Not true. Not even remotely true. For a poor programmer that may be true.
Yes, very true! Take your try at any nontrivial perl-program. Rewrite it in C. Now, pick your alternative: maintainability, speed.
And I would reverse your statement about a poor programmer. A poor programmer is one that doesn't know to choose the right tool. If you feel like spending months writing in C when I can spend a few hours on a Perl script and get the same result, then you are the poor programmer. (For the record: I'm hardly a perl-bigot, as I work almost exclusively with C and C++ code that is extremely speed-critical, to the point where a single second lost, will most likely cost us a few thousand dollars, if not more. Obviously, for such code, reliability and maintainability is also important. We use perl where it's easier and better).
But Perl can ALWAYS be beaten by C
Sure, Perl is written in C itself. By taking out the interpreter, you'll get faster. But for any project with a deadline, it's certainly not true.
It's not hard for a below average programmer to write a Perl script in a day with a performance and reliability that would take weeks if not months to achieve if it was written by an above average programmer in C. Of course, the opposite is also true, but with the exception that the Perl programmer is likely to never succeed.
For it's class of problems, Perl is surprisingly fast.
Europe has strong privacy laws, which prohibit unauthorised use of personal data (the e-mail address is considered a personal data).
No, Europe doesn't. In fact, europe doesn't have laws at all. Individual countries in Europe do, however.
Email-addresses are no more personal than street-addresses. It's not illegal to use a map to obtain street-addresses, and it's not illegal to search the web or usenet for e-mail addresses.
There might be european countries that have mass-mailing legislation, just as there exists european countries with telemarketing legislation or mass-snail-mail-legislation. Certainly, not all european countries have it.
In the end, I think it is a matter of culture. USA is so much more obsessed by get-rich-quick schemes than Europe, that spammers are just more common. Personally, I've yet to discove spam from my own country, virtually all the spam I get is from US (or at least targeted at americans).
over-reliance on GLOBAL FUCKING VARIABLES. This can be the short path to hell with Perl, too, which is why we have the "use strict" pragma, as well as locals.
Locals in Perl, are, for almost any practical purpose globals. I really hope you meant my-variables.
No, it isn't. It's a language that can be interpreted. Most java-implementations aren't though...
In this situation, the Java program is (obviously) much faster than the interpreted bytecode version.
No, it isn't. Typical scripting languages use heavily optimized string routines, etc... In many cases, an obvious perl (or PHP I guess, although I have no experience with it) program can be faster than an obvious java (or C) program. But it certainly depends on the task you are doing.
The same is true of many other interpreted languages, optimized for specific tasks, e.g. prolog, mozart, K, J, APL, etc... Sure, in theory, native code is always better, but in reality, we seldom spend weeks, months or years to optimize for performance, but opt for simplicity instead.
Obvious too is the fact that the native code version won't run anywhere but the target machine.
Yes, but usually, we are not writing native code (or even assembler). We are writing in a high-level language, and usually, it is not too hard to compile them for different targets. Porting a reasonably well-written C program can often be much easier, then having to keep 60 different versions of JDK around, to be able to run all your Java programs (compiled to.class-files), or even make one non-trivial java program that will compile and run on all those versions of JDK.
Don't take me wrong, I really like PHP and I don't dislike Java at all. Just wanted to point that
Fine. I hope you understood what I told you, so you don't have to keep going around "pointing that" (whatever that means).
Have you ever looked at the amount of material in Gutenberg's archives? When it comes to books and material written in english, that is in the public domain, I have to say, that Gutenberg offers almost everything of interest already.
The reason the Gutenberg project isn't hugely succesful is not the lack of text. Part of it might be the lack of formatting. Nobody want's to read 600 pages of a classic work on a computer screen in ASCII. Some may be masochistic enough to do it if it was in HTML. Personally, I still prefer it in book-form.
But even if it was properly formatted in several formats (including.pdf's in several sizes), it still is a lot of work to print it out, find a decent way to keep it together (no, ring binders isn't very appropriate for something you are going to read).
The main reason Gutenberg isn't succesful is because it is not what people want. People don't want to read or print out old literature in the public domain. They either want a nice edition that looks good on the shelf, or a cheap paperback to carry around with them . And most likely they aren't particulary into really old books (with a possible few exceptions which the Gutenberg project long since have covered).
It's not like the work the Gutenberg people are doing isn't important, or isn't of good enough quality or anything else. The simple reasons it's not heavily succesfull is because very few people are really interested. I'm sure much of the work the Gutenberg people have done will become important as soon as on-demand printing is more common and affordable.
I mean, would ANYONE vote
for a canditate who refused to subject himself to honesty treatment while in office?
Yes. I would be very skeptical to someone that has done so little, that he has absolutely nothing to hide. The fact of the matter is, I would be more skeptical to someone who accepted the "truth machine", if you couldn't even find one interesting thing there. I am not sure what kind of person that would be, but certainly not something I would call human.
I would also consider it unethical to force anyone to publicly be in a "truth machine" (well, with the possible exception of hideous crimes, etc...). While it might have it's use in some situations, those people listening and questioning should surely have taken a wow of silence. And if the information was used in e.g. a courtroom, huge steps should be taken to protect the vitnesses to limit the information gained this way to exposure by the public (e.g. only by consent of vitness and lawyer).
Disney will have Mickey Mouse grandfathered in (and so on for the rest of today's "properties") for another 14 years, and
As if anyone cares if Disney is able to make a living from Mickey... At least I don't. Let them keep it if they want.
The pattern of extending all copyrights just before the deadline will continue.
This is troublesome. The fact that Mickey Mouse may have copyright for ever doesn't worry me much. The fact that everything else also has copyright for ever is what is worrying.
Although at the same time, a tax that increased but not in relation to the company's margins of income is not reasonable.
That might be so, but at least it's something that can be enforced.
So the course of action would be closer to taking their income from said copyright, and then starting with a base tax of say, 3%, and every x years that tax doubles. Something of that sort. this way after 7x years, the tax would be 21% of the income from said copyright. X could either be a portion of a renewal period, or the renewal period itself.
And exactly how are you going to get those numbers? From the companys own books? Ever heard of Enron? Your idea is so unpractical that I can't even imagine how such a system should work.
...but not too short, or companies will take authors works, sit on them for a while, publis a few copies and then publish like mad when the copyright exprires. won't happen with music/tech, but could happen with longer lasting stuff.
And exactly how is this a problem with 14 years as proposed? The longest-lasting works with commercial value seems to be books. And even after 5 years, most books will tend to have reached their peak sales.
Sure, if we say less than 2 years, this might become a problem, but it's not like anyone is seriously proposing that.
Can anyone give a good reason for needing files larger than 2gb?
Yes. Sometimes you need to store a lot of data. Even DVD's has 4.3 GB of data these days. But that's not even much compared to the amount of data we handle in seismic research. I would believe astronomists, particle physicists and a lots of other people also routinely handle ridiculous amounts of data.
By the way, in producing the DVD, you would naturally work with uncompressed data. How would you handle that?
The seek times alone withinr these files must be huge, and it smacks a bit of inefficienecy
And because it is inefficient, we should not support it? As a matter of fact, any file larger than one disk-block is inefficient. Maybe we should stop supporting that as well?
sure its just as bad to have an app use hundreds of say 4kb files or so, but two GIGABYTES???
As I've said, it's not really that much, depending on the application.
Most compilers just assume a return of zero (or true, or posixly-true, or whatever convention of the week seems popular).
For your information, I just did a test with a Visual C++ 6.0 console application. When main was declared to return void, it exited with %errorlevel% 17. This would most likely mean that the run-time system took whatever was where the exit status should have been and interpreted it as an int (possibly extracting only the lower bits).
So, no. At least Visual C++ does not assume that void main(){} really means int main(){return 0;}. It just doesn't check it, and let's you shoot yourself in the foot. I've not tested with other compilers yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if the results were the same.
Anyone who thinks "void main(void) {printf("hello world\n");}" counts as a perfectly bug-free program has clearly never coded on anything but well-behaved single-processor PC running a Microsoft OS with a well-behaved compiler
Or maybe they have, but are complete idiots when it comes to C. Your program has three large errors.
there is no prototype for printf. Thus printf will default to taking an int argument. The above code would only work if sizeof(int) == sizeof(char *)
main should return an int, not void. Otherwise, it would not be possible to return an error status to the operating system. It also violates the standard.
since main returns an int, you also need a return statement at the end of the function.
This would be very informative, if it wasn't for the fact that it was all wrong.
And I mean it. You would probably be hard pressed to find even one correct sentence here. For those interested, here are a couple of refutations.
X is based on a networking concept where anyone can access anyone else's screen as a network resource.
Wrong. Only those with permission can access it. But that would be programs, not people. For people to access the screen, they would have to physically be there, and that is no different than any other windowing system.
This leads to multi-threading issues as it is possible for two people to use the same desktop, even same application, simultaneously
Wrong. While many people can sit in front of one computer if it's enough space for them, that doesn't mean anything will be more multithreaded. Also, the display server will have to do exactly the same kind of resource multiplexing as it does on windows (whether the apps displaying windows are executing remotely or locally is of little difference, they are still in different threads and usually also different adress spaces).
As a result, toolkits that have their origins in that environment like GTK and wxwindows have strong multi-threading support not to mention strong networking support.
Wrong. Few, if any, X11-toolkits support multithreading. This is a direct result of the age of the X11 core libraries, which themselves does not support multithreading. Most everyone agrees that this is a bug, but it's also one that's hard to fix.
OTOH, Windows was built around a single user concept, which from a networking perspective is more secure because a person's desktop isn't a networking resource (but that's neither here nor there).
Wrong again. How do you think those Citrix farms work? Windows isn't built around a single-user concept any more than Unix is (I am talking about NT/2000/XP of course). It might be the case that your typical windows distribution is only useful for one user at a time, but the underlying technology very much supports several users. As for not exposing anything on the network, sure that makes it more secure. Nobody in their right mind allows X11 through their firewall. But windows has plenty of other security holes.
This results in the base windowing subsystem's reliance on processes as the fundamental object of execution (as opposed to threads).
Again wrong. XFree86 uses a simple request-response loop (no threads or processes). There do exist multithreaded X-servers however, but not for the reasons you say. Mainly, if they are multithreaded, it is purely for performance-reasons.
Whether processes or threads are used, have absolutely nothing to do with networking, but more to do with taste, and programmer preference.
As for windows, it uses threads. Lot's of them, so even there, you are wrong.
So toolkits built upon Windows (MFC, OWL, QT) are able to harness Windows's windowing support in a way that more easily and effectively takes advantage of the features of the subsystem.
I fail to see any correspondence between the "cause" and the "conclusion" here. In any case, it is wrong. On the other hand, windows is a more mature and stable GUI platform. And this is more than enough to explain why X11 GUI's generally suck in comparison (even when they are cross-platform).
Attempting to port one toolkit from its home platform to a foreign platform leads to problems of "look and feel". AWT and Swing are prime examples of toolkits that look strange whereever they are used. Likewise, wxwindows feels funny running on Windows and GTK looks funny. Hell, MFC doesn't even run on X.
True. However, MFC apps can (more or less) run on X11, if you want to pay enough for it, and you really need it. There are companies selling that sort of thing.
What this all boils down to
Well, the only thing it can boil down to, is that either you are a troll, or someone seriously likely to talk out of his ass about anything he doesn't know about.
The final "conclusion" is obviously right, but I fail to see why you needed all the errors above to "support" it.
Somehow, I doubt it. Surely, no software ever gets "finished" (even TeX, which is, at least by my standards, anything but "perfect").
But Hurd was doomed to failure from the start. It was exactly the diamond-like jewel type of system that was predestined to be obsolete by the time it finally arrived.
Yes, with a lot of good-will, it could be said that Bill Gates "invented" the portable interpreted scripting language. Most BASICs before his time was compiled. Of course, we had interpreted languages long before that time (e.g. McCarthys LISP). And it is doubtful whether Gates would know about it at the time.
His major contribution, however, is that he was one of the first to actually sell software to end-users. Untill then, software was either free, or it was paid for by the manufacturer of the computer (who would make it free - why else would somebody buy their incompatible computer?).
Actually, malloc.conf is supposed to be a symlink to a file*name* containing options, not a regular file containing them,
Wow, that's just scary! It's not that it wouldn't work, but it just scares me to think of what kind of other weird stuff the man who thought of that would put into code elsewhere...
There are no free software, open source, or non-crippled NFS clients for Windows (at least that has been the story for quite some time...)
Your options are to either
write one:-)
buy a client for each machine from one of these vendors: 1234567.
Buy a NFS/SMB gateway from one of the vendors above (or make one with Samba)
Use both samba and NFS on the server
Simply use samba
When using both NFS and Samba there might be some tricky locking issues. At least it used to be recommended against. I don't know if that's true anymore, but you should be aware of it. If you only share disks readonly, then you will of course be safe.
s I've been told, the only pure science is maths. Physics is applied Maths Chemistry is applied Physics Biology is applied
Chemistry.
But then you've been told wrong. Math is not a science. It is a study of entirely human constructs. As it turns out, some of these constructs has proven themselves useful in science, but that doesn't make math itself a science. Neither is logic a science. Nobody does experiments in either math or logic.
As for whether the rest of the argument is true, depends on your own sillyness. Biology is no more applied chemistry than enjoying dinner is applied thermodynamics. While it is true that microbiologists worry a lot about chemistry, there are also other biologists who couldn't care less, and work with entirely other things.
In the same vein, one could argue for the same hierarchy in computer scientists/engineers. At the top, we have the hardware engineers, then microcode developers, people who write device-drivers, etc, system-level programmers, application-level programmers, scripters, and end-users.
In reality, the tasks that end-users perform at a computer needs be no more easy than what hardware-engineers do when constructing one (and in doing that, most hardware engineers are also end-users...). The only difference is that it requires a different kind of knowledge.
While it is true that physics concerns itself more with "fundamental principles" than chemistry, and logic is more "fundamental" than math, this does in no way imply that math is worthless because logic is more "fundamental", or that people should stop studying chemistry, because physics is more "fundamental".
We cannot, and probably never will, be able to easily and automatically derive all important principles of math from logic, all of chemistry from physics, all of biology from chemistry, all of medicine from biology, all of psychology from medicine, all of social science from psychology, and so on. The value of science is not in it's "fundamentalness". It's in its usefulness (either direct usefullness for applied science, or in it's potential for understanding nature better in the long term for pure science).
If you want to be a scientist, there is only one science, physics.
Yes, of course. As we all know, science isn't about trying to find out about the world. It is about being able to recite formulas.
Chemistry, Engineering only imitate simple formulas of physics.
Sure. As a matter of fact, it turns out even social scientists uses "formulas" to describe the world. What a bunch of loosers they are, who try to copy this from physicists.
But, to really understand atoms, molecules etc, you really need to understand quantum physics (the way it is taught to
physicists).
Yes, physicists usually have a much better understanding of the fundamental forces involved in single-body problems. The fact that this becomes largely irrelevant due to the computational difficulties involved in calculating anything useful for chemistry is something we can ignore for now. Actually measuring phenomena that is too hard to calculate is only for lesser beings.
Ph. D. level Chemists and maybe Chemical Enginners, study quantum mechanics but it's at the level of
undergraduate junior/senior level physics majors.
Yes, and physics majors study chemistry, but only as chemistry 101. So what's your point?
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but it is
true that Chemistry or most of Engineering degree require very minimum level of math.
Actually, that is true. But not because the math isn't there. It's because the math is too fucking complex to be able to do at all. But if you like math, I'm sure a course in physical chemistry would satisfy you.
I've always felt Chemistry boring for this
reason.
So do I, but that doesn't make it any less of a science.
True science is understanding nature from quantitatively, no vague, but exact; anything qualitative in nature is vague and
waste of time.
True science is about understanding nature. If things are too complex to study quantitatively at the moment, we must do a first approximation to it, and study qualitatively first. Just because something is difficult, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
From a Doctorate level physics graduate student.
I seriously doubt that. Most physicists I've met have a sound modesty about the importance of their subject, and a better understanding of science than you.
If you use.deb or.rpm software that's OK. If you use say Portland Group FORTRAN (ugh) you have to tweak your environment.
Ahh, so you were thinking about programming (wink, wink)? But seriously, you should probably blame the Portland group instead of the shell here. It's not like they couldn't have made a.dpgk or.rpm out of it.
And even if they couldn't do that, it's not like they couldn't write some shell-scripts that could be put somewhere in your path to invoke the compiler (and set up the environment first). They could even write a small installer that modified those scripts depending on where you installed the compiler. For an excellent example of this, look at suns JDK.
I wanted to say that the existing Unix/Linux shells (1) are mutually incompatible (2) are often a pain to program (bash, uh) and use, (3) and some big vendors still keep the oldest and least friendly.
(1) Yes, they are. (Personally, I use bash for exactly that reason, since it keeps me from remembering to many syntaxes as bash is essentially sh++) (2) Well, I think bash is pretty ok. But of course, there could be lots of room for improvement. And yes, since you mentioned it, PATH (and CLASSPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc) being colon-separated instead of newline separated makes it harder to manipulate it without a few nifty aliases. They should be standard and builtin to make things easier. (3) Well, trading backwards compatibility with user-friendliness is not always so easy. But since most shell-scripts start with #!/bin/sh anyway, it would make sense to give the users a more friendly shell by default.
Why do you think yet another new shell will fix that?
It could, if well designed.
And as we both know, there are plenty of alternatives already. In particular, the following shells are all "better" than sh for end-users: tcsh, ksh, bash, zsh, es, and tclsh. It's not obvious that a new shell would improve the situation more than just add to the confusion.
But, for example, some aspects of the CLI could benefit a lot from a insightfull redisign.
I most definitely agree. But designing a "better shell" is very hard, and most people fail (look at the (lack of) success of es for example). The tradeoffs between terseness (for command-line use), regularity (for scripting), familiarity (to get anyone to use it at all), simplicity (to be useful for newcomers), and expressivity (to be the best tool for experts) makes it as much an experiment in psychology as in programming.
I doubt that we will ever reach shell-nirvana in unix (or any other place for that matter, but windows has a large advantage here, one of the things that holds us back, is that we still care about being able to run the shell over telnet to a teletype, but in windows they will probably make the default user experience to be more like e.g. emacs interaction mode, nice menus and all... By the way, have you ever looked at XMLterm? It's nice, and certainly innovative:-) Why not combine it with XML shell to get away from the pipe-filter on characters/lines only paradigm?).
The current unix-shells are the result of decades of stepwise improvements on a really good idea (at the time), and continues to be so much more useful than any of their alternatives that it's going to be hard to penetrate the "market"...
I would be much happier if the "new shell" project was started and implemented in the Unix/Linux world. Instead, the sh in SunOS 5.8 still diplays ^[[A when I try to recall previous commands by up arrow (of course, I can immediately type in "zsh" and be in a more friendly environment, but such workarounds should not be needed),
Uh? You want sh to be zsh? Why insist on typing sh then? Why would you break script-compatibility by replasing sh with something that is not sh? Why do you think yet another new shell will fix that?
and I would be happy not to have to deal with the details of PATH and environment in various Linux shells.
Uh, why are you dealing with them now? It should be set up by the distribution for you. I can't remember having fiddled much more with environment variables under linux than I have under DOS (except when I'm developing of course, but I hope it's not that you are complaining about?
Open source indeed needs a more open minded and innovative attitude.
Well, I didn't even know open source had an attitude. It's a concept, a subset of all possible software-licenses and associated software. Do you seriously believe that everyone who uses/publishes/writes/fixes/documents/etc open source software are close-minded and never innovative?
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Yes, very true! Take your try at any nontrivial perl-program. Rewrite it in C. Now, pick your alternative: maintainability, speed.
And I would reverse your statement about a poor programmer. A poor programmer is one that doesn't know to choose the right tool. If you feel like spending months writing in C when I can spend a few hours on a Perl script and get the same result, then you are the poor programmer. (For the record: I'm hardly a perl-bigot, as I work almost exclusively with C and C++ code that is extremely speed-critical, to the point where a single second lost, will most likely cost us a few thousand dollars, if not more. Obviously, for such code, reliability and maintainability is also important. We use perl where it's easier and better).
But Perl can ALWAYS be beaten by C
Sure, Perl is written in C itself. By taking out the interpreter, you'll get faster. But for any project with a deadline, it's certainly not true.
It's not hard for a below average programmer to write a Perl script in a day with a performance and reliability that would take weeks if not months to achieve if it was written by an above average programmer in C. Of course, the opposite is also true, but with the exception that the Perl programmer is likely to never succeed.
For it's class of problems, Perl is surprisingly fast.
No, Europe doesn't. In fact, europe doesn't have laws at all. Individual countries in Europe do, however.
Email-addresses are no more personal than street-addresses. It's not illegal to use a map to obtain street-addresses, and it's not illegal to search the web or usenet for e-mail addresses.
There might be european countries that have mass-mailing legislation, just as there exists european countries with telemarketing legislation or mass-snail-mail-legislation. Certainly, not all european countries have it.
In the end, I think it is a matter of culture. USA is so much more obsessed by get-rich-quick schemes than Europe, that spammers are just more common. Personally, I've yet to discove spam from my own country, virtually all the spam I get is from US (or at least targeted at americans).
Locals in Perl, are, for almost any practical purpose globals. I really hope you meant my-variables.
No, it isn't. It's a language that can be interpreted. Most java-implementations aren't though...
In this situation, the Java program is (obviously) much faster than the interpreted bytecode version.
No, it isn't. Typical scripting languages use heavily optimized string routines, etc... In many cases, an obvious perl (or PHP I guess, although I have no experience with it) program can be faster than an obvious java (or C) program. But it certainly depends on the task you are doing.
The same is true of many other interpreted languages, optimized for specific tasks, e.g. prolog, mozart, K, J, APL, etc... Sure, in theory, native code is always better, but in reality, we seldom spend weeks, months or years to optimize for performance, but opt for simplicity instead.
Obvious too is the fact that the native code version won't run anywhere but the target machine.
Yes, but usually, we are not writing native code (or even assembler). We are writing in a high-level language, and usually, it is not too hard to compile them for different targets. Porting a reasonably well-written C program can often be much easier, then having to keep 60 different versions of JDK around, to be able to run all your Java programs (compiled to .class-files), or even make one non-trivial java program that will compile and run on all those versions of JDK.
Don't take me wrong, I really like PHP and I don't dislike Java at all. Just wanted to point that
Fine. I hope you understood what I told you, so you don't have to keep going around "pointing that" (whatever that means).
Have you ever looked at the amount of material in Gutenberg's archives? When it comes to books and material written in english, that is in the public domain, I have to say, that Gutenberg offers almost everything of interest already.
The reason the Gutenberg project isn't hugely succesful is not the lack of text. Part of it might be the lack of formatting. Nobody want's to read 600 pages of a classic work on a computer screen in ASCII. Some may be masochistic enough to do it if it was in HTML. Personally, I still prefer it in book-form.
But even if it was properly formatted in several formats (including .pdf's in several sizes), it still is a lot of work to print it out, find a decent way to keep it together (no, ring binders isn't very appropriate for something you are going to read).
The main reason Gutenberg isn't succesful is because it is not what people want. People don't want to read or print out old literature in the public domain. They either want a nice edition that looks good on the shelf, or a cheap paperback to carry around with them . And most likely they aren't particulary into really old books (with a possible few exceptions which the Gutenberg project long since have covered).
It's not like the work the Gutenberg people are doing isn't important, or isn't of good enough quality or anything else. The simple reasons it's not heavily succesfull is because very few people are really interested. I'm sure much of the work the Gutenberg people have done will become important as soon as on-demand printing is more common and affordable.
Yes. I would be very skeptical to someone that has done so little, that he has absolutely nothing to hide. The fact of the matter is, I would be more skeptical to someone who accepted the "truth machine", if you couldn't even find one interesting thing there. I am not sure what kind of person that would be, but certainly not something I would call human.
I would also consider it unethical to force anyone to publicly be in a "truth machine" (well, with the possible exception of hideous crimes, etc...). While it might have it's use in some situations, those people listening and questioning should surely have taken a wow of silence. And if the information was used in e.g. a courtroom, huge steps should be taken to protect the vitnesses to limit the information gained this way to exposure by the public (e.g. only by consent of vitness and lawyer).
As if anyone cares if Disney is able to make a living from Mickey... At least I don't. Let them keep it if they want.
The pattern of extending all copyrights just before the deadline will continue.
This is troublesome. The fact that Mickey Mouse may have copyright for ever doesn't worry me much. The fact that everything else also has copyright for ever is what is worrying.
That might be so, but at least it's something that can be enforced.
So the course of action would be closer to taking their income from said copyright, and then starting with a base tax of say, 3%, and every x years that tax doubles. Something of that sort. this way after 7x years, the tax would be 21% of the income from said copyright. X could either be a portion of a renewal period, or the renewal period itself.
And exactly how are you going to get those numbers? From the companys own books? Ever heard of Enron? Your idea is so unpractical that I can't even imagine how such a system should work.
And exactly how is this a problem with 14 years as proposed? The longest-lasting works with commercial value seems to be books. And even after 5 years, most books will tend to have reached their peak sales.
Sure, if we say less than 2 years, this might become a problem, but it's not like anyone is seriously proposing that.
Yes. Sometimes you need to store a lot of data. Even DVD's has 4.3 GB of data these days. But that's not even much compared to the amount of data we handle in seismic research. I would believe astronomists, particle physicists and a lots of other people also routinely handle ridiculous amounts of data.
By the way, in producing the DVD, you would naturally work with uncompressed data. How would you handle that?
The seek times alone withinr these files must be huge, and it smacks a bit of inefficienecy
And because it is inefficient, we should not support it? As a matter of fact, any file larger than one disk-block is inefficient. Maybe we should stop supporting that as well?
sure its just as bad to have an app use hundreds of say 4kb files or so, but two GIGABYTES???
As I've said, it's not really that much, depending on the application.
For your information, I just did a test with a Visual C++ 6.0 console application. When main was declared to return void, it exited with %errorlevel% 17. This would most likely mean that the run-time system took whatever was where the exit status should have been and interpreted it as an int (possibly extracting only the lower bits).
So, no. At least Visual C++ does not assume that void main(){} really means int main(){return 0;}. It just doesn't check it, and let's you shoot yourself in the foot. I've not tested with other compilers yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if the results were the same.
Or maybe they have, but are complete idiots when it comes to C. Your program has three large errors.
Actually, it was by Buddha :-)
And I mean it. You would probably be hard pressed to find even one correct sentence here. For those interested, here are a couple of refutations.
X is based on a networking concept where anyone can access anyone else's screen as a network resource.
Wrong. Only those with permission can access it. But that would be programs, not people. For people to access the screen, they would have to physically be there, and that is no different than any other windowing system.
This leads to multi-threading issues as it is possible for two people to use the same desktop, even same application, simultaneously
Wrong. While many people can sit in front of one computer if it's enough space for them, that doesn't mean anything will be more multithreaded. Also, the display server will have to do exactly the same kind of resource multiplexing as it does on windows (whether the apps displaying windows are executing remotely or locally is of little difference, they are still in different threads and usually also different adress spaces).
As a result, toolkits that have their origins in that environment like GTK and wxwindows have strong multi-threading support not to mention strong networking support.
Wrong. Few, if any, X11-toolkits support multithreading. This is a direct result of the age of the X11 core libraries, which themselves does not support multithreading. Most everyone agrees that this is a bug, but it's also one that's hard to fix.
OTOH, Windows was built around a single user concept, which from a networking perspective is more secure because a person's desktop isn't a networking resource (but that's neither here nor there).
Wrong again. How do you think those Citrix farms work? Windows isn't built around a single-user concept any more than Unix is (I am talking about NT/2000/XP of course). It might be the case that your typical windows distribution is only useful for one user at a time, but the underlying technology very much supports several users. As for not exposing anything on the network, sure that makes it more secure. Nobody in their right mind allows X11 through their firewall. But windows has plenty of other security holes.
This results in the base windowing subsystem's reliance on processes as the fundamental object of execution (as opposed to threads).
Again wrong. XFree86 uses a simple request-response loop (no threads or processes). There do exist multithreaded X-servers however, but not for the reasons you say. Mainly, if they are multithreaded, it is purely for performance-reasons.
Whether processes or threads are used, have absolutely nothing to do with networking, but more to do with taste, and programmer preference.
As for windows, it uses threads. Lot's of them, so even there, you are wrong.
So toolkits built upon Windows (MFC, OWL, QT) are able to harness Windows's windowing support in a way that more easily and effectively takes advantage of the features of the subsystem.
I fail to see any correspondence between the "cause" and the "conclusion" here. In any case, it is wrong. On the other hand, windows is a more mature and stable GUI platform. And this is more than enough to explain why X11 GUI's generally suck in comparison (even when they are cross-platform).
Attempting to port one toolkit from its home platform to a foreign platform leads to problems of "look and feel". AWT and Swing are prime examples of toolkits that look strange whereever they are used. Likewise, wxwindows feels funny running on Windows and GTK looks funny. Hell, MFC doesn't even run on X.
True. However, MFC apps can (more or less) run on X11, if you want to pay enough for it, and you really need it. There are companies selling that sort of thing.
What this all boils down to
Well, the only thing it can boil down to, is that either you are a troll, or someone seriously likely to talk out of his ass about anything he doesn't know about.
The final "conclusion" is obviously right, but I fail to see why you needed all the errors above to "support" it.
Somehow, I doubt it. Surely, no software ever gets "finished" (even TeX, which is, at least by my standards, anything but "perfect").
But Hurd was doomed to failure from the start. It was exactly the diamond-like jewel type of system that was predestined to be obsolete by the time it finally arrived.
His major contribution, however, is that he was one of the first to actually sell software to end-users. Untill then, software was either free, or it was paid for by the manufacturer of the computer (who would make it free - why else would somebody buy their incompatible computer?).
Wow, that's just scary! It's not that it wouldn't work, but it just scares me to think of what kind of other weird stuff the man who thought of that would put into code elsewhere...
Not that I don't see similar stuff daily :-)
Your options are to either
- write one
:-)
- buy a client for each machine from one of these vendors: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
- Buy a NFS/SMB gateway from one of the vendors above (or make one with Samba)
- Use both samba and NFS on the server
- Simply use samba
When using both NFS and Samba there might be some tricky locking issues. At least it used to be recommended against. I don't know if that's true anymore, but you should be aware of it. If you only share disks readonly, then you will of course be safe.But then you've been told wrong. Math is not a science. It is a study of entirely human constructs. As it turns out, some of these constructs has proven themselves useful in science, but that doesn't make math itself a science. Neither is logic a science. Nobody does experiments in either math or logic.
As for whether the rest of the argument is true, depends on your own sillyness. Biology is no more applied chemistry than enjoying dinner is applied thermodynamics. While it is true that microbiologists worry a lot about chemistry, there are also other biologists who couldn't care less, and work with entirely other things.
In the same vein, one could argue for the same hierarchy in computer scientists/engineers. At the top, we have the hardware engineers, then microcode developers, people who write device-drivers, etc, system-level programmers, application-level programmers, scripters, and end-users.
In reality, the tasks that end-users perform at a computer needs be no more easy than what hardware-engineers do when constructing one (and in doing that, most hardware engineers are also end-users...). The only difference is that it requires a different kind of knowledge.
While it is true that physics concerns itself more with "fundamental principles" than chemistry, and logic is more "fundamental" than math, this does in no way imply that math is worthless because logic is more "fundamental", or that people should stop studying chemistry, because physics is more "fundamental".
We cannot, and probably never will, be able to easily and automatically derive all important principles of math from logic, all of chemistry from physics, all of biology from chemistry, all of medicine from biology, all of psychology from medicine, all of social science from psychology, and so on. The value of science is not in it's "fundamentalness". It's in its usefulness (either direct usefullness for applied science, or in it's potential for understanding nature better in the long term for pure science).
Yes, of course. As we all know, science isn't about trying to find out about the world. It is about being able to recite formulas.
Chemistry, Engineering only imitate simple formulas of physics.
Sure. As a matter of fact, it turns out even social scientists uses "formulas" to describe the world. What a bunch of loosers they are, who try to copy this from physicists.
But, to really understand atoms, molecules etc, you really need to understand quantum physics (the way it is taught to physicists).
Yes, physicists usually have a much better understanding of the fundamental forces involved in single-body problems. The fact that this becomes largely irrelevant due to the computational difficulties involved in calculating anything useful for chemistry is something we can ignore for now. Actually measuring phenomena that is too hard to calculate is only for lesser beings.
Ph. D. level Chemists and maybe Chemical Enginners, study quantum mechanics but it's at the level of undergraduate junior/senior level physics majors.
Yes, and physics majors study chemistry, but only as chemistry 101. So what's your point?
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but it is true that Chemistry or most of Engineering degree require very minimum level of math.
Actually, that is true. But not because the math isn't there. It's because the math is too fucking complex to be able to do at all. But if you like math, I'm sure a course in physical chemistry would satisfy you.
I've always felt Chemistry boring for this reason.
So do I, but that doesn't make it any less of a science.
True science is understanding nature from quantitatively, no vague, but exact; anything qualitative in nature is vague and waste of time.
True science is about understanding nature. If things are too complex to study quantitatively at the moment, we must do a first approximation to it, and study qualitatively first. Just because something is difficult, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
From a Doctorate level physics graduate student.
I seriously doubt that. Most physicists I've met have a sound modesty about the importance of their subject, and a better understanding of science than you.
But remember, unless sufficiently drunk, stay away from gnome-clit.
Ahh, so you were thinking about programming (wink, wink)? But seriously, you should probably blame the Portland group instead of the shell here. It's not like they couldn't have made a .dpgk or .rpm out of it.
And even if they couldn't do that, it's not like they couldn't write some shell-scripts that could be put somewhere in your path to invoke the compiler (and set up the environment first). They could even write a small installer that modified those scripts depending on where you installed the compiler. For an excellent example of this, look at suns JDK.
Perhaps :-)
I wanted to say that the existing Unix/Linux shells (1) are mutually incompatible (2) are often a pain to program (bash, uh) and use, (3) and some big vendors still keep the oldest and least friendly.
(1) Yes, they are. (Personally, I use bash for exactly that reason, since it keeps me from remembering to many syntaxes as bash is essentially sh++) (2) Well, I think bash is pretty ok. But of course, there could be lots of room for improvement. And yes, since you mentioned it, PATH (and CLASSPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc) being colon-separated instead of newline separated makes it harder to manipulate it without a few nifty aliases. They should be standard and builtin to make things easier. (3) Well, trading backwards compatibility with user-friendliness is not always so easy. But since most shell-scripts start with #!/bin/sh anyway, it would make sense to give the users a more friendly shell by default.
It could, if well designed.And as we both know, there are plenty of alternatives already. In particular, the following shells are all "better" than sh for end-users: tcsh, ksh, bash, zsh, es, and tclsh. It's not obvious that a new shell would improve the situation more than just add to the confusion.
But, for example, some aspects of the CLI could benefit a lot from a insightfull redisign.
I most definitely agree. But designing a "better shell" is very hard, and most people fail (look at the (lack of) success of es for example). The tradeoffs between terseness (for command-line use), regularity (for scripting), familiarity (to get anyone to use it at all), simplicity (to be useful for newcomers), and expressivity (to be the best tool for experts) makes it as much an experiment in psychology as in programming.
I doubt that we will ever reach shell-nirvana in unix (or any other place for that matter, but windows has a large advantage here, one of the things that holds us back, is that we still care about being able to run the shell over telnet to a teletype, but in windows they will probably make the default user experience to be more like e.g. emacs interaction mode, nice menus and all... By the way, have you ever looked at XMLterm? It's nice, and certainly innovative :-) Why not combine it with XML shell to get away from the pipe-filter on characters/lines only paradigm?).
The current unix-shells are the result of decades of stepwise improvements on a really good idea (at the time), and continues to be so much more useful than any of their alternatives that it's going to be hard to penetrate the "market"...
Not that it wouldn't be worth it though :-)
Uh? You want sh to be zsh? Why insist on typing sh then? Why would you break script-compatibility by replasing sh with something that is not sh? Why do you think yet another new shell will fix that?
and I would be happy not to have to deal with the details of PATH and environment in various Linux shells.
Uh, why are you dealing with them now? It should be set up by the distribution for you. I can't remember having fiddled much more with environment variables under linux than I have under DOS (except when I'm developing of course, but I hope it's not that you are complaining about?
Open source indeed needs a more open minded and innovative attitude.
Well, I didn't even know open source had an attitude. It's a concept, a subset of all possible software-licenses and associated software. Do you seriously believe that everyone who uses/publishes/writes/fixes/documents/etc open source software are close-minded and never innovative?