51–60 of 293 posts
Can someone help me understand what the purpose of this is: I have several free web browsers on my laptop, but I generally do not look at web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.
He does not want to be tracked.
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Like most people, I find Stallman strange. His methods are quirky, and his language grating. He alienates his allies more often than his enemies. He picks fights at the wrong times. He stands behind principle in circumstances where it clearly hurts his cause. But... he's right. Almost always, he's right. He's made a 40 year career now of being right: often decades before the rest of us figure it out. That's enough fo…
Serious question. What exactly is he right about?
I did however find this comment quite interesting. He recommends Lisp to beginner programmers. Honestly this makes me want to play with Lisp (I do just about every other popular language but I've never done Lisp): "The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most o…
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Ditto. Stallman is an enormously interesting figure in the history of software development. But who really cares how he reads his email or books his speaking engagements? (And the less one knows about his personal life is probably for the better.)
I count three of you now who cared enough to post here mocking him.
But since you brought it up, the man has some very well documented personal eccentricities, beyond his choice in laptops. I'm sure anyone who would be interested in his email-reading procedures are equally interested in those other things too.
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That's the thing. You said it. Not many will see his motivations unless he spells it out and the man is an awful communicator in that he can't go two words without putting someone off. Unfortunately he's a bit of an extremist. At least that's how he presents himself. So I doubt younger folks will get where he's coming from. I'm 25 and I've read about Stallmam for only the past five years and I can tell you that what…
He sounds like a religious fundamentalist, or an Amish farmer. What a limiting worldview.
I quite like the Amish Farmer [0] analogy to technology. Select the good bits of technology, ignore the ones that are "better left alone".
[0] Jamie Sharp, "The Amish: Technology Practice and Technological Change" ~ http://www.shawcreekgeneralstore.com/amish_article1.htm
His tone is so arrogant and condescending. >I recommend all the ethical distros — namely, those that are 100% free software. i.e.: Any distro that uses anything that I don't like, namely 100% free software, is unethical. >If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. If some random person on hacker news came out and said this, we'd call them a buffoon and say they…
Honestly, what the hell are you talking about? He spend his life explaining why non-free software is unethical and providing free software, what this has to do with liking or not liking and what is arrogant about that? There are objective criteria by which non-free software is unethical and he certainly has the right to state his opinions on this.
I skimmed documentation of Python after people told me it was fundametally similar to Lisp. My conclusion is that that is not so. When you start Lisp, it does `read', `eval', and `print', all of which are missing in Python. Lisp experts, what does this mean? As far as I can tell, Python has pretty good REPL facilities.
I skimmed documentation of Python after people told me it was fundametally similar to Lisp. My conclusion is that that is not so. When you start Lisp, it does `read', `eval', and `print', all of which are missing in Python. Lisp experts, what does this mean? As far as I can tell, Python has pretty good REPL facilities.