I think that all the other projects from the GNU group are for Linux insignificant in comparison. GCC is the only one that I really care about. A number of them I hate with a passion; the Emacs editor is horrible, for example. While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it needs to be.
Not only is this not diplomatic, it isn't even entirely rational. Once upon a time, emacs was an unusually large program, now it's only about average. And emacs has plenty of excuses to be larger than a simple text editor, because it does a lot more... sure, there are other ways of doing most of those things, but so what? You might as well complain about Perl being larger than it needs to be because you use Python.
This makes me wonder if some of the anti-RMS sentiment that you see is really the result of a deeper ideological split than open vs free software: it all goes back to the vi/emacs wars.
After LinuxWorld, I was actually a lot less impressed with Linus than I had been previously. It seemed to me like he'd gotten his fingers burned in the past by shooting his mouth off, and had concluded that he should never say anything. Look at his old style back in 1992, during the famous "Linux is Obsolete" argument with Tanenbaum: Linux is Obsolete (This is also reprinted in the back of the "Open Sources" book).
If you want to see a real diplomat in action some time, check out Brian Behlendorf.
I agree that it's a good idea to use newsreaders as newsreaders rather than to hack web interfaces that are almost as good as a newsreader.
Take a look at the way that LinuxWorld handles this. In Netscape, when you click on a link to their discussion forums, it kicks you into the Netscape newsreader, with all of the features (or lack thereof) that this implies.
What I would like, or course, is for this to be configurable so that clicking on a "news:" link could put me into nn (the greatest newsreader ever written) or perhaps into gnus, if nn is a problem. I think this is beyond the capabilities of Netscape's Communicator at present, but perhaps the new Mozilla will be a little more open about providing hooks to do this.
In any case, there are obviously some big wins from doing things this way: you want user configurable filtering? Fine, get a better news reader. And there's no additional load on the webserver that way, so it scales a lot better. If you've got a really good newsreader, you can do positive filtering like "show me stuff by this person", "show me things on this topic". This is much more useful than killfiles.
Why does this article have a score of 6? It's just another opinion, and arguably flame bait at that.
Tip #1: Avoid 'Learning Perl' by O'Reilly!
on
Learning Perl/Tk
·
· Score: 1
I'm not familiar with "Perl by Example", but when I want working examples of Perl code, I go to "The Perl Cookbook" by Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington, also on O'Reilly.
(And "Learning Perl" may not be a perfect book -- myself I was a bit put off by the artificial nature of the examples in the first chapter -- but it's hardly "garbage". )
> Almost every article about GNOME has to put down > KDE in some way or another. Why?
Because journalists are stupid, sleazy creatures that need to have an "angle" before they turn in a story. So first you get the hero worship stuff about the great Linus Torvalds, the little hacker that could, and then you get the Linus vs. RMS wars (even though the differences between them are about as huge as the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front), and so now you're starting to see the KDE vs. Gnome shit played up, because they think they've *got* to play *something* up. (And you know what? Now that we've been through the "Isn't Linux Great?" cycle, now we can expect the "Oh, that Linux hype has been overdone" cycle... something to look forward to, eh?).
Anyway, take a look at the gnome FAQ some time (http://www.gnome.org/gnomefaq/), under the question "Why not KDE?". The information is out of date (this was written when QT was still proprietary) but even so, it's pretty reasonable:
> The GNOME people like the KDE people. We think > that this difference between ourselves is > unfortunate, and we do not like having to dwell > on these differences. > > This matter has been hashed out time and time > again on the gnome list. Asking this question on > the gnome list is discouraged behaviour. If you > want to go somewhere and start a flamewar on > this topic, then please do it somewhere far far > away where we don't have to listen to you. > > GNOME will probably use components ported from > the KDE project; conversely, wherever possible > GNOME components can be freely used by KDE. We > would like to see as much cooperation as is > possible between the two projects.
Do these people sound like they're out for blood or something?
Why was this posted? Why am I writing this?
on
Feature:Free Linux
·
· Score: 1
Looks as though being a perl god does not imply sanity.
RMS deserves a lot of credit, for both the C compiler, and the gnu public license, and sticking to his guns and living according to his ideas while the rest of the world (including me) thought he was nuts.
I think I'm switching to the "Call it GNU/Linux" camp, but I can understand if most people feel that name changes are stupid, and they'd rather stick with "Linux", just because it's an already standardized name. (Though, it is not true that names are meaningless, arbitrary symbols, but let's leave that argument for another day.)
But, the idea of re-writing all of the FSF code just for the sake of spiting RMS, this is a completely bug-nuts idea, far crazier than anything I've ever heard from RMS.
I suggest sticking to the project of re-writing Unix in perl. That's a pretty beserk project too, but at least there's some point to it.
I bet Tom Christiansen uses vi. That's what the RMS wars are *really* about.
(I can't beleive I read all this drivel just so I could post my own drivel with a clear conscience...)
If the Defense Department is willing to admit that they're experiencing "cyberattacks" it means that the attacks (a) have not been successful and (b) they're planning on hitting up congress for lots of cash to defend our cyberspace. Watch out for the soon-to-be announced Hacker Gap.
Some sort of Sound capability for a Palm Pilot would be cool, all right. What I'd like to see is an "Internet Transistor Radio": a Palm Pilot plus sound plus a Ricochet modem. You could wander around the San Francsico Bay Area listening to a college radio station from Austrailia.
Unfortunately, the WinCE world may actually be a little closer to this. The Cassandra already comes with a head phone jack (though I bet the sound is awful, voice quality only: they intended it as a dictation gadget).
I'm a big fan of the Kinesis "contoured" layout: All of the heavy keys are moved under your thumbs, including Alt, Ctrl, Backspace, Delete, Enter and Space. This is perfect for the emacs abuser (no more leaning on an awkwardly placed control key with your pinky while you're thinking about what to do next). Also, the keyboard is completely programmable, so if you disagree with any of the layout decisions, you can probably fix it yourself fairly eaisly (in my case, I turn the hated CAPS/LOC key next to the A into another ESC).
There are two drawbacks: it took me about two hours to learn to use it, and another two weeks to get my speed back (on the plus side, no one else in the office can ever use my computer). The other problem is that the keyboard is a little flatter than I would like (I keep meaning to see if I can hack one to increase the hump in the middle a little bit).
Incidentally, these things come with a foot pedal (which is also eaisly programmable as any key on the keyboard, e.g. ESC, Cntrl...). I find them completely useless (I can twiddle my fingers faster than my feet), but experimenting with these things seems to be irresitable for your average geek.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this sound diplomatic to you?
Not only is this not diplomatic, it isn't even entirely rational. Once upon a time, emacs was an unusually large program, now it's only about average. And emacs has plenty of excuses to be larger than a simple text editor, because it does a lot more... sure, there are other ways of doing most of those things, but so what? You might as well complain about Perl being larger than it needs to be because you use Python.This makes me wonder if some of the anti-RMS sentiment that you see is really the result of a deeper ideological split than open vs free software: it all goes back to the vi/emacs wars.
After LinuxWorld, I was actually a lot less impressed with Linus than I had been previously. It seemed to me like he'd gotten his fingers burned in the past by shooting his mouth off, and had concluded that he should never say anything. Look at his old style back in 1992, during the famous "Linux is Obsolete" argument with Tanenbaum: Linux is Obsolete (This is also reprinted in the back of the "Open Sources" book).
If you want to see a real diplomat in action some time, check out Brian Behlendorf.
I agree that it's a good idea to use newsreaders as newsreaders rather than to hack web interfaces that are almost as good as a newsreader.
Take a look at the way that LinuxWorld handles this. In Netscape, when you click on a link to their discussion forums, it kicks you into the Netscape newsreader, with all of the features (or lack thereof) that this implies.
What I would like, or course, is for this to be configurable so that clicking on a "news:" link could put me into nn (the greatest newsreader ever written) or perhaps into gnus, if nn is a problem. I think this is beyond the capabilities of Netscape's Communicator at present, but perhaps the new Mozilla will be a little more open about providing hooks to do this.
In any case, there are obviously some big wins from doing things this way: you want user configurable filtering? Fine, get a better news reader. And there's no additional load on the webserver that way, so it scales a lot better. If you've got a really good newsreader, you can do positive filtering like "show me stuff by this person", "show me things on this topic". This is much more useful than killfiles.
Why does this article have a score of 6? It's
just another opinion, and arguably flame bait
at that.
I'm not familiar with "Perl by Example", but when
I want working examples of Perl code, I go to
"The Perl Cookbook" by Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington, also on O'Reilly.
(And "Learning Perl" may not be a perfect book -- myself I was a bit put off by the artificial nature of the examples in the first chapter -- but it's hardly "garbage". )
Look, take it easy...
> Almost every article about GNOME has to put down
> KDE in some way or another. Why?
Because journalists are stupid, sleazy creatures
that need to have an "angle" before they turn
in a story. So first you get the hero worship
stuff about the great Linus Torvalds, the little
hacker that could, and then you get the Linus vs.
RMS wars (even though the differences between
them are about as huge as the People's Front of
Judea and the Judean People's Front), and so now
you're starting to see the KDE vs. Gnome shit
played up, because they think they've *got* to
play *something* up. (And you know what? Now
that we've been through the "Isn't Linux Great?"
cycle, now we can expect the "Oh, that Linux
hype has been overdone" cycle... something to
look forward to, eh?).
Anyway, take a look at the gnome FAQ some time
(http://www.gnome.org/gnomefaq/), under the
question "Why not KDE?". The information is out
of date (this was written when QT was still
proprietary) but even so, it's pretty reasonable:
> The GNOME people like the KDE people. We think
> that this difference between ourselves is
> unfortunate, and we do not like having to dwell
> on these differences.
>
> This matter has been hashed out time and time
> again on the gnome list. Asking this question on
> the gnome list is discouraged behaviour. If you
> want to go somewhere and start a flamewar on
> this topic, then please do it somewhere far far
> away where we don't have to listen to you.
>
> GNOME will probably use components ported from
> the KDE project; conversely, wherever possible
> GNOME components can be freely used by KDE. We
> would like to see as much cooperation as is
> possible between the two projects.
Do these people sound like they're out for blood
or something?
Looks as though being a perl god does not
imply sanity.
RMS deserves a lot of credit, for both the C
compiler, and the gnu public license, and
sticking to his guns and living according to
his ideas while the rest of the world
(including me) thought he was nuts.
I think I'm switching to the "Call it
GNU/Linux" camp, but I can understand if most
people feel that name changes are stupid, and
they'd rather stick with "Linux", just because
it's an already standardized name. (Though,
it is not true that names are meaningless,
arbitrary symbols, but let's leave that
argument for another day.)
But, the idea of re-writing all of the FSF
code just for the sake of spiting RMS, this
is a completely bug-nuts idea, far crazier
than anything I've ever heard from RMS.
I suggest sticking to the project of
re-writing Unix in perl. That's a pretty
beserk project too, but at least there's
some point to it.
I bet Tom Christiansen uses vi. That's
what the RMS wars are *really* about.
(I can't beleive I read all this drivel just
so I could post my own drivel with a clear
conscience...)
The obvious one: "Learning Perl" by Randal Schwartz and Tom Christiansen. Published by O'Reilly.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl2/
If the Defense Department is willing to
admit that they're experiencing "cyberattacks"
it means that the attacks (a) have not been
successful and (b) they're planning on hitting up
congress for lots of cash to defend our cyberspace. Watch out for the soon-to-be announced Hacker Gap.
Some sort of Sound capability for a Palm Pilot would be cool, all right. What I'd like to see is an "Internet Transistor Radio": a Palm Pilot plus sound plus a Ricochet modem. You could wander around the San Francsico Bay Area listening to a college radio station from Austrailia.
Unfortunately, the WinCE world may actually be a little closer to this. The Cassandra already comes with a head phone jack (though I bet the sound is awful, voice quality only: they intended it as a dictation gadget).
All of the heavy keys are moved under your thumbs,
including Alt, Ctrl, Backspace, Delete, Enter and Space. This is perfect for the emacs abuser (no more leaning on an awkwardly placed control key with your pinky while you're thinking about what to do next). Also, the keyboard is completely programmable, so if you disagree with any of the layout decisions, you can probably fix it yourself fairly eaisly (in my case, I turn the hated CAPS/LOC key next to the A into another ESC).
There are two drawbacks: it took me about two hours to learn to use it, and another two weeks to get my speed back (on the plus side, no one else in the office can ever use my computer). The other problem is that the keyboard is a little flatter than I would like (I keep meaning to see if I can hack one to increase the hump in the middle a little bit).
Incidentally, these things come with a foot pedal (which is also eaisly programmable as any key on the keyboard, e.g. ESC, Cntrl...). I find them completely useless (I can twiddle my fingers faster than my feet), but experimenting with these things seems to be irresitable for your average geek.