The consumers CLEARLY want music that is packaged up neatly for them. Consumers will buy music, but generally only if they're barraged by enough of it to find an "artist" that they (grow to) like; very few people spend the time to scout for talent themselves.
Can you really blame them? Scouting out music is hard, you listen to a lot of stuff you don't like, and to find something new that you really like takes a lot of commitment. It usually takes several listenings for me to really know if I like an artist, so I can't really give every musician the chance they may deserve. No one can.
It would help if our public airwaves weren't held by corporations who play corporate music, but then I mostly just listen to college stations now. But college stations can be obnoxious too, so nothing's perfect. Several online music vendors have a "if you like XXX you might like YYY or ZZZ too", which I think is a good way to find something new, and since it's based on all that information they strip from us (for good or bad) it usually presents a fair sampling of artists.
But it's just hard. It's like you have a make a lifestyle out of finding new music (and we all know the people for whom it's not just a hobby, but their primary identity). So normal people end up finding music by word of mouth and the radio. That doesn't make them ignorant and they don't deserve to be reviled for it.
You seem to think that Microsoft is being threatened with punishment because it is a monopoly. This is what MS has wanted you to believe. Microsoft is being threatened because they harmed consumers. I couldn't give a damn about Netscape -- they were just a bunch of wannabe monopolists anyway. This isn't about protecting them. It's about the harm done to consumers.
This is not based speculation from their actions. It is based on direct evidence of MS executives' intentions.
Did it help you, the consumer, when Microsoft used it's discriminatory pricing to punish vendors who marketed competing products? Did it save you from the confusing situation where multiple products competed for your affection?
I must admit, the whole IE bundling thing is dumb. I think MS was actually making the right decision to include a browser with the OS. But there are other issues that have nothing to do with MS's "freedom to innovate". There's nothing innovative about using your monopoly to stifle competition. That's what this lawsuit is about.
Punishing MS for business tactics that harm consumers and the free market system is not contrary to OSS, America, or anything else other than unbridled capitalism. The US did unbridled capitalism for a while, and it didn't work well. That's why anti-trust laws exist.
Except with the current techology, since it is mechanical the bigger the platters, the slower the drivers become.
Yes, but no one's saying we're 3-5 years away from reaching the theoretical limit of mechanical technology. While we can't figure out how to get magnetic bits smaller, there's room to discover new ways to get those bits to the head. It's hard, but so is everything. That's why they pay lots of people to think about what to do next.
Those things you are talking about aren't programming, they are system administration. I agree that a mediocre system administrator can be good -- at least, mediocre as in not very creative or perceptive. Reliability is more important for an administrator -- computer or otherwise -- than innovation.
But that's not the case for programming.
I would concede that certain maintenance chores can be handled by mediocre programmers without much risk. At worse you just go back to the original version. And there is some grunt work to programming too, some boring code that needs to get written. But if you have so much junk code you aren't abstracting right. One of the nice parts about computers is you don't have to solve the same problem over and over again.
But I still pretty much stand behind my original proposition. For programmers, not all the other tasks associated with programming.
In the end you actually have to make something. Teamwork isn't about making anything. Competence, intelligence, and skill are what make things. Teamwork helps those things. But someone who's all teamwork and no skill isn't someone you want programming. I'm not defending prima donnas, I'm just saying that a prima donna who is competent isn't all bad. One who isn't competent is obviously a double loser.
But mediocre programmers are already useless. Unless maybe you are shooting for a mediocre program.
Assholes, territorialism, and egoism are all drags. But so is mediocrity. At least an asshole might also be a good programmer. The mediocre programmer might be a good mascot, but not a whole lot else.
Unless, god bless you, you are actually willing to invest in an individual so they can become a good programmer. There aren't many willing to do that these days.
I think the real trouble is they tried to be *too* faithful to the book.
I'd say they were too faithful to the general plot, not leaving out any plot elements, but not paying attention to actual story. It had every plot point -- it even had the same godawful last line. But it didn't keep the feeling of the book.
The part that really annoyed me was that it took all the power from the female characters. Jessica and Chani were both very strong in the book. But in the miniseries Jessica became a total wimp after the Atreides fall, and Chani was okay but never had the Fremen ruthlessness.
I can understand, if not entirely condone, taking sexist parts out of old stories. But this goes the opposite way, entirely to the detriment of the story. I have no idea why they would have done that.
And the Harkonnen weren't nearly as repulsive as they were supposed to be either -- not a boil to be found!
With later books the plot gets weaker and more arbitrary. They'll only do worse.
I think I sound a little bit too anti-Perl in that post. I don't like it, but I don't think it's sinful or anything. Nothing, you know, personal towards, you know, anyone.
I can't say I think Perl is a good way to program, even for other people.
You are missing the point. Perl is a syntax, not a "way to program". Programming is an art,
and there are good and bad programming styles, the language has very little to do with that.
Perl is a way to program. Yes, one can program well in Perl. It's possible to program well in GWBASIC too. But it doesn't come naturally, and it doesn't happen as often as it does with other languages.
Perl very much encourages hacks. For throw-away scripts that fine, I suppose -- though the thing you think you'll throw away now will probably still be around a couple years from now.
TMTOWTDI is a horrible, horrible way to make maintainable code. Yeah, it has nice post-structural connotations (though I hate post-structuralism with a passion for all sorts of other reasons). But it's much better to have one compelling, intuitive way to do something.
And I'm not the only one to think this. There's not a whole lot of languages that get as much disrespect as Perl does. Ada, APL, COBOL perhaps. Java, Python, C, C++ -- they all get critiques, but seldom engender the sort of distaste that Perl receives. Now, despite this Perl is popular -- I can't deny that. It has its benefits. You can make a quick hack real fast with it. But that is, by definition, not good programming. Expedient, perhaps pragmatic, but not good.
Are you from Farm Town, USA? Your simple-mindedness is surprising, even for slashdot.
Lots of great open source code comes from Japan, and regardless, it's unfair of you to say that
the original author of Ruby has his cards against him simply because of the fact that he was
Japanese.
I'm just saying it like it is. It's not unfair to say something that's true. When you compare the contribution made by Japanese programmers, and the projects led by them, there are noticable differences when compared to, say, Germany or Sweden. Projects led by people in Japan tend to stay in Japan -- maybe there's less marketing, maybe people are biased, I dunno. And there are relatively fewer Japanese programmers contributing to projects compared to other similar countries. There's a divide between communities -- a divide that doesn't exist between North America and Europe. Except maybe France, though to a lesser degree. Though hell, even KDE/GNOME has a certain Europe/North America rivalry going on.
Re:Object Oriented programming is overrated
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
I think the real benefit of OO for scripting is it is a good metaphor to use when organizing the standard library. And a good scripting language should have a good standard library. Not only that, it should have a good set of third-party libraries, which means you can't just hard-code the organization.
Yeah, I think that Python and Perl are well differentiated. They both express very different philosophies. I might even say they both express different, exclusive, but valid opinions on how to program. I might say that if I believed it, but I can't say I think Perl is a good way to program, even for other people.
But that aside, Python isn't perfect, and there are definately places where it is too loose (mostly in its object system, IMHO), and too strict (the indentation thing can be annoying sometimes -- and damn the person who invented tabs!)
But Python is pretty okay. And it's only like Perl in that they are both mostly procedural languages. I'd like Ruby for its OO system, and the clever tricks it allows. (I haven't actually used it, but I've used Smalltalk, and the abstractions that Smalltalk made and Ruby copied are really good) But why, oh why, did it have to use Perl syntax? Who would ever want such a thing? If they did, they'd use Perl. Or awk. Or bash. Or C. Or all the other stupid languages Perl took its syntax from. People who like Perl seem to like Perl. People who hate Perl come to Python. Ruby's syntax seemed to be an attempt to seduce Perlites to Ruby, when it would have been a better tactic to rally against Perl. People who would like Ruby probably weren't ever happy with Perl anyway.
Python was the right thing at the right time (and even then it was just Yet Another Scripting Language for some time). It defined itself in a compelling way. Ruby was just a little too late and not compelling enough to any one audience -- somewhat compelling to several audiences, but you need to do better than somewhat.
Probably didn't help that it came out of Japan either, as Japan doesn't really seem to be in the loop when it comes to free/open source software (language barriers?)
I'm curious: Ruby I assume is pretty close to Python in speed, no? I was under the impression they were both interpreted (byte-compiled or whatever).
But since there are orders-of-magnitude problems that sometimes need to be solved, how does Ruby do in integration with C? Python seems to do fairly well -- though I haven't used it myself -- and putting certain operations in C is a good way to speed things up. Numeric Python seems to do a lot with this, for instance. How hard is it to do this in Ruby?
I'm not saying Jobs stole the GUI -- someone had to bring it to market, and God knows Xerox wasn't up to it. Apple did a lot of important grunt work of making the GUI practical. But it wasn't like Jobs was in mortal combat with the forces of CLI, and should he have lost the world would have been plunged into CLI darkness forever.
Sure, the Cube/iMac design is thought out. But I think it fits into a model of design that is not really good. They are pretty boxes, but just putting pretty things everywhere makes for poor overall design. Most people don't think of this when they buy something -- they see one pretty thing on the shelf and want it for themselves. But either they go for an all-iMac design for their home (which is actually possible at this point -- iMac lookalike chairs, desks, pens, CD-holders, kitchenware, and hell, even clothes have come about), or they have an ugly conglomeration of bright items each screaming for attention in a different way.
But I don't have an iMac residence. Like most people I have a hodge-podge of items that I have aquired over some time, and I'm not spendthrift or wasteful enough to replace everything with Good Design. I want items that are simple, inobtrusive, and sure, reasonably attractive. I must admit, beige is an ugly color -- I'd like black more. But I like a computer that is a very boxy box, because that's all it is -- it ain't art. My shelves aren't colorful or pretty either, nor my tables, and there's stuff everywhere. I don't live in a commercial. An iMac wouldn't make my residence/work any more beautiful.
More plants and better lighting. That's the kind of design that never goes out of style.
Without the influence of Jobs and Apple we'd probably all be
stuck with a CLI.
You give Jobs too much credit. The GUI was going to happen. Exactly what it would look like was up for grabs for a while. But that was brought forward by Alan Kay et. al. at Xerox PARC, not by Jobs. He was the first one to bring it to market -- that's not revolutionary, it's inevitable.
But quitting because of flames? Thats the same as quitting for no reason.
These are real people here, and you just can't entirely divide the personal from the technical. Especially with something like this, where the participants are involved because of personal passions, not just because it's how they earn a living. If they didn't care personally, they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.
I understand that flaming is a natural, emergent part of the internet experience. But it still sucks. And it doesn't have to happen. Just as we form societies in real life, we can do it on the internet -- peer opinion means a lot on the internet (more when things aren't anonymous). If people show that they look down on flaming, that cruel words are not respected, then people will start (appropriately) censoring themselves.
The widely espoused alternative is to "put on your flame-retardant suit" and just suck it up. That works sometimes. I certainly won't be bothered if some AC writes "fuck you, idiot" in reply. But I think there are some major negatives to doing that all the time:
Your sense of empathy doesn't kick in right. If you remain sensitive to flames, you'll be sensitive when writing flame material. I've seen a lot of cases where highly flame-resistant people can be short, dismissive, demeaning, and just plain cruel to innocent, though sometimes misguided newbies (among others).
It might leak into your real life. Being a geek I had put up a lot of walls to defend myself from the ridicule of my peers. But now I'm an adult and my peers don't ridicule me. Those walls only harm me now and they probably didn't help much in my youth either. Trying to tear them down in one environment and keep them up in another is hard. I don't think my experience struggling with this is unique.
You become naturally defensive. A truly well-formed argument is one that leaves room for your opponent to gracefully concede a point. If an argument involves neither side conceding any points, that's not a helpful experience. Maybe one side converted more bystanders into their camp, but ultimately some sort of concensus has to be reached -- even if it only means that the losers agree to stay silent. This is hard to come by after flaming, and seldom creates good feelings among the group.
Flaming tends to degrade into point-by-point rebuttal and counter-rebuttal. This is closely matching the Lincoln-Douglas debating style, which I consider the least insightful way an issue can be argued (can anyone tell I wan't pleased with my brief debating experience?) This tends towards reactionary statements, which decay towards absurdity. Seldom does anything new come out of such discussions.
So yeah, you're going to get some flames. But I think they could be handled much more constructively by the group -- rephrasing vitriolic but valid flames into something more reasonable, matching flames with positive feedback, and having third parties confront flamers off-list. That last one particularly -- it's weird how a mail with a To: line that only points to one person is so much more intimate and personal than one that CC's the list. It makes people realize that there's individuals behind the email addresses, which usually is enough in itself to stop flaming. It also short-circuits the posturing that is behind many flames.
Being anal about legal issues gives FSF some creditibility when enforcing the GPL. Sure, Python certainly had the right intention with its license. But that's a weak way to enforce a legal document. Someone else will come along, and they won't have good intentions, but they'll be able to point at how FSF and GPL copyright holders never really cared about compliance anyway, so they should be allowed to bend the rules too.
Legal documents are all about being anal. The law is all about being anal. Guido doesn't care about this -- so be it. But it's because some people do care about this that the GPL exists and serves a real purpose in the world. Otherwise the GPL would just be so many words.
I like Ruby's Smalltalk-like semantics, but I must admit I'm afraid of its Perl-like syntax. Why, oh why, did he choose the most random syntax for what would otherwise be an elegant language?
But, really, this breaks down under certain usage patterns. On a system like Debian, where package installation is trivial compared to Windows, there are a ton of packages. I currently have 694 packages installed, though a significant number of them are libraries.
Consider another pattern -- extended environments. Gnome is an instance, as is KDE. I have 12 Python packages installed, and Python by itself doesn't even do anything. I won't speculate on how large Gnome or KDE are.
I have 41 gnome packages installed (or, at least packages named gnome*). What would happen if I had 41 copies of the Gnome libraries for these applications? What if packages had even greater granularity? What if I get to choose which applets I want installed? What GTK engines I want? Hell, I don't even know how engines could work with 41 copies of the libraries.
Sym linking identicle libraries to save space wouldn't do any good, because that offers nothing better than what I have now (which works just fine, actually) -- where most libraries end up in/usr/lib. In a funny way, I suppose hard links would almost work right.
On Windows per-application DLLs kind of make sense. On Windows, people don't have that many applications installed. Each application tends to do a lot on its own. This is partially the influence of commercial tendencies (people don't want to pay for something too small), and partially it's because small applications quickly become unmanagable on Windows. But Debian doesn't have this problem, and RPM-based systems have, well, not too much of this problem. Why "fix" what isn't broken?
Next you'll have us putting application files in directories named after domain names or company names, to avoid naming conflicts./usr/applications/org/gnu/gnucash. Uh huh.
I had a private life, dammit, and it didn't do me any harm. At eleven I was experimenting with fire and found my dad's porn collection, among many little secrets I kept to myself. Not surprisingly, I did not tell my parents. It was private.
Did you tell your parents these things? Would you really expect your children to tell you these things? Do you really think you know everything that's going on? Of course not. But you seem bothered by it -- even though most of us grew up that way and turned out fine.
There's a feeling in the country that every moment of a child's life should be structured, that some adult should be responsible, that it shouldn't be possible for anything to ever go wrong. Well that's fucked up.
It used to be that kids had free time, time to go explore things, time to make mistakes, time to learn about who they are. This American Life had a good little segment about The Geography of Childhood, about how children in the early 70's spent their time.
There are dangers in the world. But one of the big ones is the danger of being too safe -- it makes children too naive, unable to assert their will in the world (which they must learn to do), unable to think independently.
So I say once again: let go! The chance of your child getting kidnapped and murdered is extremely small. The chance of them doing drugs is pretty high. The chance of whether they will deal with that experience in a mature, thoughtful, and ultimately positive way is up to you, the parent. You can't keep it from happening -- so help your child become the person who can deal with it well. Help your child live their own life, because it's not your life to live. Even at 11.
Bah, kids deserve to have time to themselves too. They deserve to have private lives, and to even keep secrets. It's the way a kid figures out who they are, and get an identity seperate from their parents.
Especially because she's only with them for a couple days they need to let go a little. It's all too easy to think, well, we only have her two days every other week -- then for those two days she's ALL OURS. But that's a messed up way to think about it -- she isn't anyone's, she's herself, she needs some control over her life... like having some input as to what she does from moment to moment, and who she does it with.
This reminds me of the free speech notion -- that by being too restrictive of unprotected speech you can have a chilling effect on protected free speech. Similarly, by being to intrusive about inappropriate material, you can have a chilling effect on a child's curiosity about appropriate but -- to the child -- mysterious material.
While Apache doesn't support gzip natively (I think it does have some experimental support, though), for dynamically generated pages it's easy enough to add in. It's just a matter of searching for gzip in HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING, putting a certain header in there, and running the page through gzip (or, often, the implementations of the format integrated into the programming language of your choice). This requires no server support to do.
I am encoding sets of articles on international subjects (the most recent is a set of essays on libraries around the world). While I'm thankfully avoiding any issue of East Asian character sets, characters from multiple character sets do happen in a single document. Also, it's nice to basically leave the character set issue out entirely -- I use one character set, UTF-8. Keeping track of character set is a PITA.
Really, Unicode just eliminates a whole class of issues -- many of which are currently solvable, but with Unicode they simply aren't a problem at all. As it becomes better supported -- and Unicode is already quite well supported -- I think most places will be using it.
Also, if there's redundancy in Unicode, I imagine most of that space could be saved with gzip, which also has good support over the web, though like Unicode is far underused.
Do you think StarLogo would work well in a short timespan (like once-a-week classes for a year, or classes that are more often but only in the span of a couple months)? Do you think younger children need to have experience with Logo before using StarLogo?
Oh, and to counter some people's criticism that inner city kids need vocational training... (which Logo is not, but word processing is): don't sell the kids out.
They aren't going to be working as secretaries at age 10. They don't need those skills -- they need the skills to think. Underprivileged kids are often deprived of this in school, at least in enrichment programs they should have this chance.
Slashdot Mirror
It would help if our public airwaves weren't held by corporations who play corporate music, but then I mostly just listen to college stations now. But college stations can be obnoxious too, so nothing's perfect. Several online music vendors have a "if you like XXX you might like YYY or ZZZ too", which I think is a good way to find something new, and since it's based on all that information they strip from us (for good or bad) it usually presents a fair sampling of artists.
But it's just hard. It's like you have a make a lifestyle out of finding new music (and we all know the people for whom it's not just a hobby, but their primary identity). So normal people end up finding music by word of mouth and the radio. That doesn't make them ignorant and they don't deserve to be reviled for it.
This is not based speculation from their actions. It is based on direct evidence of MS executives' intentions.
Did it help you, the consumer, when Microsoft used it's discriminatory pricing to punish vendors who marketed competing products? Did it save you from the confusing situation where multiple products competed for your affection?
I must admit, the whole IE bundling thing is dumb. I think MS was actually making the right decision to include a browser with the OS. But there are other issues that have nothing to do with MS's "freedom to innovate". There's nothing innovative about using your monopoly to stifle competition. That's what this lawsuit is about.
Punishing MS for business tactics that harm consumers and the free market system is not contrary to OSS, America, or anything else other than unbridled capitalism. The US did unbridled capitalism for a while, and it didn't work well. That's why anti-trust laws exist.
It's the makeup that gives it away, isn't it...
But that's not the case for programming.
I would concede that certain maintenance chores can be handled by mediocre programmers without much risk. At worse you just go back to the original version. And there is some grunt work to programming too, some boring code that needs to get written. But if you have so much junk code you aren't abstracting right. One of the nice parts about computers is you don't have to solve the same problem over and over again.
But I still pretty much stand behind my original proposition. For programmers, not all the other tasks associated with programming.
In the end you actually have to make something. Teamwork isn't about making anything. Competence, intelligence, and skill are what make things. Teamwork helps those things. But someone who's all teamwork and no skill isn't someone you want programming. I'm not defending prima donnas, I'm just saying that a prima donna who is competent isn't all bad. One who isn't competent is obviously a double loser.
Assholes, territorialism, and egoism are all drags. But so is mediocrity. At least an asshole might also be a good programmer. The mediocre programmer might be a good mascot, but not a whole lot else.
Unless, god bless you, you are actually willing to invest in an individual so they can become a good programmer. There aren't many willing to do that these days.
The part that really annoyed me was that it took all the power from the female characters. Jessica and Chani were both very strong in the book. But in the miniseries Jessica became a total wimp after the Atreides fall, and Chani was okay but never had the Fremen ruthlessness.
I can understand, if not entirely condone, taking sexist parts out of old stories. But this goes the opposite way, entirely to the detriment of the story. I have no idea why they would have done that.
And the Harkonnen weren't nearly as repulsive as they were supposed to be either -- not a boil to be found!
With later books the plot gets weaker and more arbitrary. They'll only do worse.
I think I sound a little bit too anti-Perl in that post. I don't like it, but I don't think it's sinful or anything. Nothing, you know, personal towards, you know, anyone.
Perl very much encourages hacks. For throw-away scripts that fine, I suppose -- though the thing you think you'll throw away now will probably still be around a couple years from now.
TMTOWTDI is a horrible, horrible way to make maintainable code. Yeah, it has nice post-structural connotations (though I hate post-structuralism with a passion for all sorts of other reasons). But it's much better to have one compelling, intuitive way to do something.
And I'm not the only one to think this. There's not a whole lot of languages that get as much disrespect as Perl does. Ada, APL, COBOL perhaps. Java, Python, C, C++ -- they all get critiques, but seldom engender the sort of distaste that Perl receives. Now, despite this Perl is popular -- I can't deny that. It has its benefits. You can make a quick hack real fast with it. But that is, by definition, not good programming. Expedient, perhaps pragmatic, but not good.
I'm just saying it like it is. It's not unfair to say something that's true. When you compare the contribution made by Japanese programmers, and the projects led by them, there are noticable differences when compared to, say, Germany or Sweden. Projects led by people in Japan tend to stay in Japan -- maybe there's less marketing, maybe people are biased, I dunno. And there are relatively fewer Japanese programmers contributing to projects compared to other similar countries. There's a divide between communities -- a divide that doesn't exist between North America and Europe. Except maybe France, though to a lesser degree. Though hell, even KDE/GNOME has a certain Europe/North America rivalry going on.I think the real benefit of OO for scripting is it is a good metaphor to use when organizing the standard library. And a good scripting language should have a good standard library. Not only that, it should have a good set of third-party libraries, which means you can't just hard-code the organization.
But that aside, Python isn't perfect, and there are definately places where it is too loose (mostly in its object system, IMHO), and too strict (the indentation thing can be annoying sometimes -- and damn the person who invented tabs!)
But Python is pretty okay. And it's only like Perl in that they are both mostly procedural languages. I'd like Ruby for its OO system, and the clever tricks it allows. (I haven't actually used it, but I've used Smalltalk, and the abstractions that Smalltalk made and Ruby copied are really good) But why, oh why, did it have to use Perl syntax? Who would ever want such a thing? If they did, they'd use Perl. Or awk. Or bash. Or C. Or all the other stupid languages Perl took its syntax from. People who like Perl seem to like Perl. People who hate Perl come to Python. Ruby's syntax seemed to be an attempt to seduce Perlites to Ruby, when it would have been a better tactic to rally against Perl. People who would like Ruby probably weren't ever happy with Perl anyway.
Python was the right thing at the right time (and even then it was just Yet Another Scripting Language for some time). It defined itself in a compelling way. Ruby was just a little too late and not compelling enough to any one audience -- somewhat compelling to several audiences, but you need to do better than somewhat.
Probably didn't help that it came out of Japan either, as Japan doesn't really seem to be in the loop when it comes to free/open source software (language barriers?)
But since there are orders-of-magnitude problems that sometimes need to be solved, how does Ruby do in integration with C? Python seems to do fairly well -- though I haven't used it myself -- and putting certain operations in C is a good way to speed things up. Numeric Python seems to do a lot with this, for instance. How hard is it to do this in Ruby?
I'm not saying Jobs stole the GUI -- someone had to bring it to market, and God knows Xerox wasn't up to it. Apple did a lot of important grunt work of making the GUI practical. But it wasn't like Jobs was in mortal combat with the forces of CLI, and should he have lost the world would have been plunged into CLI darkness forever.
But I don't have an iMac residence. Like most people I have a hodge-podge of items that I have aquired over some time, and I'm not spendthrift or wasteful enough to replace everything with Good Design. I want items that are simple, inobtrusive, and sure, reasonably attractive. I must admit, beige is an ugly color -- I'd like black more. But I like a computer that is a very boxy box, because that's all it is -- it ain't art. My shelves aren't colorful or pretty either, nor my tables, and there's stuff everywhere. I don't live in a commercial. An iMac wouldn't make my residence/work any more beautiful.
More plants and better lighting. That's the kind of design that never goes out of style.
I understand that flaming is a natural, emergent part of the internet experience. But it still sucks. And it doesn't have to happen. Just as we form societies in real life, we can do it on the internet -- peer opinion means a lot on the internet (more when things aren't anonymous). If people show that they look down on flaming, that cruel words are not respected, then people will start (appropriately) censoring themselves.
The widely espoused alternative is to "put on your flame-retardant suit" and just suck it up. That works sometimes. I certainly won't be bothered if some AC writes "fuck you, idiot" in reply. But I think there are some major negatives to doing that all the time:
- Your sense of empathy doesn't kick in right. If you remain sensitive to flames, you'll be sensitive when writing flame material. I've seen a lot of cases where highly flame-resistant people can be short, dismissive, demeaning, and just plain cruel to innocent, though sometimes misguided newbies (among others).
- It might leak into your real life. Being a geek I had put up a lot of walls to defend myself from the ridicule of my peers. But now I'm an adult and my peers don't ridicule me. Those walls only harm me now and they probably didn't help much in my youth either. Trying to tear them down in one environment and keep them up in another is hard. I don't think my experience struggling with this is unique.
- You become naturally defensive. A truly well-formed argument is one that leaves room for your opponent to gracefully concede a point. If an argument involves neither side conceding any points, that's not a helpful experience. Maybe one side converted more bystanders into their camp, but ultimately some sort of concensus has to be reached -- even if it only means that the losers agree to stay silent. This is hard to come by after flaming, and seldom creates good feelings among the group.
- Flaming tends to degrade into point-by-point rebuttal and counter-rebuttal. This is closely matching the Lincoln-Douglas debating style, which I consider the least insightful way an issue can be argued (can anyone tell I wan't pleased with my brief debating experience?) This tends towards reactionary statements, which decay towards absurdity. Seldom does anything new come out of such discussions.
So yeah, you're going to get some flames. But I think they could be handled much more constructively by the group -- rephrasing vitriolic but valid flames into something more reasonable, matching flames with positive feedback, and having third parties confront flamers off-list. That last one particularly -- it's weird how a mail with a To: line that only points to one person is so much more intimate and personal than one that CC's the list. It makes people realize that there's individuals behind the email addresses, which usually is enough in itself to stop flaming. It also short-circuits the posturing that is behind many flames.More love.
Legal documents are all about being anal. The law is all about being anal. Guido doesn't care about this -- so be it. But it's because some people do care about this that the GPL exists and serves a real purpose in the world. Otherwise the GPL would just be so many words.
I like Ruby's Smalltalk-like semantics, but I must admit I'm afraid of its Perl-like syntax. Why, oh why, did he choose the most random syntax for what would otherwise be an elegant language?
But, really, this breaks down under certain usage patterns. On a system like Debian, where package installation is trivial compared to Windows, there are a ton of packages. I currently have 694 packages installed, though a significant number of them are libraries.
Consider another pattern -- extended environments. Gnome is an instance, as is KDE. I have 12 Python packages installed, and Python by itself doesn't even do anything. I won't speculate on how large Gnome or KDE are.
I have 41 gnome packages installed (or, at least packages named gnome*). What would happen if I had 41 copies of the Gnome libraries for these applications? What if packages had even greater granularity? What if I get to choose which applets I want installed? What GTK engines I want? Hell, I don't even know how engines could work with 41 copies of the libraries.
Sym linking identicle libraries to save space wouldn't do any good, because that offers nothing better than what I have now (which works just fine, actually) -- where most libraries end up in /usr/lib. In a funny way, I suppose hard links would almost work right.
On Windows per-application DLLs kind of make sense. On Windows, people don't have that many applications installed. Each application tends to do a lot on its own. This is partially the influence of commercial tendencies (people don't want to pay for something too small), and partially it's because small applications quickly become unmanagable on Windows. But Debian doesn't have this problem, and RPM-based systems have, well, not too much of this problem. Why "fix" what isn't broken?
Next you'll have us putting application files in directories named after domain names or company names, to avoid naming conflicts. /usr/applications/org/gnu/gnucash. Uh huh.
Did you tell your parents these things? Would you really expect your children to tell you these things? Do you really think you know everything that's going on? Of course not. But you seem bothered by it -- even though most of us grew up that way and turned out fine.
There's a feeling in the country that every moment of a child's life should be structured, that some adult should be responsible, that it shouldn't be possible for anything to ever go wrong. Well that's fucked up.
It used to be that kids had free time, time to go explore things, time to make mistakes, time to learn about who they are. This American Life had a good little segment about The Geography of Childhood, about how children in the early 70's spent their time.
There are dangers in the world. But one of the big ones is the danger of being too safe -- it makes children too naive, unable to assert their will in the world (which they must learn to do), unable to think independently.
So I say once again: let go! The chance of your child getting kidnapped and murdered is extremely small. The chance of them doing drugs is pretty high. The chance of whether they will deal with that experience in a mature, thoughtful, and ultimately positive way is up to you, the parent. You can't keep it from happening -- so help your child become the person who can deal with it well. Help your child live their own life, because it's not your life to live. Even at 11.
Especially because she's only with them for a couple days they need to let go a little. It's all too easy to think, well, we only have her two days every other week -- then for those two days she's ALL OURS. But that's a messed up way to think about it -- she isn't anyone's, she's herself, she needs some control over her life... like having some input as to what she does from moment to moment, and who she does it with.
This reminds me of the free speech notion -- that by being too restrictive of unprotected speech you can have a chilling effect on protected free speech. Similarly, by being to intrusive about inappropriate material, you can have a chilling effect on a child's curiosity about appropriate but -- to the child -- mysterious material.
While Apache doesn't support gzip natively (I think it does have some experimental support, though), for dynamically generated pages it's easy enough to add in. It's just a matter of searching for gzip in HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING, putting a certain header in there, and running the page through gzip (or, often, the implementations of the format integrated into the programming language of your choice). This requires no server support to do.
I am encoding sets of articles on international subjects (the most recent is a set of essays on libraries around the world). While I'm thankfully avoiding any issue of East Asian character sets, characters from multiple character sets do happen in a single document. Also, it's nice to basically leave the character set issue out entirely -- I use one character set, UTF-8. Keeping track of character set is a PITA.
Really, Unicode just eliminates a whole class of issues -- many of which are currently solvable, but with Unicode they simply aren't a problem at all. As it becomes better supported -- and Unicode is already quite well supported -- I think most places will be using it.
Also, if there's redundancy in Unicode, I imagine most of that space could be saved with gzip, which also has good support over the web, though like Unicode is far underused.
Just curious.
They aren't going to be working as secretaries at age 10. They don't need those skills -- they need the skills to think. Underprivileged kids are often deprived of this in school, at least in enrichment programs they should have this chance.