1. Gvim 2. Firefox 3. Thunderbird 4. Java 5. Putty 6. Vmware... and that's it. I don't need anything else because I do the rest through putty under my linux slices on vmware.
Thank you for your considered reply. I wish to qualify one thing:
> Owning the moon may seem ludricrous to you > but capitalism calls for privatizing it.
I talked about exclusive and enforced naming rights to the moon. What I implied by this warrants more explanation than that short sentence. In this system, if a corporation in Europe owned this thing, it would make it illegal for an uncivilised tribesman with no knowledge of Europe to point the moon out to his child and use the of his own language.
I wanted to come up with an examples that were absurdly contrived yet somehow conceivable. Because much of our intelletual property concepts are similarly contrived. Would capitalism support a concept such as I have indicated? Perhaps it would - trademarks are widespread. But I don't think they are that out of control in any sense.
Imagine reading a Heinlen-style dialogue featuring a character new to our planet who has never had a concept of IP. this character is slammed with the concept in the face rather than being seduced into the madness over the course of hundreds of years.
"What? You can... *own ideas*?! But - that's absurd. They are artifacts! They are the building blocks of the world. They are not something that somebody can accrue... like bread on the table or a collection of books. They are something inherent about the universe. They are not *made* - they are discovered.
When an explorer wades into uncharted territories, capturing pictures of scenes or the paths to them this should not make the lands he discoveres his property. Similarly - when a scientist discovers something about DNA - that's not hers to own - it's just an accrual of knowledge about the nature of things."
The concept of intellectual property is a hack that was produced to give people an incentive to discover things that are not really property.
Does pure capitalism extend to my moon example? Or do you think there is a break somewhere between it, IP and owning a car?
> everything should be free. That's communist. > Apple is capitalist.
I consider myself capitalist. At the same time I don't believe everything should be free - I just don't think there should be artificial government decrees that say people can own ideas beyond the right of recognition and the right to protect personal privacy.
You can say that's communist, but it's no more communist than saying that someone shouldn't be able to own a spirituality or the right to wear their eyeliner a particular way or exclusive and enforced naming rights to the moon.
You give the concepts of intellectual property too much credit. They're arbitrary. Well entrenched, but arbitrary.
Readers: if this doesn't sit well with you please do reply - I'm interested to see how other viewpoints clash with this one.
How disrespectful of Gosling to accuse us of smoking drugs for being concerned for the fate of our platform. We invest time and energy developing our skills in Java and we make personal calls on things at work in favour of their platform. Given Sun's poor decisions regarding how open the platform should be we have every right to be jumpy when they make a legal settlement with Microsoft and then fail to reiterate their support for the Microsoft's prime target (the java platform).
Some of the comments were extreme, but position papers like these should not need to be a reaction to community concern, they should anticipate it.
I don't see the big deal about the OS X interface, particularly for geeks. It's not possible to do enough using hotkeys. The only OSs that are keyboard friendly enough to be friendly to this user are the unix prompt (power and ease of use are obvious) and Windows (which is also excellent like this: win+r, alt+tab switching, etc). I'd switch to mac but navigating around is a chore because you need to use the mouse for so much.
Not all trading. As Clancy indicates in the book, not all exchanges have to happen through the stock exchange (eg: a deal in a pub), but the volume of such exceptions is very low.
Just the other day I installed redhat 9 on my system, then apt-get and did a dist-upgrade. It worked flawlessly. The gnome interface is now quite solid. It Just Works. The keyredbinding is easy and works. It's swift on my reasonably modest laptop. Admittedly I haven't tried samba yet, but I had no problems creating the symblink to get java working in the web browser.
Thanks for the respectful correction:) I'm still not entirely sold one subsidising the country so that it can have the benefits of the city - because if it's that expensive then it's that expensive. Nevertheless, I had a skewed understanding of the situation you've explained.
I agree with hist stance on broadband, and I think you've misrepresented it. What he said was that for the public to fund broadband to every home was stupid. And it is. If people want broadband they should do what I have to do, and hand over the cash for it.
The government has no role making taxpayers fork out so other people can get broadband, particularly when a large percentage of the population doesn't have a computer and fewer still have need of broadband.
The ALP would never have implemented that policy.
In the same way, I don't think the Australian government has any role in "first home-buyers grants" or other incentives that skew the market for no (publicly) good reason.
I'm a very non-professional writer. Some of you may have heard of Nanowrimo, where contestants try to write a fifty thousand word novel in a month. I heard about it on slashdot after registrations had closed two years ago and thought - this is for me! So I spoke to some friends (and many of them happen to be choristers) and we decided to run our own festival in December with basically the same premise: use any means to write a fifty thousand word novel in a calendar month. Being December you get an extra day, too. We called it 'Choristers and Others Writing On Holiday' ('cowoh'). And we've run it again once since. Anyway. I use vim (ahdore.com/craig/vim/.vimrc), and cvs, and can show the progress of my novel from beginning to end. The unix command line tools are great for composition. I have bash scripts for word count, planning, opening sections and all that.
The last website was written with jsp on tomcat3 (had an old binary laying around), postgresql 7.x and linux 2.2 running on a K62 with 256MB. It was the biggest hack I've ever written. I started with three patterns of jsp and had a weekend to do it, and managed to mangle those patterns to produce the site: word count, entrant diaries, a news section, and "top ten" portlets and the like. Nevertheless it lasted the festival, and then I destroyed it (leaving the database).
I'm currently redeveloping our website, and plan to diverge from the nanowrimo theme a lot more this time around. In addition to the old features, I want to have a comprehensive registration and profiles section; some sort of scheme for uploading daily changes; and automatic source control. I'm also writing some tools so that the data will be automatically composed into a formatted pdf at the end of the festival. Hopefully these measures will encourage people to use plain text and learn the benefits wonderful tools you can use to work with it.
We're based in Adelaide, but currently have competitors from around Australia. We're fairly small, but open to new people, and hoping to do another festival before the end of the year. My email is craig at ahdore / com.
Why - oh - why does the United States have this stupid system whereby the judge can't award costs at the end of a trial? We have it in Australia, and I'm sure plenty of other countries do.
Cut and paste in the command line
on
GTK+ TTY Port
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I find this exciting for quite a specific reason: cut and paste within the comand line. I like to run framebuffer rather than X because my machine is quite old (k6 with 256MB) and I still don't think X has evolved to be command-key friendly enough yet (although the recent releases of gnome are very close). When I use my computer, it tends to be an exercise in managing multiple command lines rather than running any windowy applications beyond firebird.
Anyway - the problem I have with the framebuffer is a lack of decent cut and paste support. It's sort of available in screen... I tried to learn it once but remember it being very awkward. I've also tried to pick up emacs for the shell but fiound that to be klunky and the terminal definitions primitive. Vim has a terminal program for it and suffers the same problems.
But with GKT+ under framebuffer, I should be able to run gnome-terminal in a vt, and with that have access to a clipboard! I hope it's easy to navigate around for selecting text and the like.
It's already got to the stage where you don't need anything faster than an ('obsolete') high end pentium 2 with an affordable amount of RAM to do everything an average user will need to do on their machine. Desktop applications, decent games, all run fine in such an environment. Even new releases of desktop applications and games run on five year old systems. That was never the case ten years ago.
I think over the next ten years we'll see that spread into development, and the demand for cutting edge hardware will be less than it is now, and far less than it was ten years ago, when even the fastest computers didn't feel fast enough.
Further, I think we'll see an evolving commoditisation of the software platform. The open source community has already reached critical mass. Within ten yeas, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBeOS and Macintosh will be pretty much interchangable, and compatibility layers will exist to bring Windows into that group as well (java, qt, gtk+ and cygwin are already breaking down barriers here..net offers to, and with enough momentum it's possible Novel could embrace and extend it to be a competitor if Microsoft changes focus).
I also think that the world of functional programming is a sleeping giant, and it will only take a perl-analogue funcional langauge (eg: hacker friendly, not as quirky as common lisp, good libraries, great community) to jump start it now that cycles and software components are cheap.
We just need to make sure we come down like a ton of bricks on techologies like hailstorm and shocking IP law while we're getting there, because both of them threaten offer the ruin the promise of a bright future.
" IT DOESN'T MATTER what their "intentions" are.. This case clearly shows how silly software patent-laws are."
Software patent laws are stupid, but it DOES matter what their intentions are. That was the point of the previous poster, and it's valid. If you have an objection to patents, voice it in a way that doesn't appear to be rebuttal to him.
Nice one. Also "because there's already a BIOS on earth called that" and "because there's already a hacker on earth called that" and "because there's a microsoft internal project called that" and "because it sounded too similar to McGuyver's employer for us to let it hang around"... (etc)
Is phoenix the most overused wanna-be-cool codename ever, or what?!
I'm a Liberal and disagree that the Liberal Party is an analogue of the Republican Party. In fact, you will find federal cabinet ministers in the liberal party who consider themselves to be closer to the US Democrats than to the US Republicans.
Most of the "ideology in brief" section seems unlikely. I mean, does anybody have an *ideology* of "terrible on the environment" of "like to be divisive (known as 'wedge politics')"? Also I'd disagree that there is an ideology of anti-welfarism. If anything, this may have been true during the 1980s but has decreased. Abbot tried to push for a social credit welfare package similar to the one Beazley took to the 1998 election through the media but was rebuffed by Howard.
The anti-immigration suggestion is incorrect - immigration has increased since Howard was elected in 1996, but has been refocussed to take in skilled immigrants.
I agree with much of the rest - lurch to the right and being different to libertarians. A shame really, I'm not too happy with the new ASIO legislation at all.
Throw away lines like "Their Attorney General also makes Joseph Goebbels look soft on terrorism" demean the suffering of people who were targeted by Goebbels, and the crimes of such figures. Williams is one of the most balanced and considering members of cabinet and is nothing like Goebbels.
There's a famous quote from former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke (no relation to Microsoft Bob) suggesting that by 1990 no Australian child would live in poverty1, presumably as a result of his policies although I'm not sure of that and can't site anything aftera brief seach. At the time he left stage with tears welled up in his eyes, but it attracted a lot of criticism in the same way as most delusional vapourware (including Gates' flowery promise here).
Slashdot Mirror
1. Gvim ... and that's it. I don't need anything else because I do the rest through putty under my linux slices on vmware.
2. Firefox
3. Thunderbird
4. Java
5. Putty
6. Vmware
Thank you for your considered reply. I wish to qualify one thing:
> Owning the moon may seem ludricrous to you
> but capitalism calls for privatizing it.
I talked about exclusive and enforced naming rights to the moon. What I implied by this warrants more explanation than that short sentence. In this system, if a corporation in Europe owned this thing, it would make it illegal for an uncivilised tribesman with no knowledge of Europe to point the moon out to his child and use the of his own language.
I wanted to come up with an examples that were absurdly contrived yet somehow conceivable. Because much of our intelletual property concepts are similarly contrived. Would capitalism support a concept such as I have indicated? Perhaps it would - trademarks are widespread. But I don't think they are that out of control in any sense.
Imagine reading a Heinlen-style dialogue featuring a character new to our planet who has never had a concept of IP. this character is slammed with the concept in the face rather than being seduced into the madness over the course of hundreds of years.
"What? You can... *own ideas*?! But - that's absurd. They are artifacts! They are the building blocks of the world. They are not something that somebody can accrue... like bread on the table or a collection of books. They are something inherent about the universe. They are not *made* - they are discovered.
When an explorer wades into uncharted territories, capturing pictures of scenes or the paths to them this should not make the lands he discoveres his property. Similarly - when a scientist discovers something about DNA - that's not hers to own - it's just an accrual of knowledge about the nature of things."
The concept of intellectual property is a hack that was produced to give people an incentive to discover things that are not really property.
Does pure capitalism extend to my moon example? Or do you think there is a break somewhere between it, IP and owning a car?
> everything should be free. That's communist.
> Apple is capitalist.
I consider myself capitalist. At the same time I don't believe everything should be free - I just don't think there should be artificial government decrees that say people can own ideas beyond the right of recognition and the right to protect personal privacy.
You can say that's communist, but it's no more communist than saying that someone shouldn't be able to own a spirituality or the right to wear their eyeliner a particular way or exclusive and enforced naming rights to the moon.
You give the concepts of intellectual property too much credit. They're arbitrary. Well entrenched, but arbitrary.
Readers: if this doesn't sit well with you please do reply - I'm interested to see how other viewpoints clash with this one.
How disrespectful of Gosling to accuse us of smoking drugs for being concerned for the fate of our platform. We invest time and energy developing our skills in Java and we make personal calls on things at work in favour of their platform. Given Sun's poor decisions regarding how open the platform should be we have every right to be jumpy when they make a legal settlement with Microsoft and then fail to reiterate their support for the Microsoft's prime target (the java platform).
Some of the comments were extreme, but position papers like these should not need to be a reaction to community concern, they should anticipate it.
Thanks, really. If it's as good as you suggest (and responsive) I'll be a mac owner within three months.
I don't see the big deal about the OS X interface, particularly for geeks. It's not possible to do enough using hotkeys. The only OSs that are keyboard friendly enough to be friendly to this user are the unix prompt (power and ease of use are obvious) and Windows (which is also excellent like this: win+r, alt+tab switching, etc). I'd switch to mac but navigating around is a chore because you need to use the mouse for so much.
My God - I see my first link to a zeph comment and - what do you know - it's a goatse link ;)
Not all trading. As Clancy indicates in the book, not all exchanges have to happen through the stock exchange (eg: a deal in a pub), but the volume of such exceptions is very low.
- C
Just the other day I installed redhat 9 on my system, then apt-get and did a dist-upgrade. It worked flawlessly. The gnome interface is now quite solid. It Just Works. The keyredbinding is easy and works. It's swift on my reasonably modest laptop. Admittedly I haven't tried samba yet, but I had no problems creating the symblink to get java working in the web browser.
Thanks for the respectful correction :) I'm still not entirely sold one subsidising the country so that it can have the benefits of the city - because if it's that expensive then it's that expensive. Nevertheless, I had a skewed understanding of the situation you've explained.
I agree with hist stance on broadband, and I think you've misrepresented it. What he said was that for the public to fund broadband to every home was stupid. And it is. If people want broadband they should do what I have to do, and hand over the cash for it.
The government has no role making taxpayers fork out so other people can get broadband, particularly when a large percentage of the population doesn't have a computer and fewer still have need of broadband.
The ALP would never have implemented that policy.
In the same way, I don't think the Australian government has any role in "first home-buyers grants" or other incentives that skew the market for no (publicly) good reason.
I'm a very non-professional writer. Some of you may have heard of Nanowrimo, where contestants try to write a fifty thousand word novel in a month. I heard about it on slashdot after registrations had closed two years ago and thought - this is for me! So I spoke to some friends (and many of them happen to be choristers) and we decided to run our own festival in December with basically the same premise: use any means to write a fifty thousand word novel in a calendar month. Being December you get an extra day, too. We called it 'Choristers and Others Writing On Holiday' ('cowoh'). And we've run it again once since. Anyway. I use vim (ahdore.com/craig/vim/.vimrc), and cvs, and can show the progress of my novel from beginning to end. The unix command line tools are great for composition. I have bash scripts for word count, planning, opening sections and all that.
The last website was written with jsp on tomcat3 (had an old binary laying around), postgresql 7.x and linux 2.2 running on a K62 with 256MB. It was the biggest hack I've ever written. I started with three patterns of jsp and had a weekend to do it, and managed to mangle those patterns to produce the site: word count, entrant diaries, a news section, and "top ten" portlets and the like. Nevertheless it lasted the festival, and then I destroyed it (leaving the database).
I'm currently redeveloping our website, and plan to diverge from the nanowrimo theme a lot more this time around. In addition to the old features, I want to have a comprehensive registration and profiles section; some sort of scheme for uploading daily changes; and automatic source control. I'm also writing some tools so that the data will be automatically composed into a formatted pdf at the end of the festival. Hopefully these measures will encourage people to use plain text and learn the benefits wonderful tools you can use to work with it.
We're based in Adelaide, but currently have competitors from around Australia. We're fairly small, but open to new people, and hoping to do another festival before the end of the year. My email is craig at ahdore / com.
What about Jedi Beach Party? I'm sure I read on slashdot episode 8 was subtitled "Jedi Beach Party".
Why - oh - why does the United States have this stupid system whereby the judge can't award costs at the end of a trial? We have it in Australia, and I'm sure plenty of other countries do.
I find this exciting for quite a specific reason: cut and paste within the comand line. I like to run framebuffer rather than X because my machine is quite old (k6 with 256MB) and I still don't think X has evolved to be command-key friendly enough yet (although the recent releases of gnome are very close). When I use my computer, it tends to be an exercise in managing multiple command lines rather than running any windowy applications beyond firebird.
... I tried to learn it once but remember it being very awkward. I've also tried to pick up emacs for the shell but fiound that to be klunky and the terminal definitions primitive. Vim has a terminal program for it and suffers the same problems.
Anyway - the problem I have with the framebuffer is a lack of decent cut and paste support. It's sort of available in screen
But with GKT+ under framebuffer, I should be able to run gnome-terminal in a vt, and with that have access to a clipboard! I hope it's easy to navigate around for selecting text and the like.
Yeah, but these are *his* kids.
It's already got to the stage where you don't need anything faster than an ('obsolete') high end pentium 2 with an affordable amount of RAM to do everything an average user will need to do on their machine. Desktop applications, decent games, all run fine in such an environment. Even new releases of desktop applications and games run on five year old systems. That was never the case ten years ago.
.net offers to, and with enough momentum it's possible Novel could embrace and extend it to be a competitor if Microsoft changes focus).
I think over the next ten years we'll see that spread into development, and the demand for cutting edge hardware will be less than it is now, and far less than it was ten years ago, when even the fastest computers didn't feel fast enough.
Further, I think we'll see an evolving commoditisation of the software platform. The open source community has already reached critical mass. Within ten yeas, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBeOS and Macintosh will be pretty much interchangable, and compatibility layers will exist to bring Windows into that group as well (java, qt, gtk+ and cygwin are already breaking down barriers here.
I also think that the world of functional programming is a sleeping giant, and it will only take a perl-analogue funcional langauge (eg: hacker friendly, not as quirky as common lisp, good libraries, great community) to jump start it now that cycles and software components are cheap.
We just need to make sure we come down like a ton of bricks on techologies like hailstorm and shocking IP law while we're getting there, because both of them threaten offer the ruin the promise of a bright future.
Nice reply :) You got good karma too :)
" IT DOESN'T MATTER what their "intentions" are.. This case clearly shows how silly software patent-laws are."
Software patent laws are stupid, but it DOES matter what their intentions are. That was the point of the previous poster, and it's valid. If you have an objection to patents, voice it in a way that doesn't appear to be rebuttal to him.
Bah! foiled!
:) :)
Nice one. Also "because there's already a BIOS on earth called that" and "because there's already a hacker on earth called that" and "because there's a microsoft internal project called that" and "because it sounded too similar to McGuyver's employer for us to let it hang around"... (etc)
Is phoenix the most overused wanna-be-cool codename ever, or what?!
People! It's been done! Find some new words!
tpost? :)
I'm a Liberal and disagree that the Liberal Party is an analogue of the Republican Party. In fact, you will find federal cabinet ministers in the liberal party who consider themselves to be closer to the US Democrats than to the US Republicans.
Most of the "ideology in brief" section seems unlikely. I mean, does anybody have an *ideology* of "terrible on the environment" of "like to be divisive (known as 'wedge politics')"? Also I'd disagree that there is an ideology of anti-welfarism. If anything, this may have been true during the 1980s but has decreased. Abbot tried to push for a social credit welfare package similar to the one Beazley took to the 1998 election through the media but was rebuffed by Howard.
The anti-immigration suggestion is incorrect - immigration has increased since Howard was elected in 1996, but has been refocussed to take in skilled immigrants.
I agree with much of the rest - lurch to the right and being different to libertarians. A shame really, I'm not too happy with the new ASIO legislation at all.
Throw away lines like "Their Attorney General also makes Joseph Goebbels look soft on terrorism" demean the suffering of people who were targeted by Goebbels, and the crimes of such figures. Williams is one of the most balanced and considering members of cabinet and is nothing like Goebbels.
There's a famous quote from former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke (no relation to Microsoft Bob) suggesting that by 1990 no Australian child would live in poverty1, presumably as a result of his policies although I'm not sure of that and can't site anything aftera brief seach. At the time he left stage with tears welled up in his eyes, but it attracted a lot of criticism in the same way as most delusional vapourware (including Gates' flowery promise here).
1 http://www.abc.net.au/am/s36058.htm