The Unix "ideal" I was referring to was that each program should do one small thing right, so we could combine it with other small programs and get a bigger thing done our way. Evidently not every one agreed it should be a good idea, starting with the folks that decided that "well, now that all the college people got their hands on Unix for 50 bucks a pop, we can start charging them real money" and the gummint that decided that they couldn't possibly let normal folks have it because the networking code actually worked. :-) So, eventually, it split into many different versions of Un*x, which from my perspective is a pity -- I'm one of the weirdos that thinks that the best version (so everyone should have just that one, y'see) is System V, altho I gladly use MacOS X.
I dunno if I should be proud or not, but I never learned Virtual Basic. I was forced to learn Lisp, but don't remember enough of it to hack emacs anymore. I'll use emacs if I have to, but thank god I don't. I think emacs really suffers from dragging around TOPS-10 control keys. Ctrl/g was abort in TOPS-10 and if DEC did the same thing they did in other OSs, you could not change it. So, when emacs came to other DEC OSs, you had to change abort to ctrl/c and overload something else but now your codes were all screwed up. As opposed to emacs under Unix, which made users come to me crying -- "You told me that ctrl/c would abort programs, and now I'm stuck in that thing and I can't get out! And it's replacing all the wrong things in 10,000 lines!". Oh, well, they had to complain about something all the time anyway... :-)
The spiral thingy! Don't you have the doohickey to put it at home? Me neither. ;-)
And yes, my old printer died after what, a decent 5 years or so of service, and when I went to get a new printer, I got this Canon Pixma 5000 (I think that's the model number) -- very decent at printing speed, the cartridges last long enough and I found it's really nice for photo printing too. But the killer, and why I wanted it (besides being sick of the Epson ink prices) is that it automatically prints both sides of the pages if you're willing to wait a little longer. Yay!
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Date: Sunday, 18 December 2005 06:50 am (UTC)The Unix "ideal" I was referring to was that each program should do one small thing right, so we could combine it with other small programs and get a bigger thing done our way. Evidently not every one agreed it should be a good idea, starting with the folks that decided that "well, now that all the college people got their hands on Unix for 50 bucks a pop, we can start charging them real money" and the gummint that decided that they couldn't possibly let normal folks have it because the networking code actually worked. :-) So, eventually, it split into many different versions of Un*x, which from my perspective is a pity -- I'm one of the weirdos that thinks that the best version (so everyone should have just that one, y'see) is System V, altho I gladly use MacOS X.
I dunno if I should be proud or not, but I never learned Virtual Basic. I was forced to learn Lisp, but don't remember enough of it to hack emacs anymore. I'll use emacs if I have to, but thank god I don't. I think emacs really suffers from dragging around TOPS-10 control keys. Ctrl/g was abort in TOPS-10 and if DEC did the same thing they did in other OSs, you could not change it. So, when emacs came to other DEC OSs, you had to change abort to ctrl/c and overload something else but now your codes were all screwed up. As opposed to emacs under Unix, which made users come to me crying -- "You told me that ctrl/c would abort programs, and now I'm stuck in that thing and I can't get out! And it's replacing all the wrong things in 10,000 lines!". Oh, well, they had to complain about something all the time anyway... :-)
The spiral thingy! Don't you have the doohickey to put it at home? Me neither. ;-)
And yes, my old printer died after what, a decent 5 years or so of service, and when I went to get a new printer, I got this Canon Pixma 5000 (I think that's the model number) -- very decent at printing speed, the cartridges last long enough and I found it's really nice for photo printing too. But the killer, and why I wanted it (besides being sick of the Epson ink prices) is that it automatically prints both sides of the pages if you're willing to wait a little longer. Yay!