You know, there are also some of us who fit in somewhere between 'gcc/gdb proficient' and 'dope', too.
My interest in computer technology in general is longstanding (first computer: brand new Commodore VIC20), but it isn't going to be a career for me and I'm never going to be able to decide for myself if, for instance, Raster's code is as sloppy as some people say; or whether Debian's packaging system is more technically sound than RPM (though I do have a perverse attraction to dselect).
All the same, I enjoy the culture Slashdot sprang out of, and I've been enjoying it since before there was even a Linux, even if I sometimes think the media exposure has caused some affectation and posturing among its less secure members, and even if I'll never graduate from shell scripts and the occasional foray into Perl to reinvent some wheel I should have just handled better knowledge of vi.
My hope is that as the Open Source/Free Software/Linux wave crests, drawing more people to sites like this one and freshmeat, these places will continue to function as 'zines instead of publications, which is to say that I hope they'll continue to remain slightly inward turned, 'eyeballs,' hits, and 'Cool Site Awards' be damned.
There are plenty of other sites for people who aren't as passionate about this particular niche. If people like me can't keep up sometimes, well, some of us don't mind, and may even enjoy it.
Enough of my yakkin'. Congratulations are in order to Scoop, and belated congratulations to Rob et al.
...this will develop into a site with a sense of humor, because that's one of the best responses you can have to the adults in a school who make your life miserable.
People throughout this discussion are saying 'shit happens, they need to stop whining.'
Unless you aren't paying taxes, and never plan to send your kids into the public school system, you should be very, very concerned. After four years in the army, I found the school I was working at to be much more addicted to authoritarian nonsense than all but my drill sergeants from basic training and one really rotten commander I drove for briefly until he fired me for 'smiling too much.' No one in the army, for instance, ever told me 'because I said so' was a reason. It's even considered bad form.
The high school, on the other hand, was a different story.
I'd sit kids down, get their referral forms, and go to enter them in the database, and I'd see 'defiance of authority' as the offense they committed. The question that always came to mind was 'Well, was the authority being legitimately invoked?' I knew of one teacher who'd call kids 'trifling idiots' then boot them out of class for telling him it was wrong to say that. That was 'defiance of authority.'
It seems that if we're going to hope to produce children that eventually amount to a thing, and who can participate in a democratic society with any ability or usefulness, we're going to need to get it through the heads of insecure adults that those kids are going to have to be allowed to protest them from time to time, and be gently taught the limits of that protest, and how to discern and deal with occasions when an authority figure is wrong. If we can't do this, it won't matter if the crypto's free and the guns are plentiful, because no one will care to use them in defense of liberties that will have ceased to matter. There's no need for a Big Brother when the population is self-pacified from an inability to think critically and occasionally argue, impolite as it may be, with someone who's claim to 'right' is never questioned.
It's fashionable among some to imply that speaking out against injustice is whining, or a sign of weakness. If anyone's weak, though, it's the ones who never develop the moral courage to say a thing while people in authority abuse their positions and others without recrimination.
I'll take these 'whiners' over the characterless sheep any day.
And rember a jury is composed of people who are too stupid to get out of Jury Duty. I think that about sums it up.
It sums up a reasonably poor attitude toward a responsibility you have if you want to participate in U.S. society.
You may be interested to know, despite the flacidity of will your post implies, that jury duty is actually one of those times when you get to circumvent elections, and the frustration of poor judicial appointments, and even your frustrations with the laws, and make decisions about the laws themselves along with your fellow jurors.
I am not a lawyer, and I am not willing to get into a debate over the validity of it, but you might want to read about jury nullification.
Empowered with that bit of knowledge, and flush with desire to do something besides recriminate your fellow citizens as an excuse to do nothing yourself, and aware now that if one socio-political hack exists maybe there are more, maybe you can make a difference.
Not interested in making a difference? Too cynical at the advanced age of 17 to do much because you've been there and done that? Might as well stop bothering at all. If you're that cashed at that age, your future is going to suck.
If you're talking Linux, and I guess it's silly of me to assume anyone on Slashdot would be running anything else*, it sort of depends on your distro.
If you're running Red Hat 6.0 or 5.2, this page gives instructions on how to use the truetype support that was rolled into the X font server in 6.0, or using Herbert Duerr's xfstt for Red Hat 5.2.
Debian 2.1, which I run, comes with xfstt, as well, and is available as a.deb on their site.
I understand that the other implementations of truetype support are better, but I've been using xfstt for well over a year now with little trouble. I think earlier memory problems have been handled. It is very easy to use and set up, and I can't imagine why any of the current distros wouldn't work with it.
Win95 almost never crashed on my system. I don't know what you guys do with your stuff but Win95 always worked well.
Which is a common occurence.
Take the office I just stopped working at. There were five computers there: two Dells with P166's, an older Gateway, a pair of brand new Gateways with PII's, and a no-name clone.
The old Gateway flakes out three or four times before lunch, but that's because the user is a serious 'cute little applet' freak. One of the Dell's can't run for more than 20 minutes without a GPF some days, and other days complains not at all. The new Gateways haven't had time to get twitchy and run happily all day long with little complaint. The other Dell (which used to be mine before I got a new Gateway from the boss to shut me up) once had to be rebooted 10 times in a day.
The administrative intern in the office told me I was the only person she'd ever heard complain about Windows, and that she'd been using it for years with no problems.
Fact is, there's no telling some days. It took me a long time to get over using a computer very gingerly once I installed Linux at home, because I was tired of things breaking every ten minutes. Other people use their Win boxes as functional multitasking workstations and have little trouble.
I've given up arguing with anyone about it because I've learned that 'works for me' is the great argument ender.
People will denigrate happy Windows users to the high heavens as having anemic skills and no clues, or as being brainwashed victims of the Redmond thought control sattelites, when the fact is, toy operating system or not, it gets the job done for people. Especially (but not exlusively to) people who are sort of timid about doing much but using what their box came with.
I personally don't like Win 9x much as a result of my experiences, and have the usual complaints about Microsoft's business practices, but I've learned my experiences are on the negative side of a pretty wide spectrum of opinions from all sorts of people.
I just wish people would stop worrying about Microsoft and get on with their lives. As much as I despise the apparent need some people have to define themselves in social terms based on their computer's OS, it's hard to ignore, because the fixation on the topic permeates the discourse of the community.
This is pretty much over the off-topic cliff, but I feel compelled to respond.
I have never met a single military man who was hankering to go to war. As trained killers they know that war is not about guts and glory, but rather about death and destruction.
My clearest memory of army training would have to come from when I'd finished basic and I was down at Fort Gordon for signal school. I was nearly booted out for refusing to sound off to this cadence:
You go to the local playground Where all the kiddies play You pull out your Uzi And you begin to spray or another verse: You go to your local church Where people go to pray You pull out a claymore And blow them all away
I was told by the drill sergeant that the cadence didn't make it clear that we were dealing with communist or nazi babies... not 'normal' ones. I was impressed by his improvisational skill, offended at his assessment of my intelligence.
I was invited to talk to the chaplain, who invited me to declare myself a conscientious objector. I conscientiously objected that he was offering an inappropriate option, since I had a pretty clear distinction in my mind between 'kiddies' at 'my local playground' and someone trying to do me or my team mates harm in a combat zone.
The company commander repeated the invitation, and I ended up consulting with a civilian minister. I ended up not taking the opportunity to be declared a CO because it would have been a lie, and it would have demeaned the memory of people who have suffered to secure the right to claim that status.
Instead, I spent the rest of training with the drill sergeants saying I didn't belong in the army because I was weak-minded, and that it upset them to have to allow me to eat their food.
I ended up in Korea a few months later with a couple of classmates, who thoughtfully told a senior enlisted soldier in our section that I was a 'pacifist.' He was kind enough to inform me that he'd shoot me in combat if I was too weak to follow orders.
Amazing, to me. I won the platoon marksmanship award in basic training, went to airborne school, and then weaseled personnel people to keep my orders to go to Korea, which was considered the most likely flashpoint in the world at the time, but none of that was enough in the face of the thought that I might not be willing to shoot or maim American civilians.
Others' experiences in/with the military will vary, and I accept them as valid, too. On the other hand, trying to claim that the military exists in some sort of indoctrinated moral perfection while civilians go around screwing things up is naive, to say the least.
In short, people who think they have major requirements had better get their act together. That means that if ISDN people actually want to try to get into a real release one of these years, they don't have all that much time to futz around any more.
Hm. I don't know if Tove will let you get near him with a clue stick.
---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Re:Don't need a palm, why do people get them?
on
PalmPilot as fetish
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· Score: 1
Well, it was something like:
The Palm Personal was on sale for a pretty low amount on the clearance rack at the local Office Depot, I'd just been back-paid three months of GI Bill benefits for courses I'd paid for already, and the job I had during last school year sometimes involved being a desk nomad. Worse, sometimes I wasn't given anything to do. I just sat, waiting for a phone to ring.
So I bought the Palm knowing, before I had it out of the box, that I was going to download a doc reader and Go. The four hour stretches at an alien desk became a little more tolerable, and I eventually converted some db's we used at that place into JFile format, so I could free myself of needing to scamper up three flights of stairs and down a hall to get at information I needed from time to time.
Sure, it's easier to get a book from the library or bring a magazine, and a nicely indexed printout of the sort of information I needed would have worked. Packing my old GameBoy (which kept me entertained many a night of radio watch while I was in Korea) would have provided the games. But like I said: it was on sale, I had the money, and it's useful without me bending my brain to make it so.
An ex-military note: I would never have used a Palm while in the Army. Some young staff officer had a Newton and a custom holster that he wore around Brigade HQ, and he was the only time, as a junior enlisted soldier, that I ever saw officers break down and poke fun at a brother officer in front of the enlisted. Plus, I'm sure I would have tried to drag it along on a jump or out into the field and smashed it.
The term 'avatar' itself was used by AOL precursor QuantumLink, the Commodore 64/128 service, for a thing that was initially to be released as 'Habitat.' As I recall, Habitat was being worked on by the Lucasfilm software people, and it initially promised a pretty interesting unrestricted environment with fantastic elements. The term 'avatar' was the user's alterego in the Habitat environment.
Habitat didn't happen, but Q-Link did release a horrible thing called "Club Caribe" where you could wander around and gamble and buy stuff (like new heads for your avatar.) A bug in the software allowed for the fairly disturbing phenomenon of people being able to come up and take your head if you made the mistake of taking it off for some reason (like... you could was reason enough for me.)
I guess Club Caribe went away when Q-Link did. The last I remember seeing it was some time in 1988, but I don't remember when Q-Link finally pulled the plug.
Was it immersive? Nope. Was it 3-d? Nope. But it was an electronic alternate universe where you could be represented as you liked by a computer alterego.
Of course. Netscape had been undermining that standard longer, and altogether their engineers don't seem as smart (I mean, come on, no style sheets without JavaScript?).
Well I'll be...
I knew this. I mean... I figured it out one day when the local movie listings page started looking all gnarly when I had JavaScript enabled, but returned to normal when I turned it off to avoid some gimcrackery on another window.
Sometimes, with Netscape running on Linux, I feel like I fled the Microsoft desert only to have to sleep with the camel I rode out on.
But that doesn't matter much to most of us, because i doubt the passthrough works under linux anyhow - device locking and all.
FWIW, I had this concern because I have a Palm Pilot I use with the PilotManager software on the same port as my Firecracker.
My unscientific stress-test was to bring up the RocketLauncher TK front-end to BottleRocket, and PilotManager. I set PilotManager to do a full sync including the backup conduit. Then I started turning lights on and off from RocketLauncher while the backup was in progress. It worked fine.
Some sites I've read, though, have cautioned against trying this with a modem or mouse. Don't know. I've got an internal modem and a PS/2 mouse.
You need a little budhism in your life..... Its not how you say it, its what you say..... or else you will go around misunderstanding when it is very important for you to pay attention to meaning instead of how that meaning is passed..
That's what we call a false dichotomy. You may look that up. I am certain Yahoo! will return a pointer to a page of rhetorical fallacies.
I'd also suggest you consider that Buddhism has moments of exquisite attention to detail. You may also want to consider the humility and self-effacement of some of its practitioners, who wouldn't be arrogant enough to expect others to wade through the distraction of their carelessness.
I think Opera is contracting development out on each of the ports. They aren't concentrating on each and every port. Consequently, when the People's Republic of China (IIRC they're the ones who built/were going to build all those C64's a couple of years back) asks for a port, Opera will contract yet another team to do to the port. ---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I don't even worry about the accuracy of the banner, though, since the beauty of the web is the sheer mass of fine-grained information available. It forces the individual to be a better and more discerning information consumer, though.
Anyone even marginally clueful will look around Slashdot for a day and see the biases are writ large for all to see, both in terms of editorial choice and in the comments posted. Every specialty site is like that, and we all ought to be sophisticated enough to know that the 'price' of micropublishing in whatever form is less compulsion to even appear unbiased.
The only real danger here is nothing we haven't all seen before: people who latch on to Slashdot as their sole source of 'news.' On the other hand (and this is not a slam on Slashdot, which I read plenty in the context of a healthy media diet composed of plenty of other sources) people like that will develop the stunted world view they've got coming to them, and the rest of us will learn to ignore them when they actually venture into the real world with their woefully narrow perspectives.
ObOnTopic: I'm looking forward to Opera for Linux. I ran it on a Win95/5x86-133/16 meg box some time ago and loved it. Much more nimble than the competition. ---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
It should be up to/.ers to decide what's "exceptional". Do we really want/. to filter the news to us like the major media players do?
I don't know whether "we" want it or not, but I am pretty certain there's some filtering going on, anyhow. I'm 1 for 4 when it comes to seeing stories I've submitted appear. I'm not complaining about this state of affairs, either. I read Slashdot precisely because it's a filter. It's what I 'pay' Rob et al for when I get rid of that adfu.blockstackers.com line in my Junkbuster configs.
*blink* I wasn't aware high schools offered tenure.
At the school I work at they sure do. The first three years a teacher is in the system, the contracts are probationary and a teacher can be non-renewed without cause. After three years, they are granted tenure, and they're removable, but it's harder and much documentation is required.
It doesn't matter anyhow, because the worst are usually well connected and they can survive about anything our largely impotent and spineless administrators care to try before giving up and hiding in their offices.
First off, Kinko's employees aren't all bad. It depends on the Kinko's you go to. (Sorry, I'm an ex-Kinkoid and that really bugged me.).
My apologies. The point I was making was not that Kinko's employees are idiots. I meant to imply that dropping a *nix box in the midst of people who had largely come over from web presses less than five years earlier, and who you'd have no reason to expect would know the first thing about running a *nix server, is a pretty bad idea (from a "keep the customer happy with their new toy" point of view.)
Sure enough... it was a terrible idea. I was the only one who knew the first thing about it, and that was quite by coincidence.
This puts me in mind of my first encounter ever with a PHB.
I worked at a copy shop in a major midwestern university that shall go unnamed. We ran three Xerox Docutechs and some smaller machines.
We ended up buying a Sun/Xerox network box of some sort. It was brought in with a lot of fanfare. I was a courier at the time, but the school gave all employees accounts on the school computers, so I was learning my way around as an Ultrix user from a Lear/Seigler ADM3a+ and a 1200 baud dialup at night.
Everyone stood around while the techs installed the thing and brought it up. I had never, at that point, seen X in action before so I had no idea there was a *nix under the hood. It wasn't until one of the techs brought up a term and I saw some of the commands they were typing that I realized what it was.
The boss 'in charge' of the machine announced that we were going to take great pains to keep the machine in good shape, and in order to keep it like new, we'd be shutting it down promptly at five every night.
Needless to say, it began to accumulate stuff that never got shuffled out by whatever housekeeping it was supposed to be doing at night, and soon the hard drive was full of undeleted tmp files and aborted print runs.
Eager to prove myself, pre-larval as I was, I went to the PHB and pointed out that the machine was running some sort of Unix and we ought to leave it on, as God intended, or figure out how the housekeeping was supposed to be done and reset some times. She told me it was just like Windows (3.0 was the current version at the time) and we didn't need to do that. I went over her head and got permission to at least twiddle with it to keep the logs rotated and the/tmp files cleaned out. She promptly took all the documentation and locked it in her office, changed all the passwords, and had me rotated to the night shift.
The machine continued to crash right and left, and no one could get at it to fix things. The PHB kept insisting it was just a faulty product. It was eventually branded a failed experiment and taken away.
I've since thought it was a rotten idea to sell a *nix box to a bunch of glorified Kinko's employees and expect them to do anything other than what they did at my shop. The support was god-awful, and the training I was eventually sent to never went past 'this is the garbage can... this is how to click and drag.'
---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Re:"Various bug fixes"
on
Netscape 4.6
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· Score: 1
I found a workaround for that bug...
Well, thanks for posting that, because I just discovered that dropdowns are still broken in 4.6 (at least on my machine), and your workaround works for Enlightenment/GNOME, too.
---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Re:are Linux users faithful?
on
Distro News
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· Score: 1
I started with Debian, but a combination of factors caused me to switch to Slackware after a hardware failure. Then I switched to Red Hat 4.2 after some time with Slackware because I realized I wasn't feeling up to dealing with Slack.
I've stayed with Red Hat since, even through the-nightmare-that-was-5.1, not out of brand loyalty as much as convenience. And I don't mean the convenience of RPM's, FWIW. I've probably built 75% of the stuff that's gone in my box.
If my machine were still just a "hobby box," I'd probably be looking at Debian again because people rave about how easy it is to upgrade and how secure it is out of the box. As it is, maybe I'll consider that once I have some cash to spring for a new hard drive and some time to goof around with getting it tweaked just so before making it LILO's default.
---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Re:"Various bug fixes"
on
Netscape 4.6
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· Score: 1
Selecting an option from a dropdown no longer prevents subsequent text box input...
Thank god someone else noticed that. I thought I was alone in the world. Once I figured out what was going on, I just learned to skip drowpdowns until I'd filled all the text boxes in, but I'll never forget the night I stumbled across the bug. I was trying to fill out the form to download a newer version to get around the bug that kept me from filling in text...
This is from the README. I've been told it applies:
Starting with 4.0, we strongly suggest setting the MOZILLA_HOME environment variable to point to the Communicator installation directory. Many Netscape Client components now look at MOZILLA_HOME as a fallback or default mechanism in addition to the existing mechanisms from previous releases.
Slashdot Mirror
And then get your company's back broken for licensing violations for not paying per seat for commercial use?
Or do you just have a really big family? ;)
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
My interest in computer technology in general is longstanding (first computer: brand new Commodore VIC20), but it isn't going to be a career for me and I'm never going to be able to decide for myself if, for instance, Raster's code is as sloppy as some people say; or whether Debian's packaging system is more technically sound than RPM (though I do have a perverse attraction to dselect).
All the same, I enjoy the culture Slashdot sprang out of, and I've been enjoying it since before there was even a Linux, even if I sometimes think the media exposure has caused some affectation and posturing among its less secure members, and even if I'll never graduate from shell scripts and the occasional foray into Perl to reinvent some wheel I should have just handled better knowledge of vi.
My hope is that as the Open Source/Free Software/Linux wave crests, drawing more people to sites like this one and freshmeat, these places will continue to function as 'zines instead of publications, which is to say that I hope they'll continue to remain slightly inward turned, 'eyeballs,' hits, and 'Cool Site Awards' be damned.
There are plenty of other sites for people who aren't as passionate about this particular niche. If people like me can't keep up sometimes, well, some of us don't mind, and may even enjoy it.
Enough of my yakkin'. Congratulations are in order to Scoop, and belated congratulations to Rob et al.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
People throughout this discussion are saying 'shit happens, they need to stop whining.'
Unless you aren't paying taxes, and never plan to send your kids into the public school system, you should be very, very concerned. After four years in the army, I found the school I was working at to be much more addicted to authoritarian nonsense than all but my drill sergeants from basic training and one really rotten commander I drove for briefly until he fired me for 'smiling too much.' No one in the army, for instance, ever told me 'because I said so' was a reason. It's even considered bad form.
The high school, on the other hand, was a different story.
I'd sit kids down, get their referral forms, and go to enter them in the database, and I'd see 'defiance of authority' as the offense they committed. The question that always came to mind was 'Well, was the authority being legitimately invoked?' I knew of one teacher who'd call kids 'trifling idiots' then boot them out of class for telling him it was wrong to say that. That was 'defiance of authority.'
It seems that if we're going to hope to produce children that eventually amount to a thing, and who can participate in a democratic society with any ability or usefulness, we're going to need to get it through the heads of insecure adults that those kids are going to have to be allowed to protest them from time to time, and be gently taught the limits of that protest, and how to discern and deal with occasions when an authority figure is wrong. If we can't do this, it won't matter if the crypto's free and the guns are plentiful, because no one will care to use them in defense of liberties that will have ceased to matter. There's no need for a Big Brother when the population is self-pacified from an inability to think critically and occasionally argue, impolite as it may be, with someone who's claim to 'right' is never questioned.
It's fashionable among some to imply that speaking out against injustice is whining, or a sign of weakness. If anyone's weak, though, it's the ones who never develop the moral courage to say a thing while people in authority abuse their positions and others without recrimination.
I'll take these 'whiners' over the characterless sheep any day.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
It sums up a reasonably poor attitude toward a responsibility you have if you want to participate in U.S. society.
You may be interested to know, despite the flacidity of will your post implies, that jury duty is actually one of those times when you get to circumvent elections, and the frustration of poor judicial appointments, and even your frustrations with the laws, and make decisions about the laws themselves along with your fellow jurors.
I am not a lawyer, and I am not willing to get into a debate over the validity of it, but you might want to read about jury nullification.
Empowered with that bit of knowledge, and flush with desire to do something besides recriminate your fellow citizens as an excuse to do nothing yourself, and aware now that if one socio-political hack exists maybe there are more, maybe you can make a difference.
Not interested in making a difference? Too cynical at the advanced age of 17 to do much because you've been there and done that? Might as well stop bothering at all. If you're that cashed at that age, your future is going to suck.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
If you're running Red Hat 6.0 or 5.2, this page gives instructions on how to use the truetype support that was rolled into the X font server in 6.0, or using Herbert Duerr's xfstt for Red Hat 5.2.
Debian 2.1, which I run, comes with xfstt, as well, and is available as a .deb on their site.
I understand that the other implementations of truetype support are better, but I've been using xfstt for well over a year now with little trouble. I think earlier memory problems have been handled. It is very easy to use and set up, and I can't imagine why any of the current distros wouldn't work with it.
Finally, if you are curious about the alternatives I skipped, there's already a HOWTO available at http://pobox.com/~brion/linux/Tru eType-HOWTO.html.
*sarcasm, it's only sarcasm.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Which is a common occurence.
Take the office I just stopped working at. There were five computers there: two Dells with P166's, an older Gateway, a pair of brand new Gateways with PII's, and a no-name clone.
The old Gateway flakes out three or four times before lunch, but that's because the user is a serious 'cute little applet' freak. One of the Dell's can't run for more than 20 minutes without a GPF some days, and other days complains not at all. The new Gateways haven't had time to get twitchy and run happily all day long with little complaint. The other Dell (which used to be mine before I got a new Gateway from the boss to shut me up) once had to be rebooted 10 times in a day.
The administrative intern in the office told me I was the only person she'd ever heard complain about Windows, and that she'd been using it for years with no problems.
Fact is, there's no telling some days. It took me a long time to get over using a computer very gingerly once I installed Linux at home, because I was tired of things breaking every ten minutes. Other people use their Win boxes as functional multitasking workstations and have little trouble.
I've given up arguing with anyone about it because I've learned that 'works for me' is the great argument ender.
People will denigrate happy Windows users to the high heavens as having anemic skills and no clues, or as being brainwashed victims of the Redmond thought control sattelites, when the fact is, toy operating system or not, it gets the job done for people. Especially (but not exlusively to) people who are sort of timid about doing much but using what their box came with.
I personally don't like Win 9x much as a result of my experiences, and have the usual complaints about Microsoft's business practices, but I've learned my experiences are on the negative side of a pretty wide spectrum of opinions from all sorts of people.
I just wish people would stop worrying about Microsoft and get on with their lives. As much as I despise the apparent need some people have to define themselves in social terms based on their computer's OS, it's hard to ignore, because the fixation on the topic permeates the discourse of the community.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I have never met a single military man who was hankering to go to war. As trained killers they know that war is not about guts and glory, but rather about death and destruction.
My clearest memory of army training would have to come from when I'd finished basic and I was down at Fort Gordon for signal school. I was nearly booted out for refusing to sound off to this cadence:
You go to the local playground
Where all the kiddies play
You pull out your Uzi
And you begin to spray
or another verse:
You go to your local church
Where people go to pray
You pull out a claymore
And blow them all away
I was told by the drill sergeant that the cadence didn't make it clear that we were dealing with communist or nazi babies... not 'normal' ones. I was impressed by his improvisational skill, offended at his assessment of my intelligence.
I was invited to talk to the chaplain, who invited me to declare myself a conscientious objector. I conscientiously objected that he was offering an inappropriate option, since I had a pretty clear distinction in my mind between 'kiddies' at 'my local playground' and someone trying to do me or my team mates harm in a combat zone.
The company commander repeated the invitation, and I ended up consulting with a civilian minister. I ended up not taking the opportunity to be declared a CO because it would have been a lie, and it would have demeaned the memory of people who have suffered to secure the right to claim that status.
Instead, I spent the rest of training with the drill sergeants saying I didn't belong in the army because I was weak-minded, and that it upset them to have to allow me to eat their food.
I ended up in Korea a few months later with a couple of classmates, who thoughtfully told a senior enlisted soldier in our section that I was a 'pacifist.' He was kind enough to inform me that he'd shoot me in combat if I was too weak to follow orders.
Amazing, to me. I won the platoon marksmanship award in basic training, went to airborne school, and then weaseled personnel people to keep my orders to go to Korea, which was considered the most likely flashpoint in the world at the time, but none of that was enough in the face of the thought that I might not be willing to shoot or maim American civilians.
Others' experiences in/with the military will vary, and I accept them as valid, too. On the other hand, trying to claim that the military exists in some sort of indoctrinated moral perfection while civilians go around screwing things up is naive, to say the least.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
In short, people who think they have major requirements had better get their act together. That means that if ISDN people actually want to try to get into a real release one of these years, they don't have all that much time to futz around any more.
Hm. I don't know if Tove will let you get near him with a clue stick.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
The Palm Personal was on sale for a pretty low amount on the clearance rack at the local Office Depot, I'd just been back-paid three months of GI Bill benefits for courses I'd paid for already, and the job I had during last school year sometimes involved being a desk nomad. Worse, sometimes I wasn't given anything to do. I just sat, waiting for a phone to ring.
So I bought the Palm knowing, before I had it out of the box, that I was going to download a doc reader and Go. The four hour stretches at an alien desk became a little more tolerable, and I eventually converted some db's we used at that place into JFile format, so I could free myself of needing to scamper up three flights of stairs and down a hall to get at information I needed from time to time.
Sure, it's easier to get a book from the library or bring a magazine, and a nicely indexed printout of the sort of information I needed would have worked. Packing my old GameBoy (which kept me entertained many a night of radio watch while I was in Korea) would have provided the games. But like I said: it was on sale, I had the money, and it's useful without me bending my brain to make it so.
An ex-military note: I would never have used a Palm while in the Army. Some young staff officer had a Newton and a custom holster that he wore around Brigade HQ, and he was the only time, as a junior enlisted soldier, that I ever saw officers break down and poke fun at a brother officer in front of the enlisted. Plus, I'm sure I would have tried to drag it along on a jump or out into the field and smashed it.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Habitat didn't happen, but Q-Link did release a horrible thing called "Club Caribe" where you could wander around and gamble and buy stuff (like new heads for your avatar.) A bug in the software allowed for the fairly disturbing phenomenon of people being able to come up and take your head if you made the mistake of taking it off for some reason (like... you could was reason enough for me.)
I guess Club Caribe went away when Q-Link did. The last I remember seeing it was some time in 1988, but I don't remember when Q-Link finally pulled the plug.
Was it immersive? Nope. Was it 3-d? Nope. But it was an electronic alternate universe where you could be represented as you liked by a computer alterego.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Well I'll be...
I knew this. I mean... I figured it out one day when the local movie listings page started looking all gnarly when I had JavaScript enabled, but returned to normal when I turned it off to avoid some gimcrackery on another window.
Sometimes, with Netscape running on Linux, I feel like I fled the Microsoft desert only to have to sleep with the camel I rode out on.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
FWIW, I had this concern because I have a Palm Pilot I use with the PilotManager software on the same port as my Firecracker.
My unscientific stress-test was to bring up the RocketLauncher TK front-end to BottleRocket, and PilotManager. I set PilotManager to do a full sync including the backup conduit. Then I started turning lights on and off from RocketLauncher while the backup was in progress. It worked fine.
Some sites I've read, though, have cautioned against trying this with a modem or mouse. Don't know. I've got an internal modem and a PS/2 mouse.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
That's what we call a false dichotomy. You may look that up. I am certain Yahoo! will return a pointer to a page of rhetorical fallacies.
Oh, what the hell:
I did it for you.
I'd also suggest you consider that Buddhism has moments of exquisite attention to detail. You may also want to consider the humility and self-effacement of some of its practitioners, who wouldn't be arrogant enough to expect others to wade through the distraction of their carelessness.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I think Opera is contracting development out on each of the ports. They aren't concentrating on each and every port. Consequently, when the People's Republic of China (IIRC they're the ones who built/were going to build all those C64's a couple of years back) asks for a port, Opera will contract yet another team to do to the port.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I don't even worry about the accuracy of the banner, though, since the beauty of the web is the sheer mass of fine-grained information available. It forces the individual to be a better and more discerning information consumer, though.
Anyone even marginally clueful will look around Slashdot for a day and see the biases are writ large for all to see, both in terms of editorial choice and in the comments posted. Every specialty site is like that, and we all ought to be sophisticated enough to know that the 'price' of micropublishing in whatever form is less compulsion to even appear unbiased.
The only real danger here is nothing we haven't all seen before: people who latch on to Slashdot as their sole source of 'news.' On the other hand (and this is not a slam on Slashdot, which I read plenty in the context of a healthy media diet composed of plenty of other sources) people like that will develop the stunted world view they've got coming to them, and the rest of us will learn to ignore them when they actually venture into the real world with their woefully narrow perspectives.
ObOnTopic: I'm looking forward to Opera for Linux. I ran it on a Win95/5x86-133/16 meg box some time ago and loved it. Much more nimble than the competition.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I don't know whether "we" want it or not, but I am pretty certain there's some filtering going on, anyhow. I'm 1 for 4 when it comes to seeing stories I've submitted appear. I'm not complaining about this state of affairs, either. I read Slashdot precisely because it's a filter. It's what I 'pay' Rob et al for when I get rid of that adfu.blockstackers.com line in my Junkbuster configs.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
*blink* I wasn't aware high schools offered tenure.
At the school I work at they sure do. The first three years a teacher is in the system, the contracts are probationary and a teacher can be non-renewed without cause. After three years, they are granted tenure, and they're removable, but it's harder and much documentation is required.
It doesn't matter anyhow, because the worst are usually well connected and they can survive about anything our largely impotent and spineless administrators care to try before giving up and hiding in their offices.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
My apologies. The point I was making was not that Kinko's employees are idiots. I meant to imply that dropping a *nix box in the midst of people who had largely come over from web presses less than five years earlier, and who you'd have no reason to expect would know the first thing about running a *nix server, is a pretty bad idea (from a "keep the customer happy with their new toy" point of view.)
Sure enough... it was a terrible idea. I was the only one who knew the first thing about it, and that was quite by coincidence.
Anyhow, apologies all the same.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I worked at a copy shop in a major midwestern university that shall go unnamed. We ran three Xerox Docutechs and some smaller machines.
We ended up buying a Sun/Xerox network box of some sort. It was brought in with a lot of fanfare. I was a courier at the time, but the school gave all employees accounts on the school computers, so I was learning my way around as an Ultrix user from a Lear/Seigler ADM3a+ and a 1200 baud dialup at night.
Everyone stood around while the techs installed the thing and brought it up. I had never, at that point, seen X in action before so I had no idea there was a *nix under the hood. It wasn't until one of the techs brought up a term and I saw some of the commands they were typing that I realized what it was.
The boss 'in charge' of the machine announced that we were going to take great pains to keep the machine in good shape, and in order to keep it like new, we'd be shutting it down promptly at five every night.
Needless to say, it began to accumulate stuff that never got shuffled out by whatever housekeeping it was supposed to be doing at night, and soon the hard drive was full of undeleted tmp files and aborted print runs.
Eager to prove myself, pre-larval as I was, I went to the PHB and pointed out that the machine was running some sort of Unix and we ought to leave it on, as God intended, or figure out how the housekeeping was supposed to be done and reset some times. She told me it was just like Windows (3.0 was the current version at the time) and we didn't need to do that. I went over her head and got permission to at least twiddle with it to keep the logs rotated and the /tmp files cleaned out. She promptly took all the documentation and locked it in her office, changed all the passwords, and had me rotated to the night shift.
The machine continued to crash right and left, and no one could get at it to fix things. The PHB kept insisting it was just a faulty product. It was eventually branded a failed experiment and taken away.
I've since thought it was a rotten idea to sell a *nix box to a bunch of glorified Kinko's employees and expect them to do anything other than what they did at my shop. The support was god-awful, and the training I was eventually sent to never went past 'this is the garbage can... this is how to click and drag.'
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Well, thanks for posting that, because I just discovered that dropdowns are still broken in 4.6 (at least on my machine), and your workaround works for Enlightenment/GNOME, too.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I've stayed with Red Hat since, even through the-nightmare-that-was-5.1, not out of brand loyalty as much as convenience. And I don't mean the convenience of RPM's, FWIW. I've probably built 75% of the stuff that's gone in my box.
If my machine were still just a "hobby box," I'd probably be looking at Debian again because people rave about how easy it is to upgrade and how secure it is out of the box. As it is, maybe I'll consider that once I have some cash to spring for a new hard drive and some time to goof around with getting it tweaked just so before making it LILO's default.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Thank god someone else noticed that. I thought I was alone in the world. Once I figured out what was going on, I just learned to skip drowpdowns until I'd filled all the text boxes in, but I'll never forget the night I stumbled across the bug. I was trying to fill out the form to download a newer version to get around the bug that kept me from filling in text...
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Starting with 4.0, we strongly suggest setting the MOZILLA_HOME environment variable to point to the Communicator installation directory. Many Netscape Client components now look at MOZILLA_HOME as a fallback or default mechanism in addition to the existing mechanisms from previous releases.
csh, tcsh: /path/to/install-directory
setenv MOZILLA_HOME
sh, bash, ksh:
MOZILLA_HOME=/path/to/install-directory
export MOZILLA_HOME
Hope this helps.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Seems pretty detailed and straightforward. Includes a link to the people who implemented the systems mentioned, but that link's dead.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net