But the demographics of those who use Linux and Wine vs those who use Linux but not Wine, most likely favors commercial software (fewer purists). So it shouldn't necessarily be discounted as a mechanism for making software cross-platform.
(Whether there's a business case for making it cross-platform at all, as you note, is still a question whose answer varies on a case-to-case basis).
I'm giving MPD a go. I've been a long-time Amarok+KDE user, and while KDE 4 has definitely been great since 4.2, Amarok has failed to make the transition so well. Crashes, the irritating wasted center space, and holding onto the audio device even when stopped.
I'm running a combination of MPD, Sonata, and some custom scripts and it accomplishes 90% of what I used to do in Amarok with less resources. Version 0.15 is supposed to support Last.fm streams, so that would be the other 10%.
Some of us, when we write software, want to be able to distribute it such that it runs on all 3 platforms "our of the box".
Yes, Java accomplishes that, and I use that solution sometimes. Qt is ok if you want to ship multiple binaries and installers. And of course a source distribution is great if you can do it. But having a native (in terms of no VM or interpreter) API available everywhere with no recompilation is also a useful tool.
I think the biggest problem with Wine is that Windows developers don't test in it. If you could get people thinking about Wine as a cheap way to achieve cross-platform compatibility, it would be much more useful.
From TFA, it sounds as if the shims are more of an "alternative" implementation for certain functions (providing expected behavior and necessary privileges). Which means doing some loader tricks (akin to setting LD_PRELOAD in Linux).
I don't want to belittle what they're doing, as it's a clever hack, and probably the best way to handle the situation, but it's not a full Win32 implementation linked normally, the way Wine and older Windows is.
I'm a big fan of this feature, and indeed it's what allows me to play my old Loki games on my laptop, but it does have a downside over a fixed ABI: you have to use old versions of libraries, missing out on whatever security- and bug-fixes haven't been backported.
The source for the libraries is all there, sure, but having two parallel branches of the same code is usually wasteful.
Wine is the definition of using hacks to get an app to run on an OS.
Wine is an (unofficial) implementation of the Win32 API. How is writing a library a hack? Because the official documentation is inconsistent and occasionally incorrect? That just makes it hard.
Third parties don't have to win to make a difference. The Democratic party now knows exactly the stakes of ignoring the people likely to vote for them. Game theory suggests that they should start adopting some of the Green platform, etc, to draw these voters and win elections.
With elections seeming to get even closer, third parties have increasingly more importance.
Which is a good start. But sometimes you're not talking about the case itself, but rather something unspecified inside, or perhaps the case *and* what's inside. There's no shorthand way to say it.
I hope you know that consumer ADSL equipment is, in fact, a modem and is even occasionally correctly called such by packaging, customer service reps, etc.
Unless you're forgetting important parts of this story, you're the one who's mistaken, not the customer.
My understanding of the judicial system was that you could only appeal errors of law, i.e. you couldn't expand the scope of your defense or introduce new evidence. I could be wrong, IANAL.
It was kind of like seeing a James Bond movie where Q is absent, Bond gets no gadgets and in fact 007 only shows up for like 15 minutes where he gets rejected by the girl (named Mary Smith) and then shot in the head. Maybe a great movie but it isn't a Bond movie.
And yet for some reason Goldfinger is considered one of the best Bond movies ever. Perhaps you should rethink what characterizes that series the most.
It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer.
Perhaps, but it's a sort of computer we have absolutely no experience with (yet). It's certainly not a Von Neumann machine, and almost certainly not a finite Turing machine. It's got analog components, holographic (redundant) paths... technology we haven't even begun to scratch in CS. It defies the very discrete math we use to formulate CS as a discipline.
Which isn't to say that in the future we won't pursue these sort of branches, and maybe even simulate organic thinking, but to say it's nothing more than software running on a computer is VASTLY simplistic.
Either it's owned by the corporation or it's owned by an individual who happens to work for a corporation. If a CEO rewards himself with a new car that's paid for by the company, then he pays income taxes on that.
I'm not quite clear on what you're proposing. A company car (or jet, etc) *is* owned by the company, even if it's for the exclusive use of one employee. How would you eliminate that particular loophole?
As a related pet peeve, did you know that from a tax point of view (at least in my home state), it's better for a company to buy you a gas-guzzling pick-up truck than a passenger car? It's exactly because of trying to close this loophole; the tax code demands that the vehicle be of certain classes so it qualifies as a business use and not personal. That's exactly the kind of wrong solution that solves nothing and adds complexity to the tax code.
the only thing I get is a credit against US taxes due for the amount of taxes I paid on that income in that foreign country.
That is incorrect! There's also the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (form 2555 and 2555-ez) which exempt your first ~$80k of wages/salary from taxable income. And the Foreign Housing Exclusion and Deduction.
You may want to go over IRS publication 54 with a calculator to see what benefits you're eligible for and which combination maximizes your financial gain.
You laugh (derisively), but GP more or less describes "leverage", the excesses of which ended up necessitating the bailout.
There's nothing particularly wrong with creating credit through leverage (more credit creates more growth opportunities), as long as your risks can be managed properly. And if we're a society that's unwilling to tolerate capital-d Depressions now and then along with our growth, we have to accept a tight level of preventative regulation in our financial sector. Finance and government will always have a more intimate relationship than most private industries.
I never understood the view that if something supports a form of DRM, it's evil. Every ebook reader supports open formats of some sort that can make every bit as much use of the device's features (EPUB in the Sony case, which is the one I'm familiar with).
Your complaint isn't with the device, it's with the associated store. Use a different store (Baen, Fictionwise), download public domain (Feedbooks), or just pirate the damn things.
Through a combination of those 3 options, I've been quite happy with my Sony Reader.
Market forces, yes, but the "bad" ones. The whole point behind supply and demand is that individual players play such a small role that it's their aggregate quantifiable interests (x goods at y price) that matter. Having a player large enough to demand certain behavior is a market *distortion*, and that's the motivation behind monopoly and price-fixing laws.
If we want our government behaving like this, let's be honest and say it's because we think mandating the behavior is in the social interest. Likening the government's tactics to those undertaken by businesses like Walmart and Best Buy is not sufficient to legitimize them.
Anything that modifies the DOM is an abomination. We have this great semantic structure for representing knowledge and we treat it as the basis for applications? Utterly clobbering useful linking or searching? Wrong tool for the job.
I disagree about Silverlight, though. Providing a rectangular viewport for a virtualized computing environment, a la Flash or Java, is perhaps a good compromise for a web-delivered application. Of course, better yet is leaving the browser entirely via something like Java web-start.
Because if it were just about copyright, you'd be right, but it's not. Bad laws like the DMCA have unintended effects that hurt the rest of us even when we're not doing a damn thing with the cartels' media. And all this while the pirates still do whatever the hell they feel like. I wish Hollywood and Washington would stop harassing so many of us in this quixotic campaign to get at so few.
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But the demographics of those who use Linux and Wine vs those who use Linux but not Wine, most likely favors commercial software (fewer purists). So it shouldn't necessarily be discounted as a mechanism for making software cross-platform.
(Whether there's a business case for making it cross-platform at all, as you note, is still a question whose answer varies on a case-to-case basis).
I'm giving MPD a go. I've been a long-time Amarok+KDE user, and while KDE 4 has definitely been great since 4.2, Amarok has failed to make the transition so well. Crashes, the irritating wasted center space, and holding onto the audio device even when stopped.
I'm running a combination of MPD, Sonata, and some custom scripts and it accomplishes 90% of what I used to do in Amarok with less resources. Version 0.15 is supposed to support Last.fm streams, so that would be the other 10%.
Some of us, when we write software, want to be able to distribute it such that it runs on all 3 platforms "our of the box".
Yes, Java accomplishes that, and I use that solution sometimes. Qt is ok if you want to ship multiple binaries and installers. And of course a source distribution is great if you can do it. But having a native (in terms of no VM or interpreter) API available everywhere with no recompilation is also a useful tool.
I think the biggest problem with Wine is that Windows developers don't test in it. If you could get people thinking about Wine as a cheap way to achieve cross-platform compatibility, it would be much more useful.
From TFA, it sounds as if the shims are more of an "alternative" implementation for certain functions (providing expected behavior and necessary privileges). Which means doing some loader tricks (akin to setting LD_PRELOAD in Linux).
I don't want to belittle what they're doing, as it's a clever hack, and probably the best way to handle the situation, but it's not a full Win32 implementation linked normally, the way Wine and older Windows is.
It's certainly not the first time anyone's skipped work to go to a con.
I'm a big fan of this feature, and indeed it's what allows me to play my old Loki games on my laptop, but it does have a downside over a fixed ABI: you have to use old versions of libraries, missing out on whatever security- and bug-fixes haven't been backported.
The source for the libraries is all there, sure, but having two parallel branches of the same code is usually wasteful.
Wine is the definition of using hacks to get an app to run on an OS.
Wine is an (unofficial) implementation of the Win32 API. How is writing a library a hack? Because the official documentation is inconsistent and occasionally incorrect? That just makes it hard.
Third parties don't have to win to make a difference. The Democratic party now knows exactly the stakes of ignoring the people likely to vote for them. Game theory suggests that they should start adopting some of the Green platform, etc, to draw these voters and win elections.
With elections seeming to get even closer, third parties have increasingly more importance.
Do you really want politicians to sit there and debate about everything and not actually get anything done?
Yes.
I call it "the case".
Which is a good start. But sometimes you're not talking about the case itself, but rather something unspecified inside, or perhaps the case *and* what's inside. There's no shorthand way to say it.
I hope you know that consumer ADSL equipment is, in fact, a modem and is even occasionally correctly called such by packaging, customer service reps, etc.
Unless you're forgetting important parts of this story, you're the one who's mistaken, not the customer.
Is that possible?
My understanding of the judicial system was that you could only appeal errors of law, i.e. you couldn't expand the scope of your defense or introduce new evidence. I could be wrong, IANAL.
One key aspect of the monument was its permanence and impenetratibility.
Evidenced, of course, by the fact that it fell down. =P
Well that depends on if you're using a Pentium to calculate it.
It was kind of like seeing a James Bond movie where Q is absent, Bond gets no gadgets and in fact 007 only shows up for like 15 minutes where he gets rejected by the girl (named Mary Smith) and then shot in the head. Maybe a great movie but it isn't a Bond movie.
And yet for some reason Goldfinger is considered one of the best Bond movies ever. Perhaps you should rethink what characterizes that series the most.
It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer.
Perhaps, but it's a sort of computer we have absolutely no experience with (yet). It's certainly not a Von Neumann machine, and almost certainly not a finite Turing machine. It's got analog components, holographic (redundant) paths... technology we haven't even begun to scratch in CS. It defies the very discrete math we use to formulate CS as a discipline.
Which isn't to say that in the future we won't pursue these sort of branches, and maybe even simulate organic thinking, but to say it's nothing more than software running on a computer is VASTLY simplistic.
Man, you guys must fucking hate Sony =)
Either it's owned by the corporation or it's owned by an individual who happens to work for a corporation. If a CEO rewards himself with a new car that's paid for by the company, then he pays income taxes on that.
I'm not quite clear on what you're proposing. A company car (or jet, etc) *is* owned by the company, even if it's for the exclusive use of one employee. How would you eliminate that particular loophole?
As a related pet peeve, did you know that from a tax point of view (at least in my home state), it's better for a company to buy you a gas-guzzling pick-up truck than a passenger car? It's exactly because of trying to close this loophole; the tax code demands that the vehicle be of certain classes so it qualifies as a business use and not personal. That's exactly the kind of wrong solution that solves nothing and adds complexity to the tax code.
the only thing I get is a credit against US taxes due for the amount of taxes I paid on that income in that foreign country.
That is incorrect! There's also the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (form 2555 and 2555-ez) which exempt your first ~$80k of wages/salary from taxable income. And the Foreign Housing Exclusion and Deduction.
You may want to go over IRS publication 54 with a calculator to see what benefits you're eligible for and which combination maximizes your financial gain.
You laugh (derisively), but GP more or less describes "leverage", the excesses of which ended up necessitating the bailout.
There's nothing particularly wrong with creating credit through leverage (more credit creates more growth opportunities), as long as your risks can be managed properly. And if we're a society that's unwilling to tolerate capital-d Depressions now and then along with our growth, we have to accept a tight level of preventative regulation in our financial sector. Finance and government will always have a more intimate relationship than most private industries.
I never understood the view that if something supports a form of DRM, it's evil. Every ebook reader supports open formats of some sort that can make every bit as much use of the device's features (EPUB in the Sony case, which is the one I'm familiar with).
Your complaint isn't with the device, it's with the associated store. Use a different store (Baen, Fictionwise), download public domain (Feedbooks), or just pirate the damn things.
Through a combination of those 3 options, I've been quite happy with my Sony Reader.
Market forces, yes, but the "bad" ones. The whole point behind supply and demand is that individual players play such a small role that it's their aggregate quantifiable interests (x goods at y price) that matter. Having a player large enough to demand certain behavior is a market *distortion*, and that's the motivation behind monopoly and price-fixing laws.
If we want our government behaving like this, let's be honest and say it's because we think mandating the behavior is in the social interest. Likening the government's tactics to those undertaken by businesses like Walmart and Best Buy is not sufficient to legitimize them.
Anything that modifies the DOM is an abomination. We have this great semantic structure for representing knowledge and we treat it as the basis for applications? Utterly clobbering useful linking or searching? Wrong tool for the job.
I disagree about Silverlight, though. Providing a rectangular viewport for a virtualized computing environment, a la Flash or Java, is perhaps a good compromise for a web-delivered application. Of course, better yet is leaving the browser entirely via something like Java web-start.
Was one mention of the blue penis not enough? Did we needed another, more descriptive, big blue penis?
That's apparently what the movie thought.
Because if it were just about copyright, you'd be right, but it's not. Bad laws like the DMCA have unintended effects that hurt the rest of us even when we're not doing a damn thing with the cartels' media. And all this while the pirates still do whatever the hell they feel like. I wish Hollywood and Washington would stop harassing so many of us in this quixotic campaign to get at so few.