This would be a good time for Skype to switch to open source and open protocols. They make their money on providing landline access and voicemail, so why do they even bother making all this proprietary stuff?
It sucks that manufacturers don't really make printer drivers for a lot of high-end equipment for Linux
High end equipment generally uses Postscript and standard printing protocols; they don't have to make "printer drivers". Printer drivers are the domain of low-cost consumer hardware.
but, if you have *any* Windows systems in your office running XP Professional or Vista Business/Enterprise,
Are you kidding? Even if setting up these things on Windows weren't such a PITA, the cost and complexity would defeat the purpose.
when the vast majority of people who would need them tend to only use Windows or OS X.
Come on, don't be such an Apple marketing victim. Yes, the majority of people use Windows. OS X and Linux desktop usage, however, are at least comparable. If we take into account all the other devices, systems, and environments that run Linux, Linux leaves OS X in the dust. And, incidentally, OS X uses the same printing system (CUPS) that Linux does.
but it works if you can't find any compatible printers for Linux.
Well, fortunately, as people have pointed out, there are many solutions. That's because there's actually a market there. Imagine that.
Well, then bacteria must be highly intelligent: not only do they have the greatest biomass and numbers on earth, they have almost certainly already traveled to other planets!
Copyright requires that a human creates something. Wolfram's software is clearly not a human, and it is unlikely to be even close to artificial intelligence either. Hence, no copyright.
Why would it make any difference to me whether Linus is a nice person? I can't stand the guy myself. But as long as Linux is open source and gets the job done, it can be developed by Jesse Helms and Michael Vick for all I care.
So what do you want Linus to do? Commit harakiri? Stop kernel development?
People who run big projects regularly make bad calls and piss off people; that just comes with the territory. Do you seriously think you'd do any better than Linus in his position?
I've bought Apple products in the past because Microsoft was even worse, and/or because they had successfully eliminated most choices (e.g., MP3 players and iTunes).
I don't think I'm going to buy another Apple product, though. I'm not dependent on iTunes anymore, and I see nothing compelling about either their phones or their computers.
Pay for XP Pro. Go to manufacturers website. Download driver. Go "clicky clicky" and reboot. Tada!
Not in this universe. In this universe, you often spend hours trying to locate some Windows driver, and then end up with an unstable system.
Spend way too damned many hours staring at a damned Bash screen when you monitor doesn't get detected correctly [...] Or having a splitting headache when the only printer driver for you printer is something written for a completely unrelated printer
Again, not in this universe. In this universe, Linux compatible hardware just works out of the box; no confusing dialog boxes, fussing with drivers or upgrades or other Windows messiness.
If you really have a broken graphics card and printer that don't work with Linux, throw them out and buy something compatible; you still save money, not to mention time, compared to Windows.
Lousy Windows hardware and driver support was one of the reasons why I simply don't bother with Windows at all anymore. In theory, you can get drivers for most hardware for Windows, in practice, you'll want to jump off a bridge before getting it to run.
And in the 15 years I've been building and repairing Windows PCs
Yeah, Windows PCs--the choice for geeks and a constant source of income for technicians. For the rest of us--people who want things to just work--Linux and Macintosh are better choices.
but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
Yes, but it is NOT OK for people to want to make money off other people's ideas. And that is why the Slashdot community is so sour on companies like Blackboard.
It's people like you and companies like Blackboard that are "anti-capitalist".
Why not just use an IrDA transmitter? You can send far more information, it's cheap, there's lots of hardware to transmit and receive you can buy, and many phones already support it.
Bezos is sorry that this blunder called the integrity of his platform in question and that he stands to lose billions in sales. He is sorry that people will now look more seriously at other E-book readers, devices that aren't as closed and controlled as his product. He is really sorry that his company committed this blunder with one of the most iconic books of the 20th century.
Bezos is really sorry that his attempts to sucker people into his DRM-laden platform and control everything about how they obtain and use information are now a little more difficult.
They aren't trying to get paid for *internet access*. They're trying to get paid from people reading their own made content. There's no problem in that.
I don't see anybody criticizing Diller for his desire to charge. I think most people simply consider him a total idiot for believing that his plans will work.
Scheme is a good first year programming language for computer science students.
It's not a good first year programming language for people whose main aspiration is to be a programmer. But why would those people waste their time studying computer science?
Resources are more than just RAM. All files, network connections, etc., have to be manually closed in Java
Java? Who said anything about Java???
There's no way to automate this (no equivalent to C++ stack unwinding)
Many garbage collected languages have unwind-protect or equivalents.
Even if you're only managing RAM, a garbage collector will totally destroy your performance if you run out of it and start paging to disk.
Garbage collectors often have lower overhead and less fragmentation than the C++ heap. Or did you think that memory management somehow was performed by fairies in C++?
To me, anything which continually scans the entire heap when you're out of RAM is a showstopping problem and makes GC useless for real applications.
You don't have a clue how real-world garbage collectors work, do you.
You also seem to be mistaking garbage collection for some kind of convenience feature. Garbage collection is not about convenience, it is about safety. You cannot have a safe language and manual storage management. In fact, if you want efficiency, memory management usually is about as much work in a garbage collected language as it is in C++. The difference is that when you're done, the GC'ed program doesn't have safety issues, and it often performs better too.
Canada kept the rules. The Canadian banking system is still the most sound.
Think about what does a "sound banking system" actually means. It means that old money stays that way. It means that generation after generation, the same banks gain more and more power and get to call more and more of the agenda. Stable banking systems are good for people who are already wealthy and powerful. Wiping out unwisely invested wealth punishes the greedy and gives the have-nots a new opportunity.
But leave it to the same fuckers from Harvard, who apparently can't even manage a college trust [vanityfair.com] without running it into the ground.
They had a spectacular run for a decade and now they are making room for some other university to take the top spot. I think that's good. Why should Harvard remain the wealthiest and most powerful university in perpetuity? What would be so good about a system in which, once you accumulate wealth, you, your family, or your organization just keeps it forever?
Change and shaking things up are good. We need financial crises and recessions if we don't want stagnate or accumulate a de-facto nobility.
What society can do is make sure that nobody starves when everything comes crashing down, and we have mostly done that in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be a good time for Skype to switch to open source and open protocols. They make their money on providing landline access and voicemail, so why do they even bother making all this proprietary stuff?
It sucks that manufacturers don't really make printer drivers for a lot of high-end equipment for Linux
High end equipment generally uses Postscript and standard printing protocols; they don't have to make "printer drivers". Printer drivers are the domain of low-cost consumer hardware.
but, if you have *any* Windows systems in your office running XP Professional or Vista Business/Enterprise,
Are you kidding? Even if setting up these things on Windows weren't such a PITA, the cost and complexity would defeat the purpose.
when the vast majority of people who would need them tend to only use Windows or OS X.
Come on, don't be such an Apple marketing victim. Yes, the majority of people use Windows. OS X and Linux desktop usage, however, are at least comparable. If we take into account all the other devices, systems, and environments that run Linux, Linux leaves OS X in the dust. And, incidentally, OS X uses the same printing system (CUPS) that Linux does.
but it works if you can't find any compatible printers for Linux.
Well, fortunately, as people have pointed out, there are many solutions. That's because there's actually a market there. Imagine that.
Well, then bacteria must be highly intelligent: not only do they have the greatest biomass and numbers on earth, they have almost certainly already traveled to other planets!
Copyright requires that a human creates something. Wolfram's software is clearly not a human, and it is unlikely to be even close to artificial intelligence either. Hence, no copyright.
I don't know of a podcast client that doesn't provide those features. Of course, they also already provided these features in 2003.
Except, of course, that they already were downloading episodic media in 2003.
Why would it make any difference to me whether Linus is a nice person? I can't stand the guy myself. But as long as Linux is open source and gets the job done, it can be developed by Jesse Helms and Michael Vick for all I care.
So what do you want Linus to do? Commit harakiri? Stop kernel development?
People who run big projects regularly make bad calls and piss off people; that just comes with the territory. Do you seriously think you'd do any better than Linus in his position?
I've bought Apple products in the past because Microsoft was even worse, and/or because they had successfully eliminated most choices (e.g., MP3 players and iTunes).
I don't think I'm going to buy another Apple product, though. I'm not dependent on iTunes anymore, and I see nothing compelling about either their phones or their computers.
Nope. The blue dye actually keeps the nerves from being overstimulated.
I assure you that you won't notice:
(1) You'll be pumped full of drugs.
(2) If you aren't pumped full of drugs, you'll be in pain.
(3) You'll mostly be thinking about whether you'll ever be able to use your weenie again.
(4) Your brain compensates anyway.
Pay for XP Pro. Go to manufacturers website. Download driver. Go "clicky clicky" and reboot. Tada!
Not in this universe. In this universe, you often spend hours trying to locate some Windows driver, and then end up with an unstable system.
Spend way too damned many hours staring at a damned Bash screen when you monitor doesn't get detected correctly [...] Or having a splitting headache when the only printer driver for you printer is something written for a completely unrelated printer
Again, not in this universe. In this universe, Linux compatible hardware just works out of the box; no confusing dialog boxes, fussing with drivers or upgrades or other Windows messiness.
If you really have a broken graphics card and printer that don't work with Linux, throw them out and buy something compatible; you still save money, not to mention time, compared to Windows.
Lousy Windows hardware and driver support was one of the reasons why I simply don't bother with Windows at all anymore. In theory, you can get drivers for most hardware for Windows, in practice, you'll want to jump off a bridge before getting it to run.
And in the 15 years I've been building and repairing Windows PCs
Yeah, Windows PCs--the choice for geeks and a constant source of income for technicians. For the rest of us--people who want things to just work--Linux and Macintosh are better choices.
but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
Yes, but it is NOT OK for people to want to make money off other people's ideas. And that is why the Slashdot community is so sour on companies like Blackboard.
It's people like you and companies like Blackboard that are "anti-capitalist".
Why not just use an IrDA transmitter? You can send far more information, it's cheap, there's lots of hardware to transmit and receive you can buy, and many phones already support it.
Bezos is sorry that this blunder called the integrity of his platform in question and that he stands to lose billions in sales. He is sorry that people will now look more seriously at other E-book readers, devices that aren't as closed and controlled as his product. He is really sorry that his company committed this blunder with one of the most iconic books of the 20th century.
Bezos is really sorry that his attempts to sucker people into his DRM-laden platform and control everything about how they obtain and use information are now a little more difficult.
We get it. Really.
Well, the choice is pretty simple.
(1) don't pay for Linux and spend some time to get it to work right, and get the job done
(2) pay for Windows, spend far more time and money to get it to work right, and get the job done
Seems to me (1) is a big win over (2) no matter what.
Yeah, I'll "miss" Vista kinda like I "miss" fluorescent green bell bottom pants or Chiapets.
They aren't trying to get paid for *internet access*. They're trying to get paid from people reading their own made content. There's no problem in that.
I don't see anybody criticizing Diller for his desire to charge. I think most people simply consider him a total idiot for believing that his plans will work.
Scheme is a good first year programming language for computer science students.
It's not a good first year programming language for people whose main aspiration is to be a programmer. But why would those people waste their time studying computer science?
You mean like:
for i in range(10):
with open("my.txt") as file:
do_something(file)
Not saying that C++ is perfect, but garbage collection isn't the answer people think it is.
Garbage collection is primarily a safety feature, not a convenience feature.
Not to say about memory usage,
Generally lower, since there is less fragmentation. The C++ storage allocator has far fewer ways in which to reduce fragmentation.
and performance when the garbage collector is invoked.
Generally better, because memory management is done more efficiently in batches.
Spoken like a programmer that has to be protected from himself/herself.
Yes. After 20 years and a couple of million lines of C++ programming, that's something I freely and fully admit.
C++ adheres to the philosophy that the programmer should be able to use the full power available.
And that philosophy appeals to programmers who have never outgrown the code jockey stage.
Resources are more than just RAM. All files, network connections, etc., have to be manually closed in Java
Java? Who said anything about Java???
There's no way to automate this (no equivalent to C++ stack unwinding)
Many garbage collected languages have unwind-protect or equivalents.
Even if you're only managing RAM, a garbage collector will totally destroy your performance if you run out of it and start paging to disk.
Garbage collectors often have lower overhead and less fragmentation than the C++ heap. Or did you think that memory management somehow was performed by fairies in C++?
To me, anything which continually scans the entire heap when you're out of RAM is a showstopping problem and makes GC useless for real applications.
You don't have a clue how real-world garbage collectors work, do you.
You also seem to be mistaking garbage collection for some kind of convenience feature. Garbage collection is not about convenience, it is about safety. You cannot have a safe language and manual storage management. In fact, if you want efficiency, memory management usually is about as much work in a garbage collected language as it is in C++. The difference is that when you're done, the GC'ed program doesn't have safety issues, and it often performs better too.
The logic you've used is like saying that fires are good, because they mean new houses will have to be built.
It's more like saying that wildfires are good because the forest renews itself. And they are.
Canada kept the rules. The Canadian banking system is still the most sound.
Think about what does a "sound banking system" actually means. It means that old money stays that way. It means that generation after generation, the same banks gain more and more power and get to call more and more of the agenda. Stable banking systems are good for people who are already wealthy and powerful. Wiping out unwisely invested wealth punishes the greedy and gives the have-nots a new opportunity.
But leave it to the same fuckers from Harvard, who apparently can't even manage a college trust [vanityfair.com] without running it into the ground.
They had a spectacular run for a decade and now they are making room for some other university to take the top spot. I think that's good. Why should Harvard remain the wealthiest and most powerful university in perpetuity? What would be so good about a system in which, once you accumulate wealth, you, your family, or your organization just keeps it forever?
Change and shaking things up are good. We need financial crises and recessions if we don't want stagnate or accumulate a de-facto nobility.
What society can do is make sure that nobody starves when everything comes crashing down, and we have mostly done that in the US.
If so, then you haven't stumbled upon C++'s many problems. Like, lack of rvalue references. Or, lack of a proper lambda.
I think \bigger problems are C++'s complexity, the presence of pointers, the use of include files, and the lack of garbage collection.