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There’s also a lobste.rs mirror on Gopher: gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/julienxx/Lobste.rs/
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As to the last point, “everything is a string”, I find it amusing that shell script is so lacking when it comes to readable string-handling operators and functions. Back when I really started learning to program on Unix, Perl was at the height of its popularity. I actively resisted learning shell in any depth for many years, and that was my reasoning. Why work in a stringly typed language that lacks nice string-handling, when I already have Perl?
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Advertising has always been about manipulating people into buying stuff they likely don’t need. It’s a bit coercive. In the days of mass media, advertisers used mass psychology to sell product to a mass audience. The media landscape has changed. With the arrival of personalized media, advertisers are going to try to build a psychological profile of the target (that means you and me) and use individual psychology to try and sell stuff that the target most likely doesn’t need. Same game, different techniques. The difference between this and advertising in the age of mass media is the sheer invasiveness and ubiquity that advertising now takes.
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It has also been about announcing the availability of products and making innovations known outside eg. journals. Stuff people may need.
I’m not defending modern advertising, or all old advertising, but the ads of old were a lot more understandable in how and what kinds of reactions they were trying to evoke. You could reason your way around an ad for cigarettes, but you can’t reason your way around invisible yet targeted ad networks.
So this communist-Cuba approach to advertising is understandable, but calling it just another technique is a bit harsh and underestimates the audience.
I’d even go so far as to say the inefficiency of classifieds and such are a self-regulatory system, which should not be removed lest more and more people do believe they need a new microwave oven every year.
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“but calling it just another technique is a bit harsh and underestimates the audience.”
I don’t know. They’d have done it in the past if they were allowed. They’ve usually been about whatever gets them the most dollars now or later. Tech and people’s habits finally let them do what they always dreamed of doing.
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Sure, I suppose, maybe.
Low-tech ads have not had highway billboard tracking or any of that stuff. So if Charles Babbage had constructed the ad networks of today for newspapers in the 1800s, the case could still be argued for a dumber way of handling the better minority of advertising.
It is good that tech has also given us better ways of spreading information and reviews about products, just if we could keep the ad networks at bay.
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It is good that tech has also given us better ways of spreading information and reviews about products, just if we could keep the ad networks at bay.
This creates a new problem. Lets say we suddenly lived in a advertising free world. So, how would you find out about products … various intermediates. These intermediates are easy to pay off, as they are few in number and you STILL have to get your message to them. So instead of advertising to the masses, you advertise by putting your product announcement in the trunk of a new Telsa and sending a Telsa to each of the meaningful reviewers… cheaper and higher impact.
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If anyone is interested in a more detailed history of the topic, I can recommend Curtis’ The Century of the Self. Even though it’s quite informative, it’s easy to follow along.
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So sorry to hear this. Slackware was the first distro I used, and I ran it for seven years, starting with 7.x in late 2000. I remember how excited I used to be about getting a box of official Slackware CDs (later DVDs) in the mail! I’m still sentimental about it. Pat is definitely the founding father of the minimalist school of Linux, I’d say.
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Wonder what he thinks of fossil and mercurial. The fossil author deliberately disallowed rewriting history; he makes a good case for it. At one time, Mercurial history was immutable too, but I believe this has changed.
I guess my point is that there are DVCS out there that satisfy his criteria; they’re just not git.
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History can never be truly immutable so long as the data is stored on mutable media like a hard disk. Refusing to package tools that do it just makes people who need the feature find/build 3rd party tools
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The site seems down now :(
About Mercurial, I believe it has always allowed rewriting history, but not by default — you have to change your configuration files to opt-in to all the “dangerous/advanced” features.
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When I first started with Linux, circa 2000, I spent a lot of time with the books and howtos from TLDP, like this one. They were great. This brings back some really fond memories.
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This one stood out.
Even though, if we really wanted, we could represent ASTs as text, this does not seem to have caught on or even be considered.
Oh really? How about Lisp?
I do like the complaint about the little languages problem a couple paragraphs later. The same complaint was made in the scsh paper more than 20 years ago, and I don’t think things have improved since then. Unix does have way too many idiosyncratic little languages.
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Specifically, this one which I think UNIX OS’s still can’t beat on all features. Even more detail given by this unbiased journalist. Namely, the integration and live coding/fixing/upgrading of the entire system from OS to apps in one IDE. Also, pausing an app with the problematic source code loaded up in IDE vs crashing with one using low-level debuggers. Also, the safety and productivity benefits of LISP in general at the system level.
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Myself and several of the blind Twitter folk I follow are really upset about this. Third-party Twitter clients are heavily used by blind twitterers.
I think I’ll be giving Mastodon a hard look in the coming weeks.
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Sending a link instead of a message is no security at all. But it does insure that in order to read the message, the reader needs to step onto the surveillance minefield known as the modern web. Sorry, but no. Let’s not do this.
The licensing business is touched on in Robert Alberti’s paper, The Rise and Fall of Gopher. He was one of the people who worked on Gopher originally. Sorry I don’t have a link handy for you.