...if only they managed not to present them so dull and un-understandable.
Most often when you think that you've finally found the solution, it appears that the only thing that you've solved is the meaning of the dang problem description.
You know, I'm only 23 and I can still recall doing those accent tricks on a typewriter? (A good ole Dutch one with a letter "ij" under the left little finger -- now why did we have to loose that letter in the Information Revolution when the Germans still got their Umlaut? We have been walked over!)
And having a C= 64 of course. You know, my grampa has seen some history passing in his life, but so have I!;-)
The obvious (?) alternative would been using some mapping of Unicode into ASCII.
Isn't that what they call UTF-8/ UTF-7?
I mean, true, it's not ASCII, but it's a mapping from Unicode to 8-bits systems.
Now if you don't support Punycode, you also can't practically reach these new domains -- because their names appear totally clueless to you. So again, why not just upgrading DNS??
I was surprised that this never got discussed on/., but there is a *very active* campaign going on in Holland to promote pre-paid cards for use on the Internet. It's called wallie, and at least we are interested to use it on our little web sale project.
Me: (points into the air) Audience: "One word" Me: (puts three fingers on its arm) Audience: "Three letters" Me: uhh... (pretends to be a Debian apting) Audience: APT!!!! Me: (points to audience while nose-picking)
I'm one of the few that try to put a little decency in Slashdot[*], and look at me now. My apologies, I got carried away, but I should not have become personal.
([*] You'll always see that this post ends up at +5 Funny just because of this part of the above sentence. Oh the irony.)
So I've heard you've something to say about Linux not being ready for The Desktop (Score 5: Insightful).
I'm just glad you've nothing to say about My Desktop, otherwise I'd been forced to run this Windows crap thing for the past five years.
- Lack of font support: whine. The new font stuff rulez.
- Lack of clipboard support: just because it's the next thing being addressed right now, people start whining that it wasn't there before.
- No single installation that Works: people have been doing this for years, and stuff like the LSB and file system standard assure that things get only better.
- Not encouraging binary-only drivers: well DOH! (I just can't express what a whiner argument this is. Just as if we would get more drivers if we were a closed source underdog, say BeOS or something, or we would like our drivers better if we didn't get the source with them. Go run to momma Gates, whiner!)
- Games: what? You put some thought on this one? Good boy! Now look around for Linux games first. But noo, you don't, because you're a gamer, and gamers don't look around for games, they want them to be thrown at them in the mall. And hey, who's better at throwing pricey products at you than our friend mr. Bill? Now can we really help that?
IMHO, what *really* is a blocker for general Linux acceptance, is UNIX legacy. That's right, UNIX legacy. Why?
Imagine designing a completely new system today. What would you come up with? Probably with a way, in one (file system level) way or another (i18n display level) to have READABLE SYSTEM DIRECTORY NAMES, dammit!;-)
And another thing, a location to put applications. Like in, this is my application, I put it in this folder, and when I delete it I have uninstalled it. Like, a folder named "Applications" or something;-) Libraries? Put them in "Libraries". DLL hell? No way - just because this is a problem on Windows doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to manually put simple library files with READABLE FILENAMES in a directory - just look how easy stuff like this is on AmigaOS. It's not all that hard to make a good management system on top of a USABLE BASE SYSTEM, long as you're willing to shake off some of that legacy and make that base system usable first.
Funny how Microsoft has the potential of crushing and/ or "embrace, extend and take over" anything that's worth big bucks, but that it has no power over el-cheapo stuff, which is probably also the reason why M$ has to use the "anti-capitalistic behaviour" dogma too often.
"Free as in GNU" is just an extreme example, however, as shareware is just as uncruncheable to Big Mic. The secret is the money required to run the battle. M$ has an awful lot of money to burn, but that's nothing compared to being able to run the battle without any money at all, if needed.
I can't imagine Google not requiring an awful lot of money to run. Think about it: while webhosts still bills at the Mbit and Mbyte, Google seems to have no problem to store a complete, indexed local copy of just about the entire 'net. I mean, for crying out loud, why shouldn't we all just host our website in Google's cache? (Hey, that's not a bad idea at all:-)
Anyway, now maybe if we're able to P2Pize/ SETIze google, so that every search is traded for some caching and calculation power (or something like that), maybe we can reduce the total cost of running the best indexer in the world to a number too low for Microsoft to catch and crunch. Just imagine the costs of maintenance to be reduced to paying a webhost and do some volunteer programming:-)
All references to the meaning (and age) of a popular Queen song aside (old news, this one), I found it very interesting to wake up first thing this morning with the news that my city was on fire.
So I guess we need radio because we need some kind of useful signal to feed to our radio alarm clocks.
OK so I'm in the position of having to write an emergency support application for a M$-based system in a M$-based environment. Stuck in there. Completely. Been requested to make a maintainable, manageable solution. And yes, this is to say "make it for M$, with M$ tools as much as you can".
I guess even within these circumstances, I'd have refused to open Visual Studio for this project, if it didn't say ".NET" as well. I mean, think of it: previous versions of VS only supported C++ or VB, with APIs to cry for (admittedly, I don't know about MFC, only about Win32).
I actually happen to dislike C++, but on top of that, it doesn't suit my project, because the low-levelness makes it harder to program without errors (e.g. null pointers, memory leaking). I'd rather have a language at a scripting level -- and NO, that's NOT VB. I hope I don't have to explain why I hate VB if only on very first sight.
So with.NET, M$ introduced a quite nice API and Java language (come on, where are the real differences) into Visual Studio, which at least saved my day; I had found an acceptable programming environment for within Windows..!
There's really no need for anybody to pick on C#, long as it's realized that it's just finally a nice programming environment for Windows, and nothing (well, not much) more. (BTW, it's not much different from NeXT (now Apple)'s use/ takeover of Objective C.)
Progeny had a graphical installer available for their Debian-based distro for years, and instead of taking over this one, Debian started creating its own graphical installer despite of a great lack of human resources for the project.
Now I don't know much about Anaconda or what it really is, and I also don't know much about Debian's reason not to use the Progeny installer, but you'll understand that I'm not really convinced that this would change installing Debian until I've heard confirmations from the Debian side of things.
I live about 20 kilometres from the Nutricia factories, so I'm used to getting my daily Chocomel -- in the French-language parts of Belgium known as Cecemel. However, once in France, there was no waiter that understood my order of either Chocomel OR Cecemel (or lait chocolate chaude). They all knew "Gouda" cheese and "Heineken" beer, however, so I was afraid that Chocomel was a little behind on being a solid Dutch export product.
No point in commenting after > 550 replies, but I'll have to try this one.
I think there's some mighty fine American behaviour at work, voting for Bush as the weasliest person (when do you guys ever stop voting for weasels and start voting for presidents?), meanwhile voting for France as the weasliest country -- being the only reasonably large country daring to voice its opinion against the godforsaken United States Under Bush.
I smell hipocrisy, and nominate the voters for the Weasliest Mass.
Well, all superiority of the GNUtils chain aside, I guess your point is valid at least in some way.
I recall trying EGCS (the former GCC fork) on my Amiga as an alternative to DCC and other C compilers. Using DCC, you could almost literally tell which byte served what function; DCC produced very small binaries, and m68k assembly is a very easy read (really! it's like reading a good book).
EGCS, OTOH, produced binaries that were immense. I recall trying to figure out the startup procedure, that is, the stuff that runs before "main". Even the startup procedure was at least a whole factor larger than the DCC code, I believe mainly because it tried to be flexible enough for glibc, for the occasion that it was compiled in -- because you also had to explicitly leave out glibc from the linking process, the default was some Cygwin-like Un*x compatibility mode.
I had also been told that the size of my binaries was because I didn't optimize. This is also the first time when I learnt of "stripping"; e.g. removing the symbol table from a binary I was used to "real", instructions-only binaries, like on the C64.
Yet, even with glibc left out, stripped binaries, optimizations, etc., DCC won by large.
The Bottom Line: YES, we ARE talking about a "Hello, world!" program here. Nevertheless, this program took quite a few kilobytes on EGCS, while the DCC version boiled down to something like (VERY pseudocode):
Well, I like telling this story, so here goes again...
The commodore 64 had a ROM assembly block which you could jump to in order to access some predefined I/O methods and stuff. (You had to know the exact ROM addresses for each function, of course.) This part of the memory was called the "KERNAL". It was always spelled like this, and always in capitals. I never really understood this, especially not in the light of the "newer spelling" used to describe Un*x kernels.
That is, until one source told me that the C64 KERNAL actually was an acronym for "Keyboard Entry, Read Network And Link". It's all up to you to believe this or not, but I think it's at least kind of funny in its own way.
I TOLD you that the Amiga Interchange File Format is far superior to everything out there! And so is their Fast File System. Heh, even BSD uses it! AMIGA RULEZ!
While "we" are all making fun of mr. Stallman, his original idea (to create a user base for Free Software as to ultimately create a legal platform and status for it) is finally seeing the first tiny steps towards a result; recognition by governments is a good first. This should also (partially) explain his hammering on the GNU brand, as to promote the ideas behind the project on moments as these. You never know what they'll pick up in new legislation just because they've heard of it and find some kind of sense in it.
Now of course this post seems like an open invitation to start another pro-/ anti-RMS GNU vs. BSD bash riot on Slashdot, but I honestly believe that most of that has been said before (duh!). All I wanted to do is put this single point of credit towards mr. Stallman, independent of any other credits he should or should not deserve in your eyes. (Let's see if this keeps you from throwing some old mud on Slashdot...)
Slashdot Mirror
I thought this DMCA thingy outruled the 1st Amendment?
...if only they managed not to present them so dull and un-understandable.
Most often when you think that you've finally found the solution, it appears that the only thing that you've solved is the meaning of the dang problem description.
Oh, the typewriter days.
;-)
I'm getting all warm inside.
You know, I'm only 23 and I can still recall doing those accent tricks on a typewriter? (A good ole Dutch one with a letter "ij" under the left little finger -- now why did we have to loose that letter in the Information Revolution when the Germans still got their Umlaut? We have been walked over!)
And having a C= 64 of course. You know, my grampa has seen some history passing in his life, but so have I!
The obvious (?) alternative would been using some mapping of Unicode into ASCII.
Isn't that what they call UTF-8/ UTF-7?
I mean, true, it's not ASCII, but it's a mapping from Unicode to 8-bits systems.
Now if you don't support Punycode, you also can't practically reach these new domains -- because their names appear totally clueless to you. So again, why not just upgrading DNS??
Other question: what place would you go to buy O'Reilly books online? (I.e.: where does the money enter the story?)
I was surprised that this never got discussed on /., but there is a *very active* campaign going on in Holland to promote pre-paid cards for use on the Internet. It's called wallie, and at least we are interested to use it on our little web sale project.
Unless it is finally done on a central package repository, like a Debian APT server.
That is so true. Now only if it were free.
Me: (points into the air)
Audience: "One word"
Me: (puts three fingers on its arm)
Audience: "Three letters"
Me: uhh... (pretends to be a Debian apting)
Audience: APT!!!!
Me: (points to audience while nose-picking)
Go run to momma Gates, whiner!
OK, sorry, this one was too harsh.
I'm one of the few that try to put a little decency in Slashdot[*], and look at me now. My apologies, I got carried away, but I should not have become personal.
([*] You'll always see that this post ends up at +5 Funny just because of this part of the above sentence. Oh the irony.)
Oh Boo Hoo.
;-)
;-) Libraries? Put them in "Libraries". DLL hell? No way - just because this is a problem on Windows doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to manually put simple library files with READABLE FILENAMES in a directory - just look how easy stuff like this is on AmigaOS. It's not all that hard to make a good management system on top of a USABLE BASE SYSTEM, long as you're willing to shake off some of that legacy and make that base system usable first.
So I've heard you've something to say about Linux not being ready for The Desktop (Score 5: Insightful).
I'm just glad you've nothing to say about My Desktop, otherwise I'd been forced to run this Windows crap thing for the past five years.
- Lack of font support: whine. The new font stuff rulez.
- Lack of clipboard support: just because it's the next thing being addressed right now, people start whining that it wasn't there before.
- No single installation that Works: people have been doing this for years, and stuff like the LSB and file system standard assure that things get only better.
- Not encouraging binary-only drivers: well DOH! (I just can't express what a whiner argument this is. Just as if we would get more drivers if we were a closed source underdog, say BeOS or something, or we would like our drivers better if we didn't get the source with them. Go run to momma Gates, whiner!)
- Games: what? You put some thought on this one? Good boy! Now look around for Linux games first. But noo, you don't, because you're a gamer, and gamers don't look around for games, they want them to be thrown at them in the mall. And hey, who's better at throwing pricey products at you than our friend mr. Bill? Now can we really help that?
IMHO, what *really* is a blocker for general Linux acceptance, is UNIX legacy. That's right, UNIX legacy. Why?
Imagine designing a completely new system today. What would you come up with? Probably with a way, in one (file system level) way or another (i18n display level) to have READABLE SYSTEM DIRECTORY NAMES, dammit!
And another thing, a location to put applications. Like in, this is my application, I put it in this folder, and when I delete it I have uninstalled it. Like, a folder named "Applications" or something
Oh, I see I'M SCREAMING sometimes. Sorry.
Funny how Microsoft has the potential of crushing and/ or "embrace, extend and take over" anything that's worth big bucks, but that it has no power over el-cheapo stuff, which is probably also the reason why M$ has to use the "anti-capitalistic behaviour" dogma too often.
:-)
:-)
"Free as in GNU" is just an extreme example, however, as shareware is just as uncruncheable to Big Mic. The secret is the money required to run the battle. M$ has an awful lot of money to burn, but that's nothing compared to being able to run the battle without any money at all, if needed.
I can't imagine Google not requiring an awful lot of money to run. Think about it: while webhosts still bills at the Mbit and Mbyte, Google seems to have no problem to store a complete, indexed local copy of just about the entire 'net. I mean, for crying out loud, why shouldn't we all just host our website in Google's cache? (Hey, that's not a bad idea at all
Anyway, now maybe if we're able to P2Pize/ SETIze google, so that every search is traded for some caching and calculation power (or something like that), maybe we can reduce the total cost of running the best indexer in the world to a number too low for Microsoft to catch and crunch. Just imagine the costs of maintenance to be reduced to paying a webhost and do some volunteer programming
Where do YOU want to go today?
All references to the meaning (and age) of a popular Queen song aside (old news, this one), I found it very interesting to wake up first thing this morning with the news that my city was on fire.
So I guess we need radio because we need some kind of useful signal to feed to our radio alarm clocks.
OK so I'm in the position of having to write an emergency support application for a M$-based system in a M$-based environment. Stuck in there. Completely. Been requested to make a maintainable, manageable solution. And yes, this is to say "make it for M$, with M$ tools as much as you can".
.NET, M$ introduced a quite nice API and Java language (come on, where are the real differences) into Visual Studio, which at least saved my day; I had found an acceptable programming environment for within Windows..!
I guess even within these circumstances, I'd have refused to open Visual Studio for this project, if it didn't say ".NET" as well. I mean, think of it: previous versions of VS only supported C++ or VB, with APIs to cry for (admittedly, I don't know about MFC, only about Win32).
I actually happen to dislike C++, but on top of that, it doesn't suit my project, because the low-levelness makes it harder to program without errors (e.g. null pointers, memory leaking). I'd rather have a language at a scripting level -- and NO, that's NOT VB. I hope I don't have to explain why I hate VB if only on very first sight.
So with
There's really no need for anybody to pick on C#, long as it's realized that it's just finally a nice programming environment for Windows, and nothing (well, not much) more. (BTW, it's not much different from NeXT (now Apple)'s use/ takeover of Objective C.)
Progeny had a graphical installer available for their Debian-based distro for years, and instead of taking over this one, Debian started creating its own graphical installer despite of a great lack of human resources for the project.
Now I don't know much about Anaconda or what it really is, and I also don't know much about Debian's reason not to use the Progeny installer, but you'll understand that I'm not really convinced that this would change installing Debian until I've heard confirmations from the Debian side of things.
You mean you know Chocomel?
I live about 20 kilometres from the Nutricia factories, so I'm used to getting my daily Chocomel -- in the French-language parts of Belgium known as Cecemel. However, once in France, there was no waiter that understood my order of either Chocomel OR Cecemel (or lait chocolate chaude). They all knew "Gouda" cheese and "Heineken" beer, however, so I was afraid that Chocomel was a little behind on being a solid Dutch export product.
Please tell me that it's different!
You got a copy of that show?
;-)
I really thought is was marvellous how well they spoke their Double Dutch; they really had all nuances perfectly!
(that's stefanrieken apestaartje softhome punt net, dankjewel
Beg to disagree (I recall the Raph Nader thing), but you always seem to toss these guys out of the running very soon ;-)
No point in commenting after > 550 replies, but I'll have to try this one.
I think there's some mighty fine American behaviour at work, voting for Bush as the weasliest person (when do you guys ever stop voting for weasels and start voting for presidents?), meanwhile voting for France as the weasliest country -- being the only reasonably large country daring to voice its opinion against the godforsaken United States Under Bush.
I smell hipocrisy, and nominate the voters for the Weasliest Mass.
Simple: the GPL is not the LGPL. Diet libc is GPL, while glibc is LGPL.
You'll have to write Free Software (as per the GPL) using diet libc, while you can develop whatever you want (within LGPL terms) with glibc.
FYI: I'm not the poster you responded to, and I've checked what I just wrote.
Well, all superiority of the GNUtils chain aside, I guess your point is valid at least in some way.
.data .code
I recall trying EGCS (the former GCC fork) on my Amiga as an alternative to DCC and other C compilers. Using DCC, you could almost literally tell which byte served what function; DCC produced very small binaries, and m68k assembly is a very easy read (really! it's like reading a good book).
EGCS, OTOH, produced binaries that were immense. I recall trying to figure out the startup procedure, that is, the stuff that runs before "main". Even the startup procedure was at least a whole factor larger than the DCC code, I believe mainly because it tried to be flexible enough for glibc, for the occasion that it was compiled in -- because you also had to explicitly leave out glibc from the linking process, the default was some Cygwin-like Un*x compatibility mode.
I had also been told that the size of my binaries was because I didn't optimize. This is also the first time when I learnt of "stripping"; e.g. removing the symbol table from a binary I was used to "real", instructions-only binaries, like on the C64.
Yet, even with glibc left out, stripped binaries, optimizations, etc., DCC won by large.
The Bottom Line: YES, we ARE talking about a "Hello, world!" program here. Nevertheless, this program took quite a few kilobytes on EGCS, while the DCC version boiled down to something like (VERY pseudocode):
label: "Hello, World!"
lda label, reg1
int 44 ; print
Now why on earth would that be so hard? A little over-engineering on the EGCS side, maybe?
Well, I like telling this story, so here goes again...
The commodore 64 had a ROM assembly block which you could jump to in order to access some predefined I/O methods and stuff. (You had to know the exact ROM addresses for each function, of course.) This part of the memory was called the "KERNAL". It was always spelled like this, and always in capitals. I never really understood this, especially not in the light of the "newer spelling" used to describe Un*x kernels.
That is, until one source told me that the C64 KERNAL actually was an acronym for "Keyboard Entry, Read Network And Link". It's all up to you to believe this or not, but I think it's at least kind of funny in its own way.
I TOLD you that the Amiga Interchange File Format is far superior to everything out there! And so is their Fast File System. Heh, even BSD uses it! AMIGA RULEZ!
Uh.. what? Oh... Never mind.
While "we" are all making fun of mr. Stallman, his original idea (to create a user base for Free Software as to ultimately create a legal platform and status for it) is finally seeing the first tiny steps towards a result; recognition by governments is a good first. This should also (partially) explain his hammering on the GNU brand, as to promote the ideas behind the project on moments as these. You never know what they'll pick up in new legislation just because they've heard of it and find some kind of sense in it.
Now of course this post seems like an open invitation to start another pro-/ anti-RMS GNU vs. BSD bash riot on Slashdot, but I honestly believe that most of that has been said before (duh!). All I wanted to do is put this single point of credit towards mr. Stallman, independent of any other credits he should or should not deserve in your eyes. (Let's see if this keeps you from throwing some old mud on Slashdot...)