Re: Wholesome choice?

In <gkot7s$4mn$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Ben Yalow <ybmcu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For you, they're unimportant. For the rest of the world -- we want
to see maps, or pictures in news stories, or listen to a piece of
music, or look at the video of the most recent SMOFcon presentations
by the Worldcon bidders, ...

That video doesn't overrun your Panix disk quota?

It never hit Panix. It was something I viewed over the web.

If I shipped the raw video (which I did for somebody who didn't have easy
access) I wouldn't go over Panix, since it's many hundreds of meg. I just
sent the file directly from my machine to theirs, since we're both sitting
on the Internet, so we can communicate directly.

Although if I'm sending more than a gig or so, it can take quite a while.
As with most DSL users, I've got a much faster download speed than upload
-- I can only ship out about 200 megabytes/hour.

To me, emailing someone giant files makes about as much sense as
faxing someone the Manhattan phone book. That's not a reasonable
way to convey the information.

Right. But large files don't get sent by email. They get sent by other
methods (http/ftp downloads, or P2P connections, such as a Skype file
transmission, etc.) I wouldn't send anything much bigger than a few meg
any other way.

"Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
My impression of what you call Internet access is that it's the
ability to look at colorful pictures of the net rather than to
actually *be* there. If I'm at a library terminal and I want to
check my email, read Usenet, update a web page, or do anything else
whatsoever except look at a web page, chances are it doesn't have
ssh and it blocks telnet:// URLs. (Yes, I'm aware that Panix
eventually installed https://shell access, to work around this.)

Of course, that's because you cut yourself off from things. The
rest of us want that stuff, even if you don't.

Want *what* things? Giant multi-media emails? I described what is
possible on a typical Windows box, and how much *more* I can do on
a terminal.

See the list at the beginning of this post. I want all of those, and
more. And you *can't* do any of those on your terminal. And I *can* do
all of those on my Windows box sitting on the Internet.

I've had a machine on the Internet for decades, as have most of
the people in this newsgroup.

Decades? Twenty years? Since 1989? Non-shell accounts were rare
and expensive then, if they existed at all. (Note that this was
years before the Web.) I suspect most people here didn't have
*any* net access then, except perhaps at work or at school. And
that those who did had either shell accounts or UUCP-only accounts.
In fact, I've found no mention anywhere online of SLIP or PPP
accounts before 1992.

Google ybmcu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx You'll see things from before 1989.

I don't doubt that you were online at that time, as I was. I *do*
doubt that you owned a machine that was directly on the Internet at
that time. Wasn't cunyvm.cuny.edu a machine owned by your school,
which you connected to via a terminal?

My employer actually. But there were other machines on the Internet,
which I also had access to.

And I prefer not to pay good money to place them where any
sufficiently clever and malicious person can read and alter all
my files. Especially since it wouldn't gain me much of anything.

If your opertaing system had reasonable security, you wou;dn't
worry about that.

Then why do I keep reading about new security breaches that have been
discovered to have been there all along, that require urgent patches?
It sounds like a "burglar-proof" house in which one day it's
discovered that the front door has been wide open all along, and a
week later it's discovered that the back door has been wide open all
along, and another week later it's discovered that the bathroom window
has been wide open all along, etc. Tell me when a decade has gone by
with no such discoveries.

I doubt it'll ever happen. But that's not Microsoft -- that's been true
since there were connections between systems. When CRISTMA EXEC took out
bunches of computer networks, it had nothing to do with Microsoft.

But typewritten publications just aren't good enough any more.
People who get those tend to decide that the convention that's
sending them out is hopelessly obsolete, and won't go. So the
convention dies.

Can you give me an example of an SF con that has died for this reason?
I'm skeptical that anyone chooses which SF cons to go to based on how
spiffy the con's computer software is. That's just not what people
want out of an SF con. (As contrasted with a computer gaming con or
a hacker con.)

How many conventions can you name that still have their publications
typewritten, instead of word processed?

But it's not the PDF that's broken -- it's pdftotext. The PDF is
valid, and displays properly. It's only when a broken piece of
software that doesn't really understand how to do the conversion
tries to read it that it breaks.

My understanding is that by default pdftotext follows the defined
word order. If not, why is there a flag to override that default?
I suspect that the maker of the PDF is not defining the word order,
but only cares that it looks okay in *his* software.

It only looks OK as a PDF. Which is fine -- that's how it's supposed to
be displayed. PDF is *not* a text format -- it's a display format.

I could spend all day answering that, but I have over 100 other
rasff messages marked as needing replies.

Currently down to 62, but about half the decrease has been from things
expiring from Panix's spool rather than from my writing replies.
Sigh. At least volume has dropped some this week.

I don't see what touch typing has to do with anything (although,
since I've only been using computers for 40+ years without touch
typing, I guess I wouldn't).

If you can enter all commands via the keyboard, rather than having to
rely on a mouse, trackball, touchpad, touchscreen, etc., then if you
can type twice as fast, you can get your work done in half the time.
(Assuming the computer can keep up with your typing, which these days
it almost certainly can unless your commands are extremely CPU- or
I/O-intensive.)

I'm limited by think time, not typing time. Anything that lets me get
words onto the screen as fast as I come up with them is fine.


* The anti-concept of "opening" a file. It means one thing to view
a text file on a screen, another thing to view a picture, another
thing to run executable code, another thing to listen to a sound
file, etc. By conflating these very different concepts under the
word "open," Windows has opened the door to malware. People who
want to view the contents of an email message end up inadvertently
running malicious program code that's embedded in it instead, as
they don't have any concept of doing one but not the other -- at
least not a concept they can convey to the computer.

That particular door began to open when the concept of strict
separation of program and data went away. Which happened at about
the time the stored program computer became the standard -- probably
late 50s or so. I don't think Microsoft is responsible for
architecture changes in the 50s.

I consider that a separate issue, except that it's true that if there
was such strict separation, such a problem wouldn't happen. But
that's like blaming a spate of burglary, not on doors being left wide
open, but on human beings not being sessile organisms.

But we've seen seen that spate of bugs start when the door got opened.

Bugs and crashes *are* inevitable.

But why are they becoming more common rather than less?

Because there used to be thousands of computers in the relatively recent
past. Now there are billions. And operating systems used to do very
little, and now they do a lot more.

* The idea that there is a perpetual arms race between "hackers" and
victims, and there's no sure and simple way of keeping bad guys
from viewing and altering all your files, or of keeping them from
remotely reprogramming your computer to send spams and viruses.
And that anyone with anything but the latest version of Windows
with the latest patches is especially at risk.

Having been on both sides of that race, going back to well before
Microsoft ever existed, I can say that competition between bug
finders and bug fixers isn't a Microsoft issue. Just talk to the
systems staff at lots of places about what April 1 was like.

If your computers aren't directly on the net, then nobody, no matter
how clever, can read or alter your files without being in your home.
This is true no matter how many bugs are on your computers.

Not even vaguely true. Viruses long ago were being spread by email to
machines not on the net at all.

Macros are a minor special case of the scripting language. And you
have much more powerful, and intuitive scripting languages for
non-Unix products.

*Graphical* scripting languages? Or are you conceding, as Apple
seems to have, that when you want to do something at all serious or
sophisticated, that you turn off the candy-colored shell and pull up
a good solid command-line interface?

All of the above. I can simply record the menu pulldowns, etc., and play
them back, of course. Or I can use a programming language invoked by my
word processor, or anything else I need.

You commented earlier in the thread about how I needed to run a C program
to do something you did as a macro. It wasn't C -- it was a REXX subset
that runs in my text editor.

I'm curious what scripting languages are more powerful than those on
Unix, especially considering the enormous variety of what's available
for Unix. As for an *intuitive* scripting language, I am as
profoundly skeptical as I would be if you were to claim that there's
an intuitive spoken language, one that doesn't need to be learned,
but in which the names of things and actions and the grammar everyone
somehow already knows.

I don't always want power -- I want something to match the task. And
learning a new language is easy -- it's when they have a different
underlying philosophy that it takes more time. SNOBOL programmers and APL
programmers have very different ways of approaching the same problem, and
it's a rare task that's easy to write in both of them (there are tasks
that are hard to write in both, of course).

And, of course, Unix with a terminal, rather than a windowing interface,
is useless for lots of tasks. You can't do layout if you can't see what
things look like (and yes, there are layout languages, such as TeX, some
of whose algorithms are used by Adobe Indesign -- but I don't let Indesign
have the final word on what looks right on a page).

--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.

Ben
--
Ben Yalow ybmcu@xxxxxxxxx
Not speaking for anybody
.

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