, and I'm sure it wasn't new even then.
In around 1985, someone marketed a "head mouse" for the Mac, that was this IR headband you wore, that put the cursor where you were looking (apparently you don't need to totally track the eyes, since your head moves slightly but perceptibly when you look elsewhere, and the feedback loop took care of the rest.)
But I heard it didn't really work all that well.
Many people operate the mouse with their feet. There are companies that sell oversized mice for this. You can also get foot-pedals for your Control/Shift/Meta keys.
I can't imagine this would cause eye strain because the eyes are already doing all the work anyway.
RSI isn't just for hands. I've read about problems that people have had with voice-recognition systems: without proper training on how to talk, saying the same words over and over all day caused serious strain to the vocal chords. Anything you do repetatively can be bad for you, our bodies aren't built for that, there was no evolutionary pressure to support it.
Wasn't the major sticking point with Xemacs the fact that Lucid did not want to assign copyright over to the FSF?
Lucid did assign the copyrights of all Lucid-authored code to the FSF. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Why don't you stop beating this dead horse already? XEmacs still exists and is still popular because many people find it to be better than Stallmacs in many ways. End of story.
All I have to say is, so? [...] Well worth the investment.
There are many things about supporting Linux, and about supporting Open Source in general, that make good business sense. The fact remains that most companies don't understand that yet, so it's good news when one does. This kind of behavior should be encouraged (but I'm not sure that mailbombing one guy with hundreds of thank-yous is necessarily the best way...)
Well I thought Tom's story was funny -- not hilarious, but worth a chuckle. But the really funny part was the oh-so-predictable responses.
This is, in fact, the true spirit of Open Source: one person plants a seed, and a thousand others join in, and make the work be much larger and more complete than it originally was.
Of course, in this case, those participating didn't actually realize what they were helping to build, which was the clever twist that Tom brought to the party. Crowd control as performance art, I love it!
When the spokesman for a project leaves and rips it apart, that's all the media needs to make a field day out of it. We're still constantly seeing stories about how Mozilla is a "failure" because of the way you departed.
So what, I should have said ``everything is going just great, I'm leaving for personal reasons unrelated to the project''? That would have been a lie. And frankly, I think it would have been unfair to the people still working on the project, too, who were in need of a wake-up call. Keep in mind that I didn't say ``the project is dead, you should all go home.'' I said ``the project is broken in these N different ways, for these reasons. You should fix them, but I'm not going to. Good luck.''
No one interviews the hundreds of people who disagree with you and are excited by Mozilla's progress.
Then get out there and make them interview you! I did it, and you can too. It's not that hard.
I think you are right, and it makes me think that there may be additional factors that helped to fuel jamie's exodous...
You should, of course, feel free to armchair-psychoanalyze me to your heart's content, and to assume that the ~4,000 words I wrote about my reasons for leaving Netscape and AOL aren't true, or aren't complete, or whatever. But think about it: I quit. I have nothing to hide, and no reason to tell you anything other than the truth.
In my estimation (and this is of course something on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree) the project was going nowhere. But more importantly, it was no longer any fun. Both because the project itself was moving at a snail's pace, and because Netscape is a lousy place to work now.
After having worked on Mozilla for just over five years, the last year and a half of which was at mozilla.org, I quit. Does that make me a ``quitter''? Sure. But how many of you have contributed even 1% of that amount of time or effort to the project? That makes you something quite a bit less than a quitter, doesn't it? Like... irrelevant.
(And for that matter, how many of you have worked on the same project for five years, or even at the same company? That's pretty rare in this industry too, you know.)
There is nothing in my resignation letters that is factually inaccurate, and those of you who imply otherwise don't know what you're talking about. (Have you even read them?) It may be that the Mozilla project is going to succeed despite all of its very real problems, and really, nothing would make me happier (because I don't want to end up using MSIE either.) I hope it's so. But I decided that if it was going to happen, it was going to have to happen without me, because I was done.
Why do you ankle-biters have such a problem with people making their own decisions about their own lives? I (and others) gave you much and owe you nothing. Deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, David Fincher had only directed Madonna videos ("Express Yourself" and a few others) before doing "Alien 3" (an ok but not great movie) followed by "Seven" and "The Game" (two of my all-time favorites), so I wouldn't dismiss someone on that basis alone.
Also, Russell Mulcahy, who did Highlander, had a ten-year career directing Duran Duran videos before that (including "Union of the Snake" and "Wild Boys".)
It's hard to imagine them doing the book justice, but the videos I've seen by that director ("Come to Daddy", "Windowlicker", and "Frozen") have been pretty cool.
Johnny Mnemonic was horrible (it had its moments, but overall, it was horrible), and it doesn't bode well that this is from the same studio.
I think the movie that most captured the Gibson spirit was Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days. And it did so without even using cyberspace, or being set far in the future. Absolutely brilliant movie.
Well it seems to be (mostly) fixed now. There is still a length limit, but it's higher. For the record, that Emacs timeline I mentioned is "> here .
And if you know what you're doing, you'll never need to buy software, you'll just write your own. And if you know what you're doing, you'll never need to take your car into the shop, you'll just fix it yourself.
Not everybody wants to be a full-time trader. Not everybody wants to spend their time being a slave to their money, and thinking about it all day. Some people just want to hire someone who knows what they are doing, and then ignore everything but the bottom line: ``how many pizzas can I buy today?''
Well of course you have to follow the money. Most brokers get paid per transaction, but there are other financial consultants whose fee is a percentage of the value of the portfolio they are managing for you. Therefore, they make more money if the value of your portfolio goes up: their incentive is tied to you making more money, which is exactly the right thing.
I'm a big fan of delegating to experts.
Sure, but you're talking about the user interface, not the protocol. The UI has exactly nothing to do with whether it's IRC or AIM on the wire underneath.
Sorry if I've misunderstood what Jabber is all about; but if I've gotten it wrong, you should probably try and clarify this on the web site, because it's really hard to tell what your architecture and goals are, and why.
I also don't understand why anyone would use AIM instead of IRC, except for the reasons of ``my new computer came with AIM and not IRC'' or ``my friends all use AIM and not IRC.'' The latter of which a multi-protocol client solves nicely.
Trademark law is a funny thing. If they want to maintain their trademark on this or that, they have to pursue all ``violations'' of it. If someone can show that they haven't enforced their trademark rights, they can lose the mark.
Of course there's no reason AOL couldn't grant particular projects a royalty-free license to use their marks, if they wanted, but they would only do that if they had a good reason to.
I just wish Sun hadn't screwed the pooch with Java. It's a good language; if only they hadn't saddled it with so much other baggage (political and technical.)
Then you have some funny definition of the word "compiler" that the rest of the world doesn't share. You seem to think that compilers targetted at virtual machines are not "real" compilers, but that compiler targetted at hardware machines are.
Ok, so I've got gcc, and it's emitting x86 code. Now I execute that code in an x86 emulator. Is gcc suddenly not a "real" compiler?
Now turn it around: I've got a compiler targetted at a virtual machine (the Emacs byte-code engine, the Java VM, whatever.) You say it's not a "real" compiler. Now someone builds a chip that executes that instruction set directly. Now suddenly, magically, it's a "real" compiler again?
Shades of Schrodinger's Cat! You can't know whether it is or isn't a compiler until you open the box?
Something of an oversimplification, as the original EMACS didn't run in stock TECO -- it required a special version of TECO that had the ability to address the full screen. Also, Guy Steele reportedly had a lot to do with that first version.
What does "true lisp" mean? Mocklisp was definitely a lisp dialect, albeit an even crummier one than elisp.
Gosling's contribution was the first version of Emacs that ran on Unix. It was also, I believe, the first version that was extended by a language other than the one in which it was written (C, Mocklisp.)
The first Emacs that was extensible using Lisp was Multics Emacs, by Bernie Greenberg.
I wrote up an Emacs timeline a while back, that I posted to comp.emacs. You can find it in DejaNews at http://www.deja.com/%3Ddnc/%5BST_rn%3Dps%5D/msgid. xp?MID=%3C36E42FA1.46F8E7B8@mozilla.org% 3E . (I don't know why Slashdot is changing that HREF to point to a different place -- anyway, if the URL above doesn't work (looks like it wrapped too, arrrgh!), search for ``emacs timeline.'')
On what do you base this insane statement? What is your basis for comparison? C?
Lisp is the single easiest language to learn, teach, or write. And this is in large part the reason for its bad reputation -- since it's easy to write, it's easy for people who have no clue to come up with something that barely works. (Whereas someone of a comparatively low skill level, faced with accomplishing the same task in C, probably won't ever get it to compile -- so you don't get to even see how crummy their C code is.)
Java is interesting in that it slips under the radar of the anti-Lisp bigots by being, essentially, a Lisp dialect with C's abhorrent syntax and bondage-and-discipline approach to data typing grafted on. An interesting hack -- giving up ease-of-use in order to get the rest of what Lisp brings to the party to be more widely accepted.
See? Write screen savers, get in on IPOs. Who said screen savers were useless.
Too bad E*Trade is involved, though -- E*Trade SUCKS . Completely unusable site, and I've been trying to fucking close my account with them for months -- they just won't do it. There's no way to do it on the web site, if you email them they say you have to do it in writing, and when I ask them in writing, they keep sending my letters back to me. It seems that the only way they can keep customers is to make it impossible for anyone to cease being a customer.
I didn't even ask to be a customer in the first place, if you wanted to participate in Netscape's Employee Stock Purchase Program, you had to use E*Trade, there was no other option.
Now Java is a ``Streaming Media Solution.'' Excuse me? What the hell is that supposed to mean? The only ``streaming media'' I've ever seen Java do has been the equivalent of server-push, or GIF89 animations.
Well one reason for that is that they probably would have just called it arthritis or something.
But another theory for this is that manual typewriters happen to be better for you than computer keyboards, both because of the force with which you have to hit the keys (causing different muscle groups to be used) and because of the longer distance your fingers have to travel (causing more extension, instead of a series of very short repetitions.) Also, the way they were angled, coupled with the distance you had to move your hands, meant that you really just couldn't slouch.
Supporting this theory is the history of the telegraph operators: they tended to have exactly the kinds of problems we're seeing today with computer users. Think about how you'd hit a telegraph key -- it's much more like the way we type today, than the way one would type on a manual.
Also, if your mom was a typist, she was probably trained to do so, and probably had better posture as a result.
This is insane advice! Hiding the symptom is only going to hurt you, it doesn't make the problem go away.
Also, over-use of ibuprofin is bad for you: while it reduces swelling, it also inhibits growth of cartilage, and is now believed to cause liver damage in large doses or over long periods of time (along with acetominophen, AKA Tylenol.)
Don't be an idiot. If it hurts, go to a doctor and get it fixed.
No. If you're leaning on your hands or wrists or elbows while typing, you're typing wrong, and you're going to hurt yourself.
Depending on what's wrong with you, this could be good advice, or very bad advice.
If the problem is muscle strain, wrist braces can help by giving the muscles a rest, and time to rebuild themselves. But If you wear them for too long, you'll cause the opposite problem: the muscles will atrophy from lack of use.
I also find it harder to do: drawing lines with the mouse down is harder than drawing them with the mouse up, for example. TrackPoints (those eraser nubby thingies) are much better for this, both because you don't have to keep lifting and moving your hand, and also because you can operate the motion with one hand while holding the buttons down with the other.
Too bad they seem to only exist on laptops, which have the worst keyboards in the world.
In around 1985, someone marketed a "head mouse" for the Mac, that was this IR headband you wore, that put the cursor where you were looking (apparently you don't need to totally track the eyes, since your head moves slightly but perceptibly when you look elsewhere, and the feedback loop took care of the rest.)
But I heard it didn't really work all that well.
Many people operate the mouse with their feet. There are companies that sell oversized mice for this. You can also get foot-pedals for your Control/Shift/Meta keys.
RSI isn't just for hands. I've read about problems that people have had with voice-recognition systems: without proper training on how to talk, saying the same words over and over all day caused serious strain to the vocal chords. Anything you do repetatively can be bad for you, our bodies aren't built for that, there was no evolutionary pressure to support it.
Lucid did assign the copyrights of all Lucid-authored code to the FSF. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Why don't you stop beating this dead horse already? XEmacs still exists and is still popular because many people find it to be better than Stallmacs in many ways. End of story.
There are many things about supporting Linux, and about supporting Open Source in general, that make good business sense. The fact remains that most companies don't understand that yet, so it's good news when one does. This kind of behavior should be encouraged (but I'm not sure that mailbombing one guy with hundreds of thank-yous is necessarily the best way...)
This is, in fact, the true spirit of Open Source: one person plants a seed, and a thousand others join in, and make the work be much larger and more complete than it originally was.
Of course, in this case, those participating didn't actually realize what they were helping to build, which was the clever twist that Tom brought to the party. Crowd control as performance art, I love it!
You doubtless use much software that, at some point in its development, was compiled on Intel hardware.
So let's slap Intel Inside logos on it all!
What's wrong with Lava Lamps? Lava Lamps are cool.
So what, I should have said ``everything is going just great, I'm leaving for personal reasons unrelated to the project''? That would have been a lie. And frankly, I think it would have been unfair to the people still working on the project, too, who were in need of a wake-up call. Keep in mind that I didn't say ``the project is dead, you should all go home.'' I said ``the project is broken in these N different ways, for these reasons. You should fix them, but I'm not going to. Good luck.''
Then get out there and make them interview you! I did it, and you can too. It's not that hard.
You should, of course, feel free to armchair-psychoanalyze me to your heart's content, and to assume that the ~4,000 words I wrote about my reasons for leaving Netscape and AOL aren't true, or aren't complete, or whatever. But think about it: I quit. I have nothing to hide, and no reason to tell you anything other than the truth.
In my estimation (and this is of course something on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree) the project was going nowhere. But more importantly, it was no longer any fun. Both because the project itself was moving at a snail's pace, and because Netscape is a lousy place to work now.
After having worked on Mozilla for just over five years, the last year and a half of which was at mozilla.org, I quit. Does that make me a ``quitter''? Sure. But how many of you have contributed even 1% of that amount of time or effort to the project? That makes you something quite a bit less than a quitter, doesn't it? Like... irrelevant.
(And for that matter, how many of you have worked on the same project for five years, or even at the same company? That's pretty rare in this industry too, you know.)
There is nothing in my resignation letters that is factually inaccurate, and those of you who imply otherwise don't know what you're talking about. (Have you even read them?) It may be that the Mozilla project is going to succeed despite all of its very real problems, and really, nothing would make me happier (because I don't want to end up using MSIE either.) I hope it's so. But I decided that if it was going to happen, it was going to have to happen without me, because I was done.
Why do you ankle-biters have such a problem with people making their own decisions about their own lives? I (and others) gave you much and owe you nothing. Deal with it.