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From the SimExplorer page on the SimDesk site:

Several patents have been filed for SimExplorer, including a recycle bin available on the Internet. SimExplorer moves deleted data to a virtual recycle bin and allows users to recover or restore that data if it was deleted by mistake. Previously, this functionality was only available on Microsoft© platforms: SimExplorer now makes it possible on all computer platforms.

Sorry, but it's already out there for multiple platforms. All they did was put it behind the familiar "Recycle bin" interface. This isn't so different from the Amazon one-click patent.

Remember Pascal? At one time, Pascal was the major development language. Pascal was taught at all the universities. But, an amazing thing happened. In a period of about 4 years, Pascal died. Hundreds of thousands of people had spent millions of hours learning the particular quirks of Pascal and of Pascal compilers. All of that time was lost.

If you have never lived through the loss of a major direction in your life, you may not even realize it can happen. The people saying I'm a troll in this thread probably haven't seen technology die.

Remember Powerbuilder? At one time there were about 1.5 million active Powerbuilder programmers.

No really, is Java dying? Now, I'm seeing, or think I'm seeing, the same thing with Java. The expected energy and support and standards have not appeared. Or have they? If I'm wrong, prove me wrong; I would like Java to be a success, that would simplify my choices. We bet part of our lives on our choices of specialization.

What frightens me is that there is so little support for GUIs in Java. When programmers don't work to improve their tools, they are consciously or unconsciously deciding that the technology does not warrant improvement.

I've seen Java programs that are unacceptably slow.

Sun mismanagement of Java makes people look elsewhere. The world is beginning to realize more fully that proprietary means, "I'm a dog on a leash; I'll bark whenever you yank my chain; please abuse me."

When you use Java, or any language in a way that is not fully compiled to native instructions, you give away your source code. Sure, what you give away is without comments or variable names, but nevertheless you may give away important routines. That's fine if you intend to make a gift of your work to the world; you should have the option not to do so. There has been surprisingly little work on full Java compilers; until Java has acceptable compilers, it hasn't proven itself. Is GCJ mature?

Visual Basic and Perl are written in C. Should it bother me about other languages that they are written in C or C++? Why not eliminate the middleman? Can an acceptable result for application development be achieved using something like Boundschecker and avoiding pointers and using automatic garbage collection where appropriate?

Slashdot has a moderation problem. You can't comment on and moderate the same story. So, moderators by definition moderate stories that don't interest them much.

Bet wrong and go back to being a novice. As I write this, the parent post has been moderated Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Overrated=1, Total=3. The question is a real and important one, not a troll. When you pick a technology, you lose part of your quality of life if you are wrong; you go back to being a novice at something else.

If you know better, educate me. If I'm wrong, and you know better, educate me. That's the entire purpose of Ask Slashdot.

Yes SWT (and indeed eclipse) is compilable under gcj see the gcj home page News article December 27, 2002

Qt/X11 Free Edition is dual licensed under the Q Public License and the GNU General Public License.

Qt Non-Commercial Edition for Microsoft Windows is licensed under the Qt Non-Commercial license.

TLS (SSL) does not need the ugly PKI technology to operate. SSL/TLS could very well use PGP keys. The difference is that PGP technology is more well designed and lends better to help building a web of trust.

Some people might say that newbies can't handle the complexity. Well it's the responsibilty of software developers to help them overcome this. Example: As the same PGP keys would be used for mail, the web of trust could be linked to the addressbook handling.

Besides, the current model gives a sense of security which is not real. Do we really trust CA's? When you go to an "internet cafe", do people check that the list of trusted CA's haven't been altered. In this way, PGP would bring the real sense of security/insecurity which is currently "masked".

Another alternative is RCS written on shell: Arch.

Wait, both Scheme and Shell are written on C, so you can't use them either. You may try to find someting written directly on Asm.

I still recommend that if you are using Java, Linux is the way to go. The Java from Sun runs on Linux just as well as any Windows platform. It beats Java for Windows 9x by a mile. If you will only use opensource software, GCC's Java compiler (get a nightly build and compile it yourself rather than relying on what comes with your distribution, as those are older) is getting pretty darn near usable. It works for 97% of my stuff now. Similarly, the classpath libraries are reaching a point where I can usually substitute them for the sun libraries.

I still recommend that if you are using Java, Linux is the way to go. The Java from Sun runs on Linux just as well as any Windows platform. It beats Java for Windows 9x by a mile. If you will only use opensource software, GCC's Java compiler (get a nightly build and compile it yourself rather than relying on what comes with your distribution, as those are older) is getting pretty darn near usable. It works for 97% of my stuff now. Similarly, the classpath libraries are reaching a point where I can usually substitute them for the sun libraries.

Apt-get makes dependencies a thing of the past.

That's something I've never fully understood. Why are dependencies so farking hard to observe? I mean to a fresh newbie or someone who just doesn't have the time or interest in it, sure, but I've found apt to be more of a pain in the ass than anything else.

Disclaimer: I've been using Slackware since shortly after it first came out. I believe my first install of Linux was with the 0.99.x kernels, but it may have been the early 1.x.x kernels, I really can't remember.

Slackware's biggest bonus (and fault) has been that it lets you do as you please with packages. It'll let you install a package without having its dependencies installed. You run the app, and you get an error. Usually something along the lines of a library missing.

Now this isn't what I'd want a newbie to see or do, but for someone who's familliar with the system you run ldd on the binary and find out what's missing and install it. No big deal.

Especially now that CheckInstall is around, I have absolutely no issue with Slackware -- -current has logrotate which was sorely missing from the distro, but Checkinstall's the best. Create Slackware, Debian or RPM packages with a touch of the keyboard. Parallel installs, links, everything's supported.

Back to Slackware's packaging. What I disliked about Debian or RPM was that if the package didn't exist you had to go hunt around trying to find it and hope someone else made it, or else make it yourself, perhaps using Checkinstall. Unfortunately both RPM and DEB have heavier requirements -- dependency trees, documentation in the right spot, patches to make it fit within their particular file structure... you either use Checkinstall to make the package poorly (but validly), or you set out on a mission and end up being the maintainer of every package you make. Slackware doesn't care, which is great for me.

Sure Debian's got 10k packages, but it seems that everything I need isn't there, isn't complete, or is old, even in the unstable tree. FreeS/WAN with NAT-traversal and SA-disconnect, GNU-Radiusd, Psi, mplayer... that's just off the top of my head. If I don't install via packages (this goes for Perl modules from CPAN, too!) I now have TWO package managers to take care of -- the one in my head and the one in the distro. For me, Slackware compliments the one in my head (or vice-versa).

Anyway enough ranting -- I just don't understand how for anyone who's been using linux for any amount of time cares about dependencies. Even with upgrades.

I don't know about other places, but China chose opensource path mainly because they don't want more american made stuffs in their Government. After an unfortunately instance when Microsoft shipped the first version of Simplified Chinese Windows 95 which included pranks from taiwanese developers who hide words like 'Communist Bandit' in their work(so much for not testing their products well before release) Of course, there's rumors about embedded missile guidiance chips in the printers to middle-east, but it's more like a X-Files episode to me. :)

Do they contribute anything back to OSS? AFAIK none for the China Government, because closing source within an organization is allowed in GPL, while RedFlag Linux, which is co-developed by Minister of Information and a Government co-owned private company seems to take opensource community value in the development.

You can even obfuscate just the patches, and publish them with the originals and a patch-applying-script, so no one can accuse you of obfuscating the source - this is simply how we write, you'd say.. ;) You could even sell the non-obfuscated code for money ;)

Linus wants everything to be open and within grasp.

you obviously haven't read GNU's"GNU/Linux FAQ".

according to the FSF, your idea of Linus's vision is completely wrong. see how the GNU crowd turn on each other like a pack of wild dogs when they have nothing better to do?

I don't know much about the topic, but doesn't the liscencing disallow you from selling it for money? Or is it just a common misconception?

An extremely common misconception. See the GNU GPL FAQ:

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

And you honestly have never heard of companies like say, oh, RedHat, selling GPLed licensed software?

All I can say is "Wow". And read this:

Selling Free Software.

Well, I don't know what to do in Windows, but I have a similar situation and just dual boot the machine. I use tar to make backup volumes and Windows to write. Tar has a multivolume option, -M, and tape length option, -L that I have never used because I've just kludged my way through with directories. Looks like you can use cygwin if you want. Thanks for asking, it was interesting to read about. The machine mostly stays under linux, and I mount the windows drive with an entry in /etc/fstab. This makes it easy to move things around the local network with ftp and ssh, which might solve your problem of wanting those files on the next computer. When I'm ready to write something out, I copy it to Windose and boot over. Look, Slashdot did this a while back.

Well, I don't know what to do in Windows, but I have a similar situation and just dual boot the machine. I use tar to make backup volumes and Windows to write. Tar has a multivolume option, -M, and tape length option, -L that I have never used because I've just kludged my way through with directories. Looks like you can use cygwin if you want. Thanks for asking, it was interesting to read about. The machine mostly stays under linux, and I mount the windows drive with an entry in /etc/fstab. This makes it easy to move things around the local network with ftp and ssh, which might solve your problem of wanting those files on the next computer. When I'm ready to write something out, I copy it to Windose and boot over. Look, Slashdot did this a while back.

how you can distibute and / or use a piece of software.

That's the difference. EULAs claim to govern use within a single computer, something that you are entitled to do anyway as the legal owner of a CD containing the software. The GPL specifically does not restrict use (see section 0), but only redistribution, something you can't do under copyright law without permission.

When you buy a book, you don't need the author's permission to read the words, do you?

Do you really think you would want to write a GCC backend that emitted Ada source code? GCC already compiles Ada, if this is accurate.
Do you mean a de-compiler? Why?

Now, nothing created after 1923 may ever belong to us all in this manner again.

You forgot about one of the other milestones of freedom

Quote from RMS in The GNU Project:

"An operating system does not mean just a kernel, barely enough to run other programs. In the 1970s, every operating system worthy of the name included command processors, assemblers, compilers, interpreters, debuggers, text editors, mailers, and much more. ITS had them, Multics had them, VMS had them, and Unix had them. The GNU operating system would include them too."

He seems to feel that an OS includes CUSPS. If not, we may have had a complete GNU OS back in '89 or so.

[tangent] What would have happened to the Linux kernel if GNU had been fully functional in the early 90's? Would it have become the illegitimate child of the GNU Project that it is today? Would RMS be so bipolar in his reaction to it? Just a thought to ponder...[/tangent]

I actually e-mailed Richard Stallman a couple years ago when I realized a great way to spread the GNU message.

My question was whether disguising pro-GNU songs (such as these) as Billboard Top 40 hits and sharing them on Peer 2 Peer networks was a "right" thing to do.

He suggested that I not do it, but did thank me for a good laugh.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html for the problems of the apple license. The GNU guys already told you long ago that you shouldn't use it. Your fault.

It's copyrighted with a copyleft

by default shred overwrites the file 25 times. This is only the sort of thing you'd want to do with sensitive data, or just before tossing the harddrive (shred /dev/hda will shred the whole drive).

It reportedly takes about 20 minutes to shred a 1.44 mb floppy, though of course it can write at a faster rate on a hard drive.

There are other limitations to shred but if you do it to an entire disk before you toss it you can have a reasonable expecation of security.

(btw a better link to the shred documentation)

Your second point is wrong. GPL allows you to charge as much as you want for binaries, but with source code you may charge no more than the costs of physically distributing it.

GNU position on selling free software

gpl

Your second point is wrong. GPL allows you to charge as much as you want for binaries, but with source code you may charge no more than the costs of physically distributing it.

GNU position on selling free software

gpl

The GNU Project FAQ says:

"Copyleft is a general method..."

"To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable."

Copyleft, as a general method, must now be interpreted and practiced in a wide field, incorporating not only programming, but all creative disciplines. Copyleft is the opportunity to make the investment in the future plentitude of the Public Domain that the relative parasitism of Copyright threatens.

As of today, when a work is Copyrighted we know its destiny. It will be sucked dry, never allowed to enrich the very public trust that helped bring it forth. Copyright will grow stronger in proportion to the vitality of each work it consumes.

As of today, we know the only work that will thrive, that will enrich the public trust, is a work that explicitly supports the intention of the United States Constitution that Copyright is granted "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

By claiming Copyright, and then licensing your works under a license in accord with this ideal of the Constitution and Copyleft, you will help ensure a wide and deep Public Domain for our future.

Copyleft licenses:

For software: The GNU Public License

For music: The EFF Open Audio License

The GNU Project FAQ says:

"Copyleft is a general method..."

"To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable."

Copyleft, as a general method, must now be interpreted and practiced in a wide field, incorporating not only programming, but all creative disciplines. Copyleft is the opportunity to make the investment in the future plentitude of the Public Domain that the relative parasitism of Copyright threatens.

As of today, when a work is Copyrighted we know its destiny. It will be sucked dry, never allowed to enrich the very public trust that helped bring it forth. Copyright will grow stronger in proportion to the vitality of each work it consumes.

As of today, we know the only work that will thrive, that will enrich the public trust, is a work that explicitly supports the intention of the United States Constitution that Copyright is granted "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

By claiming Copyright, and then licensing your works under a license in accord with this ideal of the Constitution and Copyleft, you will help ensure a wide and deep Public Domain for our future.

Copyleft licenses:

For software: The GNU Public License

For music: The EFF Open Audio License

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

GNU Philosophy

The paper is dated 1997 (published 1998). All of the languages tested have changed significantly since that time. Scheme in particular has grown several significant implementations like Scheme 48, the substrate for scsh, the Scheme shell, and Kawa, a Scheme that compiles to Java bytecodes.

buy using the pateNTdead PostBlock(tm, va lairIE et AL) device.

va.msn.?net? forget about it.

don't bet yOUR .asp on the frauduleNT stock markup "bull" again today J., as everything they're peddling, has been given to US, buy those freedom fighters over at hobbyistwhiners.org.

over at va.FUDge.controll, we call 'em freedumb fairIEs. they're all on yOUR foems list buy default.

I'm "sick & tired" :) of registering everywhere.

Requiring registration makes a service NOT FREE . It costs you part of your information and FREEDOM

Somebody explain the guys at NYT that a registration can't be free . Of course, I'm talking free as in "free speech", "land of the free" (if that means something) and not "free beer" (not that I don't like free beer).

For the interested: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

But now that we're going to be getting it, what, exactly, the hell are we really going to be doing with it?

Scan it for violations of copyleft licences (for example the GNU GPL) and then threaten Microsoft with a suit for copyright infringement (unless the source code is published forthwith under the terms of the applicable copyleft licence).

Then of course I'll be free to run Windows again :-).

Central control : Anyone who releases (or even uses, other than for R&D) a modified version is required to notify one specific organization, which happens to be Apple.

Using Kawa , which is way of compiling Scheme into Java bitecode, you could create web services and such.

5% still breaks the GPL's patent encumbrument clause (Section 7):

If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

Which means that if this holds, Linux can no longer be distrubuted. Period.

This is when hurd steps in.

You're confused about the GPL. The GPL places no limitations on how you may use software. In particular, the GPL places no restrictions on "commercial use" (whatever that means). The GPL only affects you if you redistribute GPLed software. For futher details see the license itself, or the GPL FAQ.

By the way, the crime of "piracy" involves hijacking a ship. (Hijacking a plane is legally "air piracy".) Illegally copying software is properly refered to as "copyright infringement".

Just don't turn up. After all, if I receive a letter from Uzbekistan telling me I'm due in their courts (I'm British), there's no reason I have to accept their judgement.

If the Hague treaty becomes ratified, the UK would be required to enforce a Uzbekistan court rule against you.

is that really true of the GNU project? I doubt it. I know that there is a practice of giving your copyright over to GNU but that's voluntary. I read so on their website. If i recall it's so that they can pursue violations for you etc.

Yes it is true, see this or just read about why Xemacs was forked.

I should have provided the link when discussing Richard Stallman's comments. He argues that even libraries should be clearly GPL'd rather than covered by the looser Library GPL, and it was this argument that convinced us to switch our OSS libraries to GPL. The argument is clear: by using the full power of the GPL, OSS software developers are given an advantage. For the purposes of dual licensing, it is also clear: we can benefit two specific groups of users - OSS developers AND paying customers - while not giving presents to non-paying commercial users who are, quite possibly, competitors.
The dual-license model is thus a very powerful tool for delivering OSS software to specific target users. I'd highly recommended this approach to all OSS developers who work ex-catherdra.

What a bunch of total crap. OS/2 was SMP enabled from 2.11 (or 2.1 I believe) and scaled almost flawlessly linear as the number of processors grew.

I have to back down on this one. As it turns out there are SMP enabled versions of OS/2. But this in turn brings up the question of what are we talking about? Standard OS/2 or OS/2 server? Because there's a huge price difference between the two.

Didn't know how to use REXX, eh?

I started using REXX in 1990 and it was my primary scripting language until I discovered real scripting
languages.

command line OS/2 was as much Unix like as you could want

OS/2's command line is no more powerful than the DOS command line. It pales in comparison to the UNIX shell, which is why several companies released enhanced shells for for OS/2.

used OS/2 for three 800 person 24-hour call centers

I developed for OS/2 over the course of 12 years at a factory with hundreds of OS/2 workstations. The stability of later versions of the OS/2 kernel is impressive: I've seen the kernel keep chugging along after the desktop hangs on a number of occassions. But what good is that when other layers of the system are so confounded that the only thing that solves the problem is a reboot?

So best of luck in your advocacy of a dying OS (and in the improvement of your manners) but I stand by my statement: OS/2 is not a good server operating system.

Could this be cross platform? I found this link while trying to do developer research. Here it is.

here's no reason why 99% of open source projects actually need to market themselves - they don't need to make money,

• Get users, it's much easier to work on something that people are using than working on something that noone else is using.
• Get developers, getting help for some problem you want/need solved is a big thing
• Getting feedback, it's very helpful to have external auditing of your code, or I compiled your program on blahSystem and this is what happened, or even just getting comments from people who've done similar things.
• Getting recognition, after all that works it's nice to get the warm fuzzies :)

The standard image shipped with CMUCL is about 20 MB on my FreeBSD box. This contains the whole standard library, including the compiler, debugger, profiling and tracing tools, embedded documentation (docstrings attached to functions/variables available programatically, like Python also has now) etc. To that, you add your own code, either as external libraries that get linked at runtime or integrated in the image - you load everything you wrote in a running image, both code and possibly data, and dump its state, so you don't have to re-load it on startup.

It is possible to get rid of functionality, but I doubt it's frequently used. 20 MB for the runtime system are not too much, compare for example with a Java runtime environment (or a basic Unix system, that could be regarded as Cs runtime).

Some commercial Lisps, for example Allegro Common Lisp support a more "conventional" way of delivering apps, as standard executables without the need for a runtime. Given that Franz charges higher license fees if you want to include the compiler/debugger in your app, I guess there is a way in ACL to get smaller executables.

I've browsed quite far down all comments and have yet to see someone mention the Data Display Debugger. I find it an absolutely indispensible tool for debugging anything longer than a small utility. Off the top of my head, it supports all but one of your requirements (the exception is #6 which I think is unreasonable for compiled code but I can see why you like the possibility). Hmmm - not sure about #3 mainly because I've never tried it. Don't see why not though - set a watchpoint to stop whenever the variable's value changes and then go back a frame. And yes #7 is supported if gdb is your inferior debugger through user-defined commands.

While I was RTFA, I was intoning "DDD" to just about every complaint the author brought up. Quite apart from its support for Python, Perl and Java, its visual display of data structures is unique. Array getting mangled? Display it as a graph and see exactly how and where it gets clobbered. Threads getting you down? Display the data that needs to be mutexed and attach to process.

Real debugging uses (1) printf calls to trace execution path, dump variables, and detect the crash point down to the nearest few lines (2) eyeballs and brain to spot the goof now its position is locked down. Debuggers are just for the wierdass bugs, and mostly they break differently in those cases anyway, because they're singlestepping not running full tilt.

A good debugger for those cases whern one's needed is DDD.

The last version of Media Player I installed was 7. It too had the option to not make it the default player for certain file types. And guess what: It stole them anyway.

Codecs, players, it doesn't matter. What's at issue is proprietary software, and M$'s use of it.

And as for leaving the country, that is only if DRM/DMCA/CBDTPA measures are fully enacted. I firmly believe in fair use, and these three things take that away. I would gladly move to a country that still upholds fair use rights in lieu of avoiding these three things, of which Microsoft has declared itself the #1 Champion of.

Have you read this? While it is purely speculative fiction, it does seem to be the direction we're heading in.

*sits back, waits to be called paranoid*

From what I've observed, there is no legal C++ code that doesn't self-modify which gcc can't intelligently optimize without problems.

Legal C++...well, that's the trick, isn't it? I've seen at least one major failure in a complex project I work on that was exposed by -O2 optimization level using g++-3.2.

Could you clarify on this matter please? I have seen some things break between version of g++ due to changes in how the STL was implemented. In one case, for instance, I was transparently using pointers as if they were iterators. This caused problems that required a rather large rewrite. But that was entirely my fault. Anyhow, my question is really what specifically caused your problem?

Whether it's a bug in the code or a bug in the compiler I do not know. Unfortunately, g++ doesn't seem to have the command-line interface to systematically test things.

Actually, I think -O, -O2, -O3, and -Os are mostly abbreviation for long lists of various -f commands. See the manual for a complete reference. It goes on for pages, however, and isn't exactly clear on which -f's the specific optimization levels, but it sheds some light. There is the occasional mention of "this is automatically enabled after -O2". And there's a sentence that reads On most machines, the -O option turns on the -fthread-jumps and -fdelayed-branch options, but specific machines may handle it differently.

>"Don't like, don't use."

Then you run into the George Harrison problem. Under US copyright law, access plus substantial similarity equals copying. If you have seen a piece of code, and you write a similar piece of code several years later, the courts may, depending on the specific Circuit's interpretation of "substantial similarity", consider the later piece of code to be a "derivative work" of the original code and thus subject to whatever license the author of the original code wishes to impose or deny. For this reason, no Microsoft employee is permitted to read code covered by the GNU General Public License.

Good point. It never ceases to amaze me how utterly stupid US copyright law is in many situations.

-
"And how does one GPL a program stored on a proprietary storage medium such as a ROM chip or cartridge?"

Offer to ship a CD with the source if the user pays the medium costs (info).

-
"And how does one GPL a program for a platform whose kernel will load only binaries whose hash has been signed by a central authority?"

This doesn't relate directly to the GPL itself, but relates to a problem caused by the nature of OSS. If a particular kernel will only run signed apps, GPL is still very valid, and the benefits are still present to some degree as you can still use and port the code. I don't see a problem with "GPL'ing a program" for this type of OS.