HN user
The last artist listed (Desmond Henry) was one of the professors of philosophy when I was a student at Manchester University (actually his official status was Reader). I still have one of his original drawings he gave me some 40 odd years ago. He was one of nicest people (and certainly the most eccentric person) I've met in my entire life. His academic speciality was medieval philosophy.
I also donated to the Livecode open source project. I just had a look at the Kickstarter programme. I tallied up all the contributions of those who received at least a license to the commercial product in the days after the Kickstarter ended.
Of the £493,795 raised, fully £368,285 of that donated was returned as commercial licenses to those who donated.
Those who donated in return for no immediate reward (about 0.2% of the total sum donated) got 8 years of free enhancements to the open source version. And those who have that open source version installed still get to use it ad infinitum (even if they were not contributors to the Kickstarter). There's no need to pay for any license unless features added in future are things they feel meet some need.
I've funded other projects where I never even got a viable product, never mind one that was actively developed for nearly a decade.
On a thread reminiscing about Hypercard, the only comment down-voted is the one that points to a superset of Hypercard that runs on Windows, OSX and Linux and that can also produce apps that run on iOS and Android.
And it's free to use and GPL'd.
What a weird place HN is.
"in no way shape or form a terrorist or criminal organisation".
Says you.
The SWP are followers of Leon Trotsky. https://socialistworker.co.uk/event/view/10735
Trotsky literally wrote a book advocating terrorism, a rebuke to socialists who deplored terrorism.
There's no pleasing some people.
Never mind that Livecode IDE runs on Linux, Mac and Windows it also can produce compiled apps that run on those 3 platforms and iOS and Androd and even as a webapp like PHP. And it can even compile to HTML5 (although that's more limited).
It works with version control and unicode, it has regex, cryptography, sockets, JSON, XML, OAuth2, SVG etc. It has database libraries for interacting with sqlite, postgresql, mysql, etc. It can incorporate a web browser and control that using Javascript and callbacks. It can be extended to integrate with Java, Objective-C, etc. You can create your own GUI widgets. And it's free.
But that's still too much like Hypercard, which only ran on an ancient Mac and nothing else. Hypercard could do about 10% of what Livecode can do. And Hypercard has been dead since before you touched an IDE.
Calls to handlers/functions (usually) pass through what is called "the message path", going from object -> grouped objects -> card -> substack -> stack. This path is also enhanced by frontscripts and backscripts (code placed in the path either before the initial object or behind the stack).
So well-organized code does not have to be scattered among 100s of objects, but is instead centralized and placed in the most appropriate location.
In 2016 "script only stacks" were introduced. The normal stack is a binary file containing code and GUI elements. The script only stack is a text file, meaning it can be diffed and put under normal version control.
The cross-platform technology behind Livecode has been in use and in development since before Windows 95.
The product known as Metacard and was bought out and enhanced to create Livecode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCard
I've been using it for 20 years, creating apps for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iPhone and Android.
I've had this experience with doctors so often it is chilling.
Elderly relatives writhing in pain, only to have doctors say it's indigestion (it was a perforated ulcer and an uncle had previously died from a wrongly diagnosed ulcer perforating). My partner was misdiagnosed with flu when it was pneumonia which then developed into pleurisy (I'd never seen either of the latter, but was telling the doctor that's what the symptoms looked like - 15 years later he still suffers pain from the pleurisy). I had an arm paralyzed through severe pain and the consultant doctor planned an operation "to cut the nerve" - I said I thought it was a frozen shoulder and that such a procedure was unnecessary; 6 months later the paralysis began to subside and the consultant agreed it was a frozen shoulder). Another relative died of bowel cancer that was said to be back pain (she died in the hospital where she worked). I know of several people who were telling the doctor they had cancer, only to have the doctors dismiss it as trivial, with most of these people dying because of their untreated cancer. As a child I had joint pains for years that were diagnosed as "growing pains" but turned out to a hip disease (younger cousins ended up with the same condition and because I'd already had it, they were more readily diagnosed by family members).
In both directions (treating trivial as serious and treating serious as trivial) I've seen so many mistakes. I'd be much happier to see a doctor google the symptoms rather than jump to a conclusion about what is wrong.
There's a famous anecdote where junior doctors are taught the importance of observation, by senior doctors tricking them into tasting urine. It doesn't seem to be a lesson they learn. Even when their own objective test results are contra-indicative of their pre-judgement I've seen doctors scratch their heads but stick with their incorrect pre-judgement.
When doctors I know have a family member go into hospital, you should see how attentive my doctor friends get concerning what is being said and done to their relatives. Some doctors will not even allow relatives to go into hospital for non-emergency treatment at certain times of year (because of timetabling there can be very inexperienced doctors on duty at certain times of the year).
"have an fsync that doesn't really flush to disk. OS X requires fcntl(F_FULLFSYNC) to flush to disk"
I remember highlighting this problem to the Firebird db developers maybe 13 years ago. AFAIR they were open to the problem I'd pointed out and went about fixing it on other platforms so that the db behaved everywhere as it did on OS X. I'm probably in the bottom 5% of IT professionals on this site. I'm rather amazed to find out that so late in the day Postgres has come round to fixing this.
I haven't used Firebird in years and can't find a link to the discussion (could have been via email).
"I'm a bit incredulous at the existence of these knuckle-draggers. "
I've met many people who will not watch any film - no matter how good its reputation -- if it's in black and white. The first time I heard someone say "I can't watch this - it's in black and white" I thought it was a joke. That was 22 years ago, and he was a post-grad student. He was utterly serious. Since then I've met others like that.
I guess SD is the new black (and white).
Actually, there are a variety of LaTex editors which I think must meet most people's standards. When I decided to write a book last year, I couldn't face doing it in Word (or anything which would not allow me to view the formatting codes). I was spoiled for choice when it came to LaTex editors. I settled for TexMaker, and within 6 months I had produced a 500 page book, complete with tables, charts and several thousand footnotes.
I'd never used LaTex before in my life. But I wanted the book output as PDF and it was important that the book looked professionally produced. I was really quite happy with the results. Before biting the bullet and using LaTex itself, I had looked at pandoc and other technologies which could output to PDF (e.g. python's ReST). But after some initial tests, I realised they were quite limited in their ability to output a complex PDF document.
TexMaker allows one to have the LaTex source and the PDF end result open in adjacent windows. MikTex/TexWorks was another editor which functioned in a similar fashion. With TexMaker I could jump from a line in the PDF to the originating line in the LaTex file (and vice versa). One can go to images.google.com and search for screenshots of LaTex editors to see the variety available.
The only major enhancement I would like, is if the LaTex editor would allow one to hide all the LaTex codes (perhaps colour-coding the text in the editor to indicate that a paragraph section contains hidden formatting codes). I do find the Latex markup distracting as I try to read the text. However, being able to read the PDF output and then jump to the LaTex source does mitigate this to some extent (I have a large monitor which permits me to have 2 A4 document windows open side by side).
25 years ago, I was a secretary. I used WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Word, DisplayWrite and other WP programs. Microsoft Word was just about the worst of the bunch. If it hadn't been for Microsoft's criminal monopolistic practices (OS + office suite), Word would never have become the de facto word processor in the world.
Even 15 years ago I was working as a systems administrator in a company which still insisted on using WordPerfect because of its superiority. A Microsoft fanboy became the IT Director, and WP was phased out for Word.
DabbleDB was written using Seaside, a framework which ran in Squeak (and other Smalltalk implementations).
DabbleDB met with rave reviews. http://press.dabbledb.com/ Within a couple of years the company behind it were bought by Twitter (2010) and DabbleDB closed down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB Clearly Twitter didn't buy this Smalltalk company because their product was a threat to Twitter.
It may well be that there are hugely successful corporations who are using Smalltalk and keeping quiet about it. Or it may be that being a successful Smalltalk developer is a sign of being a great developer.
My experience is the reverse. My $5 DO server running almost identical software responds much faster than my Linode server. The Linode server is far, far closer to me geographically.
I have put this down to the DO SSDs. It will be interesting to see if this is true. I've been considering migrating from Lindoe to DO because they were faster and cheaper.
I've had 2 DO VPS for about 6 months, and never had a problem with them.
"I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal."
My husband is a low-grade chef. The vast majority of places where he worked/interviewed expected him to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week (sometimes 6.5 days - those employers thought someone only working 6 hours on the 7th day was being treated well).
And bear in mind people like him are working these very long hours under time-pressure, with people barking orders at them; they are using sharp knives, boiling water, boiling fat.
Quite often, the employers kept all tips/service charges. If the staff did get tips/service charges, they went to waiting staff/bar staff.
Only about 5% of the places where he was interviewed did he get offered a 40 hour week, with some of the tips/service charges going to him.
Oh yeah. And all this on minimum wage. Hours worked beyond 40 were never paid as overtime in these places.
He was working in the kinds of restaurants were programmers and other professionals would go for dinner.
He spent the last 3 months living off his savings until he could get a job at one of the 5% of places that operated the kind of working hours that everyone else takes for granted.
Thanks for the suggestion. Tried them all. Amitryptyline made me suicidal (turns out that is a very common side-effect, and really unwelcome for someone who is in extreme pain). Gabapentin (and pre-gabalin) had no effect, but at least did not cause mental disturbance the way that Amitryptyline and Duloxetine did. The last one they tried me on was Venlaflaxine - I didn't notice any pain reduction, but I just got insomnia from it.
It's been a bad 5 to 10 years. My opinion is that "pain syndrome" was almost certainly not my problem. My pains were all skeletal/joint pains, except for pains that would suddenly appear in my left hand or right calf, even when doing nothing. Those latter two I could explain as being neuropathic, but after being in so much pain from my back, coccyx, hips and shoulder, I think my pain registration system was out of whack. And I wouldn't be surprised to discover that all the different "pain killers" I was taking were in fact contributing to further problems.
Currently I am just on morphine, but must tie myself to the bed at night to stop myself turning over in my sleep. If I lie on my sides, the pain will build (even through morphine) until it wakes me up. By that stage turning on my back will not reduce the pain and I cannot get back to sleep. Taking a sulphur supplement (NAC, or MSM) seems to be as effective as morphine (neither alone or together is really satisfactory though).
What has been so appalling in my case, has been the difficult of getting doctors to look at the individual problems properly in early stages (so a dearth of scans/treatments), until it got to the point where they were saying "you have pain syndrome". Most of the treatments that have had any success are those that I have insisted they do even when they have said they won't work. Some major treatments I have had to insist they don't do (cutting nerves??).
I'm finally getting a scan this week on my hips, after asking for this for almost 2 years. Hopefully it will show what I expect it to show, and they can treat it with steroids.
Never mind what it is doing for your mind, in my experience, paracetamol causes pain.
I've suffered from what doctors call "pain syndrome" for years. Many different parts of my body are painful at any one time. It is years since I had a pain-free day.
I never accepted that I had pain syndrome, even when doped up simultaneously on codeine, paracetamol, tramadol and diclofenac. And still in pain. Finally I was moved onto morphine, but I still cannot sleep at night because of the pain.
However, I think that my pain problems were exacerbated by (at the very least) paracetamol (max dose daily for 2 years). It is well known that sulphur compounds (NAC specifically) are required for the detoxification of the byproducts of paracetamol. Long term use of paracetamol will lead to sulphur depletion in many people. And it seems this depleted sulphur is compensated by the body taking sulphur from other places (joints, cartilage), thus causing further pains.
Trying to get an answer from doctors and pharamacists about why taking sulphur reduces my pain more than the above concoctions of "pain-killers" got me nowhere, so the above is my explanation for why the more paracetamol I took the worse my pain problems got.
The UK law is stupid. My sister took her life using paracetamol. She just drove to 3 different pharmacies and bought the max amount at each. She also bought sleeping tablets so that the pain of her dying liver would not wake her.
A few days before this, my family had tried to have her sectioned as mentally ill (she was suicidal from post-natal depression). They psychiatrists kept her in for observation for 48 hours, then released her. 24 hours later she was dead, and her child an orphan.
All the law did was slow her down for maybe 15 minutes in her suicide attempt.
Until 2 weeks ago, I'd never heard of Gangam Style. At least I can now say I am among the 1 billion hippest people on the planet. I can die happy.
We Brits are profoundly discombobulated when we visit a country like Germany, famed for its order and regulations about crossing roads, only to find that the English word "queue" got mis-translated as "free for all".
This shambles could only happen in Britain. Senior politicians get accused of being paedophiles by journalists with no evidence. Politicians routinely steal from public coffers, and don't even lose their place in Parliament (even though some were sent to prison). The country is awash with video surveillance, yet trying to get the police to respond to a crime report is like swimming upstream. A christian preacher who said "Homosexuals are deserving of the wrath of God – and so are all other sinners – and they are going to a place called hell" received a £1000 fine and a criminal conviction. Indian sikhs who criticise Indian muslims are accused of being racists.
Political correctness had taken hold in local government by the early 1980s. Practically every interaction with them requires you to tell them your race, gender and sexual preference.
The place is a mad-house.
prior art can be found in software. I'm fairly sure "page turning" existed in Lotus Organiser in the mid 1990s.
"The introduction of islam to much of the world was through trade, just the same as the christians. "
Would you care to provide evidence for that assertion about trade rather than jihad? There is evidence that for areas like Indonesia & Malaysia, trade was the route. For almost everywhere else, it was by war. Next you'll be telling me that the hundreds of years in which islam used violence to dominate Spain was a Golden Age of tolerance and multi-culturalism.
Ibn Ishaq's book "The Life of Mohammed" was known by muslims for hundreds of years as "The Book of Battles". Muslims must emulate Mohammed. In the 13 years he was in Mecca, he attained 150 followers. In Medina he embraced war, assassination, slave-taking and robbery. By the time he died, all of Arabia was muslim.
Essentially, Islam was spread by the sword.
Attacking that video as "dumb paranoid aryan propaganda" is an ad hominem fallacy. Deal with the facts.
Almost the whole world that is islamic became muslim through military occupation, the mass slaughter of the males who fought or would not convert, the looting of property and the selling off into slavery of their women and children. This was all based on emulating the behaviour of Mohammed (known as sunnah in islamic practice); Mohammed took 20% of the spoils from his army of warriors. (Some describe him as the profit of 20% because of this). This can be verified in The Life of Mohammed, the first biography of Mohammed (and written by a muslim 100 years after the death of Mohammed). The author, Ibn Ishaq, was a christian who was taken as a slave to Medina, and converted to islam for a better life (one of the inducements used in the spread of islam).
The real lesson is that christianity endured 300 years of this aggression, before Pope Urban made christianity do an about turn, and began the (very minimal) Crusades against islam. They were a failure, and islamic violence against European christendom continued until the Siege of Vienna (when Jan Sobieski defeated the muslim army on September 11, 1683).
Watch just 1 minute of this video to see what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
The muslim attack against Europe continued beyond this. The white slave trade continued for hundreds of years (it was stopped by a joint British/US naval bombardment of Algeria in 1815). In 1951 the UN report on slavery calculated that 5% of the population of Saudi Arabia and Yemen were still slaves.
Buddhism did not respond in the same way as christianity to islamic aggression. Many experts on the history of buddhism say that buddhism died about 1000 years ago (e.g. Conze). And they explicitly attribute this death of buddhism to the onslaught of the islamic invasion & destruction in India.
The real lesson is that some religions are actually militant political movements wrapped up in religion. Islam is one such religion. Islamic militancy was going on for hundreds of years before christianity responded in kind.
Not doing read locking is not a game-changer.
Firebird doesn't do read locking. Neither does Lotus Notes. Both have been around about 20 years.
"It was never an attack on our freedom." You only believe that because you are not listening to what they are saying to you.
Here is the full text of Osama Bin Laden's letter to America:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
And here is a choice extract that totally contradicts your erroneous belief.
"(Q2) [...] what do we want from you?
(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
(a) The religion of the Unification of God [...] of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to [...] Muhammad...
...It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah's Word and religion reign Supreme."
Him and his kind want to impose a theocracy on the entire world. Under the rules of jihad (outlined in the Koran), once they call you to islam and you refuse to take up islam, they have the right to kill you. http://islamqa.info/en/ref/43087
They are not just opposed to America, but also to buddhism, hinduism and African pagan religions (hence they ran a trade in Black African slaves for 1300 years). http://www.amazon.co.uk/Islams-Black-Slaves-History-Diaspora... The 1951 UN report on slavery documented that 5% of the population of Saudi Arabia and Yemen were slaves. That is almost 100 years after the US fought the Civil War. Non-muslim black Africans are still being taken as slaves in Mauritania and Sudan (which is why the non-muslim south of Sudan seceded from the muslim north last year). Baroness Cox of Britain is still going to Sudan to buy slaves in order to free them. http://groupspaces.com/humanitariancentre/item/205497 Books on sharia law say that slavery is legal under islam.
Over 5,000 buddhists in southern Thailand have been slaughtered by muslim extremists in the past 8 years. That dwarfs the deaths in the WTC, but you probably haven't heard of it.
Bin Laden's letter to America offers up Palestine as a pretext. But his kind have said they plan to take back Spain for islam (it was occupied by jihadis for 700 years, don't you know). It also explains the civil war in Sudan, and the massacres in Thailand. The jihad is also going on in Nigeria, Mali, and Kenya.
It is eurocentric arrogance to ignore what the muslim extremists are telling you they want.
By all means get on with your life, but don't deceive yourself about what they want.
The author seems more intent on Dawkins-bashing than anything else. What else can explain his deliberate mis-reading of Dawkins missive. "As is typical of hatemongers, Dawkins is careful not to name his target directly: instead, he works with insinuation -- though that said, calling the victim "Muslima" is particularly crass." Dawkins does not call Skepchick "muslima"; he addresses the missive to some "muslima" to ironically point out that there are women who suffer far worse sexism than being asked if they'd like a cup of coffee.
Two specific laws were passed in Britain in the last 25 years outlawing FGM. Yet there has not been one conviction. A report recently pointed out that there may be as many as 100,000 victims. http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/14/female-genital-mut...
Feminists have remained virtually silent on this matter for the past decade or two. The only person to mount a campaign on it is the novelist Ruth Rendell.
When the female "Equalities Minister" recently appeared on the BBC's premiere news programme defending the status quo (along with a muslim man), it was an array of young muslim women accusing the authorities of racism and sexism in not bringing prosecutions.
It really is an appalling state of affairs. And in the last 20 years, FGM has barely been mentioned by British media. I would guess that the total number of stories in the last decade is no more than 20.
When I've brought the issue up with socialist feminists they claim that it is racist to get involved.
So, I think Dawkins has a point. And from my observations of Dawkins he seems to be far more concerned to offend christians than muslims.
There are far bigger reasons to question Amnesty International's integrity. Search their website for the OIC's "Cairo Declaration" on Human Rights under Islam, and you'll find that Amnesty has completely ignored it. The Cairo Declaration subordinates all human rights to sharia law, and almost every islamic country in the world has signed the Cairo Declaration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Declaration_on_Human_Righ...
At the most extreme interpretation, slavery is legal under islamic law - see Sultanhussein Tabandeh, "A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights". And the Cairo Declaration says that there is no crime except that proscribed by sharia. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen had slaves well into the 20th century (a 1951 UN report estimated that 5% of the population of those countries were slaves), and they only "outlawed" slavery under duress from the west. There is still slave-taking and trading in Mauritania and Sudan.
There are now plenty of serious works on the 1300 years of the islamic slave trade, e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Islams-Black-Slaves-History-Diaspora... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Christian-Slaves-Muslim-Masters-Medi...
It beggars belief that Amnesty can simply ignore it when the islamic world rejects universal human rights. But as long as Amnesty ignores it, the OIC's Cairo Declaration can fly under the radar, and be ignored by mainstream media and governments.
My understanding of the Cairo Declaration might be wrong. But until it starts to be discussed by organisations like Amnesty, it is not going to be subjected to extensive critical examination.
Hypertalk has gone on from strength to strength. I'm surprised that the Ars Technica writer should be so uninformed.
Runtime Revolution have been providing a Hypercard environment for at least a decade, and the technology they acquired had been in use since about 1992 (it was originally designed for Unix environemnts).
Runrev's Livecode produces hypercard-like applications that run on Windows, OS X, linux, android, and iOS. It also runs server-side, but I have no use for that part of the tecnology.
And no, I don't work for them. I've just been using the technology for the past 10 years or so.