I wasn't posting for substance. This *is* slashdot, right?
I wasn't posting with a +1 bonus; actually, I posted the other one with the bonus to get some moderator attention. (I know they can't read anything, but I wish they'd start from the bottom and work up...)
Also, I don't think that intent really matters; judge on the merit of the post, and not on whether you think someone is a "Karma Whore". I've got a lot of karma, and I like to post on slashdot, but I've been doing it for a long time, and I don't think my posts have changed because of the addition of Karma. But I *hate* to see bad moderation, and I haven't seen that much of it lately.
(except for the occasional "Overrated" two days later when something gets moderated up to 5; I don't know how that can be anything *but* sour grapes...)
Oh yeah, this whole *thread* is Offtopic now, but marking an entire thread Offtopic is a borderline moderation abuse, IMO. Just mark the first post, and make sure the others aren't above 1, I'd say. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Someone, please read my parent comment and tell me why it's "Offtopic".
Does the moderator in question simply lack all reading comprehension? No, really, I want an answer! Let's have some accountability in reviewing here.
Okay, moderators; whatever. But before you mod this comment down, I expect you to read the parent comment, and either (1) decide to moderate it back up, or (2) tell me why it was Offtopic.
That's what people did when I was in the mountains. It's cost-effective, too, provided that vegetable matter stays cheaper than gas... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This was pretty stupid the first time; why do we have to have *two* stories on it?
Oh... to make fun of ZD-Net, of course! They'll publish anything!
(Hey, let's get TUCOWS to write a really long piece on the corruption in and downfall of Microsoft; that would be *excellent* on ZD-Net!;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why couldn't the W3C act more like Sun instead of like the UN?
I'd love it if they had some actual *teeth*, and control over the market. Even if they had to rigidly define both the standards (HTML, XML, different versions, etc.) and maybe even some browser behavior, I'd love it if they could sue Microsoft for claiming that IE5 was a compliant web browser instead of sitting idly by and letting them uglify the web.
I mean, how can you claim that your browser supports CSS when you can't pass the tests for it? That's exactly like claiming that "Microsoft Java" is Java. How can you claim that your products generate HTML when in actuality they use Windows-only, Microsoft-only character sets, and often can't display a quote to save their lives in any sort of cross-platform manner?
Standards are good, and I wish that companies would stick to them. Not break them; certainly not patent them. They can be involved in the standards process, but if they add anything non-compliant, there should be an option to turn that *off*, like -ansi mode on a good C compiler; and there should be rigorous compliance tests.
Of course, I also wish I were rich, and we had world peace, but... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Use MESS or DarcNES; I hear TuxNES has gotten better, too. I need to download them all and try them all again.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I just got a Nintendo again from e-bay, and I've been playing Metroid, but I also have Megaman & Megaman 2, Ninja Gaiden III, and a few other games. So I must say...
It's so much better playing the games on the real system!:)
After I didn't have my Nintendo anymore, I used to try to delude myself into thinking that emulators were just as good, and I must say, back when I was running DOS, Nesticle was pretty good. I dumped the intro music from Zelda with it, and I was hard-pressed to tell the difference. (not that I had a real copy of Zelda nearby...)
But I don't think it would really be the same unless I had a working TV-out on my monitor, two Nintendo controllers wired up, (hey, at least there's driver support for it...) and a perfect NES emulator... (they're getting better, but I'd want close to SNES9X's quality--for the Nintendo, of course!:) And even then... maybe it still wouldn't be the same.:)
However, since sound emulation is one of the areas most lacking on the NES emus I've seen for Linux, I'm going to sample what I can both from a real Nintendo and from some emulators wherever possible. I don't think I'll store them as raw.WAV files, though; I think I can live with a little.mp3 distortion.
(audio zealots--encode them by a factor of 2 more until no one can tell the difference; if bigger than.WAV file, use.WAV file instead.;)
...now I need to check out that site. I've heard a techno remix of Flashman's music that was ok, but my favorite was Quickman's stage. Also, I've said it before, but the music for Simon's Quest rocked!
Man, now I need to get all my Nintendo games all over again; Simon's Quest, Final Fantasy, Zelda... All gone!:| --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, SCO Merge should still be free, although it probably has some licensing restrictions. I'd still like to get that working under Linux...
I'd heard of Win4Lin, but I had forgotten, because when I went there, they had nothing I could test or download; I guess I'll have to try it now.:)
If it doesn't support NT, then it can't really be emulating everything. Sounds like what DOSEmu should be doing by now. Ah well, maybe they'll catch up, or someone will merge it with Bochs to emulate the protected-mode stuff... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I never even tried to make a comparison with UnixWare; as I said, all I ever saw was a very old box running SCO UNIX, and I've heard reports that it's pretty funky.
Linux isn't perfect, and that was a very good link BTW, but if you read the whole link, all of the major points mentioned should be fixed in 2.4; I don't know if all of them will be, but I think most of them are...
I agree with you about NFS, though; although it works fine here, I've heard it isn't perfect, and it could always use to be faster. Maybe we'll see some alternatives in the near future, though. (Coda; Linux NOW?)
I see nothing wrong with separate distros; treat them as separate UNIX flavors, and use your favorite. Portability is a good thing, anyhow. In reality they're much closer than that, though. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You can take my freedom, You can take my mp3's, but just don't take my mod files!
mp3's I can take or leave, but DemoStyle is forever, baby! Let's hear it for k-k00l MODs, S3Ms, and XMs!
(I don't know what I'd do without k_sitawe, or kngdmsky/94956...)
All Napster ever has is what everyone else already has; who wants that? Download a mod archive, and see what happens when real musicians and hackers compete for this stuff, not what the radio stations and the record companies try to shove down your throat! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The only SCO box I've ever seen was ancient, but from all reports, it's an old, crufty UNIX that needed to die.
That having been said, whoever owns SCO can port SCO Merge to Linux, and there will be much rejoicing!
(anyone get this to work? Grab it while you can, AFAICT, SCO Merge is a relatively free alternative to VMWare if you can install it; the archive is some old-style cpio archive they use for packaging, and the layout was funky enough that I didn't want to uncompress it in / on my machine; the binaries should run fine with iBCS, but it might need some SCO system-specific stuff as well, I don't know...)
But yes, SCO UNIX has nothing on Linux, but some of their applications might still be worth porting, even if all the binaries should run on Linux anyhow.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The first language I really learned how to code in was Turbo Pascal, somewhere between 5.5-7.0; I probably spent three years in high school just playing around with it, and I'll eventually work some more on BGI/SVGALib(/SDL?) portability.:)
(BASIC doesn't really count, since they didn't give me *real* subroutines for so long, and was interpreted or produced really crappy executables...)
My experience with FreePascal (or fpk-pascal) before was, although it often offers better compatibility than p2c, I'd still rather use gcc as a back-end. I never got dynamic libraries working, and I had problems porting some of my code due to apparent bugs in writeln(), (hopefully their fault, and fixed by now) and busy-wait loops (surely my fault, from programming for DOS--processes? What are those?).
Also, I wasn't too impressed with the optimizations FreePascal does, but I suppose if I give it some time, it'll get better. It does some simple things really quickly, but I saw at least a 33% speed-up not too long ago in some tightly-nested code I was hacking on just by using p2c+gcc instead....
However, for people still looking for a free Pascal language for DOS, FreePascal is a god-send, and the Linux portability can't hurt.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for providing another link to the Ed rant; I love that thing.:)
Actually, I tend to find myself using either sed or cat, but each to his own. (I much prefer it to doing everything with dd+sh...)
Well, most of what I run is, yes, xterms, Netscape, and usually mpg123 for mp3's; but PDF files just suck*, and I can see how file associations would be useful there. I gave up on them under GNOME after I tried to make one for a program that *really* wanted a terminal, even though all it really did was spawn an X-window.
(I actually had it load itself in an xterm, but what's the point? It's like that DOS window that Windows spawns and then forgets to close at the end...)
* How do we know PDFs suck? Because they look really crappy in Ed. Maybe if they weren't usually compressed... I mean, really, what was so wrong with gzipped PostScript that Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, had to mangle it and call it PDF and sell it back to us? Hmm? Ooo, they tried to stick something like HTML into it, too. Ugh. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Definitely. I wasn't trying to adopt a complete "All Closed Source Is Bad" argument there, but I was probably overgeneralizing. I guess I should move to a more clear "Open Source Whenever It Makes Sense" argument.:)
You're doing better than I am, as I haven't released a whole lot of code for anything; but then, I haven't written anything that's absolutely indispensable yet. I'd still like to code more SVGALib and BGI support on top of SDL (at the moment, I've coded some basic BGI support on top of SVGALib, and I'm not too impressed with GGI yet), and I've got a couple of other ideas, but I don't know if they'll ever happen.
My most ambitious project would be a totally configurable widget set that implements the calls for the widgets it can look like as well; but that would be a mess, and then I'd have to actually *learn* X programming.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What's this KDE is the standard I hear? Ed, ED, *ED* is the standard! Heck, whatever happened to twm? What's so hard about moving your windows around, people, that you need all this extra garbage?:)
I thought KDE looked pretty cool, but it still annoyed me too much to actually use it; it was also too slow. The same goes for GNOME. I use fvwm2, with no pager or buttons or any of that, and I select my virtual desktops with CTRL+. There's nothing hard about that. I don't want anything else, so configuration is all done, too. I like sawmill, (sawtooth? sawfish? whatever...) but not enough to use it yet; I'm pretty comfortable with what I have.
When I get my new machine, and reinstall everything, I'm sure I'll play around again with GNOME and KDE, and try them out with "sawfish", and Enlightenment and whatnot, and see if they're actually speedy or stable yet...
...but it'll probably be too much of a hassle to get rid of all that extra GUI crap and make it into a lean, mean, window-managing machine, and I'll be back to using fvwm2.
Heck, most of the time, I could just tell X to run an app fullscreen on a console, and keep doing that, and switch between those and the text consoles; but sometimes, I still want to have some more windows. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Quite right, although shareware suffers more from this than actual commercial software.
I'll agree with you about The Gimp filling a niche, and maybe X-Windows, but...
What is Emacs' niche? Is it its own niche? If I wanted a real LISP interpreter/compiler, I wouldn't use Emacs; I don't use it for an editor either--it doesn't dominate either of those niches. But perhaps if you want it all together, you want... Emacs? Hmm.
X-Windows dominates because it is a standard; I think it was made open to ensure this, too. Once a program, file format, whatever--open or closed--becomes standard and widely in use, it dominates. Of course, if it's closed, expect to see some re-implementations. Also, there are many commercial and free X-servers, and now there are alternatives that do the same sort of thing for Windows. So in this case, "X-Windows" isn't really one app, although XFree86 is pretty standard on Linux...
The Gimp is excellent, and its rival would be PhotoShop. So if you don't have the money to fork over, like The Gimp better, and are running UNIX or Windows, by all means, use The Gimp. PhotoShop is out for Windows and MacOS; the UNIX version was discontinued around 3.x, I believe, but I know that the Windows version (at least 3.0) runs very quickly under Wine. Also, we're starting to see more quality, free photo-manipulation programs for Linux, but I doubt any of them will replace The Gimp anytime soon...
But yes, my broad generalizations can often be refuted to differing degrees on a case-by-case basis. That doesn't mean there isn't any truth there, though, just that it isn't absolute.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, it makes you a naughty, naughty, bad, boy; no supper for you. Also, I searched on the net for instructions on how to grow a money tree, but they just told me to click on the links, and never showed me how...:)
But seriously, of course you shouldn't release your proprietary code. Whatever it is that makes your commercial product unique and marketable, keep it under wraps, unless your company can find another business model that works for them, and allows them to release the code. This is difficult, and won't work for many companies; heck, many of them probably can't see why they'd want to think about this in the first place, and sometimes they're right. It certainly isn't easy, and it won't make you instantly wealthy, like the money tree instructions on the internet promise to...
However, not all code is proprietary. In fact, most of it is downright dull. If you've written any libraries that are particularly good, but at the same time not a 'trade secret', you might want to release them under the LGPL, or under a BSD-style license. Ditto for any helper programs (that's why VNC was developed).
Therefore, Open Source!=Broke, and even a company that makes its living on proprietary software can still release or contribute to Open Source software as well. Apple, AT&T, Corel, (AOL/)Netscape, Sun, and many other companies have all tried this at varying levels and degrees of success.
Couldn't you call yourself something original, like "Signal 9"?
Or just do us all a favor, and go SIGKILL yourself.
Someone, moderate this guy into oblivion, spam him, and then track him down, and subscribe him to Columbia house and BMG; I'm sick of these poeople stealing user info and thinking they're clever by maligning the reputation of the posters that the trolls still couldn't hate more if they tried. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Man, I've been looking forward to this--and the D&D movie, and the Final Fantasy movie... All the gamers with decent taste finally grew up and became movie makers! Yay!
Hey, who else here loved the 6-player arcade game? I know that at least the 4-player version runs on MAME... Now if only D&D--Tower of Doom and whatnot would...
I still have that X-men arcade music going through my head... "Nightcrawler..." "ee-eeee-X-men, ee-eeee-X, ee-eeee-X-men..." "Get 'em, get 'em!"
Closed software is good because it gives us an excuse to reinvent the wheel and make better open software?
No, we do that to ourselves... Closed software is still bad, and if the world was Open Source, we'd *still* have 18 zillion versions of everything. Consider:
How many open programs are named 'ya*' or '?in?', for "Yet Another ---", or "?-- Is Not ?--"?
In the meantime, how many closed-source programs dominate the field for their type of application? (MS-Office; Windows; Photoshop; Quicken) Even if there are closed *or* open alternatives, people generally don't use them because of the stifling effects of closed software.
Even if Outlook and Eudora didn't exist, I guarantee you we'd still have mail, elm, pine, mutt.... etc., etc., ad infinitum. One program *or* one license is never enough for everybody in the Open Source world, and most people are just coding for themselves.
However, a commercial program like Outlook that is designed for the masses *does* give us something to shoot for; it's an example of "programming for the masses", which is what a program needs for more people to use it. So the Open Source e-mail clients of the future should be better for it.
BUT--this does not mean that if Microsoft opened the source for Outlook, that this would be worse--it would be better. Then we could examine it, pick it apart, and hack up a new e-mail client faster, fix some bugs, and avoid some mistakes. So open source licenses are still better, and closed programs provide an example, but they certainly don't help us by being closed, AND they aren't the reason why there are so many Open Source app/clones out there--that's just because everyone has their own itch to scratch. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What do you mean, "voting in your pajamas is unsafe"?
I mean, are you saying that when you vote, you shouldn't wear pajamas? 'cause if I tried that, I think they'd kick me out of the polls! You need to wear *at least* pajamas to go anywhere in the US--it really isn't fair.
...or do you mean that if you only vote *in* your pajamas, then that isn't safe? Well, I don't see how you'd tally the votes, or even what you're calling *voting*, you sickos.
In conclusion, I must say that when I vote, I am often in my pajamas--if by voting you mean "Slashdot polls". And I haven't gotten injured yet, except when my mouse hand starts to hurt. (Yes, I mean my *mouse* hand! You sickos!!!) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Before you spout about how much RedHat is charging, look at what the other companies charge.
MySQL provides increasing levels of support depending on how much money you give them; pay them enough, and you can get just about anything hacked into MySQL, and have a developer fly out to meet you.
Remember that old saying, "Everyone has their price"? Well, that's true for a lot of software projects, too. At least Red Hat is just offering support here, but I'm sure they get a lot of money and spend a lot of effort supporting companies like Dell or IBM or whatnot...
Actually, if it weren't for the ethics of it all, I wouldn't be surprised if a big company like Microsoft tried to buy up a lot of our developers; (so they could try to "innovate" for once) I seem to remember Alan Cox saying that he rejected a few offers from them.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
1) No, I don't think Coda is the next version of NFS; but I do think they want to replace it.
2) Coda is a network filesystem; also, what Ian was proposing in NOW sounded like one too.
3) Yeah, I really want to try out ReiserFS. I think I will when I can spring for a new computer, possibly including a couple of new hard drives--then I can really try out Software RAID, too!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Could you tell us about this "Linux NOW" project you guys are working on now?
Will the filesystem be based on Coda, or are you writing something completely new?
How does the distributed architecture compare with what is currently available?
Will it offer distributed computing, or just centralized administration?
It's great to hear that this will be released back to the community; I'm sure this will be released long before Microsoft makes any real headway on their "Millenium" project.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't posting for substance. This *is* slashdot, right?
I wasn't posting with a +1 bonus; actually, I posted the other one with the bonus to get some moderator attention. (I know they can't read anything, but I wish they'd start from the bottom and work up...)
Also, I don't think that intent really matters; judge on the merit of the post, and not on whether you think someone is a "Karma Whore". I've got a lot of karma, and I like to post on slashdot, but I've been doing it for a long time, and I don't think my posts have changed because of the addition of Karma. But I *hate* to see bad moderation, and I haven't seen that much of it lately.
(except for the occasional "Overrated" two days later when something gets moderated up to 5; I don't know how that can be anything *but* sour grapes...)
Oh yeah, this whole *thread* is Offtopic now, but marking an entire thread Offtopic is a borderline moderation abuse, IMO. Just mark the first post, and make sure the others aren't above 1, I'd say.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well now I'm pissed.
Someone, please read my parent comment and tell me why it's "Offtopic".
Does the moderator in question simply lack all reading comprehension? No, really, I want an answer! Let's have some accountability in reviewing here.
Okay, moderators; whatever. But before you mod this comment down, I expect you to read the parent comment, and either (1) decide to moderate it back up, or (2) tell me why it was Offtopic.
Thank you.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If you don't like it, go build a still.
That's what people did when I was in the mountains. It's cost-effective, too, provided that vegetable matter stays cheaper than gas...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This was pretty stupid the first time; why do we have to have *two* stories on it?
;)
Oh... to make fun of ZD-Net, of course! They'll publish anything!
(Hey, let's get TUCOWS to write a really long piece on the corruption in and downfall of Microsoft; that would be *excellent* on ZD-Net!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why couldn't the W3C act more like Sun instead of like the UN?
I'd love it if they had some actual *teeth*, and control over the market. Even if they had to rigidly define both the standards (HTML, XML, different versions, etc.) and maybe even some browser behavior, I'd love it if they could sue Microsoft for claiming that IE5 was a compliant web browser instead of sitting idly by and letting them uglify the web.
I mean, how can you claim that your browser supports CSS when you can't pass the tests for it? That's exactly like claiming that "Microsoft Java" is Java. How can you claim that your products generate HTML when in actuality they use Windows-only, Microsoft-only character sets, and often can't display a quote to save their lives in any sort of cross-platform manner?
Standards are good, and I wish that companies would stick to them. Not break them; certainly not patent them. They can be involved in the standards process, but if they add anything non-compliant, there should be an option to turn that *off*, like -ansi mode on a good C compiler; and there should be rigorous compliance tests.
Of course, I also wish I were rich, and we had world peace, but...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, I hate iNES....
:)
Use MESS or DarcNES; I hear TuxNES has gotten better, too. I need to download them all and try them all again.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I just got a Nintendo again from e-bay, and I've been playing Metroid, but I also have Megaman & Megaman 2, Ninja Gaiden III, and a few other games. So I must say...
:)
:) And even then... maybe it still wouldn't be the same. :)
.WAV files, though; I think I can live with a little .mp3 distortion.
.WAV file, use .WAV file instead. ;)
:|
It's so much better playing the games on the real system!
After I didn't have my Nintendo anymore, I used to try to delude myself into thinking that emulators were just as good, and I must say, back when I was running DOS, Nesticle was pretty good. I dumped the intro music from Zelda with it, and I was hard-pressed to tell the difference. (not that I had a real copy of Zelda nearby...)
But I don't think it would really be the same unless I had a working TV-out on my monitor, two Nintendo controllers wired up, (hey, at least there's driver support for it...) and a perfect NES emulator... (they're getting better, but I'd want close to SNES9X's quality--for the Nintendo, of course!
However, since sound emulation is one of the areas most lacking on the NES emus I've seen for Linux, I'm going to sample what I can both from a real Nintendo and from some emulators wherever possible. I don't think I'll store them as raw
(audio zealots--encode them by a factor of 2 more until no one can tell the difference; if bigger than
...now I need to check out that site. I've heard a techno remix of Flashman's music that was ok, but my favorite was Quickman's stage. Also, I've said it before, but the music for Simon's Quest rocked!
Man, now I need to get all my Nintendo games all over again; Simon's Quest, Final Fantasy, Zelda... All gone!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, SCO Merge should still be free, although it probably has some licensing restrictions. I'd still like to get that working under Linux...
:)
I'd heard of Win4Lin, but I had forgotten, because when I went there, they had nothing I could test or download; I guess I'll have to try it now.
If it doesn't support NT, then it can't really be emulating everything. Sounds like what DOSEmu should be doing by now. Ah well, maybe they'll catch up, or someone will merge it with Bochs to emulate the protected-mode stuff...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I never even tried to make a comparison with UnixWare; as I said, all I ever saw was a very old box running SCO UNIX, and I've heard reports that it's pretty funky.
Linux isn't perfect, and that was a very good link BTW, but if you read the whole link, all of the major points mentioned should be fixed in 2.4; I don't know if all of them will be, but I think most of them are...
I agree with you about NFS, though; although it works fine here, I've heard it isn't perfect, and it could always use to be faster. Maybe we'll see some alternatives in the near future, though. (Coda; Linux NOW?)
I see nothing wrong with separate distros; treat them as separate UNIX flavors, and use your favorite. Portability is a good thing, anyhow. In reality they're much closer than that, though.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You can take my freedom,
You can take my mp3's,
but just don't take my mod files!
mp3's I can take or leave, but DemoStyle is forever, baby! Let's hear it for k-k00l MODs, S3Ms, and XMs!
(I don't know what I'd do without k_sitawe, or kngdmsky/94956...)
All Napster ever has is what everyone else already has; who wants that? Download a mod archive, and see what happens when real musicians and hackers compete for this stuff, not what the radio stations and the record companies try to shove down your throat!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The only SCO box I've ever seen was ancient, but from all reports, it's an old, crufty UNIX that needed to die.
:)
That having been said, whoever owns SCO can port SCO Merge to Linux, and there will be much rejoicing!
(anyone get this to work? Grab it while you can, AFAICT, SCO Merge is a relatively free alternative to VMWare if you can install it; the archive is some old-style cpio archive they use for packaging, and the layout was funky enough that I didn't want to uncompress it in / on my machine; the binaries should run fine with iBCS, but it might need some SCO system-specific stuff as well, I don't know...)
But yes, SCO UNIX has nothing on Linux, but some of their applications might still be worth porting, even if all the binaries should run on Linux anyhow.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Boring repetitive anonymous troll...
Go code Lazarus in XLib and hack in Win32 compatibility after you implement font support.
Luser!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'll have to try it out again...
:)
:)
The first language I really learned how to code in was Turbo Pascal, somewhere between 5.5-7.0; I probably spent three years in high school just playing around with it, and I'll eventually work some more on BGI/SVGALib(/SDL?) portability.
(BASIC doesn't really count, since they didn't give me *real* subroutines for so long, and was interpreted or produced really crappy executables...)
My experience with FreePascal (or fpk-pascal) before was, although it often offers better compatibility than p2c, I'd still rather use gcc as a back-end. I never got dynamic libraries working, and I had problems porting some of my code due to apparent bugs in writeln(), (hopefully their fault, and fixed by now) and busy-wait loops (surely my fault, from programming for DOS--processes? What are those?).
Also, I wasn't too impressed with the optimizations FreePascal does, but I suppose if I give it some time, it'll get better. It does some simple things really quickly, but I saw at least a 33% speed-up not too long ago in some tightly-nested code I was hacking on just by using p2c+gcc instead....
However, for people still looking for a free Pascal language for DOS, FreePascal is a god-send, and the Linux portability can't hurt.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for providing another link to the Ed rant; I love that thing. :)
Actually, I tend to find myself using either sed or cat, but each to his own. (I much prefer it to doing everything with dd+sh...)
Well, most of what I run is, yes, xterms, Netscape, and usually mpg123 for mp3's; but PDF files just suck*, and I can see how file associations would be useful there. I gave up on them under GNOME after I tried to make one for a program that *really* wanted a terminal, even though all it really did was spawn an X-window.
(I actually had it load itself in an xterm, but what's the point? It's like that DOS window that Windows spawns and then forgets to close at the end...)
* How do we know PDFs suck? Because they look really crappy in Ed. Maybe if they weren't usually compressed... I mean, really, what was so wrong with gzipped PostScript that Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, had to mangle it and call it PDF and sell it back to us? Hmm? Ooo, they tried to stick something like HTML into it, too. Ugh.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Definitely. I wasn't trying to adopt a complete "All Closed Source Is Bad" argument there, but I was probably overgeneralizing. I guess I should move to a more clear "Open Source Whenever It Makes Sense" argument. :)
:)
You're doing better than I am, as I haven't released a whole lot of code for anything; but then, I haven't written anything that's absolutely indispensable yet. I'd still like to code more SVGALib and BGI support on top of SDL (at the moment, I've coded some basic BGI support on top of SVGALib, and I'm not too impressed with GGI yet), and I've got a couple of other ideas, but I don't know if they'll ever happen.
My most ambitious project would be a totally configurable widget set that implements the calls for the widgets it can look like as well; but that would be a mess, and then I'd have to actually *learn* X programming.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What's this KDE is the standard I hear? Ed, ED, *ED* is the standard! Heck, whatever happened to twm? What's so hard about moving your windows around, people, that you need all this extra garbage? :)
I thought KDE looked pretty cool, but it still annoyed me too much to actually use it; it was also too slow. The same goes for GNOME. I use fvwm2, with no pager or buttons or any of that, and I select my virtual desktops with CTRL+. There's nothing hard about that. I don't want anything else, so configuration is all done, too. I like sawmill, (sawtooth? sawfish? whatever...) but not enough to use it yet; I'm pretty comfortable with what I have.
When I get my new machine, and reinstall everything, I'm sure I'll play around again with GNOME and KDE, and try them out with "sawfish", and Enlightenment and whatnot, and see if they're actually speedy or stable yet...
...but it'll probably be too much of a hassle to get rid of all that extra GUI crap and make it into a lean, mean, window-managing machine, and I'll be back to using fvwm2.
Heck, most of the time, I could just tell X to run an app fullscreen on a console, and keep doing that, and switch between those and the text consoles; but sometimes, I still want to have some more windows.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Quite right, although shareware suffers more from this than actual commercial software.
:)
I'll agree with you about The Gimp filling a niche, and maybe X-Windows, but...
What is Emacs' niche? Is it its own niche? If I wanted a real LISP interpreter/compiler, I wouldn't use Emacs; I don't use it for an editor either--it doesn't dominate either of those niches. But perhaps if you want it all together, you want... Emacs? Hmm.
X-Windows dominates because it is a standard; I think it was made open to ensure this, too. Once a program, file format, whatever--open or closed--becomes standard and widely in use, it dominates. Of course, if it's closed, expect to see some re-implementations. Also, there are many commercial and free X-servers, and now there are alternatives that do the same sort of thing for Windows. So in this case, "X-Windows" isn't really one app, although XFree86 is pretty standard on Linux...
The Gimp is excellent, and its rival would be PhotoShop. So if you don't have the money to fork over, like The Gimp better, and are running UNIX or Windows, by all means, use The Gimp. PhotoShop is out for Windows and MacOS; the UNIX version was discontinued around 3.x, I believe, but I know that the Windows version (at least 3.0) runs very quickly under Wine. Also, we're starting to see more quality, free photo-manipulation programs for Linux, but I doubt any of them will replace The Gimp anytime soon...
But yes, my broad generalizations can often be refuted to differing degrees on a case-by-case basis. That doesn't mean there isn't any truth there, though, just that it isn't absolute.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, it makes you a naughty, naughty, bad, boy; no supper for you. Also, I searched on the net for instructions on how to grow a money tree, but they just told me to click on the links, and never showed me how... :)
But seriously, of course you shouldn't release your proprietary code. Whatever it is that makes your commercial product unique and marketable, keep it under wraps, unless your company can find another business model that works for them, and allows them to release the code. This is difficult, and won't work for many companies; heck, many of them probably can't see why they'd want to think about this in the first place, and sometimes they're right. It certainly isn't easy, and it won't make you instantly wealthy, like the money tree instructions on the internet promise to...
However, not all code is proprietary. In fact, most of it is downright dull. If you've written any libraries that are particularly good, but at the same time not a 'trade secret', you might want to release them under the LGPL, or under a BSD-style license. Ditto for any helper programs (that's why VNC was developed).
Therefore, Open Source!=Broke, and even a company that makes its living on proprietary software can still release or contribute to Open Source software as well. Apple, AT&T, Corel, (AOL/)Netscape, Sun, and many other companies have all tried this at varying levels and degrees of success.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Christ; not another moronic Sig11 clone.
Couldn't you call yourself something original, like "Signal 9"?
Or just do us all a favor, and go SIGKILL yourself.
Someone, moderate this guy into oblivion, spam him, and then track him down, and subscribe him to Columbia house and BMG; I'm sick of these poeople stealing user info and thinking they're clever by maligning the reputation of the posters that the trolls still couldn't hate more if they tried.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Man, I've been looking forward to this--and the D&D movie, and the Final Fantasy movie... All the gamers with decent taste finally grew up and became movie makers! Yay!
Hey, who else here loved the 6-player arcade game? I know that at least the 4-player version runs on MAME... Now if only D&D--Tower of Doom and whatnot would...
I still have that X-men arcade music going through my head... "Nightcrawler..." "ee-eeee-X-men, ee-eeee-X, ee-eeee-X-men..." "Get 'em, get 'em!"
Sorry; damn, that's catchy!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Closed software is good because it gives us an excuse to reinvent the wheel and make better open software?
No, we do that to ourselves... Closed software is still bad, and if the world was Open Source, we'd *still* have 18 zillion versions of everything. Consider:
How many open programs are named 'ya*' or '?in?', for "Yet Another ---", or "?-- Is Not ?--"?
In the meantime, how many closed-source programs dominate the field for their type of application? (MS-Office; Windows; Photoshop; Quicken) Even if there are closed *or* open alternatives, people generally don't use them because of the stifling effects of closed software.
Even if Outlook and Eudora didn't exist, I guarantee you we'd still have mail, elm, pine, mutt.... etc., etc., ad infinitum. One program *or* one license is never enough for everybody in the Open Source world, and most people are just coding for themselves.
However, a commercial program like Outlook that is designed for the masses *does* give us something to shoot for; it's an example of "programming for the masses", which is what a program needs for more people to use it. So the Open Source e-mail clients of the future should be better for it.
BUT--this does not mean that if Microsoft opened the source for Outlook, that this would be worse--it would be better. Then we could examine it, pick it apart, and hack up a new e-mail client faster, fix some bugs, and avoid some mistakes. So open source licenses are still better, and closed programs provide an example, but they certainly don't help us by being closed, AND they aren't the reason why there are so many Open Source app/clones out there--that's just because everyone has their own itch to scratch.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What do you mean, "voting in your pajamas is unsafe"?
I mean, are you saying that when you vote, you shouldn't wear pajamas? 'cause if I tried that, I think they'd kick me out of the polls! You need to wear *at least* pajamas to go anywhere in the US--it really isn't fair.
...or do you mean that if you only vote *in* your pajamas, then that isn't safe? Well, I don't see how you'd tally the votes, or even what you're calling *voting*, you sickos.
In conclusion, I must say that when I vote, I am often in my pajamas--if by voting you mean "Slashdot polls". And I haven't gotten injured yet, except when my mouse hand starts to hurt. (Yes, I mean my *mouse* hand! You sickos!!!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Before you spout about how much RedHat is charging, look at what the other companies charge.
:)
MySQL provides increasing levels of support depending on how much money you give them; pay them enough, and you can get just about anything hacked into MySQL, and have a developer fly out to meet you.
Remember that old saying, "Everyone has their price"? Well, that's true for a lot of software projects, too. At least Red Hat is just offering support here, but I'm sure they get a lot of money and spend a lot of effort supporting companies like Dell or IBM or whatnot...
Actually, if it weren't for the ethics of it all, I wouldn't be surprised if a big company like Microsoft tried to buy up a lot of our developers; (so they could try to "innovate" for once) I seem to remember Alan Cox saying that he rejected a few offers from them.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Off the top of my head...
:)
1) No, I don't think Coda is the next version of NFS; but I do think they want to replace it.
2) Coda is a network filesystem; also, what Ian was proposing in NOW sounded like one too.
3) Yeah, I really want to try out ReiserFS. I think I will when I can spring for a new computer, possibly including a couple of new hard drives--then I can really try out Software RAID, too!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Could you tell us about this "Linux NOW" project you guys are working on now?
:)
Will the filesystem be based on Coda, or are you writing something completely new?
How does the distributed architecture compare with what is currently available?
Will it offer distributed computing, or just centralized administration?
It's great to hear that this will be released back to the community; I'm sure this will be released long before Microsoft makes any real headway on their "Millenium" project.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.