2004-9-22
haunting words from the past
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas." Alan Kay
This is a quote from Folklore.org:Macintosh Stories. Someone took the effort to document the history of Apple, specifically the development of the original Macintosh. Great stories of great accomplishments. I think we have all accepted bad defacto standards using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas. There are lots of unsophisticated buyers, and the key word here is buyers. The dollar speaks. Money talks. The unsophisticated buyers have bought into it all. It's called Microsoft products.
I usually don't fall into straight-on anti-Microsoft rhetoric. It's been done, and he who has an ear to hear, let him hear. But this quote struck me. I've read The Unix Hater's Handbook. I know the evil empire evolves. I was using computers in the '80s, I remember IBM. I also remember being jealous of PCs when I used Commodores. But this quote struck a real chord.
I have never used Outlook as a user. But I've supported it for years. It's awful. And using it with Exchange is a primitive integration with system wide account management at best. I speak as a systems administrator using Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2000. I used Mail.app last night for the first time, and it gave me shivers. It knew which messages were junk. It highlighted messages by thread, or at least it knew which messages were part of conversations on a mailing list. There are some things I like about Evolution, I have used it on and off for a few years. I haven't gotten the Exchange connector to work yet. Kmail does nothing for me really. But the premiere *expensive* commercial mail system should not suck this badly.
Want to create a distribution list with more than 8k characters? Fuck off. You have to make several nested distribution lists, all under the umbrella distribution list. The interface is terrible, none of the usual keyboard shortcuts work. You can do very little. I've found this to be true across the board. It's like Outlook is prerelease software, a proof of concept, rather than a product. A *pay* product.
Mozilla mail I like. But none of the free products is a silver bullet necessarily. I haven't found my ultimate mail client. And this is not a rant about mail clients...
The Address Book is awful. You can't find anybody. The search capabilities are nonexistent. So primitive they're terrible. There are enough features to make you *think*, "Oh, this will be easy, I'll just jump up to the Address Book, and search the catalog by this text, and...", but no. You cannot. And even if you are the admin, on the back end those things that you think you can do, you can't do those either.
But in Unix, everything is a file, and files can be streams of text. And you can get there from here. And the interfaces are getting really good. Not just imitating, but innovating.
And Apple is doing some terrific stuff there.
So, with that, let's come full circle. There are some great things happening. But.
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto st\
ndards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas."
Alan Kay
This is a quote from Folklore.org:Macintosh Stories. Someone took the effort to document the history of Apple, specifically the development of the original Macintosh. Great stories of great accomplishments. I think we have all accepted bad defacto standards using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas. There are lots of unsophisticated buyers, and the key word here is buyers. The dollar speaks. Money talks. The unsophisticated buyers have bought into it all. It's called Microsoft products.
I usually don't fall into straight-on anti-Microsoft rhetoric. It's been done, and he who has an ear to hear, let him hear. But this quote struck me. I've read The Unix Hater's Handbook. I know the evil empire evolves. I was using computers in the '80s, I remember IBM. I also remember being jealous of PCs when I used Commodores. But this quote struck a real chord.
I have never used Outlook as a user. But I've supported it for years. It's awful. And using it with Exchange is a primitive integration with system wide account management at best. I speak as a systems administrator using Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2000. I used Mail.app last night for the first time, and it gave me shivers. It knew which messages were junk. It highlighted messages by thread, or at least it knew which messages were part of conversations on a mailing list. There are some things I like about Evolution, I have used it on and off for a few years. I haven't gotten the Exchange connector to work yet. Kmail does nothing for me really. But the premiere *expensive* commercial mail system should not suck this badly.
Want to create a distribution list with more than 8k characters? Fuck off. You have to make several nested distribution lists, all under the umbrella distribution list. The interface is terrible, none of the usual keyboard shortcuts work. You can do very little. I've found this to be true across the board. It's like Outlook is prerelease software, a proof of concept, rather than a product. A *pay* product.
Mozilla mail I like. But none of the free products is a silver bullet necessarily. I haven't found my ultimate mail client. And this is not a rant about mail clients...
The Address Book is awful. You can't find anybody. The search capabilities are nonexistent. So primitive they're terrible. There are enough features to make you *think*, "Oh, this will be easy, I'll just jump up to the Address Book, and search the catalog by this text, and...", but no. You cannot. And even if you are the admin, on the back end those things that you think you can do, you can't do those either.
But in Unix, everything is a file, and files can be streams of text. And you can get there from here. And the interfaces are getting really good. Not just imitating, but innovating.
And Apple is doing some terrific stuff there.
So, with that, let's come full circle. There are some great things happening. But.
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto st\
ndards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas."
Alan Kay
Comment on this post [ so far] ... more like this: [foo]
For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing...
...they like. (Abe Lincoln)
I'm a fool for fortune.
Back to school today. Up at 6:10. Lock down the bike at class, walk in with 5 minutes to spare. Math functions lecture MWF 7:30am. Prof is kind of a spaz, but I may learn from her. Hopefully the TA on recitation days TTH is better. Then there is the Engineering Graphics class, which appears to be theoretical rather than practical, and and Ag Comm, a writing class (why my advisor had me take the agriculture flavor I don't know). I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering major so far. The rest of the day at work doing tech support tickets. I should have gone to OSU when I was 18. I have never seen so many pretty, well dressed young girls. Mercy.
Wanted to get back to some points from my last post, I found out that sys.stdin.read is what I need to use to accept pipes from the shell in Python. I have written a little code, but I need to learn how to handle the stream by reading to EOF, and I need to write the stream into a file that has the proper format for a bzero post. I guess the default behavior for a stream on stdin should be assumed to be post content. I could then do away with making it necessary to give the post argument, but I still need the name of the blog...
The smoking is going a little worse. A few a day. Cigarettes, that is.
I also posted about all of the tools that come by default with OS X. I smacked myself on the forehead last week when I realized that ruby and the man pages were right there in terminal.app. Last night I realized that php was also included! With Apache I can't believe that a commercial operating system includes such a rich environment. My heart is swollen with pride :) Why doesn't Microsoft build on these things too? Why do they make you buy their development tools, or at best find and make them run yourself on the Web? They could at least include their free tools like the command line C++ compiler. Dirty dogs. But why not integrate? Why not provide a good framework in the default system?
A vendor called me a Unix bigot once. It made me very angry, but at the same time I'm proud. If I am a Unix bigot, then so be it. If you don't like it, kiss my butt.
In reading my Monty story, it made me sound like I'm currently living with my buddy Al, which is not the case. I stayed for about six months, and now I have lived with my girlfriend for a year and a half.
I don't know how much I'll post as classes get going. I think my schedule will be pretty livable. I work 25 or 30 hours a week, take four classes, and get done by 5:30 or 6pm, weekends off. Not bad :) I think this could work. I'm still concerned about finances though. But I can't let this chance to finish my Bachelor's get by me. I'll make do. The refund for my student loan overage will be ready next week, I hope it's what I think it will be.
Time for a smoke. I made it through the first day of class! ;) Maybe a Miller Lite too.
I'm a fool for fortune.
Back to school today. Up at 6:10. Lock down the bike at class, walk in with 5 minutes to spare. Math functions lecture MWF 7:30am. Prof is kind of a spaz, but I may learn from her. Hopefully the TA on recitation days TTH is better. Then there is the Engineering Graphics class, which appears to be theoretical rather than practical, and and Ag Comm, a writing class (why my advisor had me take the agriculture flavor I don't know). I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering major so far. The rest of the day at work doing tech support tickets. I should have gone to OSU when I was 18. I have never seen so many pretty, well dressed young girls. Mercy.
Wanted to get back to some points from my last post, I found out that sys.stdin.read is what I need to use to accept pipes from the shell in Python. I have written a little code, but I need to learn how to handle the stream by reading to EOF, and I need to write the stream into a file that has the proper format for a bzero post. I guess the default behavior for a stream on stdin should be assumed to be post content. I could then do away with making it necessary to give the post argument, but I still need the name of the blog...
The smoking is going a little worse. A few a day. Cigarettes, that is.
I also posted about all of the tools that come by default with OS X. I smacked myself on the forehead last week when I realized that ruby and the man pages were right there in terminal.app. Last night I realized that php was also included! With Apache I can't believe that a commercial operating system includes such a rich environment. My heart is swollen with pride :) Why doesn't Microsoft build on these things too? Why do they make you buy their development tools, or at best find and make them run yourself on the Web? They could at least include their free tools like the command line C++ compiler. Dirty dogs. But why not integrate? Why not provide a good framework in the default system?
A vendor called me a Unix bigot once. It made me very angry, but at the same time I'm proud. If I am a Unix bigot, then so be it. If you don't like it, kiss my butt.
In reading my Monty story, it made me sound like I'm currently living with my buddy Al, which is not the case. I stayed for about six months, and now I have lived with my girlfriend for a year and a half.
I don't know how much I'll post as classes get going. I think my schedule will be pretty livable. I work 25 or 30 hours a week, take four classes, and get done by 5:30 or 6pm, weekends off. Not bad :) I think this could work. I'm still concerned about finances though. But I can't let this chance to finish my Bachelor's get by me. I'll make do. The refund for my student loan overage will be ready next week, I hope it's what I think it will be.
Time for a smoke. I made it through the first day of class! ;) Maybe a Miller Lite too.
Comment on this post [ so far] ... more like this: [foo]