Actually, there are times where unexpected behavior is simply a result of the problem-space being addressed. I can't think of any examples at the moment because I'm too tired, but I've known situations where something was done strangely, and it turns out that the data being manipulated must be manipulated strangely.
Sort of an issue of you don't want people who know nothing, you want people who can solve the problem that the software is aimed at manually. Of course, for something like a word processor, that is just about everyone.
Scanning, in and of itself, is not an attack. It is an informational query. I know that I've port scanned machines when I was curious about what OS they are running. Each OS tends to have certain services configured, in addition to its ip fingerprints that only programs can recognize. In short, I find your policy curious. There is nothing illegal about port scanning someone and there is also nothing dangerous.
Granted, port scanning is often a prelude to an attack, but in and of itself it doesn't really constitute much. Also, as people pointed out, if knowledge of your (paranoid) behavior got out, it would be a convenient DOS, especially from public terminals (such as on a university or internet cafe).
Actually, even 2.3.99-pre kernels still incorrectly set the defaults on the mtrr for memory. On bootup, the kernel defaults to setting the mtrrs to write-through which is singificantly slower (by a facot ro something like 5x slower) than setting them to write-back. I still have to use a bootup script to correctly set the mtrrs. I've wondered how many other people have this problem.
Ok, so let's say that you just invested 7 million dollars in a bicycle factory. I now come along and invent the car. Many fewer people want to purchase bicycles. Have I stolen from you?
Let's give another example. You own a small mom-and-pop hardware shop. I, an executive of the company that owns a national hardware store company, come in and set up a five acre hardware store that sells everything at half the cost that you do. Has your shop been devalued because of what I have done? yes. Have I stolen from you? Only metaphorically.
Devaluing someone else's property is not theft, it's just unfortunate. A rock star has the right to sell their records, not the right to have their records bought. If I choose to sell something with a very unstable price that is easily subjected to competition, it is noone else's fault but mine.
You see, the public would probably be pretty well off, at least as far as music goes, without copyright. Enough people with enough talent would put out recordings just for the fame. And plenty of musicians earn money by teaching and doing local performances. There is no inherent right of people to earn money in any way that they please.
Copyright is a legal fiction imposed on society for the good of society. To break that imposition is to break society's will, not to steal from the person who had artificial rights. As many people have pointed out, the proper name for copyright infringement is copyright infringement. Or illegal copying if you prefer.
If you want to use irrelevant value-added terms, why don't you use genocide, or racial bigotry, or torture. Sure, they don't actually describe what's going on, but neither does piracy. Yes, language is a fluid thing, but that doesn't mean that you still can't use words improperly.
If language is so fluid, why don't you call illegally copying copyrighted material deforestation. Go ahead, I dare you to. Let's see how far you get on the theory that language is fluid.
(The fun thing is that if you were to launch a multi-billion dollar advertising campaign, you would probably succeed, but that's just by shear bombardment.)
OO was made simply to representing data as objects. That is, when the best way to solve a problem is to attack it from the perspective of the objects involved, rather than the actions involved. Simple.
Data hiding is simply a matter of public vs. private APIs. You anounce your public API, you don't anounce your private API, and you make the distinction that anyone using the private API gets what they deserve. Glibc does this, for instance. OO has nothing to do with public vs. private APIs. If the people using your code really don't want to pay attention, a simple #define private public will get your language syntax out of the way as easily as actually using functions with __ preceding them will. Again, implementation hiding is simply a matter of making the distinction between public and private, you don't need the language for that. If you really can't trust your programmers enough to follow the rules, make the damn thing a tcp/ip server or a corba service.
As for data encapsulation, which is OO, how does perl's OO not do this? You define classes, then make objects out of them. Each object has encapsulated data. Simple. It works. Very well, in my experience.
You see, I can't stand windows any more. That crufty and annoyingly long cut-and-paste standard that windows uses, for example. And there is no safe operating system which allows any user to shut down. If you really want to run as root (win9x), just log in as root to your Linux box all the time.
NT makes you switch users to log out (or should, maybe it assumes that console users should be able to kill the system since they can always hit the power switch).
And the X thing isn't an ease of use issue. It's vendors not releasing their proprietary specs in most cases. Otherwise it is drivers which simply need to be fixed. I have never had problems with getting X up on supported video cards, it's the 1/2 supported video cards that give problems.
Anyhow, the fact that windows doesn't have a security model (9x) or that it is a half-baked OS (NT) that forces users to be at the console and thus assumes that they are is not a good thing. Eventually those things should go away.
Oh, and the X cut-and-paste model is better than the windows one. I only highlight things for one reason: to copy. Why on earth should I have to hit a key to enable me to copy after I've highlighted? Of course, that just goes to show that we're different people. But please don't take UI preferences as easier/harder. They are just different.
Oh, and have you seen Xconfigurator lately? It makes setting X up pretty damn easy. The list goes on.
Have you not looked into a project like gnome or an installer like redhat's in the last three years? Noone thinks that normal users are hackers. They're being designed for, things just take time. As it is, for me, using windows is torture. I feel like I've had my arms cut off when I have to use it. It's weak, tempermental, badly designed, and when you get down to it, the people who designed it must not believe that its users were going to actually try to get work done. What sort of idiocy is make the windowing buttons dependent on the application? What dolt didn't provide a kill -9 option? When I say that I want a window dead, I want it dead now, not 30 seconds from now.
Yes, unix requires work. At least where hardware support permits, it allows you to do work, too.
So, in conclusion, unix requires work to use. Windows requires much more patience to endure it. Personally, I'd rather work than endure. And there are always the issues of freedom, but that's off topic. At least to the point is that I will generally always take power of enslavement. Maybe you prefer bondage. your choice. You are right that being a slave is easier.
(A) noone is actually taking anything from them. Their artificial rite to profit from the work is being infringed, but deep down, noone really believes in "intellectual property rights" the way that the RIAA/MPAA wants us too. Think about it. If you carry this a bit further, you will have college students signing contracts not to infringe on the IP of their professors by doing differential equations without paying a fee to them. Dummies guides which only license the knowledge inside. It's all plausible to do with law if you really buy into the IP stuff.
(B) These people would have more of a moral leg to stand on if they didn't learn most of what they know from everyone else. If they grew up inside of a plastic box and were never taught english or given musical lessons, they'd have more of a right to call what they do their property. As it is, when they learned the musical theory of thousands of people before them, how to play from their instructors, and the language they sing in from the people around them, they are not in a very good position to take the moral highground and claim that their songs are really theirs in some fundamental way. Let's take a random example: Britney Spears "Baby one more time." The use of the term baby as an endearment isn't hers, it was around a lot longer than that. The phrase, "one more time" is also a normal english gramatical construction far predating her existence, let alone her song. So while there is something original in putting the whole thing together the way that she did, it certainly isn't hers alone. Why should the contributions of everyone else, which does make up the majority of the song if you analyze it, be public domain for her but not the other way around?
IP was created simply to encourage people to innovate, not because anyone thought that it really is the moral way things are. If you think about, the RIAA uses a hell of a lot of stuff that other people came up with, repackages it, and calls it their own. Musicians add something that wasn't their before, but not that much most of the time.
It makes sense to provide a way for people to profit off of their purely intellectual work to encourage them to do so, but to think of this as a given right when they themselves have recieved so much from the public is just ridiculous. If they can prove that they 'created' their work entirely, then IP would make sense. As it is, most people could only really convieve of it as a legal convenience if they thought about it.
(C) Most of the time the music isn't worth it. I know a lot of people who would be more sympathetic to the RIAA if the RIAA wasn't all about fleecing everyone that they can. From what I understand they fleece the artists, and they sure as hell fleece the public. The tape vs. CD issue that many people like to bring up is one example.
Oh, and please don't drag out that tired old argument about "if you don't like it, go somewhere else." That works in a capitalistic system, not the hybrid system we have with regard to IP. I'll operate under strict capitalism if they do too. No IP laws and I'll go elsewhere if I'm not happy with what they're providing. As soon as they get special legal protections, they're out of the realm of go elsehwere if you don't like what they're selling.
So, in conclusion, I don't think that anyone thinks that napster has the moral highground. I think that it's just a matter of everyone realizing that the RIAA doesn't really have it either.
You said it much better than I could. nVidia hasn't contributed anything worth while to the open source community, and I really wish that the copyright holders would play hardball here. I'll donate money to the legal offense fund.
Besides, how exactly does one accidentally borrow code? Did they confuse the linux bttv driver with their in-house bttv driver?
I'm with you. Fuck them to hell and back.
Sometime soon, the kernel people really should say, "As of version x.y.z, no more binary-only kernel modules will be permitted." It's not like linux needs binary-only kernel modules any more.
No, handling it by fulfilling their legal obligations and releasing source is the best way. What they're doing now is absurd. What they're doing now is the direct equivalent of stealing and then promising to give it back and expecting there to be no consequences. If you believe that copyright is worth anything, this whole situation is completely wrong.
Them simply removing the code is not very productive. It at least will mean that they don't violate the GPL (That we know of) any more in the future past not releasing source for their GPL-derrived work. What about the fact that they didn't release source? Does it really work that I can copy office2000 and the only thing that happens if I get caught is that I have to delete it?
You're quite right. Why are they being left off so easily? After all, since the only thing which allowed them to redistribute the GPL'd code was their acceptance of the GPL, we can conclude that by distributing they accepted it. The people with the code should start asking for their source.
What sort of answer is "we copied some code out of a GPL'd program by accident". Give me a break! You have to be genuinely stupid to not know that linux is released under the GPL. And you also have to be genuinely stupid not to know that copyright exists. (both of these statements are made within the context of being a software developer in the US, etc.)
So my question is, what are the best tools to use to decompile code? I think that I'd like to decompile their "public domain" drivers and then post the decompiled source. recomendations?
Oh, and if it turns out that I wasn't right that they're public domain, I'll take them down in a few weeks.
Why use the BSD license unless you're an egomaniac? Why do you need the world to know what you've done. Can't you just be content with yourself without the praise of others?
Make your works public domain. The BSD license would be public domain without that stupid 'Ego clause'. Grow up and stop demanding that people pay attention to you.
You're just restricting people's freedoms by using the BSD license.
Seriously, how do you justify using the BSD license over public domain? Is it really just that your ego needs petting?
Be Inc violated a license to distribute copyrighted material. Bruce made an announcement about this. Where is the smearing? Be broke the law. Bruce is letting them simply fix the problem for the future and get away with distributing currently illegal stuff. Bruce did nothing but state the truth in a public setting.
Furthermore, bruce never advocated not using Be products, nor indicated that Be is evil, nor in any other way impaired Be's future business or reputation. Be was not materially injured in this (people who are going to use BeOS are not going to be extreme GNU types anyhow). Oh, and Be is responsible for the misdeeds of its employees in a commercial capacity, so by the one engineer in Be making this mistake, all of Be did, so this isn't misdirection of blame, either.
Where on earth is all this, you mistreated Be by revealing their mistakes before they could correct them. It would be nice to notify Be beforehand. It's hardly necessary and they don't suffer in any material way from not being notified first.
Besides, this isn't the first GPL violation that Be has done. You'd think that the first one would have sent them a message.
Are pipe bombs and the at least dozen or so other explosives makeable with easily accessible materials really that much safer than guns? Remember that these school killings were premeditated. The kids weren't carrying guns and got pissed off. They got pissed off, then went and got guns. So without guns they'll get pipe bombs. Or poison gas. Or acid. Or kerosene (throw a cup of kerosene in someone's face and hit them with a lighter and see how well they do). Or steal a car and drive it into the kids waiting at the bus stop. Or illegal guns.
Wow. What a tremendously improved situation. Taking away guns misses the point. Especially whe some movies come out about using pipe bombs instead of guns to take out your high school. Then all the uncreative psychopaths will know how to do it without guns. maybe people will be crying to make the ingrediants to pipe bombs illegal.
The world is dangerous. You'll never be able to get rid of weapons.
It's funny, too. I remember when a guy got on a LIRR train and started shooting people. All that the unarmed people on the train could do was get shot until he ran out of bullets. He was definitely and adult. Just think of what he could have done with some pipe bombs or poison gas mixtures. Actually, it's probably a good think that he used a gun rather than opening the door and throwing some pipe bombs in. Just think of how many people would have died then (consider than an LIRR train usually holds around 100 people and only a dozen or so were killed in this maniac's run).
The solution of removing guns is all well and good. How do you propose to do it universally? Disarming just part of the populace doesn't solve anything. Arms races happen for a reason: once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.
The nuclear arms race has made this a more dangerous world. Just think how dangerous it would be if only one country had nukes.
Do you want only the government and criminals to have guns? What does that solve? Yes, fewer accidental shootings. So the kids at columbine would have taken everyone out with pipe bombs (as I recall the ones that they used miraculously didn't go off, so in the future people will know to check out a few bombs before using them). Wow. huge improvement.
You can't disarm a populace. Technology is too good nowadays. So you want a government which has absolute power over its populace and a criminal class hugely better armed than its victims. What exactly does this achieve?
Oh, and the constitution does guarantee the right of people to bear arms. It sites specifically that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. Basically it is obvious to any thinking person that in order for a group of people to be free they must be able to maintain their freedom against those who would take it away from them. Consequently, they must be able to weild an equal amount of violent force to those who would threaten them.
So how do you propose to disarm the law-abiding populace of America and yet allow them to maintain their freedom against those who would take it away from them? I mean over time. Not just today but tomorrow, especially realizing that time changes and noone can forsee the future.
Especially considering that history is replete with instances of a military taking over a government and instituting rule by the head of the military. Why is it that most gun-elimination proponents seem to think that Stalinist Russia, Hitler Germany, Poll Pot Cambodia(?), etc. happened hundreds of years ago? Unjust governments are neither rarities nor are they strictly limited to nations which have always had unjust governments.
Oh, and what about if I die because you drive drunk, tired, with screaming kids in your car who distract you, etc? Should you have a car? I have a strong suspicion that many more people die in car accidents than in gun accidents. If safety is your main concern, don't you have much more important cases to pursue?
You misunderstand me. I care quite a bit about maintenance. have you ever read the linux coding standard? It probably violates quite a bit of what's considered "good" coding practice in python-land.
I "use strict;" in all of my programs. Writing maintainable code and writing "good" code are two different things. Sometimes it makes code more maintainable to violate standard spacing practice (rarely, but I've seen it in most of the code that I've looked at). Sometimes faster code is perfectly maintainable but not asthetically pleasing to a python programmer.
The point isn't about maintainable versus untmaintainable, it's about the python way versus flexibility. For some reason, one particular way of doing things has become codified in pyton-land as the "right" way.
Python doesn't even have a goddam for statement. At least not one that iterates like a C for statement. Instead you have to pull some bullshit about taking pieces of an array. I didn't even bother trying to follow at that point in the tutorial. If you really like python, fine. I'm sure that you'd love cobol, too. That one has a leg up on python as it's supposed to be self-documenting.
Oh, and can python do anything like the -e 'code' functionality of perl, where you can do simple tasks without having to pull up a file editor?
I have my serious doubts about python. The only virtue that I've ever heard extolled by its admirers is that it makes life more doable for the unintelligent. Well, maybe what you need is morons on your staff who have a few programming skills and pretend to be programmers. Maybe you even have a few good ones who prefer python. But please don't make the presumption that because not everyone needs crutches those who don't can't walk properly? I don't need the crutch of whitespace indenting on every line to be able to read a program. It can help so I always put it in my programs, but then again there are places where it hurts more than it helps. So Perl trusts that the people programming in it aren't idiots. Python doesn't. Fine. Just because you have no judgement and can't write readable code without help doesn't mean that other people can't.
To date none of my perl code comes close to being able to win the obfuscated perl contest. Why? Because I'm writing code for people to maintain. It's quite doable, you simply have to want to do it.
If you hire programmers who don't want their code to be readable but think that python is the magic cure, then you deserve what you'll end up with.
Oh, and you know what? Sometimes it's the right thing to do to have some sections of code which need to be blazingly fast and as a result are hard for all but a few really good people to maintain. You can have the slow video drivers, I'll take the ones with inline assembly thank you. The same things goes for everywhere. Sometimes the more important thing is execution time. Remember that there are going to be people who occasionally use your programs (at least there are people who use Perl programs) and their time isn't so tremendously less valuable than yours. So some sections (well contained if done right) will take more time to maintain and require more skill to do so. Big deal. To do things exceptionally well requires exceptional people. This is no different in programming than any other field.
Note, this is only applicable to small and well-contained areas. Inline assembly is only used in certain places in video drivers. In all things, do the task in such a way as to save the most human time. Somtimes that is the programmers time, sometimes the user's time. And always balance this with having programs which work properly.
Thankfully, computers should eventually be fast enough where you don't need competent programmers to write usuable programs, then everyone can use python.
Btw, can python do multi-threading? Once you start to get that complex, you'll need intelligent programmers anyhow, so the whole having to learn the syntax argument will be lost. And so will, in most cases, the argument about readability. When you hire good people one of the things that you should hire them for is their ability to write readable programs. Note: that's readable by other competant and skilled people, not readable by morons.
Though maybe you're one of those companies who's trying to hire a lot of morons rather than a few skilled people. In that case by all means use python. You'll need all the help you can get to get your people to write mediocre programs.
If you ever switch to a company where skilled people are hired and they take pride in what they do, then use whatever language you want. Programmers who write readable code write readable programs. It really is as simple as that.
Yes, there was no python advocacy in this thread, though that's probably because the thread is so new. Prettymuch every thread I've seen on slashdot in the last six months having to do with perl, even just by offhandedly mentioning it, has gotten a whole collection of python advocates flaming perl and getting marked as insightful for some reason.
And no, I'm not expressing any insecurity. I started learning perl about two and a half years ago. I haven't really done much with it until a few months ago. Everything that I've had to learn has been very easy to learn, I've just learned it as I need it.
If anyone has to be insecure about a language, it's you python people. The best attribute of python in its advocates eyes at least is that you don't have to actually be intelligent to learn the syntax. Big deal. Wow. So you have to learn Perl's syntax. Is learning really that painful for you?
It's also quite amusing that python advocates often talk about Perl's OO parts being bolted on. I know that they're quite easy and not pervasive, if that's what's meant. Thank God. OO has many legitimate places, it's also not the best way to do everything. Python doesn't even have a simple C-like for statement. Python goes back to the good old days of fortran-77 when whitespace was significant. Even fortran got rid of that stupid shackle.
Oh, I'm nearly done with a graphical checkbook register written in perl, it was quite easy to do. I'm working on a web-based email program that's also pretty easy in the programming side (it's just a big project). I've got a web index-generating program written in Perl, and a message-board written in Perl. Perl is quite nice for small jobs and large ones. As the motto goes: make the easy stuff easy and the hard stuff doable.
Just out of curiosity, does python force you to handle all exceptions the way that Java does?
I have no desire to maintain code from any language where doing things "right" is more important than getting things done or writing efficient code. So I won't maintain your python code and you won't maintain my perl code. Sounds good to me.
Can we please not have every python advocate on slashdot jump out and shout about how hard a time they have reading perl code? I'm sure python is a great language, though I have no interest in using any language which uses whitespace instead of braces. The only thing all this python advocacy achieves is making the python crowd look quite unhospitable. The perl community is a really nice one to be a part of, and if you notice you'll find very few perl folks flaming the python folks, it only goes the other way around. Can the python flamers for once just let people use the perfectly open, standard tools that they want.
I've never had any significant trouble reading perl code in various modules that I've used. I have had trouble reading reading python examples that people have posted. What does this prove? I've used to perl and not python. Python isn't magic, and it doesn't suit some people. Can we just let that be?
Anyhow, on to the question at hand. I've heard that perl 5.6 is mostly a bugfix release. What bugs are there to fix? I've never run accross any myself, and I use perl quite a bit. Does anyone here have any examples of the sorts of bugs being fixed? I'm quite curious what they are.
Well, you're close, except it would be the serpent to break the silence. And he would get much more insulting, while the pearled monk would be much nicer. At least this is the trent I've noticed on slashdot.
Perl people, believing that there's more than one way to do things and being adaptable creatures don't mind that python people use python at all. Python people, being something which forces them to try to convince the world that python is the way the truth and the light, do so.
I don't know why this is so. I don't know why the python people seem to insist that because perl is a big langauge it's bad. I don't know why they think that having to learn perl to use it makes it a bad language.
Perhaps python is a great language for beginners because it really forces them to do things that they should have learned anyhow. Maybe it's a great language because it doesn't differ from most other languages very much (this is usually called easy to learn). Maybe it's great because it's extremely inflexible because God talked directly to guido van rossam (sp?) and guido just wrote down the lines. I don't really know.
I do know that I think that a very heavily OO approach to problems is putting the theory before the practice and being way too anal. I like perl's modules because they give you the flexibility of OO with the reduction in typing of OO without giving you the increase in typing of B&D OO.
Besides, I can write a filter and then write very sloppy python code. If you need clean code, use strict and execute with -w. If you are stuck maintaining the code of someone who is sloppy and determinted to be so, your in trouble. Maybe python encourages writing clean code. So does perl -Mstrict -w when you get down to it. Probably more so. With the right packages installed perl will even check for Y2k bugs (a moot point nowadays).
The closest theory that I can come up with is that there are probably a few really intelligent python programmers, and these people aren't zealots. There are hords of mediocre python programmers, and these people are zealots because they lack the ability to learn many languages, especially if some of those languages aren't minimalistic languages.
As larry wall has said, there's more than one way to do it. Perl can be used to optimize for many different things. One of them is readability. There are readability flags in regular expressions, for crying out loud. Does python have/x (admittedly, not that I've ever used it, if you know regular expressions they're generally clear enough)? So if you want readable code, write it. Yes, this takes a bit of discipline. Big deal. Force all your programmers to use strict. Have them run with -w every friday for good measure.
Do it how you want. I really just wish that the python fanatics would stop prattling that people need to be in chains before they'll be moral. In the end, that's why I'll never use python - any language whose main claim is to be nearly as good as perl but without any flexibility just isn't worth the time. I can go learn Alpha in binary if I really want minimum flexibility for maximum readability. Just think, only around 100 instructions to memorize and then I know the entire language! Just a few hours and I can read anyone's code and know instantly what it does!
The problem with the one true way is that generally everyone else does it the wrong way. And this is not insignificant.
What happens when you are forced to do something the way you don't want to? You are less likely to do it. I am more reluctant to code parts of programs when I don't like how I have to code them. As a result, I have to force myself to do them and to do them properly.
What's the result? Sometimes they don't get done properly. When I was doing java just about every catch block had nothing in it, because it was such a damn pain to do. The result: my code didn't handle error conditions properly - the very result of what what supposed to handle error conditions.
There isn't one true way to do things. When you get down to it, scripting languages themselves are the wrong way to do things. Sure, they save one programmer some hours, but they cost millions of people CPU time. The right way to code is in C, where you are intimiately aware of execution time. Or maybe it isn't. It's great that the python crowd agrees on what the one true way is. I don't agree with them.
There was a language back when that used whitespace to enforce coding - it was called FORTRAN. That language really, really sucks. I've had to work in it. It sucks. Badly. Well, to me. I've heard that there are people who will program in nothing but fortran. Each to his own. But to me, fortran programs were no easier to read. COBOL is supposed to be a nightmare, and it uses whitespace to make things look better.
The point? That not everyone believes that the same way is the right way. Your method may optimize for one thing that I don't think is worth optimizing for. Mine may optimize for something that you don't think worth optimizing for. Other people code out certain functions in assembly just to get some extra speed from their CPUs, and they're optimizing differently from both of us. Which is right? I don't really know. If I had to program in a language which enforced whitespace, I'd probably rip apart the interpreter and rewrite it to use {} the way that most normal programming languages do. There are places where whitespace makes life harder to read. Like a function with lots of arguments, for example. Or an assignment with lots of text. It's a lot better to make exceptions for them in indenting style because they make things more readable.
In the end, any time anyone claims that they know what the one true way is with only negligible amounts of doubt, I start to wonder. You have plenty of very infamous company and just a tiny bit of famous company. And the famous ones all had or claimed to have divine inspiration. Are you going to claim that python was dictaed to guido directly from God or some angel?
What's the problem? Yes, you have to learn that. You have to learn to click on the windows thingy, too (believe me, you do. I've had to explain it to people).
It's very simple, easy, clean, and fast. I've had one problem so far, and that was another sysadmin messing with things on me. I've never had a problem on my own system.
Oh, and for extra benefit, debian installs tend not to kill your other programs, which windows installs are famous for. From what I understand they're getting better, but getting programs to work together is just as important as getting any individual one to work. If one program kills the rest, guess which program goes?
Well, considering that what you wrote was a flame, it deserved to be moderated as such. However, since it apparently was marked higher than it deserved (probably in part do to the fact that you announced that it would be moderated down), it needs responding to.
Please produce these developers who say that linux should be hard to use. Name one. If you can do that (I can't), then name 10. I'd be really impressed if you can find someone who wrote a program that more than 1000 people are using who believes that software should be hard to use.
I can find you the Gtk people, and the gnome people, and the KDE people, and the tk people who think otherwise. The enlightenment people do.
About the only fact close to what you're talking about is that the documentation was slower in coming than the tools and the power tools sooner in coming than the newbie tools. This isn't from ideology, it's just the nature of things.
People who make tools that they use will generally always make the tools for power users first, then the simpler tools. These are encessarily exclusive. Tools for power users are streamlined and require that you know how to use them. Thus the help is off on the side, not in front. Short but unintuitive commands are more efficient than longer but intuitive ones, so one or the other must be used (though not always there, check out the GNU standard of long options).
What distribution of linux are you using, anyhow? Slackware 1.x? If you check out a modern distribution of linux, especially one of the redhat based ones, they tend to be very user friendly. True, they're easier the closer you get to common hardware and harder the further away from that that you get, but that's always the case.
Anyhow, the linux world is moving over to being easier. It takes time. I'm currently writing a graphical checkbook register with graphical configuration and online help. I'll be releasing it within a few days. other people are doing similar things. Like everything in life it's just taking time.
If you can't help, please don't complain. Encourage. Give people a reason to care. I want people to use my software. Others want people to user their software too. Give us a reason to think that you're going to and that you'll be polite about it, and we'll be more motivated to write it in a way that you'd like. The world works quite well if you cooperate. Give it a try. You'll be a welcome part of the community if you do.
I'm fairly sure that you're perfectly free to take your patches to a GPL'd app and compile them and then sell that as proprietary software under a conventional copyright-protected scheme.
What it doesn't allow you to do is to compile the other people's work and include it with your own as proprietary.
Big difference. The mere fact that your patches won't do anything useful on their own is irrelevant (as is the fact that they probably won't even compile). You can do what you want with your own work. You just can't do what you want with other people's work.
The free in Free Software refers to everyone's freedom, not just yours. The idea is to promote the most freedom among the most number of people. And it's just a license. You can always break it as you want, just as you can break the law for other crim. Simialar idea, too. You're not chained up before you do anything to prevent you from comitting murder, you're just chained up afterwards. You have freedom until you abuse it to do things that are anti-social.
Your subsequent lack of freedom would be regretable and sub-optimal, but less so than the effects of your unchecked actions. We're still on the earth-bound side of heaven, so we do have to recognize that fact. It doesn't do us any good to pretend that everyone's perfect. People will abuse public domain software. They always have the freedom to do so until we chop their fingers off, we just won't let them get away with it.
It's just a matter of the lesser of two evils, really. In the eyes of a lot of people, whether or not software is free is more important than whether or not you can make unimpeded moral decisions about it. And the reason why isn't about you, but about the hundreds and thousands of people who will have to deal with the consequences of your actions. RMS would prefer that the public not be allowed to be hurt unimpeded.
Maybe it's a bit utilitarian, but you have to be utilitarian at some points, especially when you don't want to have a theocracy. The only other alternative is anarchy, and that's not very attractive.
You put that very well. Thank you. Oh, and I second the motion: thank you RMS. And everyone else who gave their source away and made this a better world.
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Actually, there are times where unexpected behavior is simply a result of the problem-space being addressed. I can't think of any examples at the moment because I'm too tired, but I've known situations where something was done strangely, and it turns out that the data being manipulated must be manipulated strangely.
Sort of an issue of you don't want people who know nothing, you want people who can solve the problem that the software is aimed at manually. Of course, for something like a word processor, that is just about everyone.
Scanning, in and of itself, is not an attack. It is an informational query. I know that I've port scanned machines when I was curious about what OS they are running. Each OS tends to have certain services configured, in addition to its ip fingerprints that only programs can recognize. In short, I find your policy curious. There is nothing illegal about port scanning someone and there is also nothing dangerous.
Granted, port scanning is often a prelude to an attack, but in and of itself it doesn't really constitute much. Also, as people pointed out, if knowledge of your (paranoid) behavior got out, it would be a convenient DOS, especially from public terminals (such as on a university or internet cafe).
Actually, even 2.3.99-pre kernels still incorrectly set the defaults on the mtrr for memory. On bootup, the kernel defaults to setting the mtrrs to write-through which is singificantly slower (by a facot ro something like 5x slower) than setting them to write-back. I still have to use a bootup script to correctly set the mtrrs. I've wondered how many other people have this problem.
I'm using an Asus K7M w/ a 600 MHz Athlon.
Ok, so let's say that you just invested 7 million dollars in a bicycle factory. I now come along and invent the car. Many fewer people want to purchase bicycles. Have I stolen from you?
Let's give another example. You own a small mom-and-pop hardware shop. I, an executive of the company that owns a national hardware store company, come in and set up a five acre hardware store that sells everything at half the cost that you do. Has your shop been devalued because of what I have done? yes. Have I stolen from you? Only metaphorically.
Devaluing someone else's property is not theft, it's just unfortunate. A rock star has the right to sell their records, not the right to have their records bought. If I choose to sell something with a very unstable price that is easily subjected to competition, it is noone else's fault but mine.
You see, the public would probably be pretty well off, at least as far as music goes, without copyright. Enough people with enough talent would put out recordings just for the fame. And plenty of musicians earn money by teaching and doing local performances. There is no inherent right of people to earn money in any way that they please.
Copyright is a legal fiction imposed on society for the good of society. To break that imposition is to break society's will, not to steal from the person who had artificial rights. As many people have pointed out, the proper name for copyright infringement is copyright infringement. Or illegal copying if you prefer.
If you want to use irrelevant value-added terms, why don't you use genocide, or racial bigotry, or torture. Sure, they don't actually describe what's going on, but neither does piracy. Yes, language is a fluid thing, but that doesn't mean that you still can't use words improperly.
If language is so fluid, why don't you call illegally copying copyrighted material deforestation. Go ahead, I dare you to. Let's see how far you get on the theory that language is fluid.
(The fun thing is that if you were to launch a multi-billion dollar advertising campaign, you would probably succeed, but that's just by shear bombardment.)
Hi,
OO was made simply to representing data as objects. That is, when the best way to solve a problem is to attack it from the perspective of the objects involved, rather than the actions involved. Simple.
Data hiding is simply a matter of public vs. private APIs. You anounce your public API, you don't anounce your private API, and you make the distinction that anyone using the private API gets what they deserve. Glibc does this, for instance. OO has nothing to do with public vs. private APIs. If the people using your code really don't want to pay attention, a simple #define private public will get your language syntax out of the way as easily as actually using functions with __ preceding them will. Again, implementation hiding is simply a matter of making the distinction between public and private, you don't need the language for that. If you really can't trust your programmers enough to follow the rules, make the damn thing a tcp/ip server or a corba service.
As for data encapsulation, which is OO, how does perl's OO not do this? You define classes, then make objects out of them. Each object has encapsulated data. Simple. It works. Very well, in my experience.
You see, I can't stand windows any more. That crufty and annoyingly long cut-and-paste standard that windows uses, for example. And there is no safe operating system which allows any user to shut down. If you really want to run as root (win9x), just log in as root to your Linux box all the time.
NT makes you switch users to log out (or should, maybe it assumes that console users should be able to kill the system since they can always hit the power switch).
And the X thing isn't an ease of use issue. It's vendors not releasing their proprietary specs in most cases. Otherwise it is drivers which simply need to be fixed. I have never had problems with getting X up on supported video cards, it's the 1/2 supported video cards that give problems.
Anyhow, the fact that windows doesn't have a security model (9x) or that it is a half-baked OS (NT) that forces users to be at the console and thus assumes that they are is not a good thing. Eventually those things should go away.
Oh, and the X cut-and-paste model is better than the windows one. I only highlight things for one reason: to copy. Why on earth should I have to hit a key to enable me to copy after I've highlighted? Of course, that just goes to show that we're different people. But please don't take UI preferences as easier/harder. They are just different.
Oh, and have you seen Xconfigurator lately? It makes setting X up pretty damn easy. The list goes on.
Have you not looked into a project like gnome or an installer like redhat's in the last three years? Noone thinks that normal users are hackers. They're being designed for, things just take time. As it is, for me, using windows is torture. I feel like I've had my arms cut off when I have to use it. It's weak, tempermental, badly designed, and when you get down to it, the people who designed it must not believe that its users were going to actually try to get work done. What sort of idiocy is make the windowing buttons dependent on the application? What dolt didn't provide a kill -9 option? When I say that I want a window dead, I want it dead now, not 30 seconds from now.
Yes, unix requires work. At least where hardware support permits, it allows you to do work, too.
So, in conclusion, unix requires work to use. Windows requires much more patience to endure it. Personally, I'd rather work than endure. And there are always the issues of freedom, but that's off topic. At least to the point is that I will generally always take power of enslavement. Maybe you prefer bondage. your choice. You are right that being a slave is easier.
I think that the reason that noone cares is that:
(A) noone is actually taking anything from them. Their artificial rite to profit from the work is being infringed, but deep down, noone really believes in "intellectual property rights" the way that the RIAA/MPAA wants us too. Think about it. If you carry this a bit further, you will have college students signing contracts not to infringe on the IP of their professors by doing differential equations without paying a fee to them. Dummies guides which only license the knowledge inside. It's all plausible to do with law if you really buy into the IP stuff.
(B) These people would have more of a moral leg to stand on if they didn't learn most of what they know from everyone else. If they grew up inside of a plastic box and were never taught english or given musical lessons, they'd have more of a right to call what they do their property. As it is, when they learned the musical theory of thousands of people before them, how to play from their instructors, and the language they sing in from the people around them, they are not in a very good position to take the moral highground and claim that their songs are really theirs in some fundamental way. Let's take a random example: Britney Spears "Baby one more time." The use of the term baby as an endearment isn't hers, it was around a lot longer than that. The phrase, "one more time" is also a normal english gramatical construction far predating her existence, let alone her song. So while there is something original in putting the whole thing together the way that she did, it certainly isn't hers alone. Why should the contributions of everyone else, which does make up the majority of the song if you analyze it, be public domain for her but not the other way around?
IP was created simply to encourage people to innovate, not because anyone thought that it really is the moral way things are. If you think about, the RIAA uses a hell of a lot of stuff that other people came up with, repackages it, and calls it their own. Musicians add something that wasn't their before, but not that much most of the time.
It makes sense to provide a way for people to profit off of their purely intellectual work to encourage them to do so, but to think of this as a given right when they themselves have recieved so much from the public is just ridiculous. If they can prove that they 'created' their work entirely, then IP would make sense. As it is, most people could only really convieve of it as a legal convenience if they thought about it.
(C) Most of the time the music isn't worth it. I know a lot of people who would be more sympathetic to the RIAA if the RIAA wasn't all about fleecing everyone that they can. From what I understand they fleece the artists, and they sure as hell fleece the public. The tape vs. CD issue that many people like to bring up is one example.
Oh, and please don't drag out that tired old argument about "if you don't like it, go somewhere else." That works in a capitalistic system, not the hybrid system we have with regard to IP. I'll operate under strict capitalism if they do too. No IP laws and I'll go elsewhere if I'm not happy with what they're providing. As soon as they get special legal protections, they're out of the realm of go elsehwere if you don't like what they're selling.
So, in conclusion, I don't think that anyone thinks that napster has the moral highground. I think that it's just a matter of everyone realizing that the RIAA doesn't really have it either.
You said it much better than I could. nVidia hasn't contributed anything worth while to the open source community, and I really wish that the copyright holders would play hardball here. I'll donate money to the legal offense fund.
Besides, how exactly does one accidentally borrow code? Did they confuse the linux bttv driver with their in-house bttv driver?
I'm with you. Fuck them to hell and back.
Sometime soon, the kernel people really should say, "As of version x.y.z, no more binary-only kernel modules will be permitted." It's not like linux needs binary-only kernel modules any more.
No, handling it by fulfilling their legal obligations and releasing source is the best way. What they're doing now is absurd. What they're doing now is the direct equivalent of stealing and then promising to give it back and expecting there to be no consequences. If you believe that copyright is worth anything, this whole situation is completely wrong.
Them simply removing the code is not very productive. It at least will mean that they don't violate the GPL (That we know of) any more in the future past not releasing source for their GPL-derrived work. What about the fact that they didn't release source? Does it really work that I can copy office2000 and the only thing that happens if I get caught is that I have to delete it?
You're quite right. Why are they being left off so easily? After all, since the only thing which allowed them to redistribute the GPL'd code was their acceptance of the GPL, we can conclude that by distributing they accepted it. The people with the code should start asking for their source.
What sort of answer is "we copied some code out of a GPL'd program by accident". Give me a break! You have to be genuinely stupid to not know that linux is released under the GPL. And you also have to be genuinely stupid not to know that copyright exists. (both of these statements are made within the context of being a software developer in the US, etc.)
So my question is, what are the best tools to use to decompile code? I think that I'd like to decompile their "public domain" drivers and then post the decompiled source. recomendations?
Oh, and if it turns out that I wasn't right that they're public domain, I'll take them down in a few weeks.
Why use the BSD license unless you're an egomaniac? Why do you need the world to know what you've done. Can't you just be content with yourself without the praise of others?
Make your works public domain. The BSD license would be public domain without that stupid 'Ego clause'. Grow up and stop demanding that people pay attention to you.
You're just restricting people's freedoms by using the BSD license.
Seriously, how do you justify using the BSD license over public domain? Is it really just that your ego needs petting?
Be Inc violated a license to distribute copyrighted material. Bruce made an announcement about this. Where is the smearing? Be broke the law. Bruce is letting them simply fix the problem for the future and get away with distributing currently illegal stuff. Bruce did nothing but state the truth in a public setting.
Furthermore, bruce never advocated not using Be products, nor indicated that Be is evil, nor in any other way impaired Be's future business or reputation. Be was not materially injured in this (people who are going to use BeOS are not going to be extreme GNU types anyhow). Oh, and Be is responsible for the misdeeds of its employees in a commercial capacity, so by the one engineer in Be making this mistake, all of Be did, so this isn't misdirection of blame, either.
Where on earth is all this, you mistreated Be by revealing their mistakes before they could correct them. It would be nice to notify Be beforehand. It's hardly necessary and they don't suffer in any material way from not being notified first.
Besides, this isn't the first GPL violation that Be has done. You'd think that the first one would have sent them a message.
Are pipe bombs and the at least dozen or so other explosives makeable with easily accessible materials really that much safer than guns? Remember that these school killings were premeditated. The kids weren't carrying guns and got pissed off. They got pissed off, then went and got guns. So without guns they'll get pipe bombs. Or poison gas. Or acid. Or kerosene (throw a cup of kerosene in someone's face and hit them with a lighter and see how well they do). Or steal a car and drive it into the kids waiting at the bus stop. Or illegal guns.
Wow. What a tremendously improved situation. Taking away guns misses the point. Especially whe some movies come out about using pipe bombs instead of guns to take out your high school. Then all the uncreative psychopaths will know how to do it without guns. maybe people will be crying to make the ingrediants to pipe bombs illegal.
The world is dangerous. You'll never be able to get rid of weapons.
It's funny, too. I remember when a guy got on a LIRR train and started shooting people. All that the unarmed people on the train could do was get shot until he ran out of bullets. He was definitely and adult. Just think of what he could have done with some pipe bombs or poison gas mixtures. Actually, it's probably a good think that he used a gun rather than opening the door and throwing some pipe bombs in. Just think of how many people would have died then (consider than an LIRR train usually holds around 100 people and only a dozen or so were killed in this maniac's run).
The solution of removing guns is all well and good. How do you propose to do it universally? Disarming just part of the populace doesn't solve anything. Arms races happen for a reason: once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.
The nuclear arms race has made this a more dangerous world. Just think how dangerous it would be if only one country had nukes.
Do you want only the government and criminals to have guns? What does that solve? Yes, fewer accidental shootings. So the kids at columbine would have taken everyone out with pipe bombs (as I recall the ones that they used miraculously didn't go off, so in the future people will know to check out a few bombs before using them). Wow. huge improvement.
You can't disarm a populace. Technology is too good nowadays. So you want a government which has absolute power over its populace and a criminal class hugely better armed than its victims. What exactly does this achieve?
Oh, and the constitution does guarantee the right of people to bear arms. It sites specifically that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. Basically it is obvious to any thinking person that in order for a group of people to be free they must be able to maintain their freedom against those who would take it away from them. Consequently, they must be able to weild an equal amount of violent force to those who would threaten them.
So how do you propose to disarm the law-abiding populace of America and yet allow them to maintain their freedom against those who would take it away from them? I mean over time. Not just today but tomorrow, especially realizing that time changes and noone can forsee the future.
Especially considering that history is replete with instances of a military taking over a government and instituting rule by the head of the military. Why is it that most gun-elimination proponents seem to think that Stalinist Russia, Hitler Germany, Poll Pot Cambodia(?), etc. happened hundreds of years ago? Unjust governments are neither rarities nor are they strictly limited to nations which have always had unjust governments.
Oh, and what about if I die because you drive drunk, tired, with screaming kids in your car who distract you, etc? Should you have a car? I have a strong suspicion that many more people die in car accidents than in gun accidents. If safety is your main concern, don't you have much more important cases to pursue?
You misunderstand me. I care quite a bit about maintenance. have you ever read the linux coding standard? It probably violates quite a bit of what's considered "good" coding practice in python-land.
I "use strict;" in all of my programs. Writing maintainable code and writing "good" code are two different things. Sometimes it makes code more maintainable to violate standard spacing practice (rarely, but I've seen it in most of the code that I've looked at). Sometimes faster code is perfectly maintainable but not asthetically pleasing to a python programmer.
The point isn't about maintainable versus untmaintainable, it's about the python way versus flexibility. For some reason, one particular way of doing things has become codified in pyton-land as the "right" way.
Python doesn't even have a goddam for statement. At least not one that iterates like a C for statement. Instead you have to pull some bullshit about taking pieces of an array. I didn't even bother trying to follow at that point in the tutorial. If you really like python, fine. I'm sure that you'd love cobol, too. That one has a leg up on python as it's supposed to be self-documenting.
Oh, and can python do anything like the -e 'code' functionality of perl, where you can do simple tasks without having to pull up a file editor?
I have my serious doubts about python. The only virtue that I've ever heard extolled by its admirers is that it makes life more doable for the unintelligent. Well, maybe what you need is morons on your staff who have a few programming skills and pretend to be programmers. Maybe you even have a few good ones who prefer python. But please don't make the presumption that because not everyone needs crutches those who don't can't walk properly? I don't need the crutch of whitespace indenting on every line to be able to read a program. It can help so I always put it in my programs, but then again there are places where it hurts more than it helps. So Perl trusts that the people programming in it aren't idiots. Python doesn't. Fine. Just because you have no judgement and can't write readable code without help doesn't mean that other people can't.
To date none of my perl code comes close to being able to win the obfuscated perl contest. Why? Because I'm writing code for people to maintain. It's quite doable, you simply have to want to do it.
If you hire programmers who don't want their code to be readable but think that python is the magic cure, then you deserve what you'll end up with.
Oh, and you know what? Sometimes it's the right thing to do to have some sections of code which need to be blazingly fast and as a result are hard for all but a few really good people to maintain. You can have the slow video drivers, I'll take the ones with inline assembly thank you. The same things goes for everywhere. Sometimes the more important thing is execution time. Remember that there are going to be people who occasionally use your programs (at least there are people who use Perl programs) and their time isn't so tremendously less valuable than yours. So some sections (well contained if done right) will take more time to maintain and require more skill to do so. Big deal. To do things exceptionally well requires exceptional people. This is no different in programming than any other field.
Note, this is only applicable to small and well-contained areas. Inline assembly is only used in certain places in video drivers. In all things, do the task in such a way as to save the most human time. Somtimes that is the programmers time, sometimes the user's time. And always balance this with having programs which work properly.
Thankfully, computers should eventually be fast enough where you don't need competent programmers to write usuable programs, then everyone can use python.
Btw, can python do multi-threading? Once you start to get that complex, you'll need intelligent programmers anyhow, so the whole having to learn the syntax argument will be lost. And so will, in most cases, the argument about readability. When you hire good people one of the things that you should hire them for is their ability to write readable programs. Note: that's readable by other competant and skilled people, not readable by morons.
Though maybe you're one of those companies who's trying to hire a lot of morons rather than a few skilled people. In that case by all means use python. You'll need all the help you can get to get your people to write mediocre programs.
If you ever switch to a company where skilled people are hired and they take pride in what they do, then use whatever language you want. Programmers who write readable code write readable programs. It really is as simple as that.
Yes, there was no python advocacy in this thread, though that's probably because the thread is so new. Prettymuch every thread I've seen on slashdot in the last six months having to do with perl, even just by offhandedly mentioning it, has gotten a whole collection of python advocates flaming perl and getting marked as insightful for some reason.
And no, I'm not expressing any insecurity. I started learning perl about two and a half years ago. I haven't really done much with it until a few months ago. Everything that I've had to learn has been very easy to learn, I've just learned it as I need it.
If anyone has to be insecure about a language, it's you python people. The best attribute of python in its advocates eyes at least is that you don't have to actually be intelligent to learn the syntax. Big deal. Wow. So you have to learn Perl's syntax. Is learning really that painful for you?
It's also quite amusing that python advocates often talk about Perl's OO parts being bolted on. I know that they're quite easy and not pervasive, if that's what's meant. Thank God. OO has many legitimate places, it's also not the best way to do everything. Python doesn't even have a simple C-like for statement. Python goes back to the good old days of fortran-77 when whitespace was significant. Even fortran got rid of that stupid shackle.
Oh, I'm nearly done with a graphical checkbook register written in perl, it was quite easy to do. I'm working on a web-based email program that's also pretty easy in the programming side (it's just a big project). I've got a web index-generating program written in Perl, and a message-board written in Perl. Perl is quite nice for small jobs and large ones. As the motto goes: make the easy stuff easy and the hard stuff doable.
Just out of curiosity, does python force you to handle all exceptions the way that Java does?
I have no desire to maintain code from any language where doing things "right" is more important than getting things done or writing efficient code. So I won't maintain your python code and you won't maintain my perl code. Sounds good to me.
Can we please not have every python advocate on slashdot jump out and shout about how hard a time they have reading perl code? I'm sure python is a great language, though I have no interest in using any language which uses whitespace instead of braces. The only thing all this python advocacy achieves is making the python crowd look quite unhospitable. The perl community is a really nice one to be a part of, and if you notice you'll find very few perl folks flaming the python folks, it only goes the other way around. Can the python flamers for once just let people use the perfectly open, standard tools that they want.
I've never had any significant trouble reading perl code in various modules that I've used. I have had trouble reading reading python examples that people have posted. What does this prove? I've used to perl and not python. Python isn't magic, and it doesn't suit some people. Can we just let that be?
Anyhow, on to the question at hand. I've heard that perl 5.6 is mostly a bugfix release. What bugs are there to fix? I've never run accross any myself, and I use perl quite a bit. Does anyone here have any examples of the sorts of bugs being fixed? I'm quite curious what they are.
Well, you're close, except it would be the serpent to break the silence. And he would get much more insulting, while the pearled monk would be much nicer. At least this is the trent I've noticed on slashdot.
/x (admittedly, not that I've ever used it, if you know regular expressions they're generally clear enough)? So if you want readable code, write it. Yes, this takes a bit of discipline. Big deal. Force all your programmers to use strict. Have them run with -w every friday for good measure.
Perl people, believing that there's more than one way to do things and being adaptable creatures don't mind that python people use python at all. Python people, being something which forces them to try to convince the world that python is the way the truth and the light, do so.
I don't know why this is so. I don't know why the python people seem to insist that because perl is a big langauge it's bad. I don't know why they think that having to learn perl to use it makes it a bad language.
Perhaps python is a great language for beginners because it really forces them to do things that they should have learned anyhow. Maybe it's a great language because it doesn't differ from most other languages very much (this is usually called easy to learn). Maybe it's great because it's extremely inflexible because God talked directly to guido van rossam (sp?) and guido just wrote down the lines. I don't really know.
I do know that I think that a very heavily OO approach to problems is putting the theory before the practice and being way too anal. I like perl's modules because they give you the flexibility of OO with the reduction in typing of OO without giving you the increase in typing of B&D OO.
Besides, I can write a filter and then write very sloppy python code. If you need clean code, use strict and execute with -w. If you are stuck maintaining the code of someone who is sloppy and determinted to be so, your in trouble. Maybe python encourages writing clean code. So does perl -Mstrict -w when you get down to it. Probably more so. With the right packages installed perl will even check for Y2k bugs (a moot point nowadays).
The closest theory that I can come up with is that there are probably a few really intelligent python programmers, and these people aren't zealots. There are hords of mediocre python programmers, and these people are zealots because they lack the ability to learn many languages, especially if some of those languages aren't minimalistic languages.
As larry wall has said, there's more than one way to do it. Perl can be used to optimize for many different things. One of them is readability. There are readability flags in regular expressions, for crying out loud. Does python have
Do it how you want. I really just wish that the python fanatics would stop prattling that people need to be in chains before they'll be moral. In the end, that's why I'll never use python - any language whose main claim is to be nearly as good as perl but without any flexibility just isn't worth the time. I can go learn Alpha in binary if I really want minimum flexibility for maximum readability. Just think, only around 100 instructions to memorize and then I know the entire language! Just a few hours and I can read anyone's code and know instantly what it does!
The problem with the one true way is that generally everyone else does it the wrong way. And this is not insignificant.
What happens when you are forced to do something the way you don't want to? You are less likely to do it. I am more reluctant to code parts of programs when I don't like how I have to code them. As a result, I have to force myself to do them and to do them properly.
What's the result? Sometimes they don't get done properly. When I was doing java just about every catch block had nothing in it, because it was such a damn pain to do. The result: my code didn't handle error conditions properly - the very result of what what supposed to handle error conditions.
There isn't one true way to do things. When you get down to it, scripting languages themselves are the wrong way to do things. Sure, they save one programmer some hours, but they cost millions of people CPU time. The right way to code is in C, where you are intimiately aware of execution time. Or maybe it isn't. It's great that the python crowd agrees on what the one true way is. I don't agree with them.
There was a language back when that used whitespace to enforce coding - it was called FORTRAN. That language really, really sucks. I've had to work in it. It sucks. Badly. Well, to me. I've heard that there are people who will program in nothing but fortran. Each to his own. But to me, fortran programs were no easier to read. COBOL is supposed to be a nightmare, and it uses whitespace to make things look better.
The point? That not everyone believes that the same way is the right way. Your method may optimize for one thing that I don't think is worth optimizing for. Mine may optimize for something that you don't think worth optimizing for. Other people code out certain functions in assembly just to get some extra speed from their CPUs, and they're optimizing differently from both of us. Which is right? I don't really know. If I had to program in a language which enforced whitespace, I'd probably rip apart the interpreter and rewrite it to use {} the way that most normal programming languages do. There are places where whitespace makes life harder to read. Like a function with lots of arguments, for example. Or an assignment with lots of text. It's a lot better to make exceptions for them in indenting style because they make things more readable.
In the end, any time anyone claims that they know what the one true way is with only negligible amounts of doubt, I start to wonder. You have plenty of very infamous company and just a tiny bit of famous company. And the famous ones all had or claimed to have divine inspiration. Are you going to claim that python was dictaed to guido directly from God or some angel?
apt-cache search package
apt-get install actual_package_name
What's the problem? Yes, you have to learn that. You have to learn to click on the windows thingy, too (believe me, you do. I've had to explain it to people).
It's very simple, easy, clean, and fast. I've had one problem so far, and that was another sysadmin messing with things on me. I've never had a problem on my own system.
Oh, and for extra benefit, debian installs tend not to kill your other programs, which windows installs are famous for. From what I understand they're getting better, but getting programs to work together is just as important as getting any individual one to work. If one program kills the rest, guess which program goes?
Well, considering that what you wrote was a flame, it deserved to be moderated as such. However, since it apparently was marked higher than it deserved (probably in part do to the fact that you announced that it would be moderated down), it needs responding to.
Please produce these developers who say that linux should be hard to use. Name one. If you can do that (I can't), then name 10. I'd be really impressed if you can find someone who wrote a program that more than 1000 people are using who believes that software should be hard to use.
I can find you the Gtk people, and the gnome people, and the KDE people, and the tk people who think otherwise. The enlightenment people do.
About the only fact close to what you're talking about is that the documentation was slower in coming than the tools and the power tools sooner in coming than the newbie tools. This isn't from ideology, it's just the nature of things.
People who make tools that they use will generally always make the tools for power users first, then the simpler tools. These are encessarily exclusive. Tools for power users are streamlined and require that you know how to use them. Thus the help is off on the side, not in front. Short but unintuitive commands are more efficient than longer but intuitive ones, so one or the other must be used (though not always there, check out the GNU standard of long options).
What distribution of linux are you using, anyhow? Slackware 1.x? If you check out a modern distribution of linux, especially one of the redhat based ones, they tend to be very user friendly. True, they're easier the closer you get to common hardware and harder the further away from that that you get, but that's always the case.
Anyhow, the linux world is moving over to being easier. It takes time. I'm currently writing a graphical checkbook register with graphical configuration and online help. I'll be releasing it within a few days. other people are doing similar things. Like everything in life it's just taking time.
If you can't help, please don't complain. Encourage. Give people a reason to care. I want people to use my software. Others want people to user their software too. Give us a reason to think that you're going to and that you'll be polite about it, and we'll be more motivated to write it in a way that you'd like. The world works quite well if you cooperate. Give it a try. You'll be a welcome part of the community if you do.
I place this code in the public domain.
I'm fairly sure that you're perfectly free to take your patches to a GPL'd app and compile them and then sell that as proprietary software under a conventional copyright-protected scheme.
What it doesn't allow you to do is to compile the other people's work and include it with your own as proprietary.
Big difference. The mere fact that your patches won't do anything useful on their own is irrelevant (as is the fact that they probably won't even compile). You can do what you want with your own work. You just can't do what you want with other people's work.
The free in Free Software refers to everyone's freedom, not just yours. The idea is to promote the most freedom among the most number of people. And it's just a license. You can always break it as you want, just as you can break the law for other crim. Simialar idea, too. You're not chained up before you do anything to prevent you from comitting murder, you're just chained up afterwards. You have freedom until you abuse it to do things that are anti-social.
Your subsequent lack of freedom would be regretable and sub-optimal, but less so than the effects of your unchecked actions. We're still on the earth-bound side of heaven, so we do have to recognize that fact. It doesn't do us any good to pretend that everyone's perfect. People will abuse public domain software. They always have the freedom to do so until we chop their fingers off, we just won't let them get away with it.
It's just a matter of the lesser of two evils, really. In the eyes of a lot of people, whether or not software is free is more important than whether or not you can make unimpeded moral decisions about it. And the reason why isn't about you, but about the hundreds and thousands of people who will have to deal with the consequences of your actions. RMS would prefer that the public not be allowed to be hurt unimpeded.
Maybe it's a bit utilitarian, but you have to be utilitarian at some points, especially when you don't want to have a theocracy. The only other alternative is anarchy, and that's not very attractive.
You put that very well. Thank you. Oh, and I second the motion: thank you RMS. And everyone else who gave their source away and made this a better world.