Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." -- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Not feeling well: a bit of stomach upset, a little dizzy, more tired than usual (which says a lot) ... and the usual randomish assortment of aches and pains. Adds up to not doing a great job of coping with the world right now. Figure a 30% chance that I'll feel well enough to get to rehearsal tonight (haven't given up on that, so if I manage to feel better, I'll be there), and I did not get around to writing most of what I'd planned to yesterday, nor addressing Groundhog Day cards (which I'm running out of time for). Yesterday's little bonus snow left a bit on my steps but seems to have mostly blown off of my little patch of sidewalk, so no extra sweeping (it wasn't enough to shovel anyhow), but I still haven't cleared a spot in front of hte house for my car (and neither has a city snowplow), nor dug it out of it's current spot on Mount St. It's currently street-cleaning hours for where it's parked now, so I hope they're not ticketing for that today. It'd be stupid if they did, since there's still all this snow there, but who trusts the city government not to be stupid? Unfortunately I was not up to dealing with it yesterday (nor now), so I'm left with hoping.

Just about the only thing I had the energy for yesterday was occasionally poking at my main mailbox with Mutt (not my usual mail program, but useful for certain tasks) ... didn't reply to anything, so my "to do" pile of email is stil just as huge, but every so often I'd go through a chunk of the alphabet by sender or by subject, and delete spam. It's down to under 19,000 messages and 83 MB now. (It was more than 32,000 messages and 135 MB on Sunday.) I really need to get around to installing CRM114 as a filter. But I noticed a few patterns (starting with: if the subject starts with my name, I can almost certainly ignore the message ... and also noticing which of my friends tend to use the kinds of subject lines spammers mimic. And the vast majority of email with no subject is spam, but there's enough legitimate blank-subject mail that I can't just race through that section of the listing with my finger on the 'd' key. Anyhow, that's been my big accomplishment for the past 36 hours: deleting spam. And I still have a lot sitting there.

A few days ago, I was reading something from, or in support of, that group that was complaining that Spongebob Squarepants is encouraging homosexuality (one of the groups with "Family" in their name, which is actually relevant here), and ran across an interesting meme in it (yeah, more interesting than the expected anti-gay memes). The author referred to "bigotry" as a liberal "code word".

Except that it's not. "Bigotry" isn't code, it's blunt. It means exactly what it says. It doesn't dress up the concept in prettier phrasing to make it harder to argue with or to sneak past someone's "Wha'd they just say?" filter. It doesn't hide an agenda behind an innocuous-sounding phrase. It doesn't even try to be polite. It's raw. Maybe even rude. It's the antithesis of a "code word".

Calling it a code word is a distraction. An attempt to encourage the reader to dismiss it henceforth as either meaningless or deceitful. And the meme that says "you can ignore statements the other side makes about 'bigotry' without feeling bad" is snuck in there as part of the scenery. Sneaky and malignant.

Admittedly none of us are perfect, and sometimes when we say the word "bigotry" we focus on certain forms of it and overlook others. But we get called on that when we do, and we expect each other to call us on it. The fact that the group complaining about it is trying to defend a particular example of bigotry does not make it our code word.

The irony, of course, is that this is coming from one of the so-called "family" organizations. "Family" and "family values" are the code phrases most often used as examples of the concept of a code word! "Family" is not used by conservatives to denote a comprehensively -- nor even consistently -- pro-families approach. It is a shorthand for "anti-liberal, anti-homosexual, and reactionary" and usually has anti-sex and "strict-father" family-model elements added. Much of the "family values" agenda actually opposes families that don't fit their particular "moral" crusade. They say "family" because that sounds nicer than "anti-gay" and frames it as something dangerous to argue against: "How could you be anti-family?" And they do this while working to make life harder for existing families in the real world who fail to fit their narrow model. As far as I can tell, there's little done in the "pro family" name that actually helps families -- even "corect" ones -- beyond a few token feelgood speeches. That is, what I've seen isn't even pro-"the right kind of" family; only anti-"the wrong kind" (and, frequently, pro-censorship using "the children" as an excuse).

And this is a group that has the gall to issue a statement that refers to "bigotry" as a liberal code word? They can't even say "But think of the children!" sincerely because there's a footnote that says, "unless the children are gay, have gay parents, have a non-Norman-Rockwell family structure, or fail to be cowed into narrow social roles." What are they arguing against in the article I read? A video that tells children, more or less, "don't beat people up for being different".

So it's not hard to see why a "family"-agenda group would want to defang the word "bigotry" by convincing people to dismiss it as a code word.

Be careful out there, and don't step on the meme-mines.

syntonic_comma sent me the URL of a review of the new Amiga and AmigaOS 4 (developer), which I found simply interesting and nifty and fun until I hit the "performance" section on the last page and started thinking about what it implied WRT solving a problem I'd muttered about before...

Because the OS is so small (About 60MB on disk for a complete install), it fits very nicely in 256MB of RAM, with room for several applications, most of which have a similarly small memory footprint. This means that you can run the OS and multitask between several applications without ever swapping to the disk. In fact, although the new ExecSG kernel in OS4 supports virtual memory, it appears to be turned off in this build.

Running the OS and all its apps completely in memory provides a very different user experience than one is used to from modern operating systems. Switching applications is instantaneous, as is switching screens (providing you are running separate screens at the same monitor resolution, otherwise you have to wait for your monitor to resync).

Scrolling is about as fast as on my 2.4GHz P4 PC. While the PC clearly blows away the AmigaOne on pure CPU performance (for example, unarchiving files, or ripping to MP3), for general use they "feel" about the same. The A1 feels much faster than my 733MHz Pentium 3 running XP, and makes my poor 500MHz G3 iBook running OS X feel like a pig stuck in molasses.

(Note that the system he reviewed has an 800 MHz PPC CPU.)

Small. Snappy. Hmm. Maybe bloatware isn't inevitable after all. Maybe my perception of so much modern software as being bloatware isn't mere curmudgeonliness after all. I wonder whether it'll still be small and snappy ifwhen it gets to a "ready or prime time" version. Reading about it has gotten me interested in the Amiga again, in any case, if only for curiosity and an interest in a high perceived-performance:hardware-oomph ratio. (Way back when, I wanted an Amiga for the things that PCs and Macs just didn't do well (or in some cases, at all), starting with preemtive multitasking and hot video. Other platforms have caught up on those fronts.)

I also found the author's speculation interesting:

The AmigaOS is small (tiny, even!) fast, and Internet-ready, yet already has a large library of supported applications, exactly what is needed for the next generation of cell phones and other handheld devices. I have been playing around with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, and have installed the OS (as you can see from the screenshots, the OS plus all the applications and data I was testing took up only 377 megabytes) onto a 512MB compact flash card for a prototype wireless tablet I am developing.

[...] as cell phones, PDAs and living room set-top media boxes become more prevalent in the future, there is a chance that the A1 and OS4 could find a profitable niche. I have used PDAs that have similar CPU and RAM capacities as my AmigaOne and they do not provide the same speed and functionality that is already available in OS4. OS4 feels like a full desktop, yet has the resource requirements of a handheld. There is a chance, albeit a small one, that the Amiga might play a small role in this arena.

(That could be a lot more interesting than just allowing you to compose custom ring tones in Deluxe Music Construction Set, but I couldn't help thinking of that...)

A long time ago I told people that my ideal computer setup would have a PC, a Mac, a Unix machine, and an Amiga under the desk. I never did get that Amiga, but I've currently got Mac classic, not X yet), Windows, Linux, and BSD within easy reach (either physical keyboard or telnet). It's probably not yet time to put Amiga back on the wishlist for completeness-of-toolkit reasons, but it's creeping back on for coolness-and-curiosity reasons.