...who once said that 640k of memory should be enough for anybody. But really, what the hell do we need these extra 10-20% speed boosts for at this point besides Q3 benchmarks to impress your l337 friends?
I don't know what amazes me more: that the Powerbook I carry around is 10 times more powerful than the Cray supercomputers of 20 years ago, or that I still watch it struggle to resize a window under OSX.
Hrm. All right, maybe we do need to overclock our machines still. But something is terribly wrong.
...when faced by a common enemy? Whether as hackers banding against the evil forces trying to quash open source, one city's sports fans against another, nations, or multinational alliances, it seems we can only get over ourselves enough to cooperate when we're threatened.
Make no mistake, I support every word of this statement and am amazed by the signatures on it - the policies and strategies espoused by Microsoft are a threat to us all and need to be taken seriously. I just wish we could get together more often on things that weren't as directly threatening, with less venom and bile directed at each other (Perl vs Python, Emacs vs Vi, Gnome vs KDE, Red Hat vs. Just About Anybody, ad nauseum), instead of waiting for Big Evil Threats from Outside to remind us that we're all in the same camp. TomatoMan
The video on this site is really something. 27mb QuickTime. The pencil sketch renderings of quake 3 are amazing. I may have to install Windows again just to see this in action. Ack!
...where so much changed between the "official" releases that I can't update my Ximian desktop anymore because of all of the failed dependencies. (Not a flame against Ximian, who I love, but that's the truth.)
I like Apple's method of providing regular, touching-in, fix-a-few-things updates. They're small, they work, they're quick, and they let me know there are still humans on the other side of the installer.
I can't believe what I'm reading. Heart attack at 49? Shouldn't we be able to prevent this kind of thing by now?
Douglas Adams was a real hacker - he hacked the English language and made it do things no-one had ever thought of before. His characters were engaging and his stories were brilliantly original. I'm amazed by how much his writing has affected my own thought process; like Monty Python, whole chapters hang verbatim in my addled memory.
I particularly loved the bit about how most of the actual work on the Guide got done by any hitchhiker that wandered into the offices and "saw something worth doing." That, for me, sums up the hacker spirit better than anything I've ever read. I feel like we've all lost a brother.
In the real world nobody really cares about what knowledge happens to sit inside your head.
Well, in my real world, I sure do. If I'm interviewing you for a job, there are the the following basic rules as far as I'm concerned:
If you know what you're doing, I don't give a wet slap what certifications you have.
If you don't know what you're doing, I don't give a wet slap what certifications you have.
I can do google searches and swipe other people's work without anybody's help, thanks, if that's what it takes. If I was going to pay someone actual money to do work for me, I'd want to feel assured that they either have a clue, or aptitude and a whole lotta love.
Heh. Haven't worked for large companies, have you? A mom-and-pop shop might not check, but a big corp *will* check, and it will check your previous jobs, and dates on them, and etc. etc.
I've only worked at one big company (Dun & Bradstreet) - I don't think they checked my credentials since I didn't present any. But I'm willing to believe you on this one.
...the better for all of us. It deserves to be decently buried at midnight in an unmarked grave, but that's about all.
Of course, *nix users are probably the last people that need to be told this, but every little bit helps.
N4 is the single biggest ball-and-chain around the ankles of people otherwise dying to write quality, standards-compliant code. Now we just have to get the mac users to give it up, most Win people are using IE5, which is good enough for the most part.
Internet Explorer on Windows is the best & fastest browser there is, period.
This is just plain wrong, if by "best" you mean "supports the w3 standards." IE/win has positioning bugs and problems with the object tag that made me have to hack stupid, non-compliant workarounds for IE/win on a recent project I did that used strict XHTML 1.0, CSS, and WAI level AAA code. The code was 100% valid and worked perfectly on IE5/mac, Moz/*, and NN6/*. Only IE5/win was broken.
As of pre-Moz-0.9, IE5/mac far outperforms any other browser as far as standards-compliance goes. Haven't checked the latest Moz, but I expect it's still true.
This interests me a lot. Joe Cheater cheats on his final exams and graduates - let's say college - on other people's work and with a slippery-at-best grasp of the subject his diploma says he's reached a certain level of comptence/knowledge in.
Then he goes out into a workplace that expects him to know what his diploma suggests he should. What now? Well, his strategy is going to be either to catch up fast, or keep looking for work to borrow/steal and pass off as his own. Probably the latter, because if the former was an option he probably wouldn't have had to cheat in the first place.
Is this any harder in the "real world" than it was in school? Nope. The internet is out there for everybody, and it's now just too hard to track everyone's work in a foolproof way. Will he get caught? Maybe eventually - but he's got a pretty good shot at becoming a comfortable PHB too, since so few of us have the energy to verify everything people claim. How hard would it be, for example, to print up a realistic-looking diploma or grad school transcript on a laser printer at Kinko's? If someone handed you one and it looked real, would you call the university to verify that it was real? No, you'd say "wow, MIT!" and hire him/her.
I used to teach GED classes, and I had students who passed who came back and told me that they had essentially closed their eyes and guessed at the multiple test questions, and done this over and over until they got a passing score. So they were out in the world with the equivalent of a high school diploma, who were barely literate and couldn't add 12+13.
We can write nasty things about cheaters, but they do it because we're all too lazy to police/stop them or really verify what their diplomas say they can do. The professor in this article was a very rare exception (he sounded like a cool professor, too). As long as people accept paper credentials as proof of ability (IT certification, anyone?), cheaters will keep doing what they do. Why shouldn't they? It's a much faster way to the top, and most of the time, we don't mind that much.
Between CD-R's at $0.30 each, and gas at three bucks a gallon, it looks like a gloomy summer ahead for Joe American Consumer and Pr0n Hound.
Too expensive to drive to the beach and too expensive to back up all that pr0n. And with cable rates going up... we might have to start talking to each other or something.
Also, there's the fact of 'Natural Selection' to consider. Something is wrong with those genes if they're not being passed on.
This is an excellent and important point, but it is based on the premise that Mother Nature knows better than we do what's right and wrong. The problem is that the pro-tinkering folks (not necessarily sure which side of this line I'm on myself) don't necessarily accept it as a premise, so it can't be a foundation of the core argument.
Even scarier (and more exciting) is the notion that we might actually be able to learn or decide how to shape our own stuff, and that Mother Nature has led us to this point, and that it's all part of a Plan.
Just thinking about this stuff makes me woozy. It feels like the vastest area of unknown territory I've ever contemplated.
Please stop whining about Apple not open-sourcing everything it does.
Has Apple broken any laws with this? Have they violated the licenses of the open-source components of their operating system, which they spent millions developing?If so, file a lawsuit. If not, stop whining.
Look, Open-Source World (tm): YOU wrote the license, YOU wrote the terms. If you want to write code under a new "Non-Apple" license that you create because you don't like Aple, then do it. But quit your crying about how people legitimitely use the license YOU created just because they don't give away all the cool shit they create with it.
Flame away, but the kneejerk Apple-bashing that goes on here is really starting to make me sick. It's almost as bad as the M$ bashing.
As more and more of the "prime-time" sites float subscription fees, this will divert more and more traffic to the free sites, which will crunch them even more through increased bandwidth costs. I know I won't be paying to read Salon or Yahoo or anything else; I'll keep surfing for the (dwindling) free sites and keep driving their costs up. And since I run a couple myself, seeing my own costs go up as more people give up on the pay sites.
Lovers of free information might wind up inadvertantly killing a lot of it off just by trying to access it. This is a real problem.
I'm somewhat comforted by the fact that they have to ask, and don't just know.
I'm sure part of their desire to know is myopic, but part of it is certainly an attempt to be sure people aren't buying OS-less PCs and using their friend's copy of Windows on it (not that that's all that easy these days anyway). Forgive them for that.
Isn't it better that they have to ask people to tell them in order to (try to) establish that knowledge, rather than wiring Windows to beam signals back to the mothership to detect pirated copies? That's the thin end of a nasty wedge, and this question seems to suggest some evidence that they aren't being particularly nasty about this.
To those who argue that direct mailing should be easily opted out of, consider this: how easy is it to opt out of the existing direct mail offers you receieve via snail mail? It usually takes some real effort.
Yes, it does. I've tried to get off paper junk mailing lists for ten years and it doesn't make a scrap of difference. I've written to the Direct Mail Association, followed every instruction the Post Office has for stopping junk mail, and all it does is leave me out of breath. You can't possibly stop the flow of crap once it starts. Use a credit card for something and you go right back on all the lists the marketers share with each other. It's hopeless.
Trees keep dying to print junk mail for me that goes straight to the recycle bin. Every bit of effort that goes into producing, delivering, carting away and recycling that junk mail is wasted. Every bit.
It's fucking idiotic.
Please, if you want me to take you seriously, explain how you're not using the stupid actions of others to justify your own stupid actions. I don't want your direct mail. You should believe me when I say that. And I shouldn't have to keep telling you, and all the other "direct mailers" and spammers, "no, no, no, no, no, no, no" all my fucking life just to keep my mailbox clear.
Why can't this apply to the web?
Why on earth should it? And we're not talking about the web here, we're talking about email.
How on earth could they omit the brothers that did Myst, only the best-selling game of all time (last I checked)? And smack in the middle of the 90s, too, the period they're ostensibly referring to. Myst spawned a whole generation of (mostly bad) rip-offs, and an entire new genre of gaming.
Rumor is that a few people liked Riven, too. And nothing rocked like Cosmic Osmo, way back when.
I'm waiting for OSX as fanatically as anybody, but here's why I can't use OSX on a daily basis:
- I can't print
- I can't use my external USB drives, USB scanner, or SCSI CD-RW
- My 3rd-party mouse is barely functional.
Yes, I love running emacs in term windows and so on, but I need access to my devices. On the other hand, my spankin' new TiBook is just a toy for playing Diablo on until I get Darwin, so I NEED OSX. Lack of DVD support sucks, because that was going to be the coup-de-grace killersexycool thing I showed off to my Windows-weenie friends (and brother). I didn't want to have two partitions, I wanted to go all-out OSX. Looks like I can't until summer.:(
Second, sometimes it is rather handy just to fire up lynx to do a quick little errand, instead of waiting 30 seconds Netcrap 6.0 to come up.
Lynx does a good job of supporting most of the standards, actually. A standards-compliant site should work well in Lynx.
Third, how is this going to affect accessiblitiy for disabled people. Do the latest standards allow for this group of people to use the web?
Of course. That's one of the central purposes of having the standards at all. You can't hit WAI level AAA with old browsers except for the most basic, text-only sites. You need standards-compliant browsers and standards-compliant code to have images and multimedia and be fully accessible to the disabled.
Sooner or later, this does have to happen. The standards we all need won't be fully implemented until people stop writing hacked code necessary to support broken browsers.
OK, realistically, of course it will take a bunch more time before everybody upgrades, but it's going to take an explicit push/campaign to raise awareness and make it happen.
I've already started to do most of my coding (except on a couple of hand-picked sites targeted at legacy users) in XHTML strict/CSS with non-table positioning (floats, relative and absolute) - things that just don't and can't work in older browsers. I do server-side sniffing that redirects to a warning page if a lame browser is detected, which explains the situation and gives them a link into the site that skips the browser-sniff if they really want to go in without a compliant browser. But the results are usually disastrous for them, even though the code is 100% valid. And for these sites, as the WASP says, if the code is valid and your browser can't display it, then it's your browser's problem.
No, that attitude won't work for everyone and all sites. But we doing smaller sites can begin now, and an education campaign to get people to upgrade and chuck these stupid, broken legacy browser will help everyone.
The w3 has been talking about this for years. The Web Accessibility Initiative is their site dedicated to exactly this issue, and is rich in information and resources for implementation. See particularly the guidelines, checklists, and techniques sections.
You do have a lot of work ahead of you. It's much easier to start with accesibility in mind than to retro-fit everything. You might be able to script some of it, as others are suggesting, but your first step should be to thorougly familiarize yourself with the information at the WAI.
That was one of Abby Hoffman's neat tricks from Steal This Book. If it's postage paid, you can mail them a brick and the post office is required to deliver it (or was as of about 1968, unless the laws have changed), hitting them up for a lot more than $0.30. As he put it, "...this is also a great way to get rid of your garbage."
Slashdot Mirror
...who once said that 640k of memory should be enough for anybody. But really, what the hell do we need these extra 10-20% speed boosts for at this point besides Q3 benchmarks to impress your l337 friends? I don't know what amazes me more: that the Powerbook I carry around is 10 times more powerful than the Cray supercomputers of 20 years ago, or that I still watch it struggle to resize a window under OSX.
Hrm. All right, maybe we do need to overclock our machines still. But something is terribly wrong.
TomatoMan
...when faced by a common enemy? Whether as hackers banding against the evil forces trying to quash open source, one city's sports fans against another, nations, or multinational alliances, it seems we can only get over ourselves enough to cooperate when we're threatened. Make no mistake, I support every word of this statement and am amazed by the signatures on it - the policies and strategies espoused by Microsoft are a threat to us all and need to be taken seriously. I just wish we could get together more often on things that weren't as directly threatening, with less venom and bile directed at each other (Perl vs Python, Emacs vs Vi, Gnome vs KDE, Red Hat vs. Just About Anybody, ad nauseum), instead of waiting for Big Evil Threats from Outside to remind us that we're all in the same camp.
TomatoMan
The video on this site is really something. 27mb QuickTime. The pencil sketch renderings of quake 3 are amazing. I may have to install Windows again just to see this in action. Ack!
i mg/style-i3d-web.mov
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Gallery/Stylized/
TomatoMan
Only for Windows. Porters can grab the win32 source and try their luck and hope it isn't win32'd to death, but pfeh.
i WantIt.html
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Gallery/NPRQuake/
TomatoMan
...me without mod points. Ah well.
TomatoMan
...where so much changed between the "official" releases that I can't update my Ximian desktop anymore because of all of the failed dependencies. (Not a flame against Ximian, who I love, but that's the truth.)
I like Apple's method of providing regular, touching-in, fix-a-few-things updates. They're small, they work, they're quick, and they let me know there are still humans on the other side of the installer.
TomatoMan
I can't believe what I'm reading. Heart attack at 49? Shouldn't we be able to prevent this kind of thing by now?
Douglas Adams was a real hacker - he hacked the English language and made it do things no-one had ever thought of before. His characters were engaging and his stories were brilliantly original. I'm amazed by how much his writing has affected my own thought process; like Monty Python, whole chapters hang verbatim in my addled memory.
I particularly loved the bit about how most of the actual work on the Guide got done by any hitchhiker that wandered into the offices and "saw something worth doing." That, for me, sums up the hacker spirit better than anything I've ever read. I feel like we've all lost a brother.
Rest in peace.
TomatoMan
In the real world nobody really cares about what knowledge happens to sit inside your head.
Well, in my real world, I sure do. If I'm interviewing you for a job, there are the the following basic rules as far as I'm concerned:
I can do google searches and swipe other people's work without anybody's help, thanks, if that's what it takes. If I was going to pay someone actual money to do work for me, I'd want to feel assured that they either have a clue, or aptitude and a whole lotta love.
Heh. Haven't worked for large companies, have you? A mom-and-pop shop might not check, but a big corp *will* check, and it will check your previous jobs, and dates on them, and etc. etc.
I've only worked at one big company (Dun & Bradstreet) - I don't think they checked my credentials since I didn't present any. But I'm willing to believe you on this one.
TomatoMan
...the better for all of us. It deserves to be decently buried at midnight in an unmarked grave, but that's about all.
Of course, *nix users are probably the last people that need to be told this, but every little bit helps.
N4 is the single biggest ball-and-chain around the ankles of people otherwise dying to write quality, standards-compliant code. Now we just have to get the mac users to give it up, most Win people are using IE5, which is good enough for the most part.
TomatoMan
Internet Explorer on Windows is the best & fastest browser there is, period.
This is just plain wrong, if by "best" you mean "supports the w3 standards." IE/win has positioning bugs and problems with the object tag that made me have to hack stupid, non-compliant workarounds for IE/win on a recent project I did that used strict XHTML 1.0, CSS, and WAI level AAA code. The code was 100% valid and worked perfectly on IE5/mac, Moz/*, and NN6/*. Only IE5/win was broken.
As of pre-Moz-0.9, IE5/mac far outperforms any other browser as far as standards-compliance goes. Haven't checked the latest Moz, but I expect it's still true.
TomatoMan
This interests me a lot. Joe Cheater cheats on his final exams and graduates - let's say college - on other people's work and with a slippery-at-best grasp of the subject his diploma says he's reached a certain level of comptence/knowledge in.
Then he goes out into a workplace that expects him to know what his diploma suggests he should. What now? Well, his strategy is going to be either to catch up fast, or keep looking for work to borrow/steal and pass off as his own. Probably the latter, because if the former was an option he probably wouldn't have had to cheat in the first place.
Is this any harder in the "real world" than it was in school? Nope. The internet is out there for everybody, and it's now just too hard to track everyone's work in a foolproof way. Will he get caught? Maybe eventually - but he's got a pretty good shot at becoming a comfortable PHB too, since so few of us have the energy to verify everything people claim. How hard would it be, for example, to print up a realistic-looking diploma or grad school transcript on a laser printer at Kinko's? If someone handed you one and it looked real, would you call the university to verify that it was real? No, you'd say "wow, MIT!" and hire him/her.
I used to teach GED classes, and I had students who passed who came back and told me that they had essentially closed their eyes and guessed at the multiple test questions, and done this over and over until they got a passing score. So they were out in the world with the equivalent of a high school diploma, who were barely literate and couldn't add 12+13.
We can write nasty things about cheaters, but they do it because we're all too lazy to police/stop them or really verify what their diplomas say they can do. The professor in this article was a very rare exception (he sounded like a cool professor, too). As long as people accept paper credentials as proof of ability (IT certification, anyone?), cheaters will keep doing what they do. Why shouldn't they? It's a much faster way to the top, and most of the time, we don't mind that much.
TomatoMan
Between CD-R's at $0.30 each, and gas at three bucks a gallon, it looks like a gloomy summer ahead for Joe American Consumer and Pr0n Hound.
Too expensive to drive to the beach and too expensive to back up all that pr0n. And with cable rates going up... we might have to start talking to each other or something.
TomatoMan
Even scarier (and more exciting) is the notion that we might actually be able to learn or decide how to shape our own stuff, and that Mother Nature has led us to this point, and that it's all part of a Plan.
Just thinking about this stuff makes me woozy. It feels like the vastest area of unknown territory I've ever contemplated.
TomatoMan
Please stop whining about Apple not open-sourcing everything it does.
Has Apple broken any laws with this? Have they violated the licenses of the open-source components of their operating system, which they spent millions developing?If so, file a lawsuit. If not, stop whining.
Look, Open-Source World (tm): YOU wrote the license, YOU wrote the terms. If you want to write code under a new "Non-Apple" license that you create because you don't like Aple, then do it. But quit your crying about how people legitimitely use the license YOU created just because they don't give away all the cool shit they create with it.
Flame away, but the kneejerk Apple-bashing that goes on here is really starting to make me sick. It's almost as bad as the M$ bashing.
TomatoMan
As more and more of the "prime-time" sites float subscription fees, this will divert more and more traffic to the free sites, which will crunch them even more through increased bandwidth costs. I know I won't be paying to read Salon or Yahoo or anything else; I'll keep surfing for the (dwindling) free sites and keep driving their costs up. And since I run a couple myself, seeing my own costs go up as more people give up on the pay sites.
Lovers of free information might wind up inadvertantly killing a lot of it off just by trying to access it. This is a real problem.
TomatoMan
I'm somewhat comforted by the fact that they have to ask, and don't just know.
I'm sure part of their desire to know is myopic, but part of it is certainly an attempt to be sure people aren't buying OS-less PCs and using their friend's copy of Windows on it (not that that's all that easy these days anyway). Forgive them for that.
Isn't it better that they have to ask people to tell them in order to (try to) establish that knowledge, rather than wiring Windows to beam signals back to the mothership to detect pirated copies? That's the thin end of a nasty wedge, and this question seems to suggest some evidence that they aren't being particularly nasty about this.
Could be a smokescreen too, I suppose...
TomatoMan
To those who argue that direct mailing should be easily opted out of, consider this: how easy is it to opt out of the existing direct mail offers you receieve via snail mail? It usually takes some real effort.
Yes, it does. I've tried to get off paper junk mailing lists for ten years and it doesn't make a scrap of difference. I've written to the Direct Mail Association, followed every instruction the Post Office has for stopping junk mail, and all it does is leave me out of breath. You can't possibly stop the flow of crap once it starts. Use a credit card for something and you go right back on all the lists the marketers share with each other. It's hopeless.
Trees keep dying to print junk mail for me that goes straight to the recycle bin. Every bit of effort that goes into producing, delivering, carting away and recycling that junk mail is wasted. Every bit.
It's fucking idiotic.
Please, if you want me to take you seriously, explain how you're not using the stupid actions of others to justify your own stupid actions. I don't want your direct mail. You should believe me when I say that. And I shouldn't have to keep telling you, and all the other "direct mailers" and spammers, "no, no, no, no, no, no, no" all my fucking life just to keep my mailbox clear.
Why can't this apply to the web?
Why on earth should it? And we're not talking about the web here, we're talking about email.
TomatoMan
...the funniest thing I've EVER read on slashdot. My sides hurt.
TomatoMan
How on earth could they omit the brothers that did Myst, only the best-selling game of all time (last I checked)? And smack in the middle of the 90s, too, the period they're ostensibly referring to. Myst spawned a whole generation of (mostly bad) rip-offs, and an entire new genre of gaming.
Rumor is that a few people liked Riven, too. And nothing rocked like Cosmic Osmo, way back when.
TomatoMan
I'm waiting for OSX as fanatically as anybody, but here's why I can't use OSX on a daily basis:
:(
- I can't print
- I can't use my external USB drives, USB scanner, or SCSI CD-RW
- My 3rd-party mouse is barely functional.
Yes, I love running emacs in term windows and so on, but I need access to my devices. On the other hand, my spankin' new TiBook is just a toy for playing Diablo on until I get Darwin, so I NEED OSX. Lack of DVD support sucks, because that was going to be the coup-de-grace killersexycool thing I showed off to my Windows-weenie friends (and brother). I didn't want to have two partitions, I wanted to go all-out OSX. Looks like I can't until summer.
TomatoMan
Second, sometimes it is rather handy just to fire up lynx to do a quick little errand, instead of waiting 30 seconds Netcrap 6.0 to come up.
Lynx does a good job of supporting most of the standards, actually. A standards-compliant site should work well in Lynx.
Third, how is this going to affect accessiblitiy for disabled people. Do the latest standards allow for this group of people to use the web?
Of course. That's one of the central purposes of having the standards at all. You can't hit WAI level AAA with old browsers except for the most basic, text-only sites. You need standards-compliant browsers and standards-compliant code to have images and multimedia and be fully accessible to the disabled.
TomatoMan
They mention IE 5.5 - that's all fine and dandy, but what about, say, IE 5.0 for Mac?
IE 5.0 for mac is the most standards-compliant browser at present. It does have some bugs, though, and 5.5 is reportedly in beta.
TomatoMan
Sooner or later, this does have to happen. The standards we all need won't be fully implemented until people stop writing hacked code necessary to support broken browsers.
OK, realistically, of course it will take a bunch more time before everybody upgrades, but it's going to take an explicit push/campaign to raise awareness and make it happen.
I've already started to do most of my coding (except on a couple of hand-picked sites targeted at legacy users) in XHTML strict/CSS with non-table positioning (floats, relative and absolute) - things that just don't and can't work in older browsers. I do server-side sniffing that redirects to a warning page if a lame browser is detected, which explains the situation and gives them a link into the site that skips the browser-sniff if they really want to go in without a compliant browser. But the results are usually disastrous for them, even though the code is 100% valid. And for these sites, as the WASP says, if the code is valid and your browser can't display it, then it's your browser's problem.
No, that attitude won't work for everyone and all sites. But we doing smaller sites can begin now, and an education campaign to get people to upgrade and chuck these stupid, broken legacy browser will help everyone.
TomatoMan
The w3 has been talking about this for years. The Web Accessibility Initiative is their site dedicated to exactly this issue, and is rich in information and resources for implementation. See particularly the guidelines, checklists, and techniques sections.
You do have a lot of work ahead of you. It's much easier to start with accesibility in mind than to retro-fit everything. You might be able to script some of it, as others are suggesting, but your first step should be to thorougly familiarize yourself with the information at the WAI.
TomatoMan
That was one of Abby Hoffman's neat tricks from Steal This Book. If it's postage paid, you can mail them a brick and the post office is required to deliver it (or was as of about 1968, unless the laws have changed), hitting them up for a lot more than $0.30. As he put it, "...this is also a great way to get rid of your garbage."
TomatoMan