One thing that it does have over Konqueror is cross-platormness.
Moz runs on Linux, Win32, OS/2, BeOS, AIX, HPUX, SunOS, MacOS 9, MaxOS X and probably a few more I've forgotten.
Konqueror runs on any system that can run KDE, which I figure is fairly broad, but almost certainly not as broad as Moz.
And if you took all the stuff in libs that Konqueror uses from KDE, that comes to quite a fair amount. Yes, you've already loaded a lot of it for your other apps under KDE, so on KDE it's not a big hit. But in terms of total code used by the app, it's a fair amount.
You want me to take a bunch of people who know Emacs and test their time doing some editing task against their time using a mouse-based editor?
Even that's a little unfair.
The most accurate test of all would be to set up a series of common (and not so common) _goals_ to be completed (such as that 'replace all occurrences of 'e' with '|' in a paragraph test), and then let keyboarders and mousers attempt to solve them with their own choice of tools, and see who's faster.
Bet the keyboarding vi or emacs users thrash the bollocks off of the mousers.
The one actual study he did that he cited was so contrived to be untrue. With a paragraph, replace all occurrences of 'e' with '|'
Keyboarders, 99 secs
Mousers, 50-odd secs
Huh? I'm sorry, but
:%s/e/|/g
is a hell of a lot quicker than the method he said mouse users were forced to use. And I'm sure emacs users have a Ctrl-Shift-Meta- key combination to do the same sort of thing.
OK, that keyboard example does assume that paragraph is the only one in the whole document that you're editing. So, to make it slightly more selective
:%s/e/|/gc
Will ask you to replace each occurrence of 'e' with '|'.
Alternatively, if you don't want to check any lines above where you currently are
:.,$s/e/|/gc
Will check from the current line to the end of the document, and you can cancel the search/replace as soon as you've reached the end of the bit you need to change.
All I can say is that mousing is probably faster than keyboarding _if_ you're using an application that has a totally shitty brain-dead keyboard interface that doesn't actually allow you to use your keyboard effectively. And if you're playing with a stacked deck like that, don't be surprised if you get the results you want.
Give a mouser and a keyboarder a _task_ to complete, and let them use their own choice of tools (e.g. vi for text editing) to accomplish it.
Hrmph. Most, nay - _all_, programmers I know cannot conceive of writing _anything_ in notepad. It's the single utterly crappest text editor in the entire world. 'ed' is more powerful for fucks sake.
Don't disrespect Visual Studio too much. With it M$ almost (finally) made a semi-competent text editor. Sure, it's pretty limited and hugely expensive for a text editor, but what else do you expect from them? Give them a break, man.
He _wrote_ the software in another country, where such software is legal, for a company based in that country where that software is legal.
_Separately_ to that, the Sales & Marketing department (or whatever division is responsible) _also_ decided to release the software in the US, and did so.
Dmitri then went to the US and was arrested for an action taken by the company he works for. Note he's a programmer. I'm a programmer. I have no input whatsoever as to where the software I write is sold once I write it. And I don't care either. It's not my job, or my responsibility. That's someone else. Someone who knows international law. Someone who knows who to talk to to get packaging made, and to ship millions of units half way around the world. Someone who can spot a target audience. I can't do that, and the person who does that probably can't do my job either.
I very much doubt he is responsible in _any_ way for trafficking in circumvention devices. He almost certainly didn't decide to sell the software in the US, and he almost certainly didn't sell the software to anyone in the US.
He came to give a _talk_ on the software he helped _write_, _in_another_country_, _where_it's_legal_.
Fuck off did he sell that software. Or make it available to anyone except the people employing him. Wake up and look around you. Think about it, for God's sake. Use your brain.
But isn't it curious that everybody knows the name X10?
Who?
I'm serious here. I generally only read/. from work, so I tend to use lynx so the suits don't notice - to them it's just another 'scary black screen with monospaced grey / lightly colored text', just like all the other windows I have open which are running vi.
So, uh, who are they, and why are they so annoying?
All it does is allow you to "compile" your source into a more obfuscated form of source that no-one can read but you can ship off to any other computer where it will get compiled for real (usually JIT - which is IMO more like a cached interpreter, but that's just semantics) before being run.
All a CLR allows you to do is obfuscate your source a lot. We don't bother. Just ship the real source and allow someone to compile it themselves.
CLRs are just a klunky workaround for people who feel a need to hide their source for whatever reason.
Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
What system _doesn't_ require a lot of maintenance to set up _properly_ and keep running _properly_? As for competent Linux admins being expensive - again, what closed source systems have cheap competent admins? You don't always get what you pay for (there are a lot of fakers out there) but if you don't pay for it, you certainly won't get it, no matter what system you're running.
As for loss of data - your tirade against OSS software seems to fall down when as a counterpoint to Ext2's bad performance under an unclean shutdown, you mention FreeBSD _another OS OS_, as a shining example of how to Do The Right Thing.
Ext3FS - I'll take your word for it. But no-one ever said that _every_ piece of OSS was great. Some of it will stink. Same as closed source. There are normally good alternatives (XFS?)
Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally
Care to provide some evidence of this. If we're allowing anecdotal evidence, I'm sure I've heard stories of Linux boxen getting uptimes of > 1 year, even when running some pretty flaky user-mode stuff.
And I've heard a lot of crashes determined to be flaky hardware; as Linux tends to run on commodity PC bits and pieces, and a lot of people tend to go for 'as cheap as possible' there, I wouldn't be surprised if the MTBF for that stuff is a lot lower than the kind of hardware you pay tens of thousands of dollars for from Sun or HP.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.
Uh - how exactly is Linux so much harder to use / learn than almost any other individual *nix? Seems pretty similar to me moving over from HP(s)UX and Slowaris. No more differences between either of them and Linux than there are between those two.
And badly coded tools? Please. The GNU tools are some of the best I've ever worked with on any system. No 'long lines silently truncated'. Vim's extensions to vi are fantastic. GNU make is so much more flexible and powerful than the standard 'make' on most platforms. Bash rules. gcc is a hell of a lot better than a number of proprietary compilers I've worked with. gdb kicks most other debuggers' asses right out of the building.
Which particular low performing, data mangling, not-adhering-to-spec, standard-incompliant tools were you referring to again?
K.
Don't confuse not voting with being too lazy to vote. One of the reasons I never voted for a long time is the sheer uselessness of it all.
How to decide who to vote for. Listen to what the politicians say they're going to do when you vote for them and they get in. But they never do what they say they're going to. Oh - they do some of it, but not all. And there's no way of determining before the fact which bits of policy they mean and will implement, which bits of policy they want to mean and might implement, and which bits of policy they're making up to get you to vote for them.
So if you can never be sure what anyone is going to do when you've voted them in, how can you make a civically responsible choice about _who_ to vote for? And if you can't decide who to vote for, do you want to exercise your most grave responsibility on a guess?
So for a number of years I didn't vote, not out of laziness, but because a 'none of the above' option failed to exist on the ballot. There was no way of registering my dissatisfaction with _all_ the candidates at once.
Some suggest spoiling your ballot. Yeah, and get it thrown out and lumped in (statistically) with all the people who can't fill in their ballot paper properly? No thanks.
(In the end, my solution was to vote for the Green party. They are, at least, a party I can respect, as they're a party based on issues which they believe are very important (as do I) and won't go changing their position for a bigger share of the vote. Also, they're a party which (at least in England) won't be winning a general election anytime soon, so I don't have to worry about them changing policies (or even just having policies I disagree with in the first place) on things orthogonal to the environment. _But_ (and this is the important point), the more votes they get, the more environmental policies the Big Two parties will need to put in place in an attempt to win those votes. And the more policies they _claim_ they're going to have, the more they're actually going to have to do when whoever it is wins gets in. Implment 0 of 2 environmental policies, people probably won't notice that much. Implement 0 of 20 environmental policies, they will. That's the theory at least.)
That's a really dumb `ls` replacement if it doesn't notice when it's being run on itself and give false information back about its last modified time. (Like just look in the same directory and give the same date/time as 'cp' or some such)
If you're writing a GUI, IMO you _need_ a graphical dev tool. You can't create graphical art on the command line. It just doesn't work. So, yes, for writing GUIs, GUI dev tools are a hell of a lot more advanced an neccessary.
But for writing back-end code, I don't think is makes a bit of difference. I'm just as productive with a bunch of rxvts running vim and `gdb -nw` as I am with anything like MS Dev Studio or Borland C++ builder, or anything like that.
The fact that command line tools are `small tools that do one thing and do it well' allow you much more control over what you're trying to do that these large behemoths that try and anticipate your needs and do loads of stuff for you that you don't want to get involved with.
Most software written is written for the first time. Writing a new piece of software is not like building another house. It's like building the first house, or the first bridge, or the first power station. If one were already build, we'd use that. But there isn't, so we have to invent it as we go.
And no matter how many houses or bridges you've built, it's really unlikely you'll build your first power plant correctly the first time around. There's stuff you just can't know about power plants until you actually get around to building one and see where your plans were wrong.
Yeah - I can write a function (or object, or whatever) to do foo with my eyes closed. Just as a good engineer can build a wall or a tower. But until you put all your walls and towers together for this damn thing, it's really easy to miss the support beam you _really_ need to hold _that_ piece of roof up, even if all the rest of the roof, and all the walls, floors and plumbing work. And because it's _way_ too expensive in terms of time and money to pull the whole thing down and do it again from scratch, you jury-rig it. You have to.
Of course it doesn't help that your schedules are normally set by someone else, who insists that you have to get this new piece of software out the door before anyone else, because getting to market first with a buggy product is more important (in their eyes) than getting it right. There's always time to get it right later they say, but if we miss getting to market first, someone else will have the mindshare and won't bother buying our product, even if it is better, if they've already got this other guy's product that _almost_ does the job and they've been promised a cheap upgrade and bugfix within the year.
And seeing as they're the guys with the money, if you won't do it their way, they'll quite happily find someone who will.
So you write and design this piece of software as you go, doing your damn best to make it Right given the (impossible) constraints given, but having to jury-rig as you go at times, telling yourself you'll get it right for version 2, having learned what you have. Meanwhile, your non-technical superiours look at you strange when you say that the internals are 'ugly' and that you really need to tear it all down and start again (which is what research - which is what you're doing, let's face it - is all about), and insist that version 2 will do fine being an extension of what's already there.
How come they have so many new inventions for this new chip? What - none of them could have fit on any of their older technology? Yes, I'm sure a lot of effort went into that thing, but to get over 200 new ideas on one product (especially one that is mostly an old idea that's just been too expensive before) seems amazing.
Yes, and a program that breaks the copy protection on an e-book can be used for several legitimate purposes that are not illegal also.
This includes, but is not limited to, making personal, fair-use copies for purposes of backup or space-shifting.
Another is to simply prove that such a program can be written, and that the copy protection is not perfect.
Reminds me of an SF story I read about (haven't actually read it myself) where an alien comes to earth, learns a load of stuff from us and decides to take back to his home planet a copy of our entire knowledge base. So he gets our Encyclopeida Terra (or whatever), and converts it into a computer format.
This is, of course, just a single really big number, if read as such. Which our alien takes the reciprocal of, giving him a number between 0 and 1. He then marks this point on a rod of some type, where the fraction along the rod from one end that he makes the mark is the same as this reciprocal number he's got.
Voila! He has encoded our entire bank of knowlege as a single mark on a rod. And he could easily put other marks on the same rod as well, indicating other civilisations' banks of knowledge. All he has to do is work out how far along the rod the mark is as a fraction of the length of the rod, take its reciprocal, and he's got it all back.
As the owner of a work copyrighted by someone else, aren't I allowed by 'fair use' to make as many personal copies of that work as I like, so long as I have destroyed all those copies if I ever get round to reselling that work to someone else?
Copies in RAM are certainly not going to stick around (ditto copies in swap) for any length of time; they're not for commercial gain; they require me having a copy of the work already. Why on earth is extra legislation needed for these 'RAM copies', when fair use seems to cover it so well?
The difference between cable and broadcast signals though is that if you get cable, you sign a contract saying "I agree not to crack this thing and try and get stuff I've not paid for"
If you just design something that pulls stuff that is being beamed into your home without you having asked for it straight out of the air and does some wierd stuff to it before piping it to your TV, where's the harm in that?
Just one question that has bothered me about the pro-gun lobby.
When the gun ownership argument is over and you've won, will you be as fervent in getting all those drink-driving laws repealed, as they impinge on your right to freely travel on the public highways?
Unfortunately I'm not from the US, and do not pretend to be an expert on the constitution, but I do recall reading that the right to travel freely on public highways is enshrined in the constitution, either explicity or implicitly. If I am wrong here, please point that out.
The point being that by not fighting these laws (no matter what their constitutional status) aren't you giving up liberty for safety? And are hence deserving of neither?
Or do you in fact concede that there are some laws that are required for public safety, where _other_ people's lives are endangered (I don't care what you do that endangers your own life, but you carrying a gun has the potential of endangering mine in the same way that you driving home after 10 pints of beer has the potential of endangering mine), and that the only reason you want to play with guns is, well, because you want to play with guns.
And even if the right to own a gun is one enshrined by the constitution (all that 'organised militia' banter doesn't really grab me that much as I'm not from the US, but I do notice a lot of debate on the subject) isn't one of the great things about the US Constitution the fact that it can be changed if it becomes out of date with the needs of the society it serves?
K.
Re:Is the law really meant 2 be understood by laym
on
IANAL
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· Score: 2
Excellent link. Thanx.
Was just thinking about the ideas in the thesis (only read the first few pages so far - will read the rest as soon as I've finished this note) and thought that, much like a number of technical documents, it would be really good for each law to have a normative, technical definition, and a separate, informative, plain english (to be updated as the language changes?) rationale that explains the spirit of the law, the conditions that neccesitated its drafting, and some of the reasons behind some of the less-obvious decisions made in the normative work.
K.
Re:Here's the appeal of the Net in a nutshell
on
IANAL
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· Score: 2
Yeah, but while stereotypes do exist, of the whole list you gave, on the internet you get to pick your traits that people judge you on. You get to choose a browser, an OS, an ISP, the forum (be it/., kuro5hin, askme.com or IRC) in which you participate, and the other forums you claim to participate in.
Don't like the stereotypes you're lumbered with? Dump your ID, create a new one with stereotypes that reflect the personality you have / want to get across, and start again.
It's not changing your race, creed or economic status IRL. Almost all of the sterotypes you come across on the net are choosable and changeable, by yourself, without too much hassle.
Yeah, if you're utterly clueless, you probably won't be able to hide it and will get labelled as clueless. Tough. You're lacking technical knowledge in a specific area? Most people will forgive that if you show some humility and a willingness to gain more knowledge. Those that don't forgive ignorance (note: ignorance is not stupidity) aren't worth bothering with anyway.
OK, the 'not native english speaker' is a bummer. And english is a git of a language to learn. So, yes, that is a problem. But I think that the internet is much closer to the "everyone who chooses to be equal, can be" utopia than you claim it to be:)
So, it's noted that item X is purchased with bill Y.
Big fucking deal. It's not like I have my name on the bill. There's still no way of tracing the sale to an individual.
Even if it is noted by your cash machine that you got out bill Y from the cash machine earlier - so what? That bill could have passed through a dozen hands before being used for that purchase. Even in a fairly tight timeframe.
Of course if you really want to be paranoid, any money you get out of a cash machine goes into a date-marked shoebox for a month or so, and you only spend money in shoeboxes marked with a date over a month ago.
Huh? IIRC, the ANSI standard, which was later adopted as the ISO C standard with no changes apart from section numbering, commonly known as C89, requires that comments are replaced by a single space, making the/**/ token splicing specifically not work if you were using your compiler in a strictly conforming mode.
(Although a number of compilers still provided a non-strictly-conforming 'traditional' mode which would allow such constructs, along with various other bits and pieces that we (and our code) had all got used to)
Slashdot Mirror
Are there any hidden features that I have missed?
One thing that it does have over Konqueror is cross-platormness.
Moz runs on Linux, Win32, OS/2, BeOS, AIX, HPUX, SunOS, MacOS 9, MaxOS X and probably a few more I've forgotten.
Konqueror runs on any system that can run KDE, which I figure is fairly broad, but almost certainly not as broad as Moz.
And if you took all the stuff in libs that Konqueror uses from KDE, that comes to quite a fair amount. Yes, you've already loaded a lot of it for your other apps under KDE, so on KDE it's not a big hit. But in terms of total code used by the app, it's a fair amount.
K.
You want me to take a bunch of people who know Emacs and test their time doing some editing task against their time using a mouse-based editor?
Even that's a little unfair.
The most accurate test of all would be to set up a series of common (and not so common) _goals_ to be completed (such as that 'replace all occurrences of 'e' with '|' in a paragraph test), and then let keyboarders and mousers attempt to solve them with their own choice of tools, and see who's faster.
Bet the keyboarding vi or emacs users thrash the bollocks off of the mousers.
Yeah, like the specifics he used were any use.
The one actual study he did that he cited was so contrived to be untrue. With a paragraph, replace all occurrences of 'e' with '|'
Keyboarders, 99 secs
Mousers, 50-odd secs
Huh? I'm sorry, but
:%s/e/|/g
is a hell of a lot quicker than the method he said mouse users were forced to use. And I'm sure emacs users have a Ctrl-Shift-Meta- key combination to do the same sort of thing.
OK, that keyboard example does assume that paragraph is the only one in the whole document that you're editing. So, to make it slightly more selective
:%s/e/|/gc
Will ask you to replace each occurrence of 'e' with '|'.
Alternatively, if you don't want to check any lines above where you currently are
:.,$s/e/|/gc
Will check from the current line to the end of the document, and you can cancel the search/replace as soon as you've reached the end of the bit you need to change.
All I can say is that mousing is probably faster than keyboarding _if_ you're using an application that has a totally shitty brain-dead keyboard interface that doesn't actually allow you to use your keyboard effectively. And if you're playing with a stacked deck like that, don't be surprised if you get the results you want.
Give a mouser and a keyboarder a _task_ to complete, and let them use their own choice of tools (e.g. vi for text editing) to accomplish it.
K.
Hrmph. Most, nay - _all_, programmers I know cannot conceive of writing _anything_ in notepad. It's the single utterly crappest text editor in the entire world. 'ed' is more powerful for fucks sake.
Don't disrespect Visual Studio too much. With it M$ almost (finally) made a semi-competent text editor. Sure, it's pretty limited and hugely expensive for a text editor, but what else do you expect from them? Give them a break, man.
No!
Dmitri did not _sell_ the software.
He _wrote_ the software in another country, where such software is legal, for a company based in that country where that software is legal.
_Separately_ to that, the Sales & Marketing department (or whatever division is responsible) _also_ decided to release the software in the US, and did so.
Dmitri then went to the US and was arrested for an action taken by the company he works for. Note he's a programmer. I'm a programmer. I have no input whatsoever as to where the software I write is sold once I write it. And I don't care either. It's not my job, or my responsibility. That's someone else. Someone who knows international law. Someone who knows who to talk to to get packaging made, and to ship millions of units half way around the world. Someone who can spot a target audience. I can't do that, and the person who does that probably can't do my job either.
I very much doubt he is responsible in _any_ way for trafficking in circumvention devices. He almost certainly didn't decide to sell the software in the US, and he almost certainly didn't sell the software to anyone in the US.
He came to give a _talk_ on the software he helped _write_, _in_another_country_, _where_it's_legal_.
Fuck off did he sell that software. Or make it available to anyone except the people employing him. Wake up and look around you. Think about it, for God's sake. Use your brain.
Sorry, this _really_ pisses me off.
K.
But isn't it curious that everybody knows the name X10?
/. from work, so I tend to use lynx so the suits don't notice - to them it's just another 'scary black screen with monospaced grey / lightly colored text', just like all the other windows I have open which are running vi.
Who?
I'm serious here. I generally only read
So, uh, who are they, and why are they so annoying?
What's so great about a CLR???
All it does is allow you to "compile" your source into a more obfuscated form of source that no-one can read but you can ship off to any other computer where it will get compiled for real (usually JIT - which is IMO more like a cached interpreter, but that's just semantics) before being run.
All a CLR allows you to do is obfuscate your source a lot. We don't bother. Just ship the real source and allow someone to compile it themselves.
CLRs are just a klunky workaround for people who feel a need to hide their source for whatever reason.
Oh for moderator points....
Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
What system _doesn't_ require a lot of maintenance to set up _properly_ and keep running _properly_? As for competent Linux admins being expensive - again, what closed source systems have cheap competent admins? You don't always get what you pay for (there are a lot of fakers out there) but if you don't pay for it, you certainly won't get it, no matter what system you're running.
As for loss of data - your tirade against OSS software seems to fall down when as a counterpoint to Ext2's bad performance under an unclean shutdown, you mention FreeBSD _another OS OS_, as a shining example of how to Do The Right Thing.
Ext3FS - I'll take your word for it. But no-one ever said that _every_ piece of OSS was great. Some of it will stink. Same as closed source. There are normally good alternatives (XFS?)
Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally
Care to provide some evidence of this. If we're allowing anecdotal evidence, I'm sure I've heard stories of Linux boxen getting uptimes of > 1 year, even when running some pretty flaky user-mode stuff.
And I've heard a lot of crashes determined to be flaky hardware; as Linux tends to run on commodity PC bits and pieces, and a lot of people tend to go for 'as cheap as possible' there, I wouldn't be surprised if the MTBF for that stuff is a lot lower than the kind of hardware you pay tens of thousands of dollars for from Sun or HP.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.
Uh - how exactly is Linux so much harder to use / learn than almost any other individual *nix? Seems pretty similar to me moving over from HP(s)UX and Slowaris. No more differences between either of them and Linux than there are between those two.
And badly coded tools? Please. The GNU tools are some of the best I've ever worked with on any system. No 'long lines silently truncated'. Vim's extensions to vi are fantastic. GNU make is so much more flexible and powerful than the standard 'make' on most platforms. Bash rules. gcc is a hell of a lot better than a number of proprietary compilers I've worked with. gdb kicks most other debuggers' asses right out of the building.
Which particular low performing, data mangling, not-adhering-to-spec, standard-incompliant tools were you referring to again?
K.
Don't confuse not voting with being too lazy to vote. One of the reasons I never voted for a long time is the sheer uselessness of it all.
How to decide who to vote for. Listen to what the politicians say they're going to do when you vote for them and they get in. But they never do what they say they're going to. Oh - they do some of it, but not all. And there's no way of determining before the fact which bits of policy they mean and will implement, which bits of policy they want to mean and might implement, and which bits of policy they're making up to get you to vote for them.
So if you can never be sure what anyone is going to do when you've voted them in, how can you make a civically responsible choice about _who_ to vote for? And if you can't decide who to vote for, do you want to exercise your most grave responsibility on a guess?
So for a number of years I didn't vote, not out of laziness, but because a 'none of the above' option failed to exist on the ballot. There was no way of registering my dissatisfaction with _all_ the candidates at once.
Some suggest spoiling your ballot. Yeah, and get it thrown out and lumped in (statistically) with all the people who can't fill in their ballot paper properly? No thanks.
(In the end, my solution was to vote for the Green party. They are, at least, a party I can respect, as they're a party based on issues which they believe are very important (as do I) and won't go changing their position for a bigger share of the vote. Also, they're a party which (at least in England) won't be winning a general election anytime soon, so I don't have to worry about them changing policies (or even just having policies I disagree with in the first place) on things orthogonal to the environment. _But_ (and this is the important point), the more votes they get, the more environmental policies the Big Two parties will need to put in place in an attempt to win those votes. And the more policies they _claim_ they're going to have, the more they're actually going to have to do when whoever it is wins gets in. Implment 0 of 2 environmental policies, people probably won't notice that much. Implement 0 of 20 environmental policies, they will. That's the theory at least.)
That's a really dumb `ls` replacement if it doesn't notice when it's being run on itself and give false information back about its last modified time. (Like just look in the same directory and give the same date/time as 'cp' or some such)
How many times...?
main() RETURNS INT!!!
Stop reading Schildt.
Now write both of the following declarations out 100 times each.
int main(void);
int main(int argc, char ** argv);
:-)
If you're writing a GUI, IMO you _need_ a graphical dev tool. You can't create graphical art on the command line. It just doesn't work. So, yes, for writing GUIs, GUI dev tools are a hell of a lot more advanced an neccessary.
But for writing back-end code, I don't think is makes a bit of difference. I'm just as productive with a bunch of rxvts running vim and `gdb -nw` as I am with anything like MS Dev Studio or Borland C++ builder, or anything like that.
The fact that command line tools are `small tools that do one thing and do it well' allow you much more control over what you're trying to do that these large behemoths that try and anticipate your needs and do loads of stuff for you that you don't want to get involved with.
Yeah, there is some truth in that, but...
Most software written is written for the first time. Writing a new piece of software is not like building another house. It's like building the first house, or the first bridge, or the first power station. If one were already build, we'd use that. But there isn't, so we have to invent it as we go.
And no matter how many houses or bridges you've built, it's really unlikely you'll build your first power plant correctly the first time around. There's stuff you just can't know about power plants until you actually get around to building one and see where your plans were wrong.
Yeah - I can write a function (or object, or whatever) to do foo with my eyes closed. Just as a good engineer can build a wall or a tower. But until you put all your walls and towers together for this damn thing, it's really easy to miss the support beam you _really_ need to hold _that_ piece of roof up, even if all the rest of the roof, and all the walls, floors and plumbing work. And because it's _way_ too expensive in terms of time and money to pull the whole thing down and do it again from scratch, you jury-rig it. You have to.
Of course it doesn't help that your schedules are normally set by someone else, who insists that you have to get this new piece of software out the door before anyone else, because getting to market first with a buggy product is more important (in their eyes) than getting it right. There's always time to get it right later they say, but if we miss getting to market first, someone else will have the mindshare and won't bother buying our product, even if it is better, if they've already got this other guy's product that _almost_ does the job and they've been promised a cheap upgrade and bugfix within the year.
And seeing as they're the guys with the money, if you won't do it their way, they'll quite happily find someone who will.
So you write and design this piece of software as you go, doing your damn best to make it Right given the (impossible) constraints given, but having to jury-rig as you go at times, telling yourself you'll get it right for version 2, having learned what you have. Meanwhile, your non-technical superiours look at you strange when you say that the internals are 'ugly' and that you really need to tear it all down and start again (which is what research - which is what you're doing, let's face it - is all about), and insist that version 2 will do fine being an extension of what's already there.
_That's_ why it's ugly and doesn't work.
How come they have so many new inventions for this new chip? What - none of them could have fit on any of their older technology? Yes, I'm sure a lot of effort went into that thing, but to get over 200 new ideas on one product (especially one that is mostly an old idea that's just been too expensive before) seems amazing.
Yes, and a program that breaks the copy protection on an e-book can be used for several legitimate purposes that are not illegal also.
This includes, but is not limited to, making personal, fair-use copies for purposes of backup or space-shifting.
Another is to simply prove that such a program can be written, and that the copy protection is not perfect.
Reminds me of an SF story I read about (haven't actually read it myself) where an alien comes to earth, learns a load of stuff from us and decides to take back to his home planet a copy of our entire knowledge base. So he gets our Encyclopeida Terra (or whatever), and converts it into a computer format.
:)
This is, of course, just a single really big number, if read as such. Which our alien takes the reciprocal of, giving him a number between 0 and 1. He then marks this point on a rod of some type, where the fraction along the rod from one end that he makes the mark is the same as this reciprocal number he's got.
Voila! He has encoded our entire bank of knowlege as a single mark on a rod. And he could easily put other marks on the same rod as well, indicating other civilisations' banks of knowledge. All he has to do is work out how far along the rod the mark is as a fraction of the length of the rod, take its reciprocal, and he's got it all back.
(Now for a bonus point, why won't it work?
...are surely 'fair use', aren't they?
As the owner of a work copyrighted by someone else, aren't I allowed by 'fair use' to make as many personal copies of that work as I like, so long as I have destroyed all those copies if I ever get round to reselling that work to someone else?
Copies in RAM are certainly not going to stick around (ditto copies in swap) for any length of time; they're not for commercial gain; they require me having a copy of the work already. Why on earth is extra legislation needed for these 'RAM copies', when fair use seems to cover it so well?
K.
Well, I'm not actually here to guide humanity through it's next stage of evolution, but yes, that is where I got the name :)
Nicely spotted. Not many people appear to have read that particular book.
The difference between cable and broadcast signals though is that if you get cable, you sign a contract saying "I agree not to crack this thing and try and get stuff I've not paid for"
If you just design something that pulls stuff that is being beamed into your home without you having asked for it straight out of the air and does some wierd stuff to it before piping it to your TV, where's the harm in that?
No contract, no foul.
K.
Just one question that has bothered me about the pro-gun lobby.
When the gun ownership argument is over and you've won, will you be as fervent in getting all those drink-driving laws repealed, as they impinge on your right to freely travel on the public highways?
Unfortunately I'm not from the US, and do not pretend to be an expert on the constitution, but I do recall reading that the right to travel freely on public highways is enshrined in the constitution, either explicity or implicitly. If I am wrong here, please point that out.
The point being that by not fighting these laws (no matter what their constitutional status) aren't you giving up liberty for safety? And are hence deserving of neither?
Or do you in fact concede that there are some laws that are required for public safety, where _other_ people's lives are endangered (I don't care what you do that endangers your own life, but you carrying a gun has the potential of endangering mine in the same way that you driving home after 10 pints of beer has the potential of endangering mine), and that the only reason you want to play with guns is, well, because you want to play with guns.
And even if the right to own a gun is one enshrined by the constitution (all that 'organised militia' banter doesn't really grab me that much as I'm not from the US, but I do notice a lot of debate on the subject) isn't one of the great things about the US Constitution the fact that it can be changed if it becomes out of date with the needs of the society it serves?
K.
Excellent link. Thanx.
Was just thinking about the ideas in the thesis (only read the first few pages so far - will read the rest as soon as I've finished this note) and thought that, much like a number of technical documents, it would be really good for each law to have a normative, technical definition, and a separate, informative, plain english (to be updated as the language changes?) rationale that explains the spirit of the law, the conditions that neccesitated its drafting, and some of the reasons behind some of the less-obvious decisions made in the normative work.
K.
Yeah, but while stereotypes do exist, of the whole list you gave, on the internet you get to pick your traits that people judge you on. You get to choose a browser, an OS, an ISP, the forum (be it /., kuro5hin, askme.com or IRC) in which you participate, and the other forums you claim to participate in.
:)
Don't like the stereotypes you're lumbered with? Dump your ID, create a new one with stereotypes that reflect the personality you have / want to get across, and start again.
It's not changing your race, creed or economic status IRL. Almost all of the sterotypes you come across on the net are choosable and changeable, by yourself, without too much hassle.
Yeah, if you're utterly clueless, you probably won't be able to hide it and will get labelled as clueless. Tough. You're lacking technical knowledge in a specific area? Most people will forgive that if you show some humility and a willingness to gain more knowledge. Those that don't forgive ignorance (note: ignorance is not stupidity) aren't worth bothering with anyway.
OK, the 'not native english speaker' is a bummer. And english is a git of a language to learn. So, yes, that is a problem. But I think that the internet is much closer to the "everyone who chooses to be equal, can be" utopia than you claim it to be
So, it's noted that item X is purchased with bill Y.
Big fucking deal. It's not like I have my name on the bill. There's still no way of tracing the sale to an individual.
Even if it is noted by your cash machine that you got out bill Y from the cash machine earlier - so what? That bill could have passed through a dozen hands before being used for that purchase. Even in a fairly tight timeframe.
Of course if you really want to be paranoid, any money you get out of a cash machine goes into a date-marked shoebox for a month or so, and you only spend money in shoeboxes marked with a date over a month ago.
Huh? IIRC, the ANSI standard, which was later adopted as the ISO C standard with no changes apart from section numbering, commonly known as C89, requires that comments are replaced by a single space, making the /**/ token splicing specifically not work if you were using your compiler in a strictly conforming mode.
(Although a number of compilers still provided a non-strictly-conforming 'traditional' mode which would allow such constructs, along with various other bits and pieces that we (and our code) had all got used to)
K.