Apparently you already have given up Flash on your iPhone, yet you continue to use it.

The iPhone carrying demographic is a large and affluent one which often uses its phones to find somewhere to eat. It's very dumb of restaurants to show these users nothing more than a blue lego. Unfortunately the restaurants are not showing the Flash users anything much better. Those Flash infested restaurant websites just have a lot of loud music that is trying to sound hip, menus that are hard to read because they are black text on a maroon background, and navigation buttons that are impossible to find. I go to one of these looking for a menu and I just give up even from a Flash enabled device.

These people need to just put up a simple website with hours and a menu.

Last I heard Debian was going to switch to eglibc, which of course still isn't FreeBSD's libc. I don't know what the status of that is though.

That's just it. "The advantages of Copyleft" have been illusory. Many enormously successful works have been created with those BSD-style licenses. They continue to evolve and develop without Copyleft. To name just a few, there is the world's most popular web server, all of the BSD operating systems, the X window system, the CPython interpreter and, coincidentally, the PHP interpreter upon which Wordpress relies.

The GPL is a highly restrictive software license. It does not promote freedom and no one has ever shown that its restrictive Copyleft has accomplished anything in spite of all the confusion it has wrought.

As I recall, I could switch Terminal to black on white. The problem was that some of the color combinations where then practically invisible--could have been yellow on white or cyan on white; I don't remember for sure. So I needed to change the colors that Terminal used in its black-on-white scheme, but this was not possible without some sort of plugin-like thing (not sure what the technical term for it was.)

I remember seeing that Apple made this a feature in 10.5.

For me a glossy screen is an absolute deal-killer. I once had a MacBook (the white, plastic one.) There were things about it that took some getting used to--I am accustomed to PC hardware running Linux. I could get used to the one-button mouse, the different keyboard shortcuts, and differences in the software like no X11 (at least, not ordinarily) and the Finder. I rather liked the idea of a PC running Unix without having to futz with installing an OS not supported by the OEM.

But what drove me to sell the thing on eBay was the glossy screen. Gloss makes it absolutely impossible to do any work with any bright light source over my shoulder. I do a lot of work in a terminal, and a black background is just impossible to read. So I switched them to a light background. That actually wasn't easy because the Terminal in OS X at the time (10.4, I think) made it really hard to switch colors--I had to download some sort of plugin to do something that X11 terminals have been capable of for years. Even with a light background, though, it was hard to do work if there was a lamp behind me and impossible to do work if there was a window behind me.

I complained of this, and some people said "well, just close the blinds" or "sit somewhere else." I now laugh when Steve Jobs said that if you phone is dropping calls when you hold it a certain way, don't hold it that way. Seems responses like that are common amongst the Apple set.

This was so bad that I sold the thing and now I won't buy a laptop with a glossy screen. That pretty much limits me to enterprise models as nearly all the consumer models have the glossy screen. I think Apple used to have a very expensive MacBook Pro that gave you a choice between glossy and matte but I don't think they have that choice anymore. No more Apple hardware for me.

Boost Mobile. $50, text all you want, unlimited web.

Cricket. $40, text all you want, unlimited web.

So there is something you can do about it, but you'd rather sit around and whine. Or maybe you want the top notch devices and top notch network but you don't want to pay for it. Okay.

Yikes, that's why I stopped using KDE. I can't have an odd crash here and there of my terminal emulator. That might take with it an email I've been working on, or a long-running file download. Stability is critical.

The ancient xterm that I now use has never crashed on me, not once.

Have you tried recently? A few years ago I blocked all incoming text messages on Verizon Wireless.

So what's going on with the asterisk in the name? A disclaimer?

* Prices and participation may vary. See store for details. We may actually steal all your data and post it publicly.

The review pans the inclusion of a history chapter in the book. I haven't seen the book's history chapter, so maybe it is not a good one. However, I can say that knowing the history of vi helps enormously if you're trying to "hack" it so I think such a chapter is needed.

By knowing the history of vi you will know that it was built on top of a line editor, ex. That helps the beginner understand why vi is a modal editor and why some commands are available both as ex commands (with a colon preceding them) and as normal mode commands. One of the powerful things about all those ex mode commands is that they are easy to script. You can feed a bunch of ex commands into vim from standard input, thus completely scripting an editing session without learning a bizarre scripting language. (You do however have to learn bizarre ex commands :) This is an easy workaround for some Unix conundrums--that you can't, for example, easily stick text onto the beginning of a file from the command line. I've got shell scripts that do this. (One could also use ed, but again, it helps to know the history of vi to know this stuff.)

Knowing the history also explains other vim oddities. For search, vi uses patterns under which some characters, like curly braces, only have special meaning if they are escaped. When you understand that old Unix utilities used regular expressions that are like this, and that the vi patterns thus resemble the patterns that you use with grep (not egrep) or sed, this makes more sense. It also makes all the vim "magic" settings make more sense.

Also, understanding the history of Unix made it easier for me to understand vim's limitations. For awhile I tried to learn vim script so that I could write scripts that would automatically generate certain text for me. Maybe this would be easy with, say, emacs, but vim script just seemed painful to me--and then it would only work with vim. With time I learned that vi fits in with the Unix toolbox model. Rather than use your editor to generate boilerplate text, it's very easy to generate that sort of thing in a shell script or using m4. Then just load it up into the editor. Vim also uses some external programs, such as ctags.

Unix is a big grab bag of tools that have a long history. I have always found that knowing the history of these tools and where they came from and how they were meant to be used together is enormously helpful.

Yeah, I'm sure they won't object when I have sex on their couch, and hopefully the cat hasn't taken a piss on the couch either.

Yep, hotels are for suckers.

He says the browser might require me to reboot my phone. Isn't this a sign of a flawed operating system? An application shouldn't cause the entire phone to freeze.

I was experiencing random glitches on my Motorola Droid. Verizon told me to do a factory reset because sometimes apps make the phone do strange things, hampering the phone's functionality. Shouldn't a proper OS keep apps from messing up the whole phone, no matter how crappy the app is?

Wow, you call the near extermination of an entire group of people "civil"?

Unbelievable.

The problem is that Bing is not really innovative. Certainly Microsoft does not approach Bing from a perspective of innovation. When Ballmer talks about Bing he talks about beating Google. Zune was about beating iPod. Meanwhile Google and Apple, which have already perfected Google and iPod, are creating their next innovations while Microsoft just starts to catch up.

Most of the Apple products meanwhile are not produced to beat Microsoft or anyone else; instead they seem to make them to make the best product.