Hey,
Really nice site you got here.
I'll come back more often and check it out.
Peace!

How green is the grass on the other side of the fence?
Not much. Don't believe it I tell you.
Jerry

Hey,
Great stuff here!
I'll definitely bookmark this place and come back soon.
Rob

Pretty Cool Place.
I like your style too.
 
Cya again,
Joey

Hello,
Very Informative Posts.
I really like what you have going on here. I'll be back soon

If Bruce is buried in spam, it's not because
there are too many criminals sending out dumb
come-ons; it's because Bruce has decided to
execute the directives those criminals have sent
his way. I don't execute those directives.

In fairness, Bruce's email address has been
scrawled everywhere across the net for quite a few
years now, from the days when that's what one did
with one's email address, ie. before Cantor (sp?)
and Siegel. Only since then has it become
necessary to treat your email address like some
kind of True Name.

BTW thanks for the kind words about SpamAssassin!
Good to know it's kicking spammer ass around the
world...

Again, well said, Stefan (you gotta stop doing this or I'll be forced to start a religion to you).

I spent a lot of time learning to write web pages because I wanted what that gave me. That was the last big time dump I was willing to commit to. But I never got as good as many people here because I didn't need to get any better and the goodies I got from being good enough were...enough.

Actually, I'm really anxiously waiting for the next cool thing, but I haven't seen it yet.

"I don't feel like doing the steep climb up one more learning curve."

I don't mind steep learning curves, but there has to be something pretty good up top.

I would love to tinker with WiFi stuff. Set up a node. Look for chalk marks to appear near my apartment. But right now, I don't want to devote the time-and-effort to something just for coolness sake.

Revivalist preacher? Yeah, bruces is damn fun to watch. I caught one of his performances at an SF convention, where someone asked him about space colonies. It was like watching a velociraptor tear into a pack of Barnies.

Newtonian physics is "so much bullshit"? Newtonian physics? Newtonian physics got us to the Moon, buster. The fact that it's not a complete description of the laws of the physical universe doesn't make it "so much bullshit". I smell a middle being excluded so grandiosely that it leaves me dubious about everything else you say.

"That's awfully B&W. What's innovation to a CS wonk is a incomprehensible hash of neologisms, strange usages, and white boards full of badly drawn squares and circles to an, um, civilian computer user."

Stephan put it perfectly. I was an early user of computers in educational settings and used to think of myself as an early adapter, at least in my work.

I haven't seen anything too groundbreaking in awhile, and what's out there sounds incomprehensible, e.g. WiFi/80211. I don't feel like doing the steep climb up one more learning curve. I use my two year old imac with its slightly aged apps. and am content. I haven't even upgrated to System X.

I once saw Bruce at Powell's in Portland. He's a revivalist preacher, and his text should be read that way. Great stuff.

And because it was designed by the net/for the net, it has excellent features that would never make it into a technology designed by someone who gave a festering shit about "business models." Chief among these is the ability to right-click on any banner ad and select "block images from this server" from a pop-up menu.

Actually, iCab is a commercial browser that had ad-blocking before Mozilla, only it also lets you filter by image dimensions and phrase-matching the URL. Granted, it's been in beta forever...

Edited by author 06-28-2002 10:48 PM
"Depending on your PoV, the innovation took place in Turing's day and stopped, or it
 has been continuous ever since, but the drop off Bruce describes just
 didn't happen."

That's awfully B&W. What's innovation to a CS wonk is a incomprehensible hash of neologisms, strange usages, and white boards full of badly drawn squares and circles to an, um, civilian computer user.

Before I went back to school and got all learned, I trained salespeople and worked trade shows where I dealt with electronic store buyers, reps, press people and the great unwashed. From the point of view of the non-geek, computers got *massively more useful* from the mid-eighties to the late nineties. They went from baffling, high-priced toys that the boss made you learn to indispensible parts of our quotidian realities.

Over the last few years, the apparent rate of innovation from the point of view of average user has slowed down, to the point where people are buying fewer new computers.

Average User includes *me* by the way. I can fully appreciate glitz and glory and technical sweetness, but I see no need to get rid of my current home system (533 MHz AMD K2) or laptop (90 MHz Pentium). I have enough money in my "new hardware" fund to get a real screamer system, but I won't because what I have does everything I need. I don't even have a hankering to participate in the WiFi revolution, because there's no killer app yet, from my POV.

Bruce has been enthusiastically evangelizing for Spam Assassin lately, so his complaint may have been for rhetorical purposes.

Mozilla was designed for use by people who live on the net. It was written by people who live on the net.

Then why does it have a built-in mail client, a built-in HTML editor and a built-in IRC client? Surely people who use the net daily have these apps already and probably have favourite apps they much prefer. Doesn't this sort of bloatware seem more akin to market-share and business plan zombies than web-geeks?

It is the one thing that has always pissed me off about Mozilla and why I am very happy to see Chimera (and its Linux kin) build just a browser with the Mozilla engine.