Yarn, I'm interested to know what qualities you identified in one but not in the other. I have become increasingly aware of art since reading a great article by Paul graham (lisp guy currently writing arc, paulgraham.com), and would like to know your thoughts. I am not trained at looking at art but am interested in learning more, and only discovered the other day how little respect I have for the brazen "I don't know anything about art but I know what I like" approach to the world.
There's no neat category to put my politics in, but I consider myself a long-term libertarian. News like the topic of this story compounds my belief: that the days of being able to save people from themselves are over. Information is free, as are the power and corruption it brings. The only way forward for any society is to empower its individuals to the point where they take will care of themselves.
Cursive is well and truly out of date. It takes a lot of practice to master, and the only benefit is the aesthetic value on the page and perhaps some speed - and then only in the hands of the practiced. But from what I've seen I doubt it.
From what I can see, 'nice' handwriting is inversely proportional to the amount of education you've had. My grandfather had a truly exception hand for writing in the italic style, and used to write regularly to relatives, and as favours to people who needed something special written. He left school at the end of year ten, and studied writing years later.
Meanwhile, doctors spend between six and fifteen years in the education system after year twelve - and look at the standard of their writing! It really is that bad!
I write regularly on black notepads I carry around with me everywhere, and in a separate written journal I keep. We had to study propre cursive technique at school, I gave up on it half way through high school when I was writing a lot for my humanities subjects. It's too hard to legibly and consistently, and prefer printing.
> Not a general statement on Apple software, > but their software on Windows feels and acts > the same way as IBM's - an afterthought.
I think that's a both very general and apt summary of Apple software on Windows - QT is far from as bad as it gets. WebObjects for windows is a disgrace. Buggy; unmaintaned; just installing it reduces the staiblity of your machine; slow; written in a braindead way so that the frame abstraction acts like it would on a mac (except buggy); too much stuff bundled in the same processes; lots of services running you don't need and which are difficult to get rid of; etc, etc, etc.
Not *always*... I recently got in the embarassing situation of trying to carry it (and the pocketknives to my keys) on one of my many flights between adelaide and melbourne. Whoops.
Of course in the old days, you could say it was a tool of trade (aka protagonist from _Cryptonomicon_) and get away with it - I'd done this several times.
But for some reason - not any more..
There are some other important tools I can think of:
- Stuffit for mac classic *executable* on a *native* floppy or CDROM - it can be really hard to get this otherwise because the resourcefork issue means you can't get it, and so much stuff needs it.
- For similar reasons winzip is good although easier to get hold of.
- Your text editor of choice (and of course that choice should be vim;) )
> creating a standardized software architecture > for embedded devices that takes (sic) advantage > of open source software and the benefits of > Linux (sic)
I had hoped that Microsoft buying Corel would lead to its downfall. After all, that's what's happened to everyone else who has had wordperfect:) But at least they took a huge loss in the process.
Two weeks ago I might have cried. But maybe it's time to move on.
I recently go my fifth first-post on slashdot, which should qualify me as an 'ace'. It's sad to see the end of an era like this, but maybe it's time to move on.
Or I could just subscribe and rub it in the noses of those wannabies with only one or two under their belt! Yeah!
I suspect NASCAR is not an ideal example
on
Game Theory at 190mph
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I suspect NASCAR is not an ideal (ie: boundary pushing) example of the sorts of game theory this article talks about.
Most of all: cycling. There's more flexibility for overtaking - a limitation in track racing. Other than that, the nature of the competition is similar - slipstreaming and darfting.
Another comparison I thought of is the board game Diplomacy, because there's more time to think, and betrayal is all but inevitable: in order to win, you will have to screw your allies if you are on the path to success. This is not necesarily the case in nascar where you may be happy to lose now because it's meaningless whether you come fourteenth or fifteenth. In diplomacy, there is a status attached to mere survival. I admit, there is a path to stalemate whereby you honour your agreements. However, it is rare.
However, I found the point of the article - regarding where accidents happen - to be very interesting.
I thought the plot for this movie was rubbish. If computers were going to take over that'd do it by working through the systems that are all around us - global networks, omniprescent computing. The idea of a complex AI from a single facility (be it military, research or manufacturing) taking over the world makes much more sense to me than the prospect or some sort of incredible 'robot nation' of bipeds that look and act like humans do. I hope the quality of subsequent stories is better than this was.
How are you supposed to design a reliable schema if you don't do a complete design before you start?
For a project I've recently been on, we did the whole half-assed XP thing: skipped on design but didn't really make up for it enough in other ways. It was a bit of a mess.
Anyway, I spent heaps of time correcting for database changes that came up late in development, and that was a pain. Because a schema change in one place means code changes all over the place... you get the idea.
So how do people usually get around that? Is there a good strategy to abstracting the database away like crazy that gets around the problem?
I have come to despise the whole hacker culture based on the use of the sort of tricks the review illustrated. I comment my code like crazy, avoid confusing booleans, put null on the lhs of code, etc.
But unfortunately, the other people on my team do none of that, and it would only be more painful if they were trying the sort of stunts this book focuses on.
Thanks for that. I'll give it another try. Since you're so helpful..:)
I keep all of my mail (two years worth) in/var/spool/mail. Is there a way of keeping mail longetiviyt like htis with mutt? (I don't have to parse it each time I log in because I use gnu/screen:) )
I hear people rant and rant aobut mutt but I still use pine. As I can tell, the keys for mutt suck out of the box, and I can't be bothered researching how to configure it and then spending however long it will take to tweak it. I believe in software that just works. Why do the mutt keys have to suck so much? (this is coming from a hardened vim user, btw;) )
I've had real problems with tomcat under debian several times. One one machine, I couldn't get it working from apckage after lots of attempts. So I downloaded the source and installed it. I've had to patch it with the recentish security hole. Now I can't get jsp pages working. "org.apache.jasper.JasperException".
On my machine at work, I spent all of last friday trying to get tomcat working again after an apt-get upgrade. No luck. There's some jspo library it justkeeps complaining about (even though I'm not even using jsp with the server and have nuked all the example stuff). Tried uninstalling, reinstalling. No luck. Tried nuking all configuration and copying of a colleagues computer who's works. No luck. Had colleague and sysadmin scratch heads with me for a couple of hours. No luck.
Wow. Haven't felt this ranty in a while:). In bits I even sound-anticapitalist, which is completely out of character (and a misreading!:) )
*ALL* their products except for Windows and Office are so crappy that they couldn't survive without massive cash infusions.
That's incorrect. In fact the opposite is true. Many of their products are surperior, because they don't play by the same rules everyone else does. They have an economy of scale with Office and Windows that allows them to flood them with money in development costs and come out ahead. But they then apply those development standards to all their other products too, because the overhead of developments costs is just not an issue (because they're subsidised by two monopolies). They illegally leverage their dominance of two areas (OS and Office) to maximise profit and flood the market with well researched, high quality products in other areas, which helps keep their opponents at bay and preventing high quality apps from coming to fruition which could be offered on multiple platforms and thereby harm the Windows/Office monopoly.*
Their competitors in several areas spend all their time playing catch up, because Microsoft can can play outside of the capitalist economic principles everyone else works by. The reason free software succeeds is because we've found a different way to evade the same rules. >:)
However, there are exceptions - where their opposition fail to achieve to their potential not for lack of potential spending but just because they're stupid. Look at sqlplus (Oracle). I complained about it to Oracle last time we had them over for a presentation. Their sales people looked at me confused. So I asked them to fire it up and type a command. Then I told them to press the up button. Not only did command line history fail to work - the damn thing segfaulted, and the sales staff laughed! (and no, nothing has been done in the last six months to fix it, hell why change now?) I'm disgusted a company can thrive with that sort of mentality and regard for its consumers. Say what you like about Microsoft - Office Assistant was incredibly stupid, but they got rid of that. Oracle arn't as aware of their customers as Microsoft.
How about the default install of Solaris and shocking assortment of tools when there are far surperior free OS environments around with free tools that Sun themselves could use? It's another example of a company with its head too far up its ass.
* They piss us off like crazy, because their line is controlled by marketing people, but then governments piss us off like crazy for the same reasons. They reach the sweet spot where they are the closest thing to being all things to all people. And desite everyone's personal grudges with that approach, in general those approaches work better than appealing really well to a small group. I note that Apple's marketshare containues to dwindle as it has for fifteen years. As have pretty much all the competitors - Adobe and Quicken remain. And Adobe are a special effects company first, and a software company second (as anybody who has dealt with their not so fantastic distributors knows), so it can be argued that they play by different rules also.
Debian is lovely once it's installed, but difficult to get there. Hence I can't get it to work on my oldish system at home, but my mailserver at work (which runs pine, python, vim, screen and allows me to do just about everything I do on a computer except run the sh connection to get me there and a web browser). I'd like to try that new debian based commercial system, but can't afford it with the current exchange rate between Autralia and the US.:(
RPM based distributions are the opposite. Easy to install to be nice - although mandrake 9 refuses to work on my home machine (on boot after first install it tells me I have a readonly partition and refuses to go further?!?! tried several file system types, no other weird config, although there's a promise IDE card in the machine but not on that disk). But maintaining them is a pain in the ass. You have to do a throwaway every time you want to upgrade to benefit from the new stuff properly (in my experience - don't like rpms).
At work I have to use windows for my main project at the moment because I run webobjects. Although one of my colleagues dislikes the environment enough that he runs it under vmware and does everything (compiling, editing, staging) except databse management (eomodeler - yuck) under linux and emacs. My workstation is quite a bit slower - so I use his build scripts, cygwin and gvim to get around as much of WO as possible.
I've tried installing yellow dog linux on my 9600 mac at home in the last few weeks. It was version 2.1 and on book just can't load X. So I can't get mac on linux running even. Hope to give 2.3 a go in a few weeks tho.
Yesterday I had to do some bug fixing on a tomcat project and got to boot back into linux. It's a dream system for me (short of a new release of BeOS): runs recent gnome stuff, vim, screen, mozilla. However, without a sysadmin to point me to recentish debian packages (because the standard stuff is always way out of date, even debian unstable you have to wait ages for new stuff) ad help me out when my XF86Config file starts getting weird or apt-get upgrade screws up lilo so I can't boot the machine.. I struggle running linux.
For those reasons (and counterstrike) my home worstation still runs windows most of the time (although I'm in Be at the moment). With cygwin and python and mozilla, Windows *can* be bearable. Although the latest gnome leaves it for dead - in my mind a good linux setup is far and away the best development environment out there.
I wish linux was easy in all the ways BeOS is easy. Dead simple solid (and not as intrusive) boot manager, superfast and easy install that works, no rpms:) I really wish debian would get their act together or Xandros would start an aid program for people living in weak-currency countries;)
Um.. no it's not.. it's a different fork in the source. The X is (or was) about 'eXtended'. They both have a X interface, they both have a terminal interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Yarn, I'm interested to know what qualities you identified in one but not in the other. I have become increasingly aware of art since reading a great article by Paul graham (lisp guy currently writing arc, paulgraham.com), and would like to know your thoughts. I am not trained at looking at art but am interested in learning more, and only discovered the other day how little respect I have for the brazen "I don't know anything about art but I know what I like" approach to the world.
There's no neat category to put my politics in, but I consider myself a long-term libertarian. News like the topic of this story compounds my belief: that the days of being able to save people from themselves are over. Information is free, as are the power and corruption it brings. The only way forward for any society is to empower its individuals to the point where they take will care of themselves.
Cursive is well and truly out of date. It takes a lot of practice to master, and the only benefit is the aesthetic value on the page and perhaps some speed - and then only in the hands of the practiced. But from what I've seen I doubt it.
From what I can see, 'nice' handwriting is inversely proportional to the amount of education you've had. My grandfather had a truly exception hand for writing in the italic style, and used to write regularly to relatives, and as favours to people who needed something special written. He left school at the end of year ten, and studied writing years later.
Meanwhile, doctors spend between six and fifteen years in the education system after year twelve - and look at the standard of their writing! It really is that bad!
I write regularly on black notepads I carry around with me everywhere, and in a separate written journal I keep. We had to study propre cursive technique at school, I gave up on it half way through high school when I was writing a lot for my humanities subjects. It's too hard to legibly and consistently, and prefer printing.
Foiled - but I'll get you next time, my pretty!!!
I'm not even a subscriber!
> Not a general statement on Apple software,
> but their software on Windows feels and acts
> the same way as IBM's - an afterthought.
I think that's a both very general and apt summary of Apple software on Windows - QT is far from as bad as it gets. WebObjects for windows is a disgrace. Buggy; unmaintaned; just installing it reduces the staiblity of your machine; slow; written in a braindead way so that the frame abstraction acts like it would on a mac (except buggy); too much stuff bundled in the same processes; lots of services running you don't need and which are difficult to get rid of; etc, etc, etc.
> Leatherman - Always carry one with you.\
;) )
Not *always*... I recently got in the embarassing situation of trying to carry it (and the pocketknives to my keys) on one of my many flights between adelaide and melbourne. Whoops.
Of course in the old days, you could say it was a tool of trade (aka protagonist from _Cryptonomicon_) and get away with it - I'd done this several times.
But for some reason - not any more..
There are some other important tools I can think of:
- Stuffit for mac classic *executable* on a *native* floppy or CDROM - it can be really hard to get this otherwise because the resourcefork issue means you can't get it, and so much stuff needs it.
- For similar reasons winzip is good although easier to get hold of.
- Your text editor of choice (and of course that choice should be vim
- Long lengths of crimped UTP
> TRON + Linux = "T-Linux"
Surely it should be T-GNU/Linux.
> creating a standardized software architecture
> for embedded devices that takes (sic) advantage
> of open source software and the benefits of
> Linux (sic)
Imagine a baerwolf cluster of those!
I had hoped that Microsoft buying Corel would lead to its downfall. After all, that's what's happened to everyone else who has had wordperfect :) But at least they took a huge loss in the process.
Two weeks ago I might have cried. But maybe it's time to move on.
I recently go my fifth first-post on slashdot, which should qualify me as an 'ace'. It's sad to see the end of an era like this, but maybe it's time to move on.
Or I could just subscribe and rub it in the noses of those wannabies with only one or two under their belt! Yeah!
yeah-yeah
.
.
I suspect NASCAR is not an ideal (ie: boundary pushing) example of the sorts of game theory this article talks about.
Most of all: cycling. There's more flexibility for overtaking - a limitation in track racing. Other than that, the nature of the competition is similar - slipstreaming and darfting.
Another comparison I thought of is the board game Diplomacy, because there's more time to think, and betrayal is all but inevitable: in order to win, you will have to screw your allies if you are on the path to success. This is not necesarily the case in nascar where you may be happy to lose now because it's meaningless whether you come fourteenth or fifteenth. In diplomacy, there is a status attached to mere survival. I admit, there is a path to stalemate whereby you honour your agreements. However, it is rare.
However, I found the point of the article - regarding where accidents happen - to be very interesting.
I thought the plot for this movie was rubbish. If computers were going to take over that'd do it by working through the systems that are all around us - global networks, omniprescent computing. The idea of a complex AI from a single facility (be it military, research or manufacturing) taking over the world makes much more sense to me than the prospect or some sort of incredible 'robot nation' of bipeds that look and act like humans do. I hope the quality of subsequent stories is better than this was.
How are you supposed to design a reliable schema if you don't do a complete design before you start?
For a project I've recently been on, we did the whole half-assed XP thing: skipped on design but didn't really make up for it enough in other ways. It was a bit of a mess.
Anyway, I spent heaps of time correcting for database changes that came up late in development, and that was a pain. Because a schema change in one place means code changes all over the place... you get the idea.
So how do people usually get around that? Is there a good strategy to abstracting the database away like crazy that gets around the problem?
What are the worst things about gaol? Is there anything there to do with your time so you don't feel it's wasted or is it almost all boredom?
I have come to despise the whole hacker culture based on the use of the sort of tricks the review illustrated. I comment my code like crazy, avoid confusing booleans, put null on the lhs of code, etc.
But unfortunately, the other people on my team do none of that, and it would only be more painful if they were trying the sort of stunts this book focuses on.
Is that.... *four* first posts?!?! >:)
thank you ;)
Thanks for that. I'll give it another try. Since you're so helpful.. :)
/var/spool/mail. Is there a way of keeping mail longetiviyt like htis with mutt? (I don't have to parse it each time I log in because I use gnu/screen :) )
I keep all of my mail (two years worth) in
I hear people rant and rant aobut mutt but I still use pine. As I can tell, the keys for mutt suck out of the box, and I can't be bothered researching how to configure it and then spending however long it will take to tweak it. I believe in software that just works. Why do the mutt keys have to suck so much? (this is coming from a hardened vim user, btw ;) )
I've had real problems with tomcat under debian several times. One one machine, I couldn't get it working from apckage after lots of attempts. So I downloaded the source and installed it. I've had to patch it with the recentish security hole. Now I can't get jsp pages working. "org.apache.jasper.JasperException".
On my machine at work, I spent all of last friday trying to get tomcat working again after an apt-get upgrade. No luck. There's some jspo library it justkeeps complaining about (even though I'm not even using jsp with the server and have nuked all the example stuff). Tried uninstalling, reinstalling. No luck. Tried nuking all configuration and copying of a colleagues computer who's works. No luck. Had colleague and sysadmin scratch heads with me for a couple of hours. No luck.
Tomcat's a bitch.
Wow. Haven't felt this ranty in a while :). In bits I even sound-anticapitalist, which is completely out of character (and a misreading! :) )
*ALL* their products except for Windows and Office are so crappy that they couldn't survive without massive cash infusions.
That's incorrect. In fact the opposite is true. Many of their products are surperior, because they don't play by the same rules everyone else does. They have an economy of scale with Office and Windows that allows them to flood them with money in development costs and come out ahead. But they then apply those development standards to all their other products too, because the overhead of developments costs is just not an issue (because they're subsidised by two monopolies). They illegally leverage their dominance of two areas (OS and Office) to maximise profit and flood the market with well researched, high quality products in other areas, which helps keep their opponents at bay and preventing high quality apps from coming to fruition which could be offered on multiple platforms and thereby harm the Windows/Office monopoly.*
Their competitors in several areas spend all their time playing catch up, because Microsoft can can play outside of the capitalist economic principles everyone else works by. The reason free software succeeds is because we've found a different way to evade the same rules. >:)
However, there are exceptions - where their opposition fail to achieve to their potential not for lack of potential spending but just because they're stupid. Look at sqlplus (Oracle). I complained about it to Oracle last time we had them over for a presentation. Their sales people looked at me confused. So I asked them to fire it up and type a command. Then I told them to press the up button. Not only did command line history fail to work - the damn thing segfaulted, and the sales staff laughed! (and no, nothing has been done in the last six months to fix it, hell why change now?) I'm disgusted a company can thrive with that sort of mentality and regard for its consumers. Say what you like about Microsoft - Office Assistant was incredibly stupid, but they got rid of that. Oracle arn't as aware of their customers as Microsoft.
How about the default install of Solaris and shocking assortment of tools when there are far surperior free OS environments around with free tools that Sun themselves could use? It's another example of a company with its head too far up its ass.
* They piss us off like crazy, because their line is controlled by marketing people, but then governments piss us off like crazy for the same reasons. They reach the sweet spot where they are the closest thing to being all things to all people. And desite everyone's personal grudges with that approach, in general those approaches work better than appealing really well to a small group. I note that Apple's marketshare containues to dwindle as it has for fifteen years. As have pretty much all the competitors - Adobe and Quicken remain. And Adobe are a special effects company first, and a software company second (as anybody who has dealt with their not so fantastic distributors knows), so it can be argued that they play by different rules also.
Wyrven uses jython so there'd probably be a further speed hit from reflection (?)
Linux can be pain to get and keep running.
:(
:) I really wish debian would get their act together or Xandros would start an aid program for people living in weak-currency countries ;)
Debian is lovely once it's installed, but difficult to get there. Hence I can't get it to work on my oldish system at home, but my mailserver at work (which runs pine, python, vim, screen and allows me to do just about everything I do on a computer except run the sh connection to get me there and a web browser). I'd like to try that new debian based commercial system, but can't afford it with the current exchange rate between Autralia and the US.
RPM based distributions are the opposite. Easy to install to be nice - although mandrake 9 refuses to work on my home machine (on boot after first install it tells me I have a readonly partition and refuses to go further?!?! tried several file system types, no other weird config, although there's a promise IDE card in the machine but not on that disk). But maintaining them is a pain in the ass. You have to do a throwaway every time you want to upgrade to benefit from the new stuff properly (in my experience - don't like rpms).
At work I have to use windows for my main project at the moment because I run webobjects. Although one of my colleagues dislikes the environment enough that he runs it under vmware and does everything (compiling, editing, staging) except databse management (eomodeler - yuck) under linux and emacs. My workstation is quite a bit slower - so I use his build scripts, cygwin and gvim to get around as much of WO as possible.
I've tried installing yellow dog linux on my 9600 mac at home in the last few weeks. It was version 2.1 and on book just can't load X. So I can't get mac on linux running even. Hope to give 2.3 a go in a few weeks tho.
Yesterday I had to do some bug fixing on a tomcat project and got to boot back into linux. It's a dream system for me (short of a new release of BeOS): runs recent gnome stuff, vim, screen, mozilla. However, without a sysadmin to point me to recentish debian packages (because the standard stuff is always way out of date, even debian unstable you have to wait ages for new stuff) ad help me out when my XF86Config file starts getting weird or apt-get upgrade screws up lilo so I can't boot the machine.. I struggle running linux.
For those reasons (and counterstrike) my home worstation still runs windows most of the time (although I'm in Be at the moment). With cygwin and python and mozilla, Windows *can* be bearable. Although the latest gnome leaves it for dead - in my mind a good linux setup is far and away the best development environment out there.
I wish linux was easy in all the ways BeOS is easy. Dead simple solid (and not as intrusive) boot manager, superfast and easy install that works, no rpms
XEmacs is Emacs with an X interface.
Um.. no it's not.. it's a different fork in the source. The X is (or was) about 'eXtended'. They both have a X interface, they both have a terminal interface.