Apparently it also damages the part of the brain that detects sarcasm. When someone speaks of the 'dreaded FOO' he generally doesn't really dread FOO, but rather wants to mock those who do.
I think that "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" is their best. It's an angry song about breaking out of prison. It uses a haunting piano loop to convey a mood of desperation and momentum. "Cold Lampin' with Flav O'Flav" is one of the cleverest, with lots of tongue twisters and cultural allusions.
You can't produce the angles required to make regular polyhedra with Meccano or Lego.
Not with conventional Lego, true. But with Meccano? Seems to me you're overlooking the ability to bend flat steel members. Of course I recognize the disadvantages.
I also had Fischer Technik and prefer it to Lego or Erector (== US Meccano). Lego felt too dumb and limited compared to FT. However Erector Set was probably beyond my capabilities - I rarely played with it. I also found the aesthetic feel of Erector Set rather unpleasant - thin tinny metal, bolts that were never really tight, and bad paint colors. FT, in contrast, felt cool when you slid protruding studs into grooves. The color scheme was informative rather than decorative - grey (with black studs) for the blocks and red for specialty parts (wheels, gears, angle blocks, panels.) The same grooves which accepted studs from other blocks could also accept a steel shaft, acting as a bearing. FT encouraged you to keep one foot in the world of blocks (the Lego world) and one foot in a harder world of shafts, pulleys, wheels, sprockets.
Well, that would certainly be the wrong way to privatize. Here's how auto inspection works everywhere I've lived in the US: the DMV licenses private businesses to sell inspection services to vehicle owners. The DMV does not serve as an intermediary in these transactions. If you start an inspection station and it takes years to get operational, that's your problem. Nobody will pay you to fail to inspect vehicles.
Re:What ever happened to that MSN house?
on
Webvan Out Of Gas
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· Score: 2
I feel uncomfortable seeing BMG harnessed to sell Intel CPU's. They were a fairly scary sadistic performance art group. Now they seem like harmless Disney characters.
You are framing the discussion in terms of what the reasonable employer would or wouldn't permit. And within that framework you're right; the reasonable employer pemits some, but not all personal uses of its property. But a more important point is that no matter how unreasonable the employer, it shouldn't have the legal right to criminalize misuse of its resources. The penalty for misuse (as opposed to theft) of an employer's resources should be limited to termination. You say your boss doesn't care about thing1, but thing2 would be out of line. Suppose you misunderstood your boss, and he also considers thing1 out of line. This does not give him the right to throw you in jail.
First, the guy's not an asshole just because he disagrees with you. Second, you're missing a fact: the more electrical load is placed on the alternator, the more it resists rotation of its shaft. This means that to run the engine at a certain RPM requires more fuel when the alternator is more heavily loaded. Third, I've seen car stereos that make the headlights dim with each beat. But a better example altogether would be air conditioning, which definitely increases fuel consumption. So lets say the 'carwash kid' ran the AC, which was neither prohibited nor specifically allowed by the owner.
A phone rings. SFO: SFO Caller: Is this the Serious Fraud Office? SFO: No, we're the Silly Fraud Office. The Serious Fraud Office is at 976-1515. We only take care of Silly frauds here. Caller: Like posting imaginary cool hardware on Slashdot? SFO: Exactly. Or giving phonesex numbers to people who are looking for - never mind. Caller: And I suppose the Serious Fraud Office commits more Serious frauds, like bailing out the doomed financial institutions of political cronies? SFO: Yes. Also, pretending not be themselves when someone calls, which is of course disimpersonation of a government office.
They think the right way to segment the population is by age, sex and zip code. It might eliminate some of the most irrelevant ads, but it doesn't change the junk-flooding nature of radio advertising. Media corporations like Clear Channel view music as a 'product' to be dispensed to 'consumers' and it shows. The lack of interest leaks through the cracks in the shiny facade constantly. They'll put an ad for the Rolling Stones or some such dinosaurs on an alternative rock station. Or an ad for a disco that plays top 40. More importantly, the tone of most ads shows that they are aimed at 'the mass of drooling morons' rather than fans of a particular music. They'll use a music bed which could be expected to evoke nausea from the listeners of that station. I know someone will claim that these things are inevitable, for economic or other reasons. But in the mid-80's, alternative stations really did reflect their own style more consistently. And AM radio (on the rare occasions I listen to it) does seem to cater more to the mindset of its listeners, with a focus on money, insurance, stocks, etc. I really look forward to the end of commercial monopoly broadcasting. And I hope that Clear Channel's attempts to extend their tentacles into the internet are utter failures.
Wouldn't it be better to embed the chips in the drinks? That way you could ask your smart toilet the next morning, "What the hell was I drinking last night?"
I've increasingly seen a pattern in which people withdraw money as 20 dollar bills from an ATM and then spend them at a business, getting change in fives and ones. I suspect that almost all the twenties are then deposited at the merchant's bank. Twenties would only be given in change for 50's and 100's, which are not that common. So if you withdraw a twenty on Monday, and Safeway deposits it on Wednesday, it's a good guess that you spent it at Safeway. Not proof, not enough to convict anyone of anything, but enough to establish a rough sense of where you spend your money. Or conversely, where Safeway's money comes from.
There are plenty of failed (or at least still-standing) free software projects, too.
Oh, absolutely. And except for Minix, the projects I mentioned are doing quite well. I call them dead-end not because they're dying now, but because they can be pinched off at a single point of failure. Any given GPL project is probably going to die in the near future. However if it has worthwhile reusable code, the code could be reused in other GPL projects. My idea of 'long term credibility' comes from Vinod Villopillil's Halloween Documents. Vinod pointed out that Microsoft has long term credibility because their size ensures they will be around tomorrow. And GPL software has long term credibility because as long as someone's interested, he can keep improving it. But commercial software from small vendors has no long term credibility because if it threatens a major player the major player will buy and usually kill it. Likewise, although I'm not sure Vinod pointed this out, software like Pine has no long-term credibility because despite UW's size and credibility, there is no way of assessing their attachment to the project. I assume they would sell Pine for a price. I don't what the price is and whether anyone would pay it merely to kill Pine. I rather doubt that Pine's license was chosen for strategic reasons as in the examples you cite. I tend to think that it, like Pine, is simply a relic of an earlier time.
I'm afraid I'm not communicating my point to you. The idea that users should be grateful for any scraps that software authors throw their way is only true in a limited context. Specifically, it's true when the free-beer software is substantially ahead of the Free alternatives. I'm willing to believe that Pine was in this category when it was released. However we are now awash in truly free MUA's. The scarce resource is no longer programmers, but people's attention. Nobody has time to try all the new MUAs on freshmeat. Let X be the total number of programmer-hours invested in Pine. Let Y be the total number of hours invested by users in learning Pine. I think that X < Y. In other words, the users have put more into the relationship than the authors. And yet, according to the license the authors have the right to radically change the relationship against the users' will.
Don't you see how fucking idiotic you look with your inane cries for something that YOU HAVE NO RIGHT to demand in the first place?
Look at it this way. Radio Station R1 offers $1000 to the 1000th caller. Of course the winner has to sign a form saying he can be used in advertising without charge. Now Radio Station R2 has the same promotion, but they don't require you to sign away any rights. All other things being equal, I'd say listen to R2. Should I be 'grateful' to R1 for still giving out free money? Not really; my gratitude has moved to R2. Do I have a right to demand that I not be used in publicity if I win? Of course not. I do have a right to choose what radio station I listen to, though.
Windows Printing API is format and driver and medium neutral...
Isn't Postscript, at least in practice? When I print a page from Netscape Navigator, it uses Postscript for the output. This works fine at home (via Ghostscript/magicfilter) and at work (printers speak Postscript natively.) Same for xfig. I've written several apps which generate complex graphical output on Unix. I used Postscript for all of them. I did not have to know or care about the destination device. It seems to me (in my ignorance of the Windows Printing API) that Postscript is a superior solution, partly because it introduces a standard language as an intermediate format. This greatly eases troubleshooting of odd output problems. Have you used Postscript? Do you know it? If not, I highly recommend that you work through Adobe's Postscript Tutorial using Ghostscript when you have the time. It is a very nice language. It supports functions, which encourages you to write reusable building blocks. As for these big-apps reinventing the whole works, I tend to think they made a mistake. There seems to be a tendency to transplant ideas literally from Windows without first examining the native facility on Unix.
I'm skeptical. Remember, Microsoft said they would use XML formats in the office suites. It turns out they meant use nominal XML wrapped around a big chunk of binary data. If they're smart (and they are) they'll treat 'obscurity' as a knob they can adjust. They'll start at 0 and turn it up gradually until nothing is compatible. And it is quite possible to do this while adhering to all the standards you mentioned. XML's not that friendly when it's a huge CDATA block that's an encrypted RAM dump from a Win32 machine. And think of all the games they can play with certificates hardwired into the clients - only Microsoft and their buddies would be 'legitimate' in the.NET scheme. And as they turn that knob it goes from "I don't get the padlock icon" to "I get a dialog box - insecure site, continue connecting?" to "Access denied - you have been reported to Passport central."
I've heard roughly the same comment from some several programmers. What is so hard about printing from Unix? Linux distros generally have ghostscript/magicfilter installed. Commercial Unix is usually at sites with Postscript printers. Postscript is a great language for defining graphic output. What is this Windows Printing API and why's it better than Postscript?
He's really not complaining. He's just pointing out that Open Source programmers don't tend to work on gigantic, ambitious projects. Which is mostly a good thing, because such projects are probably bad ideas aimed at self-aggrandizement rather than doing anything useful. However it explains why we won't spontaneously produce an alternative to.NET. (.NET, as a whole, does not have any reason to exist outside Microsoft's schemes). People will only work for free on stuff they believe in. The projects I code on professionally don't always make sense to me - which is OK because I get paid. But I am not going to spend my spare time on some huge, vaguely defined project.
You're right - there is no chance of a serious competitor to.NET emerging from the free software world. Same reason Stalin and Castro got huge 'spontaneous' demonstrations in their support, and American presidents don't. But totalist organizations such as Microsoft are only superficially impressive. Yes they can set thousands of people marching in the same direction, but does it really accomplish anything? To appreciate my skepticism you have to recall how collectivism was once revered by US intellectuals. It really looked like the Soviet Union was going to kick our ass with their superior, coordinated society. Anyhow, I think.NET is another hollow 'five year plan'. At any point in Microsoft's history, the past is rotten but the future is glorious. The OS sold yesterday is now admitted to be a FPOS, but keep marching on into the glorious future!
But when Pine came out, the mindset was different.
Fine. Nobody is complaining about what the license was back then. They are complaining about what the license is now. Therefore it is not like calling Abraham Lincoln a racist. Rather, we're applying contemporary standards to a contemporary action.
Me -- I have far more warm feelings towards the developers who have been giving away valuable software for a decade and a half...
Software competes for mindshare. The software with more users will get more bug fixes and enhancements and more documentation. Using, installing and promoting pseudo-free software displaces attention and resources from Free software. UW is not doing us any favors. Rather, they are harming the development of free software. Anyhow, I agree with you that the author was unduly upset by the word 'pervert'.
If I can download the source for free (economically speaking) and look at it, it's open.
Well, good. I guess you are the perfect audience for Microsoft's shared source initiative. Before Linus made Linux, Andrew Tannenbaum made Minix. Minix was also 'source under glass', which you seem to approve. Minix enthusiasts exchanged patches, but couldn't legally fork the code. And Tannenbaum was not eager to accept patches into Minix. Why is Minix dead while Linux is taking over everything? It's not just Minix's technical inferiority - the technically inferior product frequently wins when enough enthusiasm propels it. Rather, the restrictive license was the fatal flaw. A program under such a license has no long term credibility, and anyone who spends time hacking it or learning its intricacies is probably wasting his time. Summary: the GPL exists for a reason. People are license zealots for a reason. We won't let our energy get siphoned off into dead-end projects like Pine, djbdns, Minix and ipf.
Why is vi so fast? How on earth can a text editor be low-bandwidth?
Leaving aside screen redraws, which someone else addressed, vi lets you avoid repeated keystrokes by prefixing the keystroke with a number or doing something even smarter. In pico you would move down 11 lines by holding down the down arrow and releasing it when the cursor is where you want. This works OK on a fast connection, but if the latency is high there's this annoying tendency to overshoot. And sometimes you don't know how many characters are still in the buffer, and whether the link is frozen or waiting for input. Very unpleasant. In vi you would type '11j'. If the terminal responds, great. If not, you keep half an eye on it while doing something else. Another example would be changing a word - let's say I want to change the word 'intermittent' to 'broken'. In pico I'd move the cursor (manually) to the end of 'intermittent', and either hold down the backspace key or tap it repeatedly until I'd deleted the word. Then I'd type 'broken'. In vi, I'd position the cursor at the beginnning of intermittent by typing '/interm' and hitting 'n' as necessary. Then I'd type 'cwbroken[ESC]'. (cw means change word.) If it takes a long time to get a reaction to that sequence I'm not too upset. This is why vi is better over slow lines. I won't go into why it's better in general.
If you don't think "Hello World" is worthwhile, enter a weight of 0 for it and press Recalculate Scores. That's why Doug provided the flexible interface. Of course the server is probably too slow for you to access right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently it also damages the part of the brain that detects sarcasm. When someone speaks of the 'dreaded FOO' he generally doesn't really dread FOO, but rather wants to mock those who do.
I think that "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" is their best. It's an angry song about breaking out of prison. It uses a haunting piano loop to convey a mood of desperation and momentum. "Cold Lampin' with Flav O'Flav" is one of the cleverest, with lots of tongue twisters and cultural allusions.
Not with conventional Lego, true. But with Meccano? Seems to me you're overlooking the ability to bend flat steel members. Of course I recognize the disadvantages.
I also had Fischer Technik and prefer it to Lego or Erector (== US Meccano). Lego felt too dumb and limited compared to FT. However Erector Set was probably beyond my capabilities - I rarely played with it. I also found the aesthetic feel of Erector Set rather unpleasant - thin tinny metal, bolts that were never really tight, and bad paint colors. FT, in contrast, felt cool when you slid protruding studs into grooves. The color scheme was informative rather than decorative - grey (with black studs) for the blocks and red for specialty parts (wheels, gears, angle blocks, panels.)
The same grooves which accepted studs from other blocks could also accept a steel shaft, acting as a bearing. FT encouraged you to keep one foot in the world of blocks (the Lego world) and one foot in a harder world of shafts, pulleys, wheels, sprockets.
Well, that would certainly be the wrong way to privatize. Here's how auto inspection works everywhere I've lived in the US: the DMV licenses private businesses to sell inspection services to vehicle owners. The DMV does not serve as an intermediary in these transactions. If you start an inspection station and it takes years to get operational, that's your problem. Nobody will pay you to fail to inspect vehicles.
I feel uncomfortable seeing BMG harnessed to sell Intel CPU's. They were a fairly scary sadistic performance art group. Now they seem like harmless Disney characters.
You are framing the discussion in terms of what the reasonable employer would or wouldn't permit. And within that framework you're right; the reasonable employer pemits some, but not all personal uses of its property.
But a more important point is that no matter how unreasonable the employer, it shouldn't have the legal right to criminalize misuse of its resources. The penalty for misuse (as opposed to theft) of an employer's resources should be limited to termination.
You say your boss doesn't care about thing1, but thing2 would be out of line. Suppose you misunderstood your boss, and he also considers thing1 out of line. This does not give him the right to throw you in jail.
First, the guy's not an asshole just because he disagrees with you. Second, you're missing a fact: the more electrical load is placed on the alternator, the more it resists rotation of its shaft. This means that to run the engine at a certain RPM requires more fuel when the alternator is more heavily loaded.
Third, I've seen car stereos that make the headlights dim with each beat. But a better example altogether would be air conditioning, which definitely increases fuel consumption. So lets say the 'carwash kid' ran the AC, which was neither prohibited nor specifically allowed by the owner.
A phone rings.
SFO: SFO
Caller: Is this the Serious Fraud Office?
SFO: No, we're the Silly Fraud Office. The Serious Fraud Office is at 976-1515. We only take care of Silly frauds here.
Caller: Like posting imaginary cool hardware on Slashdot?
SFO: Exactly. Or giving phonesex numbers to people who are looking for - never mind.
Caller: And I suppose the Serious Fraud Office commits more Serious frauds, like bailing out the doomed financial institutions of political cronies?
SFO: Yes. Also, pretending not be themselves when someone calls, which is of course disimpersonation of a government office.
They think the right way to segment the population is by age, sex and zip code. It might eliminate some of the most irrelevant ads, but it doesn't change the junk-flooding nature of radio advertising.
Media corporations like Clear Channel view music as a 'product' to be dispensed to 'consumers' and it shows. The lack of interest leaks through the cracks in the shiny facade constantly. They'll put an ad for the Rolling Stones or some such dinosaurs on an alternative rock station. Or an ad for a disco that plays top 40. More importantly, the tone of most ads shows that they are aimed at 'the mass of drooling morons' rather than fans of a particular music. They'll use a music bed which could be expected to evoke nausea from the listeners of that station.
I know someone will claim that these things are inevitable, for economic or other reasons. But in the mid-80's, alternative stations really did reflect their own style more consistently. And AM radio (on the rare occasions I listen to it) does seem to cater more to the mindset of its listeners, with a focus on money, insurance, stocks, etc.
I really look forward to the end of commercial monopoly broadcasting. And I hope that Clear Channel's attempts to extend their tentacles into the internet are utter failures.
Wouldn't it be better to embed the chips in the drinks? That way you could ask your smart toilet the next morning, "What the hell was I drinking last night?"
I've increasingly seen a pattern in which people withdraw money as 20 dollar bills from an ATM and then spend them at a business, getting change in fives and ones. I suspect that almost all the twenties are then deposited at the merchant's bank. Twenties would only be given in change for 50's and 100's, which are not that common.
So if you withdraw a twenty on Monday, and Safeway deposits it on Wednesday, it's a good guess that you spent it at Safeway. Not proof, not enough to convict anyone of anything, but enough to establish a rough sense of where you spend your money. Or conversely, where Safeway's money comes from.
My idea of 'long term credibility' comes from Vinod Villopillil's Halloween Documents. Vinod pointed out that Microsoft has long term credibility because their size ensures they will be around tomorrow. And GPL software has long term credibility because as long as someone's interested, he can keep improving it. But commercial software from small vendors has no long term credibility because if it threatens a major player the major player will buy and usually kill it. Likewise, although I'm not sure Vinod pointed this out, software like Pine has no long-term credibility because despite UW's size and credibility, there is no way of assessing their attachment to the project. I assume they would sell Pine for a price. I don't what the price is and whether anyone would pay it merely to kill Pine.
I rather doubt that Pine's license was chosen for strategic reasons as in the examples you cite. I tend to think that it, like Pine, is simply a relic of an earlier time.
Let X be the total number of programmer-hours invested in Pine. Let Y be the total number of hours invested by users in learning Pine. I think that X < Y. In other words, the users have put more into the relationship than the authors. And yet, according to the license the authors have the right to radically change the relationship against the users' will.
Look at it this way. Radio Station R1 offers $1000 to the 1000th caller. Of course the winner has to sign a form saying he can be used in advertising without charge. Now Radio Station R2 has the same promotion, but they don't require you to sign away any rights. All other things being equal, I'd say listen to R2. Should I be 'grateful' to R1 for still giving out free money? Not really; my gratitude has moved to R2. Do I have a right to demand that I not be used in publicity if I win? Of course not. I do have a right to choose what radio station I listen to, though.
I've written several apps which generate complex graphical output on Unix. I used Postscript for all of them. I did not have to know or care about the destination device.
It seems to me (in my ignorance of the Windows Printing API) that Postscript is a superior solution, partly because it introduces a standard language as an intermediate format. This greatly eases troubleshooting of odd output problems.
Have you used Postscript? Do you know it? If not, I highly recommend that you work through Adobe's Postscript Tutorial using Ghostscript when you have the time. It is a very nice language. It supports functions, which encourages you to write reusable building blocks.
As for these big-apps reinventing the whole works, I tend to think they made a mistake. There seems to be a tendency to transplant ideas literally from Windows without first examining the native facility on Unix.
I'm skeptical. Remember, Microsoft said they would use XML formats in the office suites. It turns out they meant use nominal XML wrapped around a big chunk of binary data. If they're smart (and they are) they'll treat 'obscurity' as a knob they can adjust. They'll start at 0 and turn it up gradually until nothing is compatible. And it is quite possible to do this while adhering to all the standards you mentioned. XML's not that friendly when it's a huge CDATA block that's an encrypted RAM dump from a Win32 machine. And think of all the games they can play with certificates hardwired into the clients - only Microsoft and their buddies would be 'legitimate' in the .NET scheme. And as they turn that knob it goes from "I don't get the padlock icon" to "I get a dialog box - insecure site, continue connecting?" to "Access denied - you have been reported to Passport central."
I've heard roughly the same comment from some several programmers. What is so hard about printing from Unix? Linux distros generally have ghostscript/magicfilter installed. Commercial Unix is usually at sites with Postscript printers. Postscript is a great language for defining graphic output. What is this Windows Printing API and why's it better than Postscript?
People will only work for free on stuff they believe in. The projects I code on professionally don't always make sense to me - which is OK because I get paid. But I am not going to spend my spare time on some huge, vaguely defined project.
You're right - there is no chance of a serious competitor to .NET emerging from the free software world. Same reason Stalin and Castro got huge 'spontaneous' demonstrations in their support, and American presidents don't. But totalist organizations such as Microsoft are only superficially impressive. Yes they can set thousands of people marching in the same direction, but does it really accomplish anything? To appreciate my skepticism you have to recall how collectivism was once revered by US intellectuals. It really looked like the Soviet Union was going to kick our ass with their superior, coordinated society. .NET is another hollow 'five year plan'. At any point in Microsoft's history, the past is rotten but the future is glorious. The OS sold yesterday is now admitted to be a FPOS, but keep marching on into the glorious future!
Anyhow, I think
Fine. Nobody is complaining about what the license was back then. They are complaining about what the license is now. Therefore it is not like calling Abraham Lincoln a racist. Rather, we're applying contemporary standards to a contemporary action.
Software competes for mindshare. The software with more users will get more bug fixes and enhancements and more documentation. Using, installing and promoting pseudo-free software displaces attention and resources from Free software.
UW is not doing us any favors. Rather, they are harming the development of free software.
Anyhow, I agree with you that the author was unduly upset by the word 'pervert'.
Before Linus made Linux, Andrew Tannenbaum made Minix. Minix was also 'source under glass', which you seem to approve. Minix enthusiasts exchanged patches, but couldn't legally fork the code. And Tannenbaum was not eager to accept patches into Minix.
Why is Minix dead while Linux is taking over everything? It's not just Minix's technical inferiority - the technically inferior product frequently wins when enough enthusiasm propels it. Rather, the restrictive license was the fatal flaw. A program under such a license has no long term credibility, and anyone who spends time hacking it or learning its intricacies is probably wasting his time.
Summary: the GPL exists for a reason. People are license zealots for a reason. We won't let our energy get siphoned off into dead-end projects like Pine, djbdns, Minix and ipf.
In vi you would type '11j'. If the terminal responds, great. If not, you keep half an eye on it while doing something else.
Another example would be changing a word - let's say I want to change the word 'intermittent' to 'broken'. In pico I'd move the cursor (manually) to the end of 'intermittent', and either hold down the backspace key or tap it repeatedly until I'd deleted the word. Then I'd type 'broken'. In vi, I'd position the cursor at the beginnning of intermittent by typing '/interm' and hitting 'n' as necessary. Then I'd type 'cwbroken[ESC]'. (cw means change word.) If it takes a long time to get a reaction to that sequence I'm not too upset.
This is why vi is better over slow lines. I won't go into why it's better in general.
Have you tried Emacs with tablature mode? (I haven't).
If you don't think "Hello World" is worthwhile, enter a weight of 0 for it and press Recalculate Scores. That's why Doug provided the flexible interface. Of course the server is probably too slow for you to access right now.