9 ms·
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
by gentooflux 10mo ago
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
- DANmode 10mo agoHe’s…something.
- bigyabai 10mo agoThe Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots
- nighthawk454 10mo agoOn the contrary, I think that was a wonderful answer and reflects the POV well. Hard to imagine something more Stallman-esque!
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.
- jsk2600 10mo agoThis is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall: > For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
- krackers 10mo agoThis makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it. For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoNo, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.
- krackers 10mo agoWhat is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoI don't know, we're both speculating. I'm just advising against "oh he could just as well do X" - you don't know.
- johannes1234321 10mo agoI assume it is more about structure and time. If you start browsing you wait for pages to load and then probably go a page further and to the next. In the batch mode you have the designated time window to go through mail and read what is there and avoid jumping into some rats nest of neverending paths. In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- kleiba 10mo agoIf you can send and receive email, why can't you run wget yourself?
- andai 10mo agoMy guess would be that he prefers having stuff in an inbox he can process one by one.
- rightbyte 10mo agoYe I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoI get that you're being sarcastic, but I actually think the world would be a kinder place if we had more of Stallman's flavor of pure hearted dogmatism.
- rightbyte 10mo agoYe I agree. I was not sarcastic other than that I must aknowledge that I probably wouldn't go to that length becouse of weakness in my heart ;)
- DonHopkins 10mo agoI bet he knows how to make a Lisp Machine screenshot.
- gentooflux 10mo agoI bet he knows how but still won't
- jdougan 10mo agoEmacs is a (virtual) Lisp Machine
- setopt 10mo agoAt least a Lisp Image.
- shevy-java 10mo agoIt is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully understood why python or ruby are useful.
- Sophira 10mo agoHe was using text mode at the time in 2002. The term has something of a technical meaning that he was likely referencing. To be precise: 1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal. 2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font. Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program. That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
- anthk 10mo agoEither script(1) or ttyrec(1). But you have to run these before. Also, I'm pretty sure tty dumping tools (as root) do exist, this is Unix after all.
- Sophira 10mo agoThose still only work for text. What I'm trying to say is that it's possible Stallman was considering that "screenshot" means "dumping a graphics buffer to disk". In the case of text mode without the framebuffer, there is no graphics buffer to dump (at least, not one that's accessible on the computer), therefore the best you can do is dumping a text buffer instead. You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist. He would absolutely have known about script(1).
- mvdtnz 10mo ago[flagged]
- 9dev 10mo agoHeavens, thank you. It’s like people assume genius when RMS wiggles his little toe and wonder what grand intellectual insight might have moved Him to do so.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoStallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".
- tormeh 10mo agoIndustrial IoT is far from useless. Consumer IoT is pretty dumb, but let's not get too sad about the IoT as a whole.
- zvmaz 10mo ago"I don't know how to make a screenshot" Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing.
- hombre_fatal 10mo agoIt’s disdain.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoNah, I think he's right, it's signaling. I think Linus and Stallman don't have disdain for "civilians". I think Linus in particular has deep disdain for people who pretend to be competent and then are not up to scrutiny; but he doesn't have those blowouts with dumbasses that he doesn't work with. On the other hand, someone who strikes me has having universal disdain is Carmack.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago> I wager that it's a status thing. Yes, it's a form of signaling. It's like a milloinaire showing "I have so much money that I can dump 10k on a Rolex and not even think about it", or a billionaire showing "I have so much money I don't even need to dump 10k on a Rolex to show how much money I have". These guy's version is "I'm so technically accomplished, that I can tell you I don't know X basic thing and you'll interpret it as a sign of my genius". That's ok. In our society we attribute too much importance on money, I don't mind if the likes of Stallman and Linus get a bit more fanhood from the wider society than they currently do.
- opan 10mo agoDue to these sorts of quotes from them, I often say semi-seriously that programmers don't know how to use computers. Another thing in this vein I often recall is Notch saying he finds both vim and emacs too confusing/difficult (while many non-programmers can use them both without issue). It may be an over-specialization. With modern labels you could say they put everything into "Dev" and only the bare minimum into "Ops".
- 10mo ago
- jasongill 10mo agoI met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him. I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over. I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
- Longlius 10mo agoI feel like rms just doesn't like human interaction generally. I've noticed that a lot of visionaries are that way.
- tjr 10mo agoI've worked with RMS a good bit over the past few decades, and, in my interactions with him, he has always come across kind, helpful, and professional.
- wahnfrieden 10mo ago[flagged]
- BobbyTables2 10mo agoDid he print those out on a printer with closed source software? (;->
- iberator 10mo agoWhy? Nroff/troff is literally designed to be printed with CUPS or Postscript etc etc etc You can also literally cat > /dev/printer
- pmontra 10mo agoMost likely that photo would have been on film in 2002. Shoot it, then wait to shoot all the pictures on the roll, bring the roll to a shop, get the prints, either scan the screenshot or mail it, with a stamp. A Polaroid would cut most of the wait time to zero. Anyway, still a lot of trouble compared to a few years later. By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM?
- quesera 10mo agoMaybe not... Digital cameras were well-established in 1998. I bought one around that time (Olympus I think, sub-1MP), and used a script on Linux to extract the images. I was not a terribly early adopter.
- anthk 10mo agofbgrab it's a thing. Then convert the resulting image to png.
- iberator 10mo agoNot everyone likes or use framebuffer. It's actually kinda 'new', as most classical linux text mode was done without it. I also have no idea how to make screenshots of text terminal (as f1-f12 with no fb)
- mjmas 10mo agoYou can use conspy -d from another tty to take a textdump of a console session. It is included as one of the utilities in busybox.
- prmoustache 10mo agoThe few photos he has on his own website have been taken by others. I doubt he even owns a camera. I don't think the second answer even qualify as a screenshot nor why he should do that upon random request by strangers.