Okay, good to see someone has come to the same conclusions I have. Python is a wonderful language, but the problem is that it has grown osmotically - the language itself is good (not great, but good), but the real popularity of it comes from its incredible amount of "batteries included".
IMHO, a real, true, ultimate pure _language_ (not standard library) needs to be polished up for an opensource successor. Something with the power of Lisp and the legibility of Python. I'm thinking of something very similar to python except that code-based blocks should be handled as custom objects like everything else in Python.
In Python, the statement
class foo(bar):
def __init__(self):
self.baz = "foo bar baz"
is using the interpreter to auto-insance a bunch of standard Python objects (a class and a method, which is than in turn wrapped with an instancemethod) based around code objects. I can subclass the interpreter "method" object or create new substitute ones in its place, but if I want to use them in the interpreter, then I have to instance them the normal way, using
whereas the main method object gets the nice def funcname(args):
statement. This is the biggest failure of Pythons generalism - its inorexicably tied to its core objects, so that if you are using it like Lisp as a fully custom-made lexicon, you still have to either a) tear the contents out of the engine objects and relocate them into your own objects or b) use stupid constructors like
myfunc = myfuncclass("myname", "my massivestring of text that is actually the whole code block that this contructor will compile into code but I have to enter it as a string like this its kinda stupid eh?")
Not very nice. I want to make custom if and class statements, replace the implicit behaviour that typing i=1 creates an int object instead of some other custom object I want it to make. Likewise, I want to use other datatypes otehr than a true python Dictionary object as the local namespace or the global namespace (well, the globals can be any kind of mapping, actually).
A generalized Python would be my dream language - Python, but where all the core objects and statements (like "if" or "class") were part of the standard library.
I was disappointed to see Lisp not get much cred on that chart. First language with dynamic typing is worth noting. I've been reading up on Lisp (not coded a line yet) and have suddenly become disappointed in the entire programming world - right here there's a language with a featureset that it has taken other languages decades to catch up to.
Where is a language with the power of Lisp and the ease of Python? Python has some wonderful features in terms of speed and readability, but it is too tied to its primitives. After reading on Lisp, then going back to coding Python, I was really frustrated that the language wasn't better generalized - that all statements (if, import, etc) are hard coded - what if I want to make a custom block statement (like if or while) or something similar? Can't do that in Python, because you don't really have access to parsed code objects the way you do in Lisp.
I've looked at the modern Lisp languages (Common Lisp and Scheme) and I can't figure out which ones are worthy of my attention. Scheme seems like it has lost the intelligent simplicity of Python in favour of clumsy "special character" based syntax, while Common Lisp has many detractors that don't complain much of details. Is your complaint about Common Lisp based on all Lisp variants? Or is CL especially bad?
I know Lisp is not the ideal language - its ugly, illegible, and slower than compiled languages - but the fact is it existed at a time so far before many languages that pathetically failed to implement its features, so I'm a little confused at the way the computing world has ignored it, instead of trying to work its principles into modern languages (Python does a little, but ends up feeling cobbled together and inconsistent).
Once you throw one "law" into the free market, you have to make sure that law will stand up to the system or the market will flow around ("Oh, we MUST offer service X? Fine, we'll just price it out of the market").
Ofcourse, patchwork messes like that are why lawyers have become the modern super-thugs that we have today. Unfortunately, it seems that lawmakers aren't very smart about creating robust, simple laws.
I say stop hiring lawyers and start hiring gamers and programmers to make laws. We know what happens when a system gets overcomplicated: if its a program, it crashes, and if its a game, either only hypernerds play it and its a commercial failure, or even worse it turns out to be an exploitable unbalanced mess.
or fuck@off.com or nonofyour@goddamnbusiness.com (wordy, but I still like that one). I also use that one for first and last name, so I've gotten used to "Hello, Nonofyour!" on websites.
Fortunately, the founders of the nation were smarter than its members, and made something called the Constitution. Liberals have this whacky idea that the consitution should be followed (although some of them have funny ideas about the 2nd amendment) and as such, tend to go up against the majority of Americans who seem to think the consitution is more convenient as a piece of toilet paper.
Interoperability and configurability are the huge ones. The best examples are IE and Word. If I want to reconfigure them, I can simply drag and drop the UI objects into the configuration I like. There's nice (if cluttered) options menus for all useful options (no config files needed).
Second, I can copy and paste a webpage out of IE and into Word. Can't do that with FireFox and StarOffice, no matter how nice they are.
Yeah - I never understand how people can discuss that music in any creative context. How is it even an issue whether you like Avril as a musician or not? She's a friggin instrument in the producer's inventory, only marginally more important than the bass guitar.
The whole "pop stars" reality TV phenominon made it even more transparent, and people still don't care. At least the corporate shill bands of the '90s were involved in the writing process (even if half of the harmonizing and mixing was done by producers).
All I ask is that the songs be associated with the person who made the music, not some ditzy little flake who teens want to fuck.
No, my point is that by enforcing tariffs as a strict policy on countries that have opressive labour systems, we encourage the countries to treat their labour forces better. If indecent working conditions are not good enough for Americans, then Americans should not be profiting off of such conditions. All I'm saying is that basic human rights should be expected of nations who wish to profit off of Western capitalism.
The problem with this attitude is that there are ways that first world nations should not have to compete. While cheaper cost of living is a sensible reason to outsource, loose labour laws are other reasons they outsource.
I mean, its one thing to outsource coders to India where its just like a programmer here - its another to outsource labour jobs to countries like Indonesia where they can treat child workers as abusable slave labour.
I figure there should be tariffs on outsourcing and importing - free trade is good economic sense, but not necessarily good social sense. However, it shouldn't be applied based on "they're stealing our jobs" so much as "we should not allow American companies and American products to be made by oppressed labour". Tax oppression. Simple. If they don't oppress their labour pool and they still steal our jobs, then you're right - they actually are more competative. But if the US has to start abusing its own workers in order to compete, then something's wrong.
Or would you rather go back to the days of Edison, locking the scientists in the lab until they invent something new.
Yeah, and lets not forget smoothtalkers like Reagan and Bush Jr, both of whom got a whole country feeling great about themselves while they did as much damage as they possibly could.
And of course conservatives are busy doing things - it takes a long time to figure out how to find that "on" switch.
Well, next time you go into a store for service and a company is too busy with new cusotmers to deal with you, just make sure you announce your problem loud enough for them to hear it.
I know if I were standing in a cell store and someone with a phone plan I was looking at came in and said "Well if you won't provide me with support and your call centre is unreachable, how the hell am I supposed to use my phone? I'm paying for minutes I can't use!" I'd be taking my business elsewher.
Thus, you move to the front of the line and also rob them a little like they deserve.
Yeah - I agree. I'm a linux newb, so I figured I'd run RedHat 9 on my old P166 with 32megs of ram for a phpbb server.
Bad, bad idea, as you can imagine. Redhat 9 has these wonderful gui admin tools, like their winXP-like service manager, but I can barely start X. Hell, I had to reinstall the damn thing just to switch it over to booting into the terminal. All because Gnome is so heavy.
I would've switched over to Fluxbox or another bantamweight WM, but then I looked into it and realised that, even if these new WMs could run my tools-of-choice, I still wouldn't know what the command-line for them was, 'cause I got them through GNOME's menu. So I had to stick to GNOME, in all its crawling glory.
Anyhow, I've managed to learn how to do most stuff from the command line, but I still find myself using GNOME to start/stop services because if I try to use the command line start-stop-restart commands they always fail.
Here's the real point - is there a full desktop/wm like Gnome, but with low resource needs (better yet, that can import gnome's setup?)
The second catch is that I still don't understand the distinction between a desktop and a window manager - is a window manager just a desktop without a windows-style start menu and those little dockable things at in the taskbar? Is there even an actual, technical difference between a desktop and a WM? Or are they the same thing in the eyes of X? If they're not - do you still need the gnome desktop running to use a new WM?
Actually, because of its massive complexity, FF6 (3 in America) was frought with bugs. Still didn't prevent it from being considered the best RPG ever by most enthusiasts of the genre.
Well, one big problem is that ffa with huge numbers is freaking pointless, and team games tend to need to have very simple gameplay so that the team strategy doesn't become too complex. Compare, say, RTS games that tend to be very complex and focus on individual player-vs-player action, wher FPS games have almost entirely moved away from simple 1-on-1 or 2-on-2.
I still play old RTS games for just that reason - BattleZone 1 or Total Annihilation work fantastically with only 4 players, whereas I figure the sweet number for a team-FPS is 12-16, or 6-8 for FFA. Enough where you can have a good variety of play and fill out a decent sized map, not so much that its just shooting a bunch of anonymous people and you may as well be playing against bots.
Some people like the giant war. Me, I think it becomes very impersonal. What I'd like to see are large-scale action games that take some features from MMOs - focus on small, manageable teams, switching in and out of teams, using your team as a means for individual advancement, not a means unto itself. Its one thing to join one army fighting another onto a random server, its another to grab some friends together, make a little team, then join a full server _as a team_ and start recruiting teammates from there in an already complex struggle for dominance.
Yeah, you can see I've got a bit of a daydream there.
I was thinking about this problem - maybe we are looking at this the wrong way - we keep thinking they have a fully developed network system like Quake. In console land, this is unnecessary - you control the client. So you can have a hyper-thick client that just sends out positional control information and "I hit you" info. Some OS PC titles work like this.
With that kind of architecture, the packets would be so thin that 32 players on a cable modem wouldn't be a real problem. Yeah, once you start getting up to the hundreds you see in BF1942, then its a problem.
Alternately, a distributed approach could work - like maybe each player serves a segment of the level, and you keep the weapon ranges and sight ranges short enough so you only have to connect to 2-4 pseudoservers at a time. Thus you get a large contiguous battlefield with distributed server load. Of course, it falls to shit when everybody gets in a fight in one place.
SCTV actually (where John Candy got his start) - it was a Canadian show, but aimed for the American mass market. There was a minute or two of extra time at the end of the show because of the difference between Canadian and American timeslot lengths, so they decided to add something "uniquely Canadian" and put in Bob and Doug in the "Great White North".
1, 3, 4. I did not know that. Only developed on Gnome. I think I may be giving KDE a second look - I had discarded it as "Windows, except that it's _almost_ free software".
2. Yes. Unfortunately: a) nobody uses it and b) I am not personally impressed with its performance. Maybe XAML will be the same, maybe not.
5. Python is slow. I've used it extensively, and know how the interpreter works inside and out. Maybe native-compiled python or Jython is fast, but Python is slow, compared to JIT languages like Java and C#.
I always wondered why people are using UT2004 as a benchmark. While the framework is, imho, the most advanced architecture out there right now, the actual rendering engine is just a holdover from 2k3, which wasn't the most spectacular thing either when it came out, but at least wasn't old news.
On another vein - does this mean mobo manufacturer are gonna start putting decent chipsets in their onboard sound and video finally? I'm sick of having to have two video cards in my computer - one shitty Trident or Intel onboard POS and one Radeon. Just put a freaking 9600 in there.
Umm, right. MS didn't put a gun to Hitachi's head. They just engaged in anti-competative behaviour. Which is why they got sued, and is what they were accused of. They killed a good operating system by using their market leverage regardless of the quality of the product. Which defeats the whole purpose of a capitalist system, the free market, etc. to a point where we may as well just be hardcore democratic socialists where the large incompetent organizations that produce crap and stifle competition would at least be democratically elected. Or we can have real competition.
For BeOS, Fuck microsoft up their stupid stupid asses.
Blame the user. Smooth. Windows and KDE both let the user work in the old Mac approach of "click to open menu, release to select the item". GTK doesn't. So, Mac users are wrong then? And if they don't like it?
Oh, right, this is GNOME, where customization is either picking your desktop wallpaper or recompiling from source.
THe "not installed at all" is someone elses line. Microsoft was just going to kill the OEM system, which would mean that a) they'd have to pay end-user prices and b) they'd have to use the end-user installation system that would be slow and thus expensive in manpower.
Besides, if it wasn't true, then why did MS settle out of court and pay $23,250,000 to Be when they sued them?
Amen. Features come second when your core framework is fucked.
IMHO, MS is finally getting something right - the framework they're designing for Longhorn is goregeous. XML GUI and class definition and all the crummy header and import crap, and C# for the procedural code. Basically, C# as a scripting engine, one almost as fast as straight C. Compare that with the sluggish Python scripts other systems use.
OS coders could do this. Just because moronic Java developers converted platform agnositicism from a nice idea into ideological zealotry doesn't mean OS coders have to. GNOME has a wonderful idea with using Java.
Think of it this way: you code all your heavy lifting code in painful C and C++. Your 3d model renderrers, your window placement, etc. Then you code all the mostly event-driven procedural crap in Java. Tons of apps do this already, but with sluggish VB or Python or Perl. Instead we do it with Java, which, compared to real compiled languages is slow, but compared to a scripting language it rocks ass.
This is what Microsoft is doing with Longhorn, and its a wonderful system. Try modding Unreal Tournament to experience a game engine built along the same paradigm (albeit without the wonderful XAML concept of Longhorn) and you'll see how much of a joy this is to code with.
Regardless of all the monstrous feature creep (like giving IE a complete copy of the Firebird feature set) of Windows, the new coding framework of Longhorn has got me twitching with anticipation. Unfortunately, it looks like its up to the OS team with the shittiest track record (GNOME) to try and make a counterpoint for this.
Linux On The Desktop will be ready just in time for Windows On The Desktop With Super Fast R.A.D. Trustable Networked Operating System.
The tools are available, Longhorn is behind schedule, its not like an OS counterpart framework with an intelligent window manager couldn't be ready long before Longhorn. But I doubt it will happen.
Re:They should stick with C
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Hooray for the GNOME roadmap. Now all they need is a car that can drive forwards. GNOME is the only thing keeping me away from Linux, and KDE isn't standardized/cross platform enough. GTK is easily the most painful widget set, both graphically and programmatically, that I have ever used.
Here in Canada we have "credit unions" which are the same as small local banks for all intents and purposes. I used one for a while until I started moving around too much and needed a bank where I could always find local branches.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, good to see someone has come to the same conclusions I have. Python is a wonderful language, but the problem is that it has grown osmotically - the language itself is good (not great, but good), but the real popularity of it comes from its incredible amount of "batteries included".
IMHO, a real, true, ultimate pure _language_ (not standard library) needs to be polished up for an opensource successor. Something with the power of Lisp and the legibility of Python. I'm thinking of something very similar to python except that code-based blocks should be handled as custom objects like everything else in Python.
In Python, the statement
class foo(bar):
def __init__(self):
self.baz = "foo bar baz"
is using the interpreter to auto-insance a bunch of standard Python objects (a class and a method, which is than in turn wrapped with an instancemethod) based around code objects. I can subclass the interpreter "method" object or create new substitute ones in its place, but if I want to use them in the interpreter, then I have to instance them the normal way, using
mycustommethodinstance = mycustommethodclass(constructorarguments)
whereas the main method object gets the nice
def funcname(args):
statement. This is the biggest failure of Pythons generalism - its inorexicably tied to its core objects, so that if you are using it like Lisp as a fully custom-made lexicon, you still have to either a) tear the contents out of the engine objects and relocate them into your own objects or b) use stupid constructors like
myfunc = myfuncclass("myname", "my massivestring of text that is actually the whole code block that this contructor will compile into code but I have to enter it as a string like this its kinda stupid eh?")
Not very nice. I want to make custom if and class statements, replace the implicit behaviour that typing i=1 creates an int object instead of some other custom object I want it to make. Likewise, I want to use other datatypes otehr than a true python Dictionary object as the local namespace or the global namespace (well, the globals can be any kind of mapping, actually).
A generalized Python would be my dream language - Python, but where all the core objects and statements (like "if" or "class") were part of the standard library.
I was disappointed to see Lisp not get much cred on that chart. First language with dynamic typing is worth noting. I've been reading up on Lisp (not coded a line yet) and have suddenly become disappointed in the entire programming world - right here there's a language with a featureset that it has taken other languages decades to catch up to.
Where is a language with the power of Lisp and the ease of Python? Python has some wonderful features in terms of speed and readability, but it is too tied to its primitives. After reading on Lisp, then going back to coding Python, I was really frustrated that the language wasn't better generalized - that all statements (if, import, etc) are hard coded - what if I want to make a custom block statement (like if or while) or something similar? Can't do that in Python, because you don't really have access to parsed code objects the way you do in Lisp.
I've looked at the modern Lisp languages (Common Lisp and Scheme) and I can't figure out which ones are worthy of my attention. Scheme seems like it has lost the intelligent simplicity of Python in favour of clumsy "special character" based syntax, while Common Lisp has many detractors that don't complain much of details. Is your complaint about Common Lisp based on all Lisp variants? Or is CL especially bad?
I know Lisp is not the ideal language - its ugly, illegible, and slower than compiled languages - but the fact is it existed at a time so far before many languages that pathetically failed to implement its features, so I'm a little confused at the way the computing world has ignored it, instead of trying to work its principles into modern languages (Python does a little, but ends up feeling cobbled together and inconsistent).
Once you throw one "law" into the free market, you have to make sure that law will stand up to the system or the market will flow around ("Oh, we MUST offer service X? Fine, we'll just price it out of the market").
Ofcourse, patchwork messes like that are why lawyers have become the modern super-thugs that we have today. Unfortunately, it seems that lawmakers aren't very smart about creating robust, simple laws.
I say stop hiring lawyers and start hiring gamers and programmers to make laws. We know what happens when a system gets overcomplicated: if its a program, it crashes, and if its a game, either only hypernerds play it and its a commercial failure, or even worse it turns out to be an exploitable unbalanced mess.
or fuck@off.com
or nonofyour@goddamnbusiness.com (wordy, but I still like that one). I also use that one for first and last name, so I've gotten used to "Hello, Nonofyour!" on websites.
Fortunately, the founders of the nation were smarter than its members, and made something called the Constitution. Liberals have this whacky idea that the consitution should be followed (although some of them have funny ideas about the 2nd amendment) and as such, tend to go up against the majority of Americans who seem to think the consitution is more convenient as a piece of toilet paper.
Interoperability and configurability are the huge ones. The best examples are IE and Word. If I want to reconfigure them, I can simply drag and drop the UI objects into the configuration I like. There's nice (if cluttered) options menus for all useful options (no config files needed).
Second, I can copy and paste a webpage out of IE and into Word. Can't do that with FireFox and StarOffice, no matter how nice they are.
Yeah - I never understand how people can discuss that music in any creative context. How is it even an issue whether you like Avril as a musician or not? She's a friggin instrument in the producer's inventory, only marginally more important than the bass guitar.
The whole "pop stars" reality TV phenominon made it even more transparent, and people still don't care. At least the corporate shill bands of the '90s were involved in the writing process (even if half of the harmonizing and mixing was done by producers).
All I ask is that the songs be associated with the person who made the music, not some ditzy little flake who teens want to fuck.
No, my point is that by enforcing tariffs as a strict policy on countries that have opressive labour systems, we encourage the countries to treat their labour forces better. If indecent working conditions are not good enough for Americans, then Americans should not be profiting off of such conditions. All I'm saying is that basic human rights should be expected of nations who wish to profit off of Western capitalism.
The problem with this attitude is that there are ways that first world nations should not have to compete. While cheaper cost of living is a sensible reason to outsource, loose labour laws are other reasons they outsource.
I mean, its one thing to outsource coders to India where its just like a programmer here - its another to outsource labour jobs to countries like Indonesia where they can treat child workers as abusable slave labour.
I figure there should be tariffs on outsourcing and importing - free trade is good economic sense, but not necessarily good social sense. However, it shouldn't be applied based on "they're stealing our jobs" so much as "we should not allow American companies and American products to be made by oppressed labour". Tax oppression. Simple. If they don't oppress their labour pool and they still steal our jobs, then you're right - they actually are more competative. But if the US has to start abusing its own workers in order to compete, then something's wrong.
Or would you rather go back to the days of Edison, locking the scientists in the lab until they invent something new.
Yeah, and lets not forget smoothtalkers like Reagan and Bush Jr, both of whom got a whole country feeling great about themselves while they did as much damage as they possibly could.
And of course conservatives are busy doing things - it takes a long time to figure out how to find that "on" switch.
Well, next time you go into a store for service and a company is too busy with new cusotmers to deal with you, just make sure you announce your problem loud enough for them to hear it.
I know if I were standing in a cell store and someone with a phone plan I was looking at came in and said
"Well if you won't provide me with support and your call centre is unreachable, how the hell am I supposed to use my phone? I'm paying for minutes I can't use!" I'd be taking my business elsewher.
Thus, you move to the front of the line and also rob them a little like they deserve.
Yeah - I agree. I'm a linux newb, so I figured I'd run RedHat 9 on my old P166 with 32megs of ram for a phpbb server.
Bad, bad idea, as you can imagine. Redhat 9 has these wonderful gui admin tools, like their winXP-like service manager, but I can barely start X. Hell, I had to reinstall the damn thing just to switch it over to booting into the terminal. All because Gnome is so heavy.
I would've switched over to Fluxbox or another bantamweight WM, but then I looked into it and realised that, even if these new WMs could run my tools-of-choice, I still wouldn't know what the command-line for them was, 'cause I got them through GNOME's menu. So I had to stick to GNOME, in all its crawling glory.
Anyhow, I've managed to learn how to do most stuff from the command line, but I still find myself using GNOME to start/stop services because if I try to use the command line start-stop-restart commands they always fail.
Here's the real point - is there a full desktop/wm like Gnome, but with low resource needs (better yet, that can import gnome's setup?)
The second catch is that I still don't understand the distinction between a desktop and a window manager - is a window manager just a desktop without a windows-style start menu and those little dockable things at in the taskbar? Is there even an actual, technical difference between a desktop and a WM? Or are they the same thing in the eyes of X? If they're not - do you still need the gnome desktop running to use a new WM?
Actually, because of its massive complexity, FF6 (3 in America) was frought with bugs. Still didn't prevent it from being considered the best RPG ever by most enthusiasts of the genre.
Well, one big problem is that ffa with huge numbers is freaking pointless, and team games tend to need to have very simple gameplay so that the team strategy doesn't become too complex. Compare, say, RTS games that tend to be very complex and focus on individual player-vs-player action, wher FPS games have almost entirely moved away from simple 1-on-1 or 2-on-2.
I still play old RTS games for just that reason - BattleZone 1 or Total Annihilation work fantastically with only 4 players, whereas I figure the sweet number for a team-FPS is 12-16, or 6-8 for FFA. Enough where you can have a good variety of play and fill out a decent sized map, not so much that its just shooting a bunch of anonymous people and you may as well be playing against bots.
Some people like the giant war. Me, I think it becomes very impersonal. What I'd like to see are large-scale action games that take some features from MMOs - focus on small, manageable teams, switching in and out of teams, using your team as a means for individual advancement, not a means unto itself. Its one thing to join one army fighting another onto a random server, its another to grab some friends together, make a little team, then join a full server _as a team_ and start recruiting teammates from there in an already complex struggle for dominance.
Yeah, you can see I've got a bit of a daydream there.
I was thinking about this problem - maybe we are looking at this the wrong way - we keep thinking they have a fully developed network system like Quake. In console land, this is unnecessary - you control the client. So you can have a hyper-thick client that just sends out positional control information and "I hit you" info. Some OS PC titles work like this.
With that kind of architecture, the packets would be so thin that 32 players on a cable modem wouldn't be a real problem. Yeah, once you start getting up to the hundreds you see in BF1942, then its a problem.
Alternately, a distributed approach could work - like maybe each player serves a segment of the level, and you keep the weapon ranges and sight ranges short enough so you only have to connect to 2-4 pseudoservers at a time. Thus you get a large contiguous battlefield with distributed server load. Of course, it falls to shit when everybody gets in a fight in one place.
SCTV actually (where John Candy got his start) - it was a Canadian show, but aimed for the American mass market. There was a minute or two of extra time at the end of the show because of the difference between Canadian and American timeslot lengths, so they decided to add something "uniquely Canadian" and put in Bob and Doug in the "Great White North".
1, 3, 4. I did not know that. Only developed on Gnome. I think I may be giving KDE a second look - I had discarded it as "Windows, except that it's _almost_ free software".
2. Yes. Unfortunately:
a) nobody uses it and
b) I am not personally impressed with its performance.
Maybe XAML will be the same, maybe not.
5. Python is slow. I've used it extensively, and know how the interpreter works inside and out. Maybe native-compiled python or Jython is fast, but Python is slow, compared to JIT languages like Java and C#.
Dunno - on a win box right now. Am not original poster who works Mac style, I just have a kneejerk annoyance for "blame the user" types.
I always wondered why people are using UT2004 as a benchmark. While the framework is, imho, the most advanced architecture out there right now, the actual rendering engine is just a holdover from 2k3, which wasn't the most spectacular thing either when it came out, but at least wasn't old news.
On another vein - does this mean mobo manufacturer are gonna start putting decent chipsets in their onboard sound and video finally? I'm sick of having to have two video cards in my computer - one shitty Trident or Intel onboard POS and one Radeon. Just put a freaking 9600 in there.
Umm, right. MS didn't put a gun to Hitachi's head. They just engaged in anti-competative behaviour. Which is why they got sued, and is what they were accused of. They killed a good operating system by using their market leverage regardless of the quality of the product. Which defeats the whole purpose of a capitalist system, the free market, etc. to a point where we may as well just be hardcore democratic socialists where the large incompetent organizations that produce crap and stifle competition would at least be democratically elected. Or we can have real competition.
For BeOS, Fuck microsoft up their stupid stupid asses.
Blame the user. Smooth. Windows and KDE both let the user work in the old Mac approach of "click to open menu, release to select the item". GTK doesn't. So, Mac users are wrong then? And if they don't like it?
Oh, right, this is GNOME, where customization is either picking your desktop wallpaper or recompiling from source.
THe "not installed at all" is someone elses line. Microsoft was just going to kill the OEM system, which would mean that
a) they'd have to pay end-user prices and
b) they'd have to use the end-user installation system that would be slow and thus expensive in manpower.
Besides, if it wasn't true, then why did MS settle out of court and pay $23,250,000 to Be when they sued them?
Amen. Features come second when your core framework is fucked.
IMHO, MS is finally getting something right - the framework they're designing for Longhorn is goregeous. XML GUI and class definition and all the crummy header and import crap, and C# for the procedural code. Basically, C# as a scripting engine, one almost as fast as straight C. Compare that with the sluggish Python scripts other systems use.
OS coders could do this. Just because moronic Java developers converted platform agnositicism from a nice idea into ideological zealotry doesn't mean OS coders have to. GNOME has a wonderful idea with using Java.
Think of it this way: you code all your heavy lifting code in painful C and C++. Your 3d model renderrers, your window placement, etc. Then you code all the mostly event-driven procedural crap in Java. Tons of apps do this already, but with sluggish VB or Python or Perl. Instead we do it with Java, which, compared to real compiled languages is slow, but compared to a scripting language it rocks ass.
This is what Microsoft is doing with Longhorn, and its a wonderful system. Try modding Unreal Tournament to experience a game engine built along the same paradigm (albeit without the wonderful XAML concept of Longhorn) and you'll see how much of a joy this is to code with.
Regardless of all the monstrous feature creep (like giving IE a complete copy of the Firebird feature set) of Windows, the new coding framework of Longhorn has got me twitching with anticipation. Unfortunately, it looks like its up to the OS team with the shittiest track record (GNOME) to try and make a counterpoint for this.
Linux On The Desktop will be ready just in time for Windows On The Desktop With Super Fast R.A.D. Trustable Networked Operating System.
The tools are available, Longhorn is behind schedule, its not like an OS counterpart framework with an intelligent window manager couldn't be ready long before Longhorn. But I doubt it will happen.
Hooray for the GNOME roadmap. Now all they need is a car that can drive forwards. GNOME is the only thing keeping me away from Linux, and KDE isn't standardized/cross platform enough. GTK is easily the most painful widget set, both graphically and programmatically, that I have ever used.
Here in Canada we have "credit unions" which are the same as small local banks for all intents and purposes. I used one for a while until I started moving around too much and needed a bank where I could always find local branches.