Quarter Life Crisis

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Random Bullets¶

460 words

• Five reasons for and against Windows – when compared to a Mac, that is.
• Cancelling overpriced journals (both via my own peeves with that topic, Buzz Anderson has another rundown and link collection on bug reporting.
• The big Winer strikes again. While the topic itself isn't interesting, the ensuing discussion sees many people saying things about the badness of Linux and Windows software. I think they're missing the point. The fact that Microsoft products are bad doesn't matter per se. Every company is free to produce as bad software as they wish. The 'bad' thing about Microsoft is that they (successfully) try to force their software on people and destroy other people's efforts at improving the computing experience. 'The Linux people' don't have a lot to offer in that department.
• Related to the above somehow – I strongly dislike the people who use Unix are smart attitude and think its plainly wrong – and may even be anti-Unix FUD by suggesting 'you're too stupid for it anyway'. I have had my hard times in Unix, starting back in 1993 when I hit 'e' in TeX on al full screen console and ended up in vi (rather than in the easy-to-use text editor I was used to from my Atari). Still, taming (not mastering) the beast that is vi or Unix won't need a genius but only a bit of knowledge about which keys to press. It's just about knowing your tools. – I can't fix the plumbing and I can't use high end graphical CAD tools, but I am pretty sure I could learn to do so. I don't see how Unix is any different from those.
• 20th anniversary Mac reloaded – by Sony – with lots of things sticking out at the sides and a 1984 style mouse. They also have an amazingly thin notebook with a displaced keyboard, which at the back still has 80% of the height of a fully fledged TiBook.
• Spam is becoming worse these days. Mainly due to arbitrarily inserted punctuation that probably tricks the fancy bayesian filters. Filter software writers will have learn to ignore these things. Perhaps even by converting the text to some kind of 'spoken' equivalent before analysis to compensate for (un)intentional typos and that kiddie number-writing.
• I also receive a lot of mail with my own address as a sender recently. Apple's Mail won't trash it because my own address is in my address book. Any way of working around this short of ruining my address book data? Will I have to install one of those local spam filters eventually? Any readymade installers for that?
• It's only beta at this time, but PithHelmet is starting to be ready for the Panther. My sanity may return.

November 15, 2003, 14:18