Well, if you are at all interested in hifi, you wouldn't care much about how loud your equipment can play. The idea is to reproduce sound as if you were there, and you will never hear a violin playing at 160dB at a concert. Besides, beyond a certain threshold, all sound starts to sound badly simply because your ears aren't designed for it. If you want to enjoy music, you listen at a comfortable level!
...does not exist! There will never be one language that can suit all possible purposes for everyone, and therefore there will never be one language that is best for teaching.
However, we should look at a few requirements for a good teaching language:
Programming is hard! A teaching language should not be unnecessary difficult. This, IMHO pretty much rules out C++ and Perl. Not that those languages doesn't have their place in the real world (they certainly do), but their complexity distracts from the purpose of learning to program well first. It should be simple to make a simple program to experiment with ideas (hello world line count is not such a bad measure). A top-level interactive loop helps this further, but equally good is a fast compiler and a good development environment. Languages that are simple to learn would at least include Pascal and it's cousins, most scripting languages, as well as various lisp-dialects
Students want instant gratification. This can mean different things to different people, personally I was instantly gratified when I learnt C and later assembly language. It made me understand more of how the machine really worked, and gave me an opportunity to actually improve on something (e.g. a faster strcpy than the one in libc) without really putting too much effort in it. Programming simple games and animations, usable GUI's and so on is also something than can be very rewarding for a fresh programmer, provided the language facilities for this are easy to use. So put in logo, Visual Basic (I've never really learned the language, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as people will have it), Tcl/Tk, Postscript and others as well.
Good software engineering skills should be taught from the start! Therefore it's important to have a language that supports at least reasonable levels of modularization. Java fits this category well, as does Python, but also many others, such as Common Lisp, Eiffel, Ada, and SmallTalk.
Depending on what direction the students are going in later, it might be a good idea to introduce some advanced concepts early. For the EE direction, more low-level languages might be better, such as Forth, C, or assembler. But eventually, everyone should know something low-level stuff so it could be done by everyone.
For the same reason, Haskell and other functional languages (such as scheme, although it really isn't functional) is popular among CS people The value of choosing a CS-oriented language (most functional and logic-programming languages will do) are that they pave the way for understanding more advanced concepts later, such as term-rewriting, parsing theory, the value of trees, and of course recursion. I would really believe that a student who only knew Haskell would most likely know more about how to build a compiler than one who only knew C, as there are more advanced concepts gained simply by choosing a more CS-directed language.
Market and bragging value is important for ambitious young boys (although perhaps not for girls, who usually accept that they are there in order to learn, and don't think they know more than their professor). I would believe most students would be pretty alienated by finding out that their first programming language is a weird ivory-tower programming language that nobody except in academia uses, and that has little in common with C++ or Java (which their friends uses, and there are ads in the papers for programmers). So unless you really want to limit your audience, your language should be somewhat mainstream.
To summarize, I have tried to tabulate some languages below on various categories from 1 to 6. Note that this is highly subjective, and most people would probably not agree, but at least they summarize how I feel about them. The categories are (in this order): EasyToLearn, InstantGratification, EnginerringSkills, HowItWorks, CS-skills, and Bragging (unfortunately/. doesn't allow tables).
Well, I guess the winners are Java, Python and SmallTalk (on the other hand, the differences between all the languages here are so small that all would make good teaching languages, depending on how you weight the factors). Java is a relatively good all-round teaching language whereas most others seems to lack something (a 1 or a 2) in at least one of the "requirements".
Yeah, the compiler only needs to read the programmers mind to find out his intentions when doing I/O with binary data. Other than that, it's very simple...
I believe that the technologies involved in the Dynam(o/ite) projects could speed up Java to the point where it would become a feasible possibility to write Java-only applications.
What if you layered the security approach? Encrypt the filesystem with a very good cypher and encrypt the entire filesystem!
Please tell me how to make sure they used encrypted filesystems 5-10 years ago, on those old machines that they are scrapping now. (See..., it's not a very helpful suggestion!)
Actually, it wouldn't help security very much to use encrypted file-systems either. Encrypted file-systems are only supposed to help if someone seizes your machine. That means it might be a good idea on a laptop, but if physical security is good, it is an unnessecary hassle to use on desktops. And, as avoiding loss of data is equally important when it comes to security, I wouldn't really think they would want to go through with that. Better just scrap the HD's.
Unfortunately, unless you manage to completely pulverize the drive, parts of the platters will still be intact, and data can be read from them. So a hammer is not the right solution. But if you really want a mechanical solution, I would probably recommend a mill (grinding it to flour:-)
Yeah, that would be really useful. Only spammers would know how to copy and paste your email-address, while ordinary people you tell your email-address can't type it...
This of course depends on what you mean by a simple writing system. If by simple you mean only "has few letters" then English is about as simple as it can be. However, english spelling is extremely idiosyncratic, there are no simple rules to follow, and almost every word is spelt in some not entirely logical way.
If you choose this view, then yes, most european languages have much more logical spelling than english. One exception might be french, which is not at all written as it is spoken, although there is admittedly a system to it.
Accent marks and diacriticals doesn't make the writing system more difficult, it simply makes it possible to write more phonetically. I would prefer the writing systems of german, danish, norwegian or swedish any day before english. I don't know any east-european languages, but I would be very surprised if most of the accents and diacriticals weren't there for a good reason, and I doubt they can be much worse than english.
From what little I know of russian, it has a very simple writing system that is even clearer and simpler than e.g. german, danish or norwegian.
On the other hand, if someone makes a truly simplified and logical spelling of the english language popular, e.g: "I thought my bones were breaking during the fight" -> "Ai thokt mai bowns wer breiking diuring the fait", it could eventually become as simple as most other european languages (or those written with the cyrillic character set).
Of course, most languages has some kind of idiosyncrasies when it comes to spelling, but english is certainly not among the easiest. And the few added letters in some european languages is laughable. German adds a few umlauts and ß, danish adds æ and ø, norwegian adds æ, ø and å, swedish adds å, ä and ö, and so on... No big deal! Besides, none of the above mentioned languages makes any use of x or z except in foreign words. Scandinavian languages never use w except in foreign words. The same is true for c in norwegian. So the letter count is mostly similar, as is true for cyrillic.
Well, he would basically be right. You see; Bill Gates is rich, and he got rich by selling software. I'm sure he has something interesting to say on the subject of producing commercial software.
Well, only according to the columnist, and it was the open source movement, not Linux which got labeled as cancer.
Besides, what's so bad about being called "cancer". Most of us are already proud of using two well-known "viruses". Unix is known as one of the most succesful computer viruses ever, taking over virtually all micro's and mini's in the 70's and 80's, and now, with Linux, also a large percentage of PC's in the 90's and onward. And the GPL is also a very effective virus which has infected the brainfunctions of millions of programmers worldwide.
If Steve Ballmer chooses to call the open source movement "cancer", you should all be proud, dammit!
But the GPL claims that it is all about freedom, when in reality it tries to be as much of a virus as possible.
Yes, it encourages others to benefit from the freedom it provides. There is no difference between theory and practice.
Making money off of hard work isn't nearly as evil as most GPL supporters try to make it sound.
I've yet to find a GPL supporter claiming there's anything wrong with earning money. I'll bet 99.999999% of all GPL supporters would really like to earn more money themselves, whether it'd be from their GPL'd product, or otherwise. In particular, RMS and the FSF has never said anything negative about getting your income from software development.
Feel free to think that MS tries to "embrace and extend" open-source technology. The reality of the situation is that Microsoft did nothing of the sort; they merely took advantage of open-ended parts of the Kerberos architecture so it could fit in with the Microsoft authentication/security model better.
Whatever. I am no expert on the Microsoft security model, and don't particulary care. But I would like to ask one simple question? Does MS Kerberos work ok within a standard Kerberos environment? No? What do you think the reason is?
Incompetence? Embrace-and-extend? Internal security model? Only a rabid MS-supporter would choose the last one. It could of course be true, but that would also imply grave incompetence, and when it comes to integrating technologies Microsoft is usually very competent, so I think embrace-and-extend is much more probable.
Re:Useful for satelites
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Flywheel UPS
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So you put two flywheels inside the satellite, each rotating in a different direction. Not much of a problem really.
Actually, you have to do this for another reason too; it would be pretty hard to change the direction the satellite is pointing at with a flywheel (gyro) spinning inside it. Put two flywheels spinning in the opposite direction of each other, and the effects pretty much cancel each other out.
No, it's not new, and it is not revolutionary. But it is a good idea that has taken surprisingly long time to catch on in the mainstream. While I can probably see better uses for it than in a web-browser (e.g. a CAD-program, or some other mainly graphical app, such as computer games or graphics applications), it is interesting to see if the time is ripe for such a good idea to finally reach the mainstream...
In case you don't like to take my word for it, gesture recognition has existed in at least one free GPL'd C++ library for quite a few years (long before Gtk came to life, and AFAIK also before Qt, at least before it became popular). The library is called Amulet and has several other interesting features, such as a constraint solver for geometry layout. Another interesting aspect of Amulet is that it does not use class-based inheritance, but uses a prototype-based approach (in the form of a C++ library) instead.
But the history goes even further back. Basically, Amulet is just a reimplementation in C++ of an even older Common Lisp library called Garnet. Sadly Garnet seems to be relatively unmaintained these days, but it provides many of the same features in a much better suited language (yes, Common Lisp is better suited for this kind of programming, although I must admit that modern C++ is a surprisingly flexible language, given it's static nature).
I paid less than $160 for my new 45GB IDE HD. Iomega wants $160 simply for their 10GB media. To get 40GB, you will need a drive: $250 and 2*$200 disks, totalling $650. With a discount, perhaps $600. Not a good deal to me.
You could simply buy a big HD for your laptop, and bring that around instead of the removable disks. The same goes for portable mp3-players or anything else small. You don't need removable media, just buy more mp3-players (or whatever your favourite unit is). With todays prices on most electronics, this seems a lot cheaper than carrying around removable harddisks.
On the other hand, if what you want is large storage capacity for archival or backup-purposes (and therefore need some kind of removable media), then CD-RW or exabyte tapes seems much more reasonable to me. At least when it comes to price. Shure, they are more inconvenient, but also a lot cheaper.
The idea of free software is that of freedom. Freedom to share code with others is one of them. Restricting usage is not sharing. The GPL is designed in order to allow people to share code as much as possible (even code not written yet, because if people use GPL'd code, they will have to make their contributions GPL'd as well).
Restricting usage to free operating systems will not further that goal. People can still use the software without sharing back to the community (although this can be achieved with additional license clauses). And few people are going to switch to free operating systems just because of one application (unless it is a real killer-app (and few of them exists)).
Why would I want people using e.g. Solaris to not use my software? If they use it, the software is likely to get contributions from their users, improve in quality and grow. By restricting usage to Linux/*BSD and other free systems only, I will no longer be able to take advantage of knowledgeable users of other systems. Thus, I am not even helping the growth of even my own free software!
So, if the idea is to further the growth of free software, I would advice against it.
Secondly, would any of the free OS's gain much by having unwilling users being forced to switch? I don't think so. People should use free software because it has advantages for them (be it better quality, lower costs, more flexibility, or for educational reasons). That is the way to get inspired users who will contribute to the project. I doubt anyone who is forced to run Linux (or some other free OS) simply for license reasons are likely to contribute much to the Linux (or other free OS) community.
Besides, even many Linux users are going to shun something under this license. If you can use it at home, but not at your workplace, then what good is it? Find something else, and not bother with it unless it is something really exciting. Well, that's how I think anyway...
Re:Is Motif Dead? No but it is gasping for air
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The Superior Motif?
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The same arguments couln't be used. XView was never "the standard", and was never intended to be. XView was a poor-man's replacement for OpenLook. And OpenLook was already small compared to Motif. So XView never had the enormous amount of legacy code written by large corporations that Motif has, and could therefore go away silently.
Personally I find this a bit sad, as I happened to like XView very much, and found the OpenLook look much nicer than Motif. It was also relatively sane to program. Well, well --- those times seem to be gone now.
Re:Is Motif Dead? No but it is gasping for air
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The Superior Motif?
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Well, anything will be dead in the not so near future. Including Linux, Motif, X11, Qt, C++, Java, combustion engines, communism, USA, humanity, and so on. What is interesting is what will be dead in the near future.
Motif has been used to create mission-critical applications in large corporations all over the world. Motif simply can't go away. There are way too much invested in Motif for it to go completely away even in the next 20 years.
That doesn't mean that Motif will ever be exciting and new again. It will be like Fortran or Cobol, with old engineers cranking out code for old legacy systems. But thrust me: It won't go away soon.
Re:Mr. Fountain is ignorant of the facts.
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The Superior Motif?
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Wrong!
He didn't miss it. If you checked the date of the article before complaining, maybe you would have understood that too.
With approximately 700000 lines of Motif-based legacy GUI-code already written: no.
Motif may suck, but so does everything else. The main benefit of Motif is stability and backwards compatibility, as well as feature completeness.
Contrary to popular opinion, this is important even in new projects. A large project that takes, say 3 years to complete requires somewhat stable components during building. Who knows what changes will happen to GTK+ and Qt during those three years? At least with Motif I would have some confidence that the API's originally documented 3 years ago still work on the latest version. This matters if you are just trying to get some work done!
Most development on Linux uses a different model. There are no customers. There are no in-house users that must be supported at all costs. There are no deadlines. If the software is buggy, it can be fixed later. Hacking value and aestethicks matters the most (as well as licensing debates), and actual functionality matters little, because if you want to do something useful, you use the command-line. Nobody cares about end-users. And those end-users that exists don't have a job to do either, so they complain about lack of themes instead of lack of functionality.
The problem is that X11 doesn't differentiate between marking text and copying text to the clipboard. If you simply paste the URL into the addressbar you will have to delete the old URL later, which is often many keystrokes, and requires some degree of precision (selecting the right text to delete). This is (to me) extremely annoying.
Why is it that every distro of Linux I have ever installed has the ugliest, most unreadable fonts ever conceived by man?
Because they are the only ones that are free. Feel free to create some better ones. As you will soon notice, creating high-quality fonts is not easy, and that's why people tend not to give them away. That's also why MS-Office isn't free...
Also, most applications are written to be portable. While some linux-distributions ship with other and better fonts, or can steel fonts from you windows-partition, the applications still have to use fonts they know are available. (Would you write an application that only worked on Mandrake Linux, or one that aimed for general Unix-compatibility?), which means the old X11 bitmap screen fonts.
X11 font-handling is also unnessecary complicated for end-users, and usually requires root-access, so requiring people to install non-standard fonts to run your application is generally not a good idea.
And of course, netscape font-handling sucks as well. But IMHO X11 is mostly to blame for it's lame and retarded font-handling (although things have improved with XFree86 lately, but such things take time to propagate to applications and libraries).
Actually, I tend to disagree. I often spend a lot of time switching between windows and marking text again just because X automatically copies any marked text.
E.g., read some text-document with an URL. You want to open it in netscape. What do you do?
Windows:
mark the URL, press Ctrl-C
switch to netscape window
paste into netscape address bar with Ctrl-V
X11:
switch to netscape window
mark all text in addressbar, press DEL
switch to texteditor
find the URL again, and mark it...
switch to netscape
paste into addressbar with middle mouse button
The problem is that X11 doesn't differentiate between marking text and copying text to the clipboard. If you simply paste the URL into the addressbar you will have to delete the old URL later, which is often many keystrokes, and requires some degree of precision (selecting the right text to delete). This is (to me) extremely annoying.
As for the keychords chosen by Windows, they make perfect sense. Most users are right-handed, and uses the right hand to guide the mouse. The left hand remains on the keyboard, where X, C and V conveniently resides. Since I can still use the mouse to switch between windows while I am pressing Ctrl-X or Ctrl-C, no speed is lost, and much convenience is gained. An additional benefit is that this allows for mouse-less operation which is what I prefer anyway.
Nope. The belief that Dvorak keyboards are vastly superior to qwerty is a common fallacy. I suggest you try reading something about Dvorak keyboards from a more unbiased source.
If you are to lazy to read: No studies confirm that Dvorak keyboards really are conclusively better. On the other hand, too little (quality) research has been done. Most of what has been done is often biased towards Dvorak in the setup, and therefore of little value. An interesting ergonomic study mentioned in the article explains why Dvorak isn't much better despite shorter finger movement and more balanced distribution of keys between hands (reason: qwerty keyboards favours alternating hand-sequences, which is also good for typing speed). The authors of the article believes the assumptions about the market underlying Dvorak propaganda is flawed, and that many keyboard layouts (other than qwerty) (with substantial variations) were given reasonable chances to become the "standard" keyboard.
As for myself, I can only add the obligatory reference to Occams razor. What do you find most likely?
Dvorak keyboards really are much better, and people using them are much more efficient, but nobody uses them because [insert random reason here]...
Dvorak was really good at selling his keyboard and ideas, and many people got fascinated by them, but in the end the expectations didn't turn out in practice, so it sort of died out.... Not that it was a bad keyboard, it was just that no noticeable gain was seen from switching.
If Dvorak keyboards really were that much more effective, people would use them.
Hopefully, it's not the same people replying both times.
My guess is that people excited about Company X building linux products reply the first time. People who see their failed business model just keeps their mouth shut (either because of lack of interest, or because they are afraid to loose karma). When Company X fails, the situation is reversed. Simple?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you are at all interested in hifi, you wouldn't care much about how loud your equipment can play. The idea is to reproduce sound as if you were there, and you will never hear a violin playing at 160dB at a concert. Besides, beyond a certain threshold, all sound starts to sound badly simply because your ears aren't designed for it. If you want to enjoy music, you listen at a comfortable level!
However, we should look at a few requirements for a good teaching language:
Programming is hard! A teaching language should not be unnecessary difficult. This, IMHO pretty much rules out C++ and Perl. Not that those languages doesn't have their place in the real world (they certainly do), but their complexity distracts from the purpose of learning to program well first. It should be simple to make a simple program to experiment with ideas (hello world line count is not such a bad measure). A top-level interactive loop helps this further, but equally good is a fast compiler and a good development environment. Languages that are simple to learn would at least include Pascal and it's cousins, most scripting languages, as well as various lisp-dialects
Students want instant gratification. This can mean different things to different people, personally I was instantly gratified when I learnt C and later assembly language. It made me understand more of how the machine really worked, and gave me an opportunity to actually improve on something (e.g. a faster strcpy than the one in libc) without really putting too much effort in it. Programming simple games and animations, usable GUI's and so on is also something than can be very rewarding for a fresh programmer, provided the language facilities for this are easy to use. So put in logo, Visual Basic (I've never really learned the language, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as people will have it), Tcl/Tk, Postscript and others as well.
Good software engineering skills should be taught from the start! Therefore it's important to have a language that supports at least reasonable levels of modularization. Java fits this category well, as does Python, but also many others, such as Common Lisp, Eiffel, Ada, and SmallTalk.
Depending on what direction the students are going in later, it might be a good idea to introduce some advanced concepts early. For the EE direction, more low-level languages might be better, such as Forth, C, or assembler. But eventually, everyone should know something low-level stuff so it could be done by everyone.
For the same reason, Haskell and other functional languages (such as scheme, although it really isn't functional) is popular among CS people The value of choosing a CS-oriented language (most functional and logic-programming languages will do) are that they pave the way for understanding more advanced concepts later, such as term-rewriting, parsing theory, the value of trees, and of course recursion. I would really believe that a student who only knew Haskell would most likely know more about how to build a compiler than one who only knew C, as there are more advanced concepts gained simply by choosing a more CS-directed language.
Market and bragging value is important for ambitious young boys (although perhaps not for girls, who usually accept that they are there in order to learn, and don't think they know more than their professor). I would believe most students would be pretty alienated by finding out that their first programming language is a weird ivory-tower programming language that nobody except in academia uses, and that has little in common with C++ or Java (which their friends uses, and there are ads in the papers for programmers). So unless you really want to limit your audience, your language should be somewhat mainstream.
To summarize, I have tried to tabulate some languages below on various categories from 1 to 6. Note that this is highly subjective, and most people would probably not agree, but at least they summarize how I feel about them. The categories are (in this order): EasyToLearn, InstantGratification, EnginerringSkills, HowItWorks, CS-skills, and Bragging (unfortunately /. doesn't allow tables).
Java: 4 4 6 3 4 6, total: 27
C: 2 5 3 6 1 5, total: 22
C++: 1 2 3 5 6, total: 17
Perl: 1 5 2 1 1 6, total: 16
Haskell: 2 3 6 1 6 1, total: 19
Forth: 3 3 1 6 4 1, total: 18
Postscript: 5 6 1 1 3 3, total: 19
Common Lisp: 4 4 6 2 6 1, total: 23
Scheme: 6 4 4 2 6 1, total: 23
Python: 6 6 6 1 4 4, total: 27
Logo: 6 6 4 1 4 1, total: 20
Pascal (or cousins): 6 4 4 5 3 3, total: 25
SmallTalk: 6 5 6 2 5 3, total: 27
Assembler: 4 3 2 6 2 6, total: 23
Well, I guess the winners are Java, Python and SmallTalk (on the other hand, the differences between all the languages here are so small that all would make good teaching languages, depending on how you weight the factors). Java is a relatively good all-round teaching language whereas most others seems to lack something (a 1 or a 2) in at least one of the "requirements".
I don't think most people would think 8 to 64 millibits more or less would be bloat :-)
Yeah, the compiler only needs to read the programmers mind to find out his intentions when doing I/O with binary data. Other than that, it's very simple...
And it isn't already?
Please tell me how to make sure they used encrypted filesystems 5-10 years ago, on those old machines that they are scrapping now. (See..., it's not a very helpful suggestion!)
Actually, it wouldn't help security very much to use encrypted file-systems either. Encrypted file-systems are only supposed to help if someone seizes your machine. That means it might be a good idea on a laptop, but if physical security is good, it is an unnessecary hassle to use on desktops. And, as avoiding loss of data is equally important when it comes to security, I wouldn't really think they would want to go through with that. Better just scrap the HD's.
Unfortunately, unless you manage to completely pulverize the drive, parts of the platters will still be intact, and data can be read from them. So a hammer is not the right solution. But if you really want a mechanical solution, I would probably recommend a mill (grinding it to flour :-)
Yeah, that would be really useful. Only spammers would know how to copy and paste your email-address, while ordinary people you tell your email-address can't type it...
If you choose this view, then yes, most european languages have much more logical spelling than english. One exception might be french, which is not at all written as it is spoken, although there is admittedly a system to it.
Accent marks and diacriticals doesn't make the writing system more difficult, it simply makes it possible to write more phonetically. I would prefer the writing systems of german, danish, norwegian or swedish any day before english. I don't know any east-european languages, but I would be very surprised if most of the accents and diacriticals weren't there for a good reason, and I doubt they can be much worse than english.
From what little I know of russian, it has a very simple writing system that is even clearer and simpler than e.g. german, danish or norwegian.
On the other hand, if someone makes a truly simplified and logical spelling of the english language popular, e.g: "I thought my bones were breaking during the fight" -> "Ai thokt mai bowns wer breiking diuring the fait", it could eventually become as simple as most other european languages (or those written with the cyrillic character set).
Of course, most languages has some kind of idiosyncrasies when it comes to spelling, but english is certainly not among the easiest. And the few added letters in some european languages is laughable. German adds a few umlauts and ß, danish adds æ and ø, norwegian adds æ, ø and å, swedish adds å, ä and ö, and so on... No big deal! Besides, none of the above mentioned languages makes any use of x or z except in foreign words. Scandinavian languages never use w except in foreign words. The same is true for c in norwegian. So the letter count is mostly similar, as is true for cyrillic.
Well, he would basically be right. You see; Bill Gates is rich, and he got rich by selling software. I'm sure he has something interesting to say on the subject of producing commercial software.
Besides, what's so bad about being called "cancer". Most of us are already proud of using two well-known "viruses". Unix is known as one of the most succesful computer viruses ever, taking over virtually all micro's and mini's in the 70's and 80's, and now, with Linux, also a large percentage of PC's in the 90's and onward. And the GPL is also a very effective virus which has infected the brainfunctions of millions of programmers worldwide.
If Steve Ballmer chooses to call the open source movement "cancer", you should all be proud, dammit!
Yes, it encourages others to benefit from the freedom it provides. There is no difference between theory and practice.
Making money off of hard work isn't nearly as evil as most GPL supporters try to make it sound.
I've yet to find a GPL supporter claiming there's anything wrong with earning money. I'll bet 99.999999% of all GPL supporters would really like to earn more money themselves, whether it'd be from their GPL'd product, or otherwise. In particular, RMS and the FSF has never said anything negative about getting your income from software development.
Feel free to think that MS tries to "embrace and extend" open-source technology. The reality of the situation is that Microsoft did nothing of the sort; they merely took advantage of open-ended parts of the Kerberos architecture so it could fit in with the Microsoft authentication/security model better.
Whatever. I am no expert on the Microsoft security model, and don't particulary care. But I would like to ask one simple question? Does MS Kerberos work ok within a standard Kerberos environment? No? What do you think the reason is? Incompetence? Embrace-and-extend? Internal security model? Only a rabid MS-supporter would choose the last one. It could of course be true, but that would also imply grave incompetence, and when it comes to integrating technologies Microsoft is usually very competent, so I think embrace-and-extend is much more probable.
Actually, you have to do this for another reason too; it would be pretty hard to change the direction the satellite is pointing at with a flywheel (gyro) spinning inside it. Put two flywheels spinning in the opposite direction of each other, and the effects pretty much cancel each other out.
In case you don't like to take my word for it, gesture recognition has existed in at least one free GPL'd C++ library for quite a few years (long before Gtk came to life, and AFAIK also before Qt, at least before it became popular). The library is called Amulet and has several other interesting features, such as a constraint solver for geometry layout. Another interesting aspect of Amulet is that it does not use class-based inheritance, but uses a prototype-based approach (in the form of a C++ library) instead.
But the history goes even further back. Basically, Amulet is just a reimplementation in C++ of an even older Common Lisp library called Garnet. Sadly Garnet seems to be relatively unmaintained these days, but it provides many of the same features in a much better suited language (yes, Common Lisp is better suited for this kind of programming, although I must admit that modern C++ is a surprisingly flexible language, given it's static nature).
You could simply buy a big HD for your laptop, and bring that around instead of the removable disks. The same goes for portable mp3-players or anything else small. You don't need removable media, just buy more mp3-players (or whatever your favourite unit is). With todays prices on most electronics, this seems a lot cheaper than carrying around removable harddisks.
On the other hand, if what you want is large storage capacity for archival or backup-purposes (and therefore need some kind of removable media), then CD-RW or exabyte tapes seems much more reasonable to me. At least when it comes to price. Shure, they are more inconvenient, but also a lot cheaper.
Restricting usage to free operating systems will not further that goal. People can still use the software without sharing back to the community (although this can be achieved with additional license clauses). And few people are going to switch to free operating systems just because of one application (unless it is a real killer-app (and few of them exists)).
Why would I want people using e.g. Solaris to not use my software? If they use it, the software is likely to get contributions from their users, improve in quality and grow. By restricting usage to Linux/*BSD and other free systems only, I will no longer be able to take advantage of knowledgeable users of other systems. Thus, I am not even helping the growth of even my own free software!
So, if the idea is to further the growth of free software, I would advice against it.
Secondly, would any of the free OS's gain much by having unwilling users being forced to switch? I don't think so. People should use free software because it has advantages for them (be it better quality, lower costs, more flexibility, or for educational reasons). That is the way to get inspired users who will contribute to the project. I doubt anyone who is forced to run Linux (or some other free OS) simply for license reasons are likely to contribute much to the Linux (or other free OS) community.
Besides, even many Linux users are going to shun something under this license. If you can use it at home, but not at your workplace, then what good is it? Find something else, and not bother with it unless it is something really exciting. Well, that's how I think anyway...
Personally I find this a bit sad, as I happened to like XView very much, and found the OpenLook look much nicer than Motif. It was also relatively sane to program. Well, well --- those times seem to be gone now.
Motif has been used to create mission-critical applications in large corporations all over the world. Motif simply can't go away. There are way too much invested in Motif for it to go completely away even in the next 20 years.
That doesn't mean that Motif will ever be exciting and new again. It will be like Fortran or Cobol, with old engineers cranking out code for old legacy systems. But thrust me: It won't go away soon.
He didn't miss it. If you checked the date of the article before complaining, maybe you would have understood that too.
Motif may suck, but so does everything else. The main benefit of Motif is stability and backwards compatibility, as well as feature completeness.
Contrary to popular opinion, this is important even in new projects. A large project that takes, say 3 years to complete requires somewhat stable components during building. Who knows what changes will happen to GTK+ and Qt during those three years? At least with Motif I would have some confidence that the API's originally documented 3 years ago still work on the latest version. This matters if you are just trying to get some work done!
Most development on Linux uses a different model. There are no customers. There are no in-house users that must be supported at all costs. There are no deadlines. If the software is buggy, it can be fixed later. Hacking value and aestethicks matters the most (as well as licensing debates), and actual functionality matters little, because if you want to do something useful, you use the command-line. Nobody cares about end-users. And those end-users that exists don't have a job to do either, so they complain about lack of themes instead of lack of functionality.
The problem is that X11 doesn't differentiate between marking text and copying text to the clipboard. If you simply paste the URL into the addressbar you will have to delete the old URL later, which is often many keystrokes, and requires some degree of precision (selecting the right text to delete). This is (to me) extremely annoying.
Because they are the only ones that are free. Feel free to create some better ones. As you will soon notice, creating high-quality fonts is not easy, and that's why people tend not to give them away. That's also why MS-Office isn't free...
Also, most applications are written to be portable. While some linux-distributions ship with other and better fonts, or can steel fonts from you windows-partition, the applications still have to use fonts they know are available. (Would you write an application that only worked on Mandrake Linux, or one that aimed for general Unix-compatibility?), which means the old X11 bitmap screen fonts.
X11 font-handling is also unnessecary complicated for end-users, and usually requires root-access, so requiring people to install non-standard fonts to run your application is generally not a good idea.
And of course, netscape font-handling sucks as well. But IMHO X11 is mostly to blame for it's lame and retarded font-handling (although things have improved with XFree86 lately, but such things take time to propagate to applications and libraries).
E.g., read some text-document with an URL. You want to open it in netscape. What do you do?
Windows:
- mark the URL, press Ctrl-C
- switch to netscape window
- paste into netscape address bar with Ctrl-V
X11:The problem is that X11 doesn't differentiate between marking text and copying text to the clipboard. If you simply paste the URL into the addressbar you will have to delete the old URL later, which is often many keystrokes, and requires some degree of precision (selecting the right text to delete). This is (to me) extremely annoying.
As for the keychords chosen by Windows, they make perfect sense. Most users are right-handed, and uses the right hand to guide the mouse. The left hand remains on the keyboard, where X, C and V conveniently resides. Since I can still use the mouse to switch between windows while I am pressing Ctrl-X or Ctrl-C, no speed is lost, and much convenience is gained. An additional benefit is that this allows for mouse-less operation which is what I prefer anyway.
If you are to lazy to read: No studies confirm that Dvorak keyboards really are conclusively better. On the other hand, too little (quality) research has been done. Most of what has been done is often biased towards Dvorak in the setup, and therefore of little value. An interesting ergonomic study mentioned in the article explains why Dvorak isn't much better despite shorter finger movement and more balanced distribution of keys between hands (reason: qwerty keyboards favours alternating hand-sequences, which is also good for typing speed). The authors of the article believes the assumptions about the market underlying Dvorak propaganda is flawed, and that many keyboard layouts (other than qwerty) (with substantial variations) were given reasonable chances to become the "standard" keyboard.
As for myself, I can only add the obligatory reference to Occams razor. What do you find most likely?
- Dvorak keyboards really are much better, and people using them are much more efficient, but nobody uses them because [insert random reason here]...
- Dvorak was really good at selling his keyboard and ideas, and many people got fascinated by them, but in the end the expectations didn't turn out in practice, so it sort of died out.... Not that it was a bad keyboard, it was just that no noticeable gain was seen from switching.
If Dvorak keyboards really were that much more effective, people would use them.My guess is that people excited about Company X building linux products reply the first time. People who see their failed business model just keeps their mouth shut (either because of lack of interest, or because they are afraid to loose karma). When Company X fails, the situation is reversed. Simple?