Although I'm certainly not arguing with you, I do find it amusing that their incredible poor track record means that when they actually do get something right, no one remembers. For example, back in 2000, MOSR—and only MOSR—boldly predicted that Apple was going to pitch their Platinum GUI style and adopt a new look called "Aqua," which they described as being liquid smooth and having extensive animations and visual effects. MOSR was widely mocked and derided. After all, Apple had only just adopted Platinum a few years ago; why such a sudden, radical departure? When Apple then did announce Aqua, everyone was quiet about MOSR for a brief while, then went back to mocking it.
It's kind of sad in a way. The rumor site who cried wolf: right so rarely that when they really do have a breaking story, no one believes them.
The intern who looks like Bill Gates is probably me (I'm Benjamin Pollack). It's not the first time I've been accused of looking like Bill Gates. I actually was reentering the United States a few years ago and going through customs in Newark, and the customs officer who was at my window when I finally got to the front of the line looked incredibly bored. I walked up and put my passport down. He glanced up, started asking the typical questions, then, staring at my face, he paused. He then looked back down at my passport, back at me, back at my passport, back at me, and then said in a thick Italian accent, "You are related to Bill Gates?" The people I was with just started cracking up, and several people suddenly glanced over in my direction. It was actually a bit embarassing, but also kind of fun to have everybody suddenly paying attention to me for no good reason.
You will be happy to know that he and I are not related. Besides, if he were, he'd hate me; I'm a diehard Mac user.
I suspect I'm feeding the trolls, but I'll answer your question anyway.
EULAs impose additional restrictions on the software beyond the restrictions that would naturally arise due to copyright. These restrictions almost always regard how the programs may be used or redistributed. The EULA for Internet Explorer, just as an example, technically forbids you from running it under WINE, even though there is no reason by copyright law that it would be illegal to do so. The EULA of server software frequently restricts how many clients may use the software at once and how many CPUs or computers the software may be placed on at once. In all of these cases, actions that would normally be acceptable under copyright law are forbidden; no freedoms are granted.
The GPL, in contrast, places no restrictions on how the program is used. It grants you additional rights beyond those that copyright law would by default permit—specifically, permission to modify and then redistribute the program without paying royalties to the copyright holder, provided that you keep those rights the same. Because these rights are greater than those afforded by copyright, you do not have permission to exercise them without accepting the GPL. This actually places the GPL on very sound legal footing compared to a click-through license agreement that places restrictions on your usage of a program.
All of that said, I am not aware of a court ruling that makes EULAs nonbinding, although certainly many people on Slashdot wish that they were not. If you are aware of such a court case, please provide a link or docket number. I'd be interested to read it.
You can use VisualWorks Smalltalk for free for noncommercial applications, and shell out for commercial, but Squeak is the only serious game in town if you want to do open-source Smalltalk work.
I always get nervous whenever I'm reading something that's a bit over my head but seems to make sense, and then I come to something where the author has no idea what he's talking about. On page 7, the author writes:
Readers pointed out that there were two errors in this sentence. The first one is that Mac OS X does use kernelthreads, and this is completely true. My confusion came from the fact that FreeBSD 4.x and older - which was part of the OS X kernel until Tiger came along - did not implement kernelthreads; rather, only userthreads.
The problem is that this correction is still wrong. OS X has never been based on FreeBSD's kernel. Although it has strived to ensure its BSD API matches FreeBSD, and has even ported over some custom extensions (such as kqueue), OS X's kernel has always been based on OPENSTEP's--a Mach microkernel with custom Unix services above it. OS X has had native threads since OS X 10.0 through the NSThread and Carbon Multiprocessing APIs. I don't know whether POSIX threads followed a different route, but the statement that OS X only got native threads in Tiger is simply wrong.
The theater where I watched ROTS last week was wonderfully raucous, as it was filled with college kids. Things had already taken a turn for the worse when the audience laughed hysterically at Jar Jar's two-second cameo at Padme's funeral (not exactly the tone you want, after all), but things really went downhill during Darth Vader's screamfest. As soon as Vader's cry of "NOOOOOO!!" died out, someone in the back of the theater yelled out, at the top of his lungs,
"YES, BITCH!!"
He was quickly escorted out of the theater, but he also got a solid round of applause from the audience. I personally thought that it added a wonderful dimension to the movie, and it was at that point that I became very sorry that Mystery Science Theater 3000 is no longer on the air.
If you really want to, you can program the GUI entirely from source code. You can see an example of how to do that in the old GNUstep tutorials that date from before Gorm (in particular, take a look at Your First Steps in GNUstep GUI Programming Part 1 and Part 2). That said, I have no idea why you'd want to do this. Gorm's interfaces are just XML files, and are therefore still fully modifyable from text. If you want something more human-readable, take a look at Renaissance.
NeXT has that capitalization because the original NeXT logo had that capitalization. It had that capitalization because the artist wanted to emphasize several adjectives that started with e (I don't remember them at this point, but they were words such as excellent, extendable, educational, and so on) so he made the e lowercase.
NEXTSTEP the operating system is and always has been all caps. OPENSTEP the operating system has also always been all caps. OpenStep the API specification is capitalized in camel case, and I'm not going to touch NeXT's computers, because I always get them wrong.
Is there any way to draw flowchart-style graphical indicators between object interface GUI representations?
That's what you do on OS X, but NeXT (and now Apple) have a patent on that implementation. GNUstep tries to circumvent it by using the small "s" and "t" circles (for "source" and "target") that you see in the video.
And any way to drag/drop primitives like the "*" and "=" operators into scopes of objects, much like drag/dropping the GUI textfields into their group?
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. When the mouse creates connections between the controller and the view, it sets up bindings that ensure that the text view is equivalent to a variable in the controller. If you want a specific instance variable (ivar) to be updated based on the contents of a text field, you can do that on Cocoa, and will probably be able to do it at some point on GNUstep as well, but that's not currently available (so far as I know). If you mean you want the actual calculation to be creatable by a GUI, I would argue that there are too few instances when such formulae would be reasonable to make that worthwhile. It's really only one line of code as-is, anyway.
Finally, does it run on Linux;)?
I think you're joking, but yes. GNUstep fills the same role as Gtk+GNOME or Qt+KDE, and runs on just about any POSIX system. FoundationKit (the non-GUI pieces) run very well on Windows and are usable for production, while AppKit (the graphical pieces) are quite solid on most Unices and getting there on Windows.
Um...I don't know whether you're kidding or not, but that command will delete all of your files one out of six times. You might want to quit executing it.
Someone--probably from here--keeps deleting all contents of the page. Click "Back in Time" at the bottom of the window. I'm trying to revert it, but whenever I do, the person just deletes the page again.
For those wondering: Javolution provides a set of classes that replace some of the core JDK classes with ones that run far faster and more efficiently. It also brings several key Java interfaces (such as Serializable or the Java 5 collection classes) to all available JDKs, even the miniature J2ME 1.1. These classes seem to work with or without garbage collection, as they have a custom object recycler. jScience, meanwhile, provides various common scientific and mathematic capabilities, such as linear equation solvers and efficient matrix operations. Both are open-source under the LGPL.
Come on, Slashdot. It's not that hard to include this much description in the story.
Last time I checked, 3 & 2 == 2 (11 & 10 == 10, if you prefer binary), so if "any boolean logitician [sic] will tell you that the version number should be 6," we are in serious trouble...
The Newton uses a huge number of custom proprietary chips relating to things such as its operating system and Newton data soups that have thus far made emulation entirely impossible. The mere fact that the iPaq uses an ARM chip won't allay those problems.
Yeah, Bell may have made the telephone, but, dammit, if Darl can sue people for using Linux, then Edison should be able to sue people for using the telephone!
Most of those contracts include a clause such that they are allowed to modify the contract without notifying you beforehand. I scratch out this clause on any contract, xerox it for my records, and send it in, and they normally don't complain (and, when they do, they normally are amenable to the change anyway once I explain my position). That's an effective way to get around the problem. However, if you did not modify the contract, you probably have no recourse this time around.
I understood your form problem, but I just don't have it. This screenshot, which I just took under Safari on Haaretz' website, has some form components with Hebrew characters. It looks perfectly fine to me; the control's labels are properly aligned and correspond to the controls, and the controls themselves display the Hebrew text just fine--even mixing the Latin and Hebrew character sets within the list. If there was a specific site you were having a problem with, I would be happy to check it out and file a bug report with Apple if the problem persists, but otherwise, I suspect the system you were on is misconfigured, or I am simply not understand the issue you were experiencing.
My problem with OSX is it's lack of support for international application. I was recently in the US, and couldn't send email in Hebrew, because OSX didn't support it.
I am a bit confused by parts of your post which application you were using, but OS X definitely supports Hebrew. TextEdit, which comes with OS X, provides strongly Hebrew support for writing documents, and if you want a stronger solution, Mellel is a superb application developed in Tel Aviv that not only supports numerous RTL languages including Hebrew, but is also a strong word processor. Mail, which is what I use to check mail, supports Hebrew input, as does the Safari web browser. The only applications that don't, as a general rule, are Microsoft's. As long as you stay away from them, you should find support for Hebrew (and Arabic and many other languages) is just fine.
I'm not saying that this is wrong, but your argument would be significantly more convincing if you could provide some sources to back up your claims. Anyone can make a statement; only reputable sources help us know that your statements are important and accurate, and potentially worth responding to.
This is totally incorrect. In the United States, the defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty, just as in a criminal case. The only difference between the two is that a civil case merely requires a "preponderance of evidence," whereas a criminal case requires that the jurors decide that the accused is guilty "beyond any reasonable doubt." Further, a civil case has a simple vote, whereas a criminal case require a unanimous decision.
Napoleonic law is only used in Louisiana state courts. Federal courts and all other states follow British law as it existed in 1776 and as it has been modified since then. British common law from 1776 and prior still applies whenever no newer precedents exist.
I honestly do not find the iBooks--at least the 12.1" versions--to be that large. They are a bit thicker than competition, but they also can take a tremendous beating. I have dropped my current iBook three times, and my previous one four or five, and neither was hurt at all. (What finally did my old iBook in was actually when idiot moving people dropped a 100 pound crate on it, which cracked the LCD. I currently use it as my home server.) By comparison, I have heard stories from my friends of when they drop their IBM and Sony laptops and they shatter badly. Yes, this is anecdotal, but If we're talking only about a pound difference weight-wise for the extra stability then it's certainly worth it to me.
When I am the only one who will have to edit a document, I use Mellel, which is a superb word processor with excellent Hebrew and Arabic support, but when the goal is portability, Word becomes the only choice. There are and have been many word processors that can handle Hebrew on Mac OS X and other systems, but Word remains a stumbling block, because that's what most people use.
On the one hand, I'm glad that packages such as OpenOffice are available, but you have got to realize that, if you really need to exchange a large number of Office documents, there is no real alternative except Office. I wish that weren't true, I try to minimize how much Office I use by using alternative products, and I wish OpenOffice the best of luck in the world and look forward to when I can use it in place of Office. However, for the moment, there are times--many of them--when I absolutely have no choice except to use Office, and the simple matter is that Microsoft has steadfastly refused not only to support Hebrew, but also Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese--really, any non-Latin language--in the Macintosh version of Word. That is wholly and entirely unacceptable, and I think that the Israeli government probably has a perfect valid point. Their reaction is perhaps a tad bit overkill, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.
Disclaimer: I am a US citizen whose native languages are American English and Southern and I am happy that way.:)
I definitely agree that having two programmers sitting next to each other is very distracting and ultimately counterproductive (at least for me). However, I have found that the Mac programming editor SubEthaEdit (formerly known as Hydra, but recently renamed due to legal issues) can be a tremendously productive alternative. In essence, you can think of it as an alternative implementation of paired programming. SubEthaEdit allows multiple users to edit a single document in real time. It uses color coding to distinguish who has added a modified what parts of the text to make real-time version tracking easy even in an highly chaotic environment, and even supports a fairly intelligent undo system. I've found that you get the benefits of paired programming (multiple people working and reviewing code at once), yet you also don't have to constantly explain everything as you're going or have that annoyance of someone leading over your shoulder, craning at the screen. Best of all, it becomes practical to have more than two people working on a single file at once. If you want, you can do NASA-style programming and have two people just searching for bugs and two people just coding. The results can be quite spectacular. SubEthaEdit may be not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'd highly recommend you at least take a look.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I'm certainly not arguing with you, I do find it amusing that their incredible poor track record means that when they actually do get something right, no one remembers. For example, back in 2000, MOSR—and only MOSR—boldly predicted that Apple was going to pitch their Platinum GUI style and adopt a new look called "Aqua," which they described as being liquid smooth and having extensive animations and visual effects. MOSR was widely mocked and derided. After all, Apple had only just adopted Platinum a few years ago; why such a sudden, radical departure? When Apple then did announce Aqua, everyone was quiet about MOSR for a brief while, then went back to mocking it. It's kind of sad in a way. The rumor site who cried wolf: right so rarely that when they really do have a breaking story, no one believes them.
The intern who looks like Bill Gates is probably me (I'm Benjamin Pollack). It's not the first time I've been accused of looking like Bill Gates. I actually was reentering the United States a few years ago and going through customs in Newark, and the customs officer who was at my window when I finally got to the front of the line looked incredibly bored. I walked up and put my passport down. He glanced up, started asking the typical questions, then, staring at my face, he paused. He then looked back down at my passport, back at me, back at my passport, back at me, and then said in a thick Italian accent, "You are related to Bill Gates?" The people I was with just started cracking up, and several people suddenly glanced over in my direction. It was actually a bit embarassing, but also kind of fun to have everybody suddenly paying attention to me for no good reason.
You will be happy to know that he and I are not related. Besides, if he were, he'd hate me; I'm a diehard Mac user.
I suspect I'm feeding the trolls, but I'll answer your question anyway.
EULAs impose additional restrictions on the software beyond the restrictions that would naturally arise due to copyright. These restrictions almost always regard how the programs may be used or redistributed. The EULA for Internet Explorer, just as an example, technically forbids you from running it under WINE, even though there is no reason by copyright law that it would be illegal to do so. The EULA of server software frequently restricts how many clients may use the software at once and how many CPUs or computers the software may be placed on at once. In all of these cases, actions that would normally be acceptable under copyright law are forbidden; no freedoms are granted.
The GPL, in contrast, places no restrictions on how the program is used. It grants you additional rights beyond those that copyright law would by default permit—specifically, permission to modify and then redistribute the program without paying royalties to the copyright holder, provided that you keep those rights the same. Because these rights are greater than those afforded by copyright, you do not have permission to exercise them without accepting the GPL. This actually places the GPL on very sound legal footing compared to a click-through license agreement that places restrictions on your usage of a program.
All of that said, I am not aware of a court ruling that makes EULAs nonbinding, although certainly many people on Slashdot wish that they were not. If you are aware of such a court case, please provide a link or docket number. I'd be interested to read it.
You can use VisualWorks Smalltalk for free for noncommercial applications, and shell out for commercial, but Squeak is the only serious game in town if you want to do open-source Smalltalk work.
The problem is that this correction is still wrong. OS X has never been based on FreeBSD's kernel. Although it has strived to ensure its BSD API matches FreeBSD, and has even ported over some custom extensions (such as kqueue), OS X's kernel has always been based on OPENSTEP's--a Mach microkernel with custom Unix services above it. OS X has had native threads since OS X 10.0 through the NSThread and Carbon Multiprocessing APIs. I don't know whether POSIX threads followed a different route, but the statement that OS X only got native threads in Tiger is simply wrong.
The theater where I watched ROTS last week was wonderfully raucous, as it was filled with college kids. Things had already taken a turn for the worse when the audience laughed hysterically at Jar Jar's two-second cameo at Padme's funeral (not exactly the tone you want, after all), but things really went downhill during Darth Vader's screamfest. As soon as Vader's cry of "NOOOOOO!!" died out, someone in the back of the theater yelled out, at the top of his lungs,
"YES, BITCH!!"
He was quickly escorted out of the theater, but he also got a solid round of applause from the audience. I personally thought that it added a wonderful dimension to the movie, and it was at that point that I became very sorry that Mystery Science Theater 3000 is no longer on the air.
If you really want to, you can program the GUI entirely from source code. You can see an example of how to do that in the old GNUstep tutorials that date from before Gorm (in particular, take a look at Your First Steps in GNUstep GUI Programming Part 1 and Part 2). That said, I have no idea why you'd want to do this. Gorm's interfaces are just XML files, and are therefore still fully modifyable from text. If you want something more human-readable, take a look at Renaissance.
NeXT has that capitalization because the original NeXT logo had that capitalization. It had that capitalization because the artist wanted to emphasize several adjectives that started with e (I don't remember them at this point, but they were words such as excellent, extendable, educational, and so on) so he made the e lowercase.
NEXTSTEP the operating system is and always has been all caps. OPENSTEP the operating system has also always been all caps. OpenStep the API specification is capitalized in camel case, and I'm not going to touch NeXT's computers, because I always get them wrong.
Um...I don't know whether you're kidding or not, but that command will delete all of your files one out of six times. You might want to quit executing it.
Someone--probably from here--keeps deleting all contents of the page. Click "Back in Time" at the bottom of the window. I'm trying to revert it, but whenever I do, the person just deletes the page again.
For those wondering: Javolution provides a set of classes that replace some of the core JDK classes with ones that run far faster and more efficiently. It also brings several key Java interfaces (such as Serializable or the Java 5 collection classes) to all available JDKs, even the miniature J2ME 1.1. These classes seem to work with or without garbage collection, as they have a custom object recycler. jScience, meanwhile, provides various common scientific and mathematic capabilities, such as linear equation solvers and efficient matrix operations. Both are open-source under the LGPL.
Come on, Slashdot. It's not that hard to include this much description in the story.
Last time I checked, 3 & 2 == 2 (11 & 10 == 10, if you prefer binary), so if "any boolean logitician [sic] will tell you that the version number should be 6," we are in serious trouble...
The Newton uses a huge number of custom proprietary chips relating to things such as its operating system and Newton data soups that have thus far made emulation entirely impossible. The mere fact that the iPaq uses an ARM chip won't allay those problems.
Yeah, Bell may have made the telephone, but, dammit, if Darl can sue people for using Linux, then Edison should be able to sue people for using the telephone!
Most of those contracts include a clause such that they are allowed to modify the contract without notifying you beforehand. I scratch out this clause on any contract, xerox it for my records, and send it in, and they normally don't complain (and, when they do, they normally are amenable to the change anyway once I explain my position). That's an effective way to get around the problem. However, if you did not modify the contract, you probably have no recourse this time around.
I understood your form problem, but I just don't have it. This screenshot, which I just took under Safari on Haaretz' website, has some form components with Hebrew characters. It looks perfectly fine to me; the control's labels are properly aligned and correspond to the controls, and the controls themselves display the Hebrew text just fine--even mixing the Latin and Hebrew character sets within the list. If there was a specific site you were having a problem with, I would be happy to check it out and file a bug report with Apple if the problem persists, but otherwise, I suspect the system you were on is misconfigured, or I am simply not understand the issue you were experiencing.
I'm not saying that this is wrong, but your argument would be significantly more convincing if you could provide some sources to back up your claims. Anyone can make a statement; only reputable sources help us know that your statements are important and accurate, and potentially worth responding to.
This is totally incorrect. In the United States, the defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty, just as in a criminal case. The only difference between the two is that a civil case merely requires a "preponderance of evidence," whereas a criminal case requires that the jurors decide that the accused is guilty "beyond any reasonable doubt." Further, a civil case has a simple vote, whereas a criminal case require a unanimous decision.
Napoleonic law is only used in Louisiana state courts. Federal courts and all other states follow British law as it existed in 1776 and as it has been modified since then. British common law from 1776 and prior still applies whenever no newer precedents exist.
I honestly do not find the iBooks--at least the 12.1" versions--to be that large. They are a bit thicker than competition, but they also can take a tremendous beating. I have dropped my current iBook three times, and my previous one four or five, and neither was hurt at all. (What finally did my old iBook in was actually when idiot moving people dropped a 100 pound crate on it, which cracked the LCD. I currently use it as my home server.) By comparison, I have heard stories from my friends of when they drop their IBM and Sony laptops and they shatter badly. Yes, this is anecdotal, but If we're talking only about a pound difference weight-wise for the extra stability then it's certainly worth it to me.
When I am the only one who will have to edit a document, I use Mellel, which is a superb word processor with excellent Hebrew and Arabic support, but when the goal is portability, Word becomes the only choice. There are and have been many word processors that can handle Hebrew on Mac OS X and other systems, but Word remains a stumbling block, because that's what most people use.
On the one hand, I'm glad that packages such as OpenOffice are available, but you have got to realize that, if you really need to exchange a large number of Office documents, there is no real alternative except Office. I wish that weren't true, I try to minimize how much Office I use by using alternative products, and I wish OpenOffice the best of luck in the world and look forward to when I can use it in place of Office. However, for the moment, there are times--many of them--when I absolutely have no choice except to use Office, and the simple matter is that Microsoft has steadfastly refused not only to support Hebrew, but also Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese--really, any non-Latin language--in the Macintosh version of Word. That is wholly and entirely unacceptable, and I think that the Israeli government probably has a perfect valid point. Their reaction is perhaps a tad bit overkill, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.
:)
Disclaimer: I am a US citizen whose native languages are American English and Southern and I am happy that way.
I definitely agree that having two programmers sitting next to each other is very distracting and ultimately counterproductive (at least for me). However, I have found that the Mac programming editor SubEthaEdit (formerly known as Hydra, but recently renamed due to legal issues) can be a tremendously productive alternative. In essence, you can think of it as an alternative implementation of paired programming. SubEthaEdit allows multiple users to edit a single document in real time. It uses color coding to distinguish who has added a modified what parts of the text to make real-time version tracking easy even in an highly chaotic environment, and even supports a fairly intelligent undo system. I've found that you get the benefits of paired programming (multiple people working and reviewing code at once), yet you also don't have to constantly explain everything as you're going or have that annoyance of someone leading over your shoulder, craning at the screen. Best of all, it becomes practical to have more than two people working on a single file at once. If you want, you can do NASA-style programming and have two people just searching for bugs and two people just coding. The results can be quite spectacular. SubEthaEdit may be not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'd highly recommend you at least take a look.