Sometimes, Scott Adams says it best.
04 February 2018: updated URL
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Cringely writes on how greatly Microsoft misunderstands the free software movement. A worthy read.
04 February 2018: updated URL
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Oceanwave Consulting tried to get support from Microsoft, but no luck, so turned to the Psychic Friends Network. Their results may surprise you.
04 February 2018: updated URL
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I recently happened upon Unix is a Four-Letter Word. It’s a nice introduction to some of the regions of Unix most useful to the new user. Although I’d recommend emacs over vi any day.
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Scott Granneman of Security Focus has an article in the Reg arguing that Windows is inherently insecure, and that if some Unix (e.g. Linux or Mac OS) took over the desktop and server markets, we’d not see the sorts of vulnerabilities and worms so prevalent with Windows, Internet Information Server, Outlook, Internet Explorer &c.
I’m not quite certain. It seems to me that as long as there are those who wish to use computers without knowledge, there will be broken programs which cater to their supposed needs — and that so long as these programs exist, there will be problems.
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JWZ writes that he’s confused by the promotion of CSS by the W3C et al.; I don’t believe that he quite understands the issue — or if he does, he professes to be ignorant in order to win some rhetorical point.
He seems to be annoyed that so many folks hated the presentation-oriented markup which Netscape introduced. He ignores the fact that structural markup leads to Good Things: automated indexing; improved searching; automatic transformation of presentation while leaving content unchanged, reading by the disabled (whether physically or technologically, e.
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If you publish a serial, you are eligible to apply for an International Standard Serial Number. This applies to magazines, journals, memoirs — and weblogs: anything which is a non-terminating serial issued in some medium. Unfortunately, the registrars are beginning to resist; apply while you’ve still a chance.
I do sympathise with them, though: the ISSN is only 7 data digits, plus a check digit, and this means that it is only possible to register some 10,000,000 serials.
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Those who are old Mac hands like myself might recall an old abandoned Apple project of the mid-90s, Dylan. Mike Lockwood has an interesting tale of the layoff of the guys who developed it. ‘The kind of layoff that could only happen at Apple.’ The article’s worth reading solely for the screenshot of the Dylan IDE the guys were working on. A long time ago I read an article (which I can unfortunately no longer find) by a fellow who wrote that source code needed to be more than just files, but actual living data, which could be manipulated in various useful ways; it looks as though the Dylan guys might have been headed in that direction.
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IBM developerWorks has cool article on faster booting using make. What I find most interesting is the way that it uses an ancient tool for a new purpose. This is enabled by the Unix philosophy: small programs which do one thing very well. These small programs can be tied together in a myriad of useful ways; in this case, ~make~’s ability to calculate dependencies is utilised to start various services, and its ability to run jobs in parallel is utilised so that one need not wait for each to start before continuing.
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According to this article, Microsoft’s Excel product is unsuited to statistical analysis and gives erroneous results. Use software such as Gnumeric — or just write your own in a real language such as Scheme or Lisp.
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An ancient develop has some great programming tips written by Bob Johnson. Good points, all, although some are pretty obvious. Well-worth taking to heart, though.
04 February 2018: updated URL
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An interesting geek toy to send MP3s to one’s stereo. It looks pretty sweet, although the OGG suport is kinda shaky (it re-encodes to MP3 on the fly, which eats CPU). I want one.
06 February 2018: updated URL
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