I'll pay $5-10/mon US for /. NNTP gateway w/o ads.
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
I'm suprised nobody has brought this up. I would be willing to pay something like $5-10/month for an nntp slashdot gateway without ads. I want to make sure I am clear about this: no ads attached to messages. TACO: for this service you will get my money.
I know gnus has a makeshift/. backend, but last I tried it, it didn't work and I don't feel like messing with CVS gnus. I want a clean, reliable nntp gateway that doesn't depend on parsing html. Don't bother putting more ads up on the main site, because people will block them (including myself).
I don't know much about ogg, as I use mp3 for most of my music encoding. I've played around with various bit rates and finaly settled on what I felt was the best for me in terms of quality vs size.
I now encode all of my music at a variable bit rate 64-256kbps with lame. Lame 3.70 does a really good job of this and produces files (at least for the types of music I listen to) that sound very good. For the most part, they encode smaller than a 192kbps, as the average bit rate used is less. As a check, peeking at John Coletrane's Giant Steps, the average bit rate is right around 150. The bulk of my music averages between 160 and 192kbps.
The cool thing about vbr is that if the file needs more than that, is can use up to 256kbps to help make the harder to encode spots sound better. So I guess the worst case size you could get would be a song completely encoded at 256kbps (but I can't say that has ever happened).
I have a hard time telling these vbr 64-256kbps files apart from the orignal cd. Sometimes I can tell, but it is rare and difficult. However, IANAA (I am not an audiophile), so doing your own tests should help.
All of your standard tools should support vbr files. Xmms does a fine job. I did need to upgrade mpg123 to pre0.59s, however.
Anyway, consider vbr before you go straight to 300kbps.
But if you have access to the school's internal network--you can ssh to one of your probably several university shell accounts--you can get out. And for the most part, there isn't anything they can do to stop that. Do your pr0n surfing, etc from another machine. I doubt the prof has a button to turn off all of the traffic going out of the campus.
They say the prof can capture e-mail and/or IM and display it. I have to imagine that isn't a very robust system. Maybe just consists of packet sniffing? That probably won't be useful if you have ssh'ed into another machine and send your mail/IM from there.
So maybe they could shut down ssh on school machines. Well, if you live in a dorm, set up ssh on a different port on a machine there and ssh into that. You could have all kinds of fun with that.
The list of ways to get around this kind of thing goes on and on, and IMHO you will probably learn more about networking than you might from a monotone prof. You get out of class what you put into it. If students don't care enough to pay attention, I say let them fail, and if they can pass anyway, let them pass.
For basic, non-security updates, I hit one of the mirrors for all my apt-get fun. While it may be unlikely that one of the main debian servers would be compromised, I wonder if they mirrors wouldn't be more vulnerable...
I guess these are the chances we take in binary upgrades, but I'm not sure that source would be much more safe, at least for those of us who don't personaly audit every single source update we do (I know I don't have the time).
Websites operated by just four corporations account for 50.4 percent of the time that U.S. users of the Web are now spending online, the authoritative Jupiter Media Metrix research firm reported in early summer.
So these people are making a claim about the amount of time people spend on websites. I'm still hunting for the reference, but the question I ask myself is, how did they collect this data? I can think of at least three different ways.
Interviewing/Observing test subjects
Requesting traffic logs from sites
Requesting traffic logs from ISP's
I would doubt method three was used, as it would probably be a violation of rights, and I doubt most ISP's would give out that info without a court order. So that leaves us with at least two other possibilities, either direct observation or requesting logs from websites.
As I'm sure most will agree, neither of these methods is going to give you good data. In the first case, I guarantee people are not going to surf the same way being observed as they will unobserved. Who volunteers for this kind of survey and looks at pr0nography, stileproject and other disgusting sites, looks at pr0nography, illegaly downloads music and movies, looks at pr0nography, grabs spl0its for some kiddie h4x0ring, and looks at pr0nography while being observed? If they were actually observed in a lab, I would almost guess the researchers might have warned against illegal activity while surfing. If the subjects were interviewed, do you honestly think they would say this is how they spent their time surfing. If you were to ask Joe Sixpack on the street what websites he looked at, he will probably only remember the names of most of the major sites (because they are so visible), and wouldn't have the guts to name his favorite pr0n site.
The second method has its share of flaws too. The researchers are going to, of course, request the logs for all of the major (ie visibile) sites. But how can you get logs from the multitute of little known sites out there? You will never get them all; the best you can do is estimate, at which point you are making up your own data.
If someone can get find the reference for this "study" and post a link here, I would appreciate it. I think Jupiter Media Metrix web site is mediametrix.com but I can't get in with my non-Javascript enabled browser.:P
[XXX] will become so widely practised that enforcing the law would put most of the population in the jail.
I do wish that logic actually held. It doesn't seem to make a bit of difference when it comes to marijuana laws.
President Bush, in his great drug policy speech of September 5, 1989, promised to double the federal priso n population again, after it had been doubled under Reagan. He succeeded. In 1993, President Bill Clinton planned to redouble the number of prisoners by 1996. He did.
-- Jack Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes
I think the United States has shown its willingness to drop large sections of the populus in cages. Maybe you should rethink the protection you feel you have by virtue of "everyone else is doing it too." I would have for you to become the newest forced employee of our great nation's prison industry.
If you are getting a big refund check, then you are probably paying too much in taxes. By not hanging on to that money yourself, you've lost the time value it had. You could have put it in something low risk like money market and still have come out ahead.
Sounds like the person doing your taxes might be getting you screwed.
Frankly, I don't quite understand why everyone is getting so upset about the way slashdot covered this story (and stories like it).
The cold, hard fact is, slashdot exists to make money. Money comes from selling advertisement space and advertisers will pay more money for pages that get a large amount of hits. Those hits come from people who want to read and post on a story, and the simple fact is: on slashdot, controversial stories (ie misleading, flamewar topics, etc) generate hits. So an easy method of making money with slashdot is with controversial stories; one way to do that is have Hemos act like a fool and post something misleading so that the hordes of crazies out there in Slashdotland flood in with their precious eyeballs, "eating up" the ads and thus generating revenue.
Come on, why do you think Jon Katz is still on staff? At least I assume he is still on staff; I've had him filtered out for so long he may not be.;)
IMHO, it is foolish to depend on slashdot writeups for coverage on a topic likely to generate flamewars (like politics, guis, etc), because the writeup is likely to be skewed to bring out the crazies. In some sense, you are being exploited. So why stick around slashdot? The fact is, because the community can create content (ie posts), we are not limited to the sometimes inaccurate content that slashdot provides. A lot of smart people still gather here (although I admit less so today than yesterday, both literally and figuratively), so it is still worth reading.
The bottom line is, if you want to encourage slashdot not to skew news, DON'T READ AND POST THOSE STORIES--IGNORE THEM. All they want from readers is a response--good or bad--because that is enough to generate money. Hit them where it hurts (by not generating hits) and if they have any sort of business sense, they will change. I admit that I am only encouraging this type of story by reading and posting, but if this post stops two people without ad filtering proxies from doing so, then good has been done. (And yes, taco, I filter your ads--all of them.)
If you are generating lots of hits on this story, it is *your* fault that slashdot tolerates writeups like this.
And what did Shapeshifter presented as a defence? A whole bunch of nothing.
Last I checked, people in America do not have to prove they are innocent; they are innocent until the prosecution proves them guilty. He doesn't have to prove he wasn't directing the protest from his phone--some lawyer has to prove he *was*.
The point wasn't his guilt or innocense, but the fact he was convicted on flimsy evidence.
So what if they have a subscription service, even if they keep around their free service. When is the last time you used a server actually run by napster anyway? Frankly, I find the selection on non-napster owned servers to be better anway, and they are often just less clogged up.
So how do you do this, you ask? Just head right over to a server list (such as napigator's), find yourself an opennap server, load it up in gnapster and go on with your bad self. No fuss, no muss, no bother.
So somebody tell me again why napster's decision to have a subscription service matter? Do you really need to pay money per month to be able to download the newest Back Street Boy's single?
Measuring the performance of machines is way to complicated of an issue to use something like a MIPS rating. Because MIPS factors out the instruction count needed to get something done, you can inflate your rating by doing a large load of useless instructions really quickly.
So if another computer can do the same amount of work with ten times less instructions, it doesn't show up in a MIPS rating.
Measuring performance just isn't as simple as looking at a single numeric rating. Sometimes you are interested in measuring responsiveness, somtimes throughput, and a lot of it depends on the specific applications you want to run. Just asking "how fast" is a processor is almost meaningless.
To my knowledge, the spec benchmarks, while not free, are the best standardized benchmarks out there. For integer performance alone, it tests data compression (gzip and bzip I think), FPGA circuit placement, compiling c code, chess, running perl, ray tracing, database stuff, etc; I can't even remember all of the stuff it tests for floating point performance. Obviously, because it isn't free you probably won't be using it to test your home linux box, but if you are doing serious bench marks, the money would be worth it.
Make up some incredibly trivial "content protection" scheme designed to keep out RIAA, lawyers, or anyone else who might give them trouble, then if those people get in, sue on the basis that they broke the "content protection" mechanism.
it is looking for some insecure cgi type package (search bugtraq for the many possibilities) that puts something in robots.txt. Whatever it puts in there could be used to identify whether the package is installed on the server, letting the cracker know the box is can be compromised.
Nobody. We're supposed to be impressed by your example of two pieces of software being changed to GPL? Wow. That sure proves something.
The authors of QT and Python are adults, not children, and your suggestion that they were forced to do anything is ridiculous. I've never heard such bullshit. Does Microsoft's FUD *force* you to use any of their software? I hope not, unless you are the worlds biggest moron who can not make choices for himself.
And as for the (-1, Troll) comment, no it isn't valid. We all know it is a reverse psychology karma whoring technique, and I felt the need to bust him on it.
I have strongly come to believe that the GPL is the worst license for any entity that expects to use software freely to use. The GPL (and RMS) is becoming a Borg-like in the way it is trying to usurp the intentions of authors of Open Source software everywhere by forcing them to assimilated. The quickest thing that will cool the government's ardor for Open Source software will be all the innumerable license incompatibilities caused by the GPL.
Gosh, who is going to protect us from the big bad RMS with his big bad GPL? What a crock of shit.
Authors decide on a license that is right for them, and as an author, you can release your software under as many licenses as you see fit. So the question is, how is RMS usurping anything? How can he possibly assimilate anyone? If you don't like his license, don't use it. Make your contributions to BSD licensed software, use BSD licensed software, and move along your merry way. Just don't bitch when some author releases his software under a license you don't like. The choice of licenses is his.
Fact of the matter is, authors don't care how free Carnage4Life thinks their software is; they use a license that fits their vision for the software.
(+5, Insightful) This user doesn't feel confident that his opinion stands on its own and thus needs to end his posts by suggesting he would only be moderated down because his views are unpopular to the/. horde.
I still think C and perl both beat smalltalk in the amount of prewritten code out there.
CPAN has a module for anything I have ever wanted to do. C has tons of code available from all over the place, including several high quality, fully functional operating systems. There may be smalltalk code out there, but I don't think there is as much as there is C and perl.
Not completely from scratch, but the amount of code out there doesn't come close to the amount of, say, C, C++, or perl code. Practically anything I want to do is already done in any of those languages, especially perl.
No, not all projects start off small. One of the rules of thumb of commercial software development is a product that takes less than six months to develop probably has no real value. Why? Because a group of average programmers can copy it in less than a year.
If you would have read my entire post, you would have realized the first part was not about commercial software. Sorry, but most Free software projects do start off small; the projects that start large are few and far between. I'd ask if you had any experience, but I see you don't even have the courage to list an e-mail address.
I've written some extremely useful stuff this way! But there are words for this: hacking, cowboy coding, etc. Do not confuse this with software engineering.
Again, if you actually read my post, you would know that I never mentioned the word engineering; so don't put words in my mouth. Perhaps you need to brush up on your reading comprehension skills, troll, rather than spending all of your time engineering software.
My entire point was the non-adoption of Smalltalk has little to do with the language itself, and more to do with the people who haven't adopted it: in the Free software world, it doesn't fit the culture very well, in the commercial world, it hasn't been marketed.
I'd wager the reasons the Free software crowd (however it is supposed to be these days, Open Source, Free, whatever) hasn't picked it up are: lack of large stores of prewritten smalltalk code, and the fact that OO design is overkill for small projects.
Allow me to elaborate. There is tons of existing C, C++, perl, etc code out there; seems like if there is anything that you would want to do, code is already out there. Why start in a language where you don't have quite as much to build on?
I hate to knock everyone's pet design methodology, but OO design *really* is overkill for smaller projects; and all projects start off small. Free software gets written because some developer has an itch. Rather than drawing up miles of uml charts for a design, [s]?he whips something quick out in a language they are familiar with (and one with lots of existing code, no less). Only afterwards does it start to grow into something that might benefit from a structured design.
The reasons the rest of the world hasn't picked it up probably has more to do with marketing than anything else. So (because no monopoly software maker has told them they need to) businesses aren't looking for people with smalltalk skills. So people don't bother to learn it as it won't further their career any.
What do you expect? Many Colleges and Universities are no longer institutions of higher learning and research; instead they have become money making institutions. They exist to make money.
My university started putting televisions in public places that constantly blast gubbish music and advertisements targeted at "twenty-something college students who know nothing about debt with credit cards given to them by parents". You can't turn down the volume (they are contractually obligated to keep a particular volume), turn them off, or otherwise exist in a public place without being marketed to. Only after serious complaints (by alumni, I'd wager) did they shut off the televisions in the cafeteria. Not only that, but the shit they blast just plain sucks; the kind of trash music propagated by Mtv and the like.
So my solution is not to go to these public places, and more importantly, not to spend any money at them. Unfortunately, so few other people seem to care. But living in a corporate engineered reality doesn't sit well with me.
If they are really worried about it. On the dorm networks where I go to school, so much stuff is available from people setting shares on windows boxen: entire full length movies, more mp3's than I've ever seen, etc etc. Napster is all find and good, but you can find so much more on peoples shares.
But whatever. None of this seems to have anything to do with common sense. Let them kill napster; people will always run OpenNap servers.
If you have ever looked at another person's Perl code and tried to maintain it, you know what I mean.
Wow, what a common misconception. I can write unmaintainable code in any language, and maintainable code in any language. I've seen beautiful perl code readable like plain enlgish and I've seen perl code so bad, it looked like it was run through a blender. But the same can be said for python; bad code can be written in every language. The key issue is the abuse of syntactic features, either through overuse or underuse.
The great thing is almost every language has a single syntactic element that makes every other line of code perfectly readable when used; it is called the comment. I suggest sprinkling it throughout code in any language.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't have anything at all against python; I just don't like to see people say misleading things about perl.
And BTW, C++ is not an object oriented language--it is a hybrid language. An examle of a real OO language would be Smalltalk.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm suprised nobody has brought this up. I would be willing to pay something like $5-10/month for an nntp slashdot gateway without ads. I want to make sure I am clear about this: no ads attached to messages. TACO: for this service you will get my money.
/. backend, but last I tried it, it didn't work and I don't feel like messing with CVS gnus. I want a clean, reliable nntp gateway that doesn't depend on parsing html. Don't bother putting more ads up on the main site, because people will block them (including myself).
I know gnus has a makeshift
Just my 0.01999999999999.
I don't know much about ogg, as I use mp3 for most of my music encoding. I've played around with various bit rates and finaly settled on what I felt was the best for me in terms of quality vs size.
I now encode all of my music at a variable bit rate 64-256kbps with lame. Lame 3.70 does a really good job of this and produces files (at least for the types of music I listen to) that sound very good. For the most part, they encode smaller than a 192kbps, as the average bit rate used is less. As a check, peeking at John Coletrane's Giant Steps, the average bit rate is right around 150. The bulk of my music averages between 160 and 192kbps.
The cool thing about vbr is that if the file needs more than that, is can use up to 256kbps to help make the harder to encode spots sound better. So I guess the worst case size you could get would be a song completely encoded at 256kbps (but I can't say that has ever happened).
I have a hard time telling these vbr 64-256kbps files apart from the orignal cd. Sometimes I can tell, but it is rare and difficult. However, IANAA (I am not an audiophile), so doing your own tests should help.
All of your standard tools should support vbr files. Xmms does a fine job. I did need to upgrade mpg123 to pre0.59s, however.
Anyway, consider vbr before you go straight to 300kbps.
Then you go to tunneling ip over http. (:
You might stop the stupid people.
But if you have access to the school's internal network--you can ssh to one of your probably several university shell accounts--you can get out. And for the most part, there isn't anything they can do to stop that. Do your pr0n surfing, etc from another machine. I doubt the prof has a button to turn off all of the traffic going out of the campus.
They say the prof can capture e-mail and/or IM and display it. I have to imagine that isn't a very robust system. Maybe just consists of packet sniffing? That probably won't be useful if you have ssh'ed into another machine and send your mail/IM from there.
So maybe they could shut down ssh on school machines. Well, if you live in a dorm, set up ssh on a different port on a machine there and ssh into that. You could have all kinds of fun with that.
The list of ways to get around this kind of thing goes on and on, and IMHO you will probably learn more about networking than you might from a monotone prof. You get out of class what you put into it. If students don't care enough to pay attention, I say let them fail, and if they can pass anyway, let them pass.
For basic, non-security updates, I hit one of the mirrors for all my apt-get fun. While it may be unlikely that one of the main debian servers would be compromised, I wonder if they mirrors wouldn't be more vulnerable...
I guess these are the chances we take in binary upgrades, but I'm not sure that source would be much more safe, at least for those of us who don't personaly audit every single source update we do (I know I don't have the time).
Okay, so let me get this straight...
So these people are making a claim about the amount of time people spend on websites. I'm still hunting for the reference, but the question I ask myself is, how did they collect this data? I can think of at least three different ways.
I would doubt method three was used, as it would probably be a violation of rights, and I doubt most ISP's would give out that info without a court order. So that leaves us with at least two other possibilities, either direct observation or requesting logs from websites.
As I'm sure most will agree, neither of these methods is going to give you good data. In the first case, I guarantee people are not going to surf the same way being observed as they will unobserved. Who volunteers for this kind of survey and looks at pr0nography, stileproject and other disgusting sites, looks at pr0nography, illegaly downloads music and movies, looks at pr0nography, grabs spl0its for some kiddie h4x0ring, and looks at pr0nography while being observed? If they were actually observed in a lab, I would almost guess the researchers might have warned against illegal activity while surfing. If the subjects were interviewed, do you honestly think they would say this is how they spent their time surfing. If you were to ask Joe Sixpack on the street what websites he looked at, he will probably only remember the names of most of the major sites (because they are so visible), and wouldn't have the guts to name his favorite pr0n site.
The second method has its share of flaws too. The researchers are going to, of course, request the logs for all of the major (ie visibile) sites. But how can you get logs from the multitute of little known sites out there? You will never get them all; the best you can do is estimate, at which point you are making up your own data.
If someone can get find the reference for this "study" and post a link here, I would appreciate it. I think Jupiter Media Metrix web site is mediametrix.com but I can't get in with my non-Javascript enabled browser. :P
[XXX] will become so widely practised that enforcing the law would put most of the population in the jail.
I do wish that logic actually held. It doesn't seem to make a bit of difference when it comes to marijuana laws.
I think the United States has shown its willingness to drop large sections of the populus in cages. Maybe you should rethink the protection you feel you have by virtue of "everyone else is doing it too." I would have for you to become the newest forced employee of our great nation's prison industry.
If you are getting a big refund check, then you are probably paying too much in taxes. By not hanging on to that money yourself, you've lost the time value it had. You could have put it in something low risk like money market and still have come out ahead.
Sounds like the person doing your taxes might be getting you screwed.
Frankly, I don't quite understand why everyone is getting so upset about the way slashdot covered this story (and stories like it).
;)
The cold, hard fact is, slashdot exists to make money. Money comes from selling advertisement space and advertisers will pay more money for pages that get a large amount of hits. Those hits come from people who want to read and post on a story, and the simple fact is: on slashdot, controversial stories (ie misleading, flamewar topics, etc) generate hits. So an easy method of making money with slashdot is with controversial stories; one way to do that is have Hemos act like a fool and post something misleading so that the hordes of crazies out there in Slashdotland flood in with their precious eyeballs, "eating up" the ads and thus generating revenue.
Come on, why do you think Jon Katz is still on staff? At least I assume he is still on staff; I've had him filtered out for so long he may not be.
IMHO, it is foolish to depend on slashdot writeups for coverage on a topic likely to generate flamewars (like politics, guis, etc), because the writeup is likely to be skewed to bring out the crazies. In some sense, you are being exploited. So why stick around slashdot? The fact is, because the community can create content (ie posts), we are not limited to the sometimes inaccurate content that slashdot provides. A lot of smart people still gather here (although I admit less so today than yesterday, both literally and figuratively), so it is still worth reading.
The bottom line is, if you want to encourage slashdot not to skew news, DON'T READ AND POST THOSE STORIES--IGNORE THEM. All they want from readers is a response--good or bad--because that is enough to generate money. Hit them where it hurts (by not generating hits) and if they have any sort of business sense, they will change. I admit that I am only encouraging this type of story by reading and posting, but if this post stops two people without ad filtering proxies from doing so, then good has been done. (And yes, taco, I filter your ads--all of them.)
If you are generating lots of hits on this story, it is *your* fault that slashdot tolerates writeups like this.
so if he's not best suited to deal with cases like this why is he so certin that he made the right decision?
Because the MPAA told him so, silly. How else?
And what did Shapeshifter presented as a defence? A whole bunch of nothing.
Last I checked, people in America do not have to prove they are innocent; they are innocent until the prosecution proves them guilty. He doesn't have to prove he wasn't directing the protest from his phone--some lawyer has to prove he *was*.
The point wasn't his guilt or innocense, but the fact he was convicted on flimsy evidence.
So what if they have a subscription service, even if they keep around their free service. When is the last time you used a server actually run by napster anyway? Frankly, I find the selection on non-napster owned servers to be better anway, and they are often just less clogged up.
So how do you do this, you ask? Just head right over to a server list (such as napigator's), find yourself an opennap server, load it up in gnapster and go on with your bad self. No fuss, no muss, no bother.
So somebody tell me again why napster's decision to have a subscription service matter? Do you really need to pay money per month to be able to download the newest Back Street Boy's single?
Indeed. :) Required reading for anyone interested in the topic, if you ask me.
Measuring the performance of machines is way to complicated of an issue to use something like a MIPS rating. Because MIPS factors out the instruction count needed to get something done, you can inflate your rating by doing a large load of useless instructions really quickly.
MIPS = (InstructionCount) / (ExecutionTime *10^6)
ExecutionTime = (InstructionCount * AvgClockCyclesPerInstr * CycleTime)
The InstructionCount's cancel out, leaving
MIPS = 1 / (AvgClockCyclesPerInstr * CycleTime *10^6)
So if another computer can do the same amount of work with ten times less instructions, it doesn't show up in a MIPS rating.
Measuring performance just isn't as simple as looking at a single numeric rating. Sometimes you are interested in measuring responsiveness, somtimes throughput, and a lot of it depends on the specific applications you want to run. Just asking "how fast" is a processor is almost meaningless.
To my knowledge, the spec benchmarks, while not free, are the best standardized benchmarks out there. For integer performance alone, it tests data compression (gzip and bzip I think), FPGA circuit placement, compiling c code, chess, running perl, ray tracing, database stuff, etc; I can't even remember all of the stuff it tests for floating point performance. Obviously, because it isn't free you probably won't be using it to test your home linux box, but if you are doing serious bench marks, the money would be worth it.
Make up some incredibly trivial "content protection" scheme designed to keep out RIAA, lawyers, or anyone else who might give them trouble, then if those people get in, sue on the basis that they broke the "content protection" mechanism.
:)
it is looking for some insecure cgi type package (search bugtraq for the many possibilities) that puts something in robots.txt. Whatever it puts in there could be used to identify whether the package is installed on the server, letting the cracker know the box is can be compromised.
Better double check your security.
Nobody. We're supposed to be impressed by your example of two pieces of software being changed to GPL? Wow. That sure proves something.
The authors of QT and Python are adults, not children, and your suggestion that they were forced to do anything is ridiculous. I've never heard such bullshit. Does Microsoft's FUD *force* you to use any of their software? I hope not, unless you are the worlds biggest moron who can not make choices for himself.
And as for the (-1, Troll) comment, no it isn't valid. We all know it is a reverse psychology karma whoring technique, and I felt the need to bust him on it.
I have strongly come to believe that the GPL is the worst license for any entity that expects to use software freely to use. The GPL (and RMS) is becoming a Borg-like in the way it is trying to usurp the intentions of authors of Open Source software everywhere by forcing them to assimilated. The quickest thing that will cool the government's ardor for Open Source software will be all the innumerable license incompatibilities caused by the GPL.
Gosh, who is going to protect us from the big bad RMS with his big bad GPL? What a crock of shit.
Authors decide on a license that is right for them, and as an author, you can release your software under as many licenses as you see fit. So the question is, how is RMS usurping anything? How can he possibly assimilate anyone? If you don't like his license, don't use it. Make your contributions to BSD licensed software, use BSD licensed software, and move along your merry way. Just don't bitch when some author releases his software under a license you don't like. The choice of licenses is his.
Fact of the matter is, authors don't care how free Carnage4Life thinks their software is; they use a license that fits their vision for the software.
(+5, Insightful) This user doesn't feel confident that his opinion stands on its own and thus needs to end his posts by suggesting he would only be moderated down because his views are unpopular to the /. horde.
I still think C and perl both beat smalltalk in the amount of prewritten code out there.
CPAN has a module for anything I have ever wanted to do. C has tons of code available from all over the place, including several high quality, fully functional operating systems. There may be smalltalk code out there, but I don't think there is as much as there is C and perl.
*shrug*
Not completely from scratch, but the amount of code out there doesn't come close to the amount of, say, C, C++, or perl code. Practically anything I want to do is already done in any of those languages, especially perl.
No, not all projects start off small. One of the rules of thumb of commercial software development is a product that takes less than six months to develop probably has no real value. Why? Because a group of average programmers can copy it in less than a year.
If you would have read my entire post, you would have realized the first part was not about commercial software. Sorry, but most Free software projects do start off small; the projects that start large are few and far between. I'd ask if you had any experience, but I see you don't even have the courage to list an e-mail address.
I've written some extremely useful stuff this way! But there are words for this: hacking, cowboy coding, etc. Do not confuse this with software engineering.
Again, if you actually read my post, you would know that I never mentioned the word engineering; so don't put words in my mouth. Perhaps you need to brush up on your reading comprehension skills, troll, rather than spending all of your time engineering software.
My entire point was the non-adoption of Smalltalk has little to do with the language itself, and more to do with the people who haven't adopted it: in the Free software world, it doesn't fit the culture very well, in the commercial world, it hasn't been marketed.
Pay attention next time.
There are a number of reasons.
;)
I'd wager the reasons the Free software crowd (however it is supposed to be these days, Open Source, Free, whatever) hasn't picked it up are: lack of large stores of prewritten smalltalk code, and the fact that OO design is overkill for small projects.
Allow me to elaborate. There is tons of existing C, C++, perl, etc code out there; seems like if there is anything that you would want to do, code is already out there. Why start in a language where you don't have quite as much to build on?
I hate to knock everyone's pet design methodology, but OO design *really* is overkill for smaller projects; and all projects start off small. Free software gets written because some developer has an itch. Rather than drawing up miles of uml charts for a design, [s]?he whips something quick out in a language they are familiar with (and one with lots of existing code, no less). Only afterwards does it start to grow into something that might benefit from a structured design.
The reasons the rest of the world hasn't picked it up probably has more to do with marketing than anything else. So (because no monopoly software maker has told them they need to) businesses aren't looking for people with smalltalk skills. So people don't bother to learn it as it won't further their career any.
Plus I just like perl and C.
What do you expect? Many Colleges and Universities are no longer institutions of higher learning and research; instead they have become money making institutions. They exist to make money.
My university started putting televisions in public places that constantly blast gubbish music and advertisements targeted at "twenty-something college students who know nothing about debt with credit cards given to them by parents". You can't turn down the volume (they are contractually obligated to keep a particular volume), turn them off, or otherwise exist in a public place without being marketed to. Only after serious complaints (by alumni, I'd wager) did they shut off the televisions in the cafeteria. Not only that, but the shit they blast just plain sucks; the kind of trash music propagated by Mtv and the like.
So my solution is not to go to these public places, and more importantly, not to spend any money at them. Unfortunately, so few other people seem to care. But living in a corporate engineered reality doesn't sit well with me.
If they are really worried about it. On the dorm networks where I go to school, so much stuff is available from people setting shares on windows boxen: entire full length movies, more mp3's than I've ever seen, etc etc. Napster is all find and good, but you can find so much more on peoples shares.
But whatever. None of this seems to have anything to do with common sense. Let them kill napster; people will always run OpenNap servers.
If you have ever looked at another person's Perl code and tried to maintain it, you know what I mean.
Wow, what a common misconception. I can write unmaintainable code in any language, and maintainable code in any language. I've seen beautiful perl code readable like plain enlgish and I've seen perl code so bad, it looked like it was run through a blender. But the same can be said for python; bad code can be written in every language. The key issue is the abuse of syntactic features, either through overuse or underuse.
The great thing is almost every language has a single syntactic element that makes every other line of code perfectly readable when used; it is called the comment. I suggest sprinkling it throughout code in any language.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't have anything at all against python; I just don't like to see people say misleading things about perl.
And BTW, C++ is not an object oriented language--it is a hybrid language. An examle of a real OO language would be Smalltalk.