vim has syntax highlighting for every programming language and file format known to man (well... nearly). Emacs, gedit, kate and others support a lot of different languages as well. However, Visual Studio only supports syntax highlighting for languages it can compile.
I hate code completion. If you mis-type something, the editor will fill out the wrong thing for you. For editing XML, you can't wrap some text in a tag, as Visual Studio auto-completes the end tag for you. I always type both quotes after an attribute, so end up with 3 quotes in Visual Studio! And yes, when I use Visual Studio, I have these turned off, thank-you-very-much!
Auto-complete for method names means that you end up playing hunt-the-function-name-game and don't necessarily understand what it is you are typing.
Error checking is good, but having it report that you need to close a parenthesis or XML tag as you are writing the document and haven't written that yet is very annoying.
Debugging in the one area where Visual Studio is very good, but well-written tests with good test coverage, and decent logging/error reporting should remove most of the need for debugging.
The functional programming languages (Haskell, F#,...) are referring to functions in a mathematical sense.
When programmers talk about functions (in Pascal, C, C++,...) they are referring to procedural programming languages.
In C++, the Standard Template Library (STL) is using a lot of functional programming techniques and style, albeit in a language that does not directly support functional programming.
English (and other natural languages) are worse than programming languages in that there is a lot more freedom of interpretation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing, specifically the "Concrete problems" section).
For example (from the wikipedia article), understanding "Time flies like an arrow" requires a lot of contextual knowledge. Also, check out http://www.gray-area.org/Research/Ambig/.
Consider also:
* Chapter I is the chapter of the book I have read.
* Take the lead of this dance while I go and take the lead out of the box.
* I am going to read a book I have read long ago.
* While on an IV drip, I managed to read through Part IV of the play.
Language (especially English) is extremely complicated, especially when colloquialisms and slang are used.
""" Newzbin indexes and links to everything on Usenet. Sometimes, you may find an item listed that you'd prefer us not to have - you may own copyright over the software for example, and having it distributed via Usenet is not your preferred method.
Since the indexing is automated we can't discern what to index, and what not to index. """
Installing Windows on a separate partition requires you to set up and install Windows on that partition. Yes, it is possible, but requires effort to maintain. And yes, I know that Linux+Wine also takes effort to maintain, but for the large part it works with minimal effort.
Dual booting also requires you to restart the machine. Thus, all your active programs get lost, and you can't switch between programs as the rest of your programs, music and other stuff are on a different partition in a format that Windows cannot read (or can with some work, but not seamlessly).
You also have to maintain two systems. This means anti-virus, firewall and updates. Linux is easier to keep up-to-date as there is a single place to update things from that updates everything.
Then you have to worry about updates to Windows overwriting the grub partition (of which there are reports), or otherwise screwing over your system (Windows ignores your partitions and writes mis-aligned partitions for its volumes -- at least Vista did when I was dual booting).
Plus, there is the licensing cost. Yes, my computer came with Vista, but it will get to the point where Microsoft will stop releasing fixes for it and I don't want to shell out for an upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 or whatever the latest version of Windows is.
Not to mention that I might not want to use Windows. And before you say anything, I have been a long-term Windows user (from Windows 95), and I prefer to use Linux these days.
And, Wine is a lot easier to sandbox. I can create a directory for each wine prefix, install the game there and have it completely isolated. Even more so if I don't have the z: drive that maps the root file system and map the shell folders to be within the prefix folder.
Wine also gives you the opportunity to run some games that do not work on Vista. Yes, there are games that do not work on Wine as well, but that is the choice I have made.
And yes, it is a conscious choice. And if game makers release games that I am interested in for Linux (thank you 2D boy!) I will buy them and support them.
What version of Firefox are you using? What version of Mac are you running on? What version of Windows are you running on? What plugins are you using? What websites are you visiting where you notice high footprint? Are you visiting a lot of Flash-based websites (e.g. youtube)? Are you constantly using javascript/ajax intensive websites (e.g. gmail or google docs)? Are you visiting a lot of Silverlight-based websites? Are you reading a lot of PDFs from the browser?
And please, file a bug with Firefox with a subject line along the lines of "Firefox consuming 1.5GB on Windows and Mac" so that the Firefox team can help track down and resolve the problem. Please include as much information as you can.
The sad thing about this is that if you have a good quality product that meets the consumers needs and is at an affordable price, then people will buy them. People these days have many different media devices (desktop, laptop, portable media player, car stereo/player, netbook,...). Most of these will have their music on their computer, synced to their portable media player and car, possibly backed up to an external drive.
With software, restrictive DRM will only push people away. For example, I have moved over to Linux, but still play games through Wine. I try out (and regularly buy) several casual games and some of the bigger ones as well (like StarCraft). DRM on this software will make it harder to run on this platform, and will drive me away from those companies. For example, I don't buy any Oberon Media games anymore, but look to Awem Studios and Big Fish Games for the casual games that I play/buy.
How do you know that Mozilla are not improving quality? If you pay attention, Mozilla are improving the quality of the codebase (memory consumption/leak fixes, crash fixes, etc.).
And while plugins do add some features, what about HTML5 support? Support for SMIL animations in SVG? Out of process plug-ins? Better JavaScript performance? Support for additional emerging and evolving standards? Better OS integration on Windows, Mac and Linux? Hardware-accelerated page rendering? WebGL support? And much more.
You don't have to use / when defining a regular expression in sed or perl (and maybe others as well), but you do have to escape \ in C/C++, perl, bash, make, python (unless using raw string literals) and others.
IINAL, but doesn't the GPL explicitly exclude any code provided as part of the Operating System and standard libraries. This allows you to use Microsoft Visual C/C++ and not require Microsoft to open up their msvcr**.dll binaries. This allows you to build GPL code on Windows or Solaris without requiring the Operating System to be GPL.
With Windows, Microsoft provide an SDK so that you can target programs for it. Likewise, WiiWare has an SDK it uses to target that platform, so I don't see what the problem is (unless they statically link parts of the WiiWare operating system (i.e. not to shared libraries running on the OS) into the games via the SDK).
Numbers are largely irrelevant. Any code will have bugs, and a percentage of those will be security issues. Yes, careful design and reviews can and will reduce the number of bugs, but will not eliminate them. Especially for a complex system that has a large codebase with multiple components interacting with each other, and with external libraries and components.
FLOSS does not refute this.
What is more interesting is: 1/ Is the fact that a larger number of vulnerabilities are found in Firefox and Chrome because their source code is there for people and researchers to examine, instead of being known only to the company producing the closed source product because that company views any of these issues to be a low priority? 2/ How quickly do the security issues get fixed? 3/ How quickly since the fix is created, does it get pushed out as a release? 4/ How quickly do customers get the fix? 5/ How many customers are left running an unpatched system? 6/ What are the tools (valgrind, sparse, dehydra, cocinelle, coverity) like for tracking down these types of issue?
According to that link, the XPS viewer is opening the XPS document in the default web browser which is Firefox. However, Firefox does not know how to render the Microsoft-specific XPS format and IE does.
This is not a Firefox problem, it is a problem with the implementors of the XPS viewer.
i4i have stated that OO.org does not implement the functionality covered in the patent, so OO.org (and thus Star Office, and by impliccation ODF) is fine. The same will go for other ODF-based office suites like KOffice.
As a part of Microsoft's continued commitment to/subvert, buyout, blackmail, corrupt, destroy and bend to our will/ interoperability and standards support...
MFC is a C++ UI framework, with classes for different UI widgets and Operating System components (such as threads). WinForms is MFC for C#.
XAML is an XML serialisation format for a set of namespaces that define UI widgets (think Mozilla XUL, Qt UI XML or Gtk's Glade), vector graphics (shapes, gradient fills, etc -- think SVG) and other bits and pieces (it even supports styling (think CSS in XML) and data templates (think XSL:T bound to C# data classes instead of XML elements)).
That is, you can do things like:
instead of:
Rectangle r = new Rectangle();
r.Fill = "Red";
Since Firefox 3.1, it's javascript engine does the same (it compiles the code on the fly to native code). "We have, right now, x86, x86-64, and ARM support in TraceMonkey." [1]
I don't know about how chrome handles this, but firefox will still interpret the javascript code for the parts of the code that it hasn't generated native code for.
There is nothing that mandates that you must have tons of addons installed. Yes, they are available and some are useful, but they are not required.
Firefox startup time being slow (and yes, the more addons you have, the slower it will be) falls into the following areas:
* disk I/O (which is not dependent on CPU speed);
* element reflow analysis being called a large number of times (this is a fancy way of saying where everything is positioned on the page - which, yes, does include the UI);
* element reflow analysis takes a long time each time it is performed;
* javascript performance.
The Firefox team are working on, investigating and making improvements to these areas.
Improving the algorithms for arbitrary precision arithmetic -- that is the area that Fabrice is interested in, not necessarily computing X number of digits of pi. That, and (a) it is interesting, (b) it is a challenge and (c) let's do it for fun.
He also wrote the Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler (http://bellard.org/otcc/) in 2002 for the Obfuscated C contest, where otcc could compile itself. This became the Tiny C Compiler (TCC) which was picked up by Robert Landley (but subsequently dropped a while later) that is a capable, fast C90/C99 compiler.
His projects page (http://bellard.org/) and the older projects (http://bellard.org/projects.html) contain a lot of interesting projects.
Slashdot Mirror
vim has syntax highlighting for every programming language and file format known to man (well... nearly). Emacs, gedit, kate and others support a lot of different languages as well. However, Visual Studio only supports syntax highlighting for languages it can compile.
I hate code completion. If you mis-type something, the editor will fill out the wrong thing for you. For editing XML, you can't wrap some text in a tag, as Visual Studio auto-completes the end tag for you. I always type both quotes after an attribute, so end up with 3 quotes in Visual Studio! And yes, when I use Visual Studio, I have these turned off, thank-you-very-much!
Auto-complete for method names means that you end up playing hunt-the-function-name-game and don't necessarily understand what it is you are typing.
Error checking is good, but having it report that you need to close a parenthesis or XML tag as you are writing the document and haven't written that yet is very annoying.
Debugging in the one area where Visual Studio is very good, but well-written tests with good test coverage, and decent logging/error reporting should remove most of the need for debugging.
The functional programming languages (Haskell, F#, ...) are referring to functions in a mathematical sense.
When programmers talk about functions (in Pascal, C, C++, ...) they are referring to procedural programming languages.
In C++, the Standard Template Library (STL) is using a lot of functional programming techniques and style, albeit in a language that does not directly support functional programming.
I specializ in de Ceiling Cat an look at de message he sez [http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php]. Iz importnt n stuff.
Yay! I haz Ceiling Cat degree!
English (and other natural languages) are worse than programming languages in that there is a lot more freedom of interpretation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing, specifically the "Concrete problems" section).
For example (from the wikipedia article), understanding "Time flies like an arrow" requires a lot of contextual knowledge. Also, check out http://www.gray-area.org/Research/Ambig/.
Consider also:
* Chapter I is the chapter of the book I have read.
* Take the lead of this dance while I go and take the lead out of the box.
* I am going to read a book I have read long ago.
* While on an IV drip, I managed to read through Part IV of the play.
Language (especially English) is extremely complicated, especially when colloquialisms and slang are used.
Hai, I can haz degree?
No, from http://docs.newzbin.com/index.php/Newzbin:Item_Removal:
"""
Newzbin indexes and links to everything on Usenet. Sometimes, you may find an item listed that you'd prefer us not to have - you may own copyright over the software for example, and having it distributed via Usenet is not your preferred method.
Since the indexing is automated we can't discern what to index, and what not to index.
"""
Installing Windows on a separate partition requires you to set up and install Windows on that partition. Yes, it is possible, but requires effort to maintain. And yes, I know that Linux+Wine also takes effort to maintain, but for the large part it works with minimal effort.
Dual booting also requires you to restart the machine. Thus, all your active programs get lost, and you can't switch between programs as the rest of your programs, music and other stuff are on a different partition in a format that Windows cannot read (or can with some work, but not seamlessly).
You also have to maintain two systems. This means anti-virus, firewall and updates. Linux is easier to keep up-to-date as there is a single place to update things from that updates everything.
Then you have to worry about updates to Windows overwriting the grub partition (of which there are reports), or otherwise screwing over your system (Windows ignores your partitions and writes mis-aligned partitions for its volumes -- at least Vista did when I was dual booting).
Plus, there is the licensing cost. Yes, my computer came with Vista, but it will get to the point where Microsoft will stop releasing fixes for it and I don't want to shell out for an upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 or whatever the latest version of Windows is.
Not to mention that I might not want to use Windows. And before you say anything, I have been a long-term Windows user (from Windows 95), and I prefer to use Linux these days.
And, Wine is a lot easier to sandbox. I can create a directory for each wine prefix, install the game there and have it completely isolated. Even more so if I don't have the z: drive that maps the root file system and map the shell folders to be within the prefix folder.
Wine also gives you the opportunity to run some games that do not work on Vista. Yes, there are games that do not work on Wine as well, but that is the choice I have made.
And yes, it is a conscious choice. And if game makers release games that I am interested in for Linux (thank you 2D boy!) I will buy them and support them.
What version of Firefox are you using?
What version of Mac are you running on?
What version of Windows are you running on?
What plugins are you using?
What websites are you visiting where you notice high footprint?
Are you visiting a lot of Flash-based websites (e.g. youtube)?
Are you constantly using javascript/ajax intensive websites (e.g. gmail or google docs)?
Are you visiting a lot of Silverlight-based websites?
Are you reading a lot of PDFs from the browser?
And please, file a bug with Firefox with a subject line along the lines of "Firefox consuming 1.5GB on Windows and Mac" so that the Firefox team can help track down and resolve the problem. Please include as much information as you can.
We'll see what conclusion Ubisoft comes to.
The sad thing about this is that if you have a good quality product that meets the consumers needs and is at an affordable price, then people will buy them. People these days have many different media devices (desktop, laptop, portable media player, car stereo/player, netbook, ...). Most of these will have their music on their computer, synced to their portable media player and car, possibly backed up to an external drive.
With software, restrictive DRM will only push people away. For example, I have moved over to Linux, but still play games through Wine. I try out (and regularly buy) several casual games and some of the bigger ones as well (like StarCraft). DRM on this software will make it harder to run on this platform, and will drive me away from those companies. For example, I don't buy any Oberon Media games anymore, but look to Awem Studios and Big Fish Games for the casual games that I play/buy.
How do you know that Mozilla are not improving quality? If you pay attention, Mozilla are improving the quality of the codebase (memory consumption/leak fixes, crash fixes, etc.).
And while plugins do add some features, what about HTML5 support? Support for SMIL animations in SVG? Out of process plug-ins? Better JavaScript performance? Support for additional emerging and evolving standards? Better OS integration on Windows, Mac and Linux? Hardware-accelerated page rendering? WebGL support? And much more.
$ sed -e 's,\\,/,'
You don't have to use / when defining a regular expression in sed or perl (and maybe others as well), but you do have to escape \ in C/C++, perl, bash, make, python (unless using raw string literals) and others.
IINAL, but doesn't the GPL explicitly exclude any code provided as part of the Operating System and standard libraries. This allows you to use Microsoft Visual C/C++ and not require Microsoft to open up their msvcr**.dll binaries. This allows you to build GPL code on Windows or Solaris without requiring the Operating System to be GPL.
With Windows, Microsoft provide an SDK so that you can target programs for it. Likewise, WiiWare has an SDK it uses to target that platform, so I don't see what the problem is (unless they statically link parts of the WiiWare operating system (i.e. not to shared libraries running on the OS) into the games via the SDK).
Numbers are largely irrelevant. Any code will have bugs, and a percentage of those will be security issues. Yes, careful design and reviews can and will reduce the number of bugs, but will not eliminate them. Especially for a complex system that has a large codebase with multiple components interacting with each other, and with external libraries and components.
FLOSS does not refute this.
What is more interesting is:
1/ Is the fact that a larger number of vulnerabilities are found in Firefox and Chrome because their source code is there for people and researchers to examine, instead of being known only to the company producing the closed source product because that company views any of these issues to be a low priority?
2/ How quickly do the security issues get fixed?
3/ How quickly since the fix is created, does it get pushed out as a release?
4/ How quickly do customers get the fix?
5/ How many customers are left running an unpatched system?
6/ What are the tools (valgrind, sparse, dehydra, cocinelle, coverity) like for tracking down these types of issue?
According to that link, the XPS viewer is opening the XPS document in the default web browser which is Firefox. However, Firefox does not know how to render the Microsoft-specific XPS format and IE does.
This is not a Firefox problem, it is a problem with the implementors of the XPS viewer.
i4i have stated that OO.org does not implement the functionality covered in the patent, so OO.org (and thus Star Office, and by impliccation ODF) is fine. The same will go for other ODF-based office suites like KOffice.
OpenGL can even be used to implement all versions of Direct3D (wine).
OpenGL is a graphics-specific API (like Direct3D). If you want sound, network, etc. support, try SDL or Qt.
As a part of Microsoft's continued commitment to /subvert, buyout, blackmail, corrupt, destroy and bend to our will/ interoperability and standards support...
Or in XAML: <Laughter Voice="{Binding Type:Evil}" EmbraceExtendExtinguish.Stage="Embrace"><Intonation.Type>Manical</Intonation.Type></Laughter>.
Ah, /. is eating the tag. Should be:
<Rectangle Fill="Red"/>
MFC is a C++ UI framework, with classes for different UI widgets and Operating System components (such as threads). WinForms is MFC for C#.
XAML is an XML serialisation format for a set of namespaces that define UI widgets (think Mozilla XUL, Qt UI XML or Gtk's Glade), vector graphics (shapes, gradient fills, etc -- think SVG) and other bits and pieces (it even supports styling (think CSS in XML) and data templates (think XSL:T bound to C# data classes instead of XML elements)).
That is, you can do things like:
instead of:
Rectangle r = new Rectangle();
r.Fill = "Red";
Since Firefox 3.1, it's javascript engine does the same (it compiles the code on the fly to native code). "We have, right now, x86, x86-64, and ARM support in TraceMonkey." [1]
I don't know about how chrome handles this, but firefox will still interpret the javascript code for the parts of the code that it hasn't generated native code for.
[1] http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-jit-the-dream-gets-closer-in-firefox
There is nothing that mandates that you must have tons of addons installed. Yes, they are available and some are useful, but they are not required.
Firefox startup time being slow (and yes, the more addons you have, the slower it will be) falls into the following areas:
* disk I/O (which is not dependent on CPU speed);
* element reflow analysis being called a large number of times (this is a fancy way of saying where everything is positioned on the page - which, yes, does include the UI);
* element reflow analysis takes a long time each time it is performed;
* javascript performance.
The Firefox team are working on, investigating and making improvements to these areas.
Improving the algorithms for arbitrary precision arithmetic -- that is the area that Fabrice is interested in, not necessarily computing X number of digits of pi. That, and (a) it is interesting, (b) it is a challenge and (c) let's do it for fun.
He also wrote the Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler (http://bellard.org/otcc/) in 2002 for the Obfuscated C contest, where otcc could compile itself. This became the Tiny C Compiler (TCC) which was picked up by Robert Landley (but subsequently dropped a while later) that is a capable, fast C90/C99 compiler.
His projects page (http://bellard.org/) and the older projects (http://bellard.org/projects.html) contain a lot of interesting projects.
Also of note: Fabrice achieved the record for Pi computation in 1997 as well:
http://bellard.org/pi/pi_hexa.html
http://bellard.org/pi-challenge/announce220997.html
http://bellard.org/pi/