Hmm. Is a geek with good communications skills still a geek?
Moot point. After seeing further evidence, I'm forced to admit that I was wrong. Drepper is your classic online asshole. His problem is not the way he communicates his ideas. His problem is a total indifference to ideas that conflict with his.
The entire idea behind "english" based languages is that they'd supposedly be simple to teach to non-engineers.
Well, duh. That's not the issue. The question you need to ask is whether the complication and ambiguity of English can be translated in this way.
COBOL code isn't English. It's just code that happens to use English words in its syntax. Pretending that it's English actually makes it harder for non-engineers to understand what's going on.
Calling her an Ensign was a severe slap in the face of her reputation.
I think I speak for all of American when I say, Huh?
I know she didn't invent COBOL. She did invent many its stupider design goals.
And dude, she screwed up. Never mind that that she was a "pioneer". Other people working during the same period managed to do better. By the time she made this decision to write a parser for English, there were plenty of people who could have told her it was a bad idea.
I just wrote this post defending Drepper, but now I take it all back. It's perfectly reasonable to expect a maintainer to explain his actions. Responding with "you don't write my paycheck" makes him an asshole, pure and simple.
It occurs to me that Redhat does pay Drepper's salary. I assume that he gets to maintain glibc because they're donating his time? I'm sure they know, even if he doesn't, that donating resources to an open source project does not give them ownership of said project. If I were one of these frustrated developers who's tired of Drepper's BS, I'd find out how his boss is and have a word.
Drepper does come across as an asshole totally antagonistic to ARM and embedded development. But after a little googling, I'm convinced his thinking is a little more complicated than that. Basically, he seems to think that glibc is poorly suited to embedded applications, and wishes that ARM developers would develop their own specialized libcs.. He's also concerned that in GCC development, the needs of some platforms that happen to have powerful backers (such as AIX) get more priority than their mindshare deserves.
He's got some good points. He does express them in a way that's unnecessarily offensive and combative. But that doesn't make him an asshole. That makes him a typical geek!
You're talking ancient history, and Borland tools that have been gone since the mid 90s. I'm talking Delphi and its siblings. These are great pieces of software, which have inspired a fanatical following. But that's all they've ever inspired. They're used only when the developers outstubborn the managers that want something more standard. You may thinks that's stupid, but it's the way things have been since they were first introduced.
I guess I follow. But I think I have the same problem with your "eat your own dogfood" argument as I do with the analogy itself. Just as people don't really enjoy eating dogfood, I don't think a lot of programmers enjoy writing compilers in COBOL!
I guess I can see your use case. But no brainer? It's not that much more difficult to keep your files on a laptop and transfer them to the Kindle as needed. And laptops don't tend to get lost under couch cushions, or at least not as often as SD cards.
Algol was invented during that time frame. It had problems of its own, but it was the first step towards modern block-structured languages like Pascal and C. COBOL was a big step in the wrong direction. I mean, a compiler for "English"? Didn't it occur to Ensign Hopper that there's a reason mathematicians don't work in plain language?
I was on the Unix side, so my involvement with workstations was limited to being an end user. But I did have an nGen (which Burroughs OEMed as the B20 series) on my desk. I'll always be sorry that there was no place for the thing once lack of total IBM compatibility became a deal-breaker. There were so many things that were better thought out than other systems. Like those external, passively-cooled power supplies. And a keyboard where they actually thought through serious use cases, instead of just kludging onto the original teletype keyboard, as most keyboards still do.
I knew about the development tools being moved into CodeGear, but at the time it happened, Borland's plans to find a buyer seemed like wishful thinking. Much later, they finally did manage to sell CodeGear to Embarcadero. I missed the news when it happened, unsurprisingly.
Without the development tools, the Borland brand doesn't really mean a lot. It was kind of dumb of the company to to ditch them. (Yeah, I know, Borland has never been known for its marketing brilliance.) I doubt that MicroFocus will continue to use it. Any bets that they'll sell it to Embarcadero?
Books with dense graphics are not the sort of thing you'd read on a monochrome display. And what's this nonsense about markup? It doesn't take a lot of data to indicate where text styles change.
Consider the hassle of carrying around your entire library on SD cards. If you really want that much storage on an ebook reader (which I don't believe), support for thumb drives would be more to the point.
Not all MP3 player users insist on carrying around their entire library. I think most don't. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and even so my old 1GB MP3 player holds several weeks worth of listening.
If I wanted to carry around more than a couple of gigabytes of library, I doubt that I'd want to do it on a device like this. That much data has to be organized somehow, and that's be a pain to do on a device that's as deliberately simple as this one. This is a device for casual reading; the portable Library of Congress hasn't reached its financial sweet spot yet.
COBOL may not have much mindshare among slashdotters, but there's a lot of COBOL code out there. Most of those boring apps that do nothing but apply simple business logic, like the one that cuts your paycheck, are written in COBOL. Remember the Y2K crisis? That was mostly about COBOL apps.
Which isn't a defense for the continued existence of COBOL. I only disagree with your statement that it should've died off in the 80s because I think it never should have been invented, with its stupid pseudo-English syntax. But like Fortran and RPG, it's too well established to be disposed of.
Assuming that Borland still does IDEs and compilers (weren't they trying to spin off that business?) this is a really good fit. Borland's tools are really kewl, but they've never gained serious mindshare, and survive only because of a lot of diehard users. Not, strictly speaking, legacy tools, but really the same kind of marketplace.
Incidentally, I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which back in the early 80s sold a MicroFocus COBOL compiler for its 68010 UNIX boxes. This compiler was, weirdly enough, written in COBOL. Somebody once explained to me why this made sense, but I've forgotten the explanation.
Because every little bit of hardware you add to a device raises the price. Consumer devices are sold on paper-thin margins, so you aim on the likely use case. You don't add features, however cheap, that most of your users will never need.
The exception to this is legacy features, like those infrared ports you see on so many laptops. But this is a totally new application — there's no history to impose legacy features.
Here, network connectivity is a book delivery mechanism that's going to be off most of the time. You can use it for web browsing, but really this isn't a great web appliance even with a fast connection. So why bother with the weight, cost, and power drain of WiFi?
Don't really see the point of an SD card. Sneakernet? Use USB. Extra storage? Internal is over 3 GB; how many books do you need to carry around with you?
By "table of contents feature" I assume you mean the bookmark pane? Kind of hard to support when there's no mouse or touch screen. I suppose it's doable, but you'd complicate the user interface quite a bit. You might consider that a reasonable tradeoff, but this is not a geek device.
This is not an "early adopter" price. It's a luxury item, and priced accordingly. Notice that the 6-inch Kindle has done quite well at 75% of this price. Both will be out of the price range of a lot of people. But somebody who travels a lot can afford to drop this much on a device, and would probably find it worth it to have a ebook reader that goes days without recharging. If I fit that kind of profile, I'd consider the price more than reasonable.
And where, specifically does he say it's ok to buy access to someone else's SMTP server when said server uses non-Free software?
You might be able to find a provider who will guarantee that it's SMTP server is "free". (Though I don't know of a single provider that does this.) But how on earth do you guarantee that every server your email passes through is "free"?
And for what it's worth I owe you no explanation; I'm just trying to do my bit to kurb ignorant ranting by presenting the facts.
If you feel no obligation to listen to my arguments, why should I feel any obligation to listen to yours?
Oh I forgot, you don't have arguments, you have "facts". Grow up.
If NT were just an alternative way to run 16-bit Windows applications, then you'd have a point. But NT runs a lot of applications that won't run on Windows 98.
You're completely missing the point about tax rates. Whatever the figures and technicalities, the top tax bracket in the U.S. is a lot less than 52%. Perhaps the point would be more obvious if you lived in the U.S., where the pundits the writer mentions make a whipping boy of European "socialism", which they basically use as a code word for the high taxes (real and imagined) that rich Europeans pay.
Basically the guy is saying that an American who looks at the Dutch tax system is going to jump to the common misunderstanding that it's a soak-the-rich scheme. And he's right, we would.
As for vacation money, the fact that it's effectively part of your salary is kind of beside the point. In the U.S. (and everywhere except the Netherlands, if I'm not mistaken) there's no government mandate to make sure people have money for a proper vacation. You're expected to save or borrow your vacation money on your own; if you can't or don't, you're out of luck. Whereas in the Netherlands there seems to be an assumption that everybody, even people who are improvident or don't work, deserves a chance to get away for a short while. That's a very unusual and interesting point of view.
Oh jeez. Not everything MS does is part of some complex evil plan. Bill Gates may be dishonest and unprincipled, but he's no Professor Moriarity. He's not even Melvin Dummar. Most of his major successes come from blind luck. His domination of the desktop OS market especially, since he was doing his best to stay out of that market!
Anyway, what do licensing issues have to do with anything? MS may have written most of the code in OS/2, but I don't recall them using that fact to prevent IBM from selling it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Is a geek with good communications skills still a geek?
Moot point. After seeing further evidence, I'm forced to admit that I was wrong. Drepper is your classic online asshole. His problem is not the way he communicates his ideas. His problem is a total indifference to ideas that conflict with his.
The entire idea behind "english" based languages is that they'd supposedly be simple to teach to non-engineers.
Well, duh. That's not the issue. The question you need to ask is whether the complication and ambiguity of English can be translated in this way.
COBOL code isn't English. It's just code that happens to use English words in its syntax. Pretending that it's English actually makes it harder for non-engineers to understand what's going on.
Calling her an Ensign was a severe slap in the face of her reputation.
I think I speak for all of American when I say, Huh?
I know she didn't invent COBOL. She did invent many its stupider design goals.
And dude, she screwed up. Never mind that that she was a "pioneer". Other people working during the same period managed to do better. By the time she made this decision to write a parser for English, there were plenty of people who could have told her it was a bad idea.
I just wrote this post defending Drepper, but now I take it all back. It's perfectly reasonable to expect a maintainer to explain his actions. Responding with "you don't write my paycheck" makes him an asshole, pure and simple.
It occurs to me that Redhat does pay Drepper's salary. I assume that he gets to maintain glibc because they're donating his time? I'm sure they know, even if he doesn't, that donating resources to an open source project does not give them ownership of said project. If I were one of these frustrated developers who's tired of Drepper's BS, I'd find out how his boss is and have a word.
Drepper does come across as an asshole totally antagonistic to ARM and embedded development. But after a little googling, I'm convinced his thinking is a little more complicated than that. Basically, he seems to think that glibc is poorly suited to embedded applications, and wishes that ARM developers would develop their own specialized libcs.. He's also concerned that in GCC development, the needs of some platforms that happen to have powerful backers (such as AIX) get more priority than their mindshare deserves.
He's got some good points. He does express them in a way that's unnecessarily offensive and combative. But that doesn't make him an asshole. That makes him a typical geek!
You're talking ancient history, and Borland tools that have been gone since the mid 90s. I'm talking Delphi and its siblings. These are great pieces of software, which have inspired a fanatical following. But that's all they've ever inspired. They're used only when the developers outstubborn the managers that want something more standard. You may thinks that's stupid, but it's the way things have been since they were first introduced.
I guess I follow. But I think I have the same problem with your "eat your own dogfood" argument as I do with the analogy itself. Just as people don't really enjoy eating dogfood, I don't think a lot of programmers enjoy writing compilers in COBOL!
I guess I can see your use case. But no brainer? It's not that much more difficult to keep your files on a laptop and transfer them to the Kindle as needed. And laptops don't tend to get lost under couch cushions, or at least not as often as SD cards.
Troll? What idiot did I offend this time? And how? Is somebody a Grace Hopper fanboy? If so, you really need to get a life!
I'd love to see the Delphi and its sibling IDEs become major players. But the window of opportunity for that happening closed well over a decade ago.
Algol was invented during that time frame. It had problems of its own, but it was the first step towards modern block-structured languages like Pascal and C. COBOL was a big step in the wrong direction. I mean, a compiler for "English"? Didn't it occur to Ensign Hopper that there's a reason mathematicians don't work in plain language?
I was on the Unix side, so my involvement with workstations was limited to being an end user. But I did have an nGen (which Burroughs OEMed as the B20 series) on my desk. I'll always be sorry that there was no place for the thing once lack of total IBM compatibility became a deal-breaker. There were so many things that were better thought out than other systems. Like those external, passively-cooled power supplies. And a keyboard where they actually thought through serious use cases, instead of just kludging onto the original teletype keyboard, as most keyboards still do.
I knew about the development tools being moved into CodeGear, but at the time it happened, Borland's plans to find a buyer seemed like wishful thinking. Much later, they finally did manage to sell CodeGear to Embarcadero. I missed the news when it happened, unsurprisingly.
Without the development tools, the Borland brand doesn't really mean a lot. It was kind of dumb of the company to to ditch them. (Yeah, I know, Borland has never been known for its marketing brilliance.) I doubt that MicroFocus will continue to use it. Any bets that they'll sell it to Embarcadero?
Go FORTRAN yourself, you FrameMaker.
OK, I agree, that's uncool.
Books with dense graphics are not the sort of thing you'd read on a monochrome display. And what's this nonsense about markup? It doesn't take a lot of data to indicate where text styles change.
Consider the hassle of carrying around your entire library on SD cards. If you really want that much storage on an ebook reader (which I don't believe), support for thumb drives would be more to the point.
Not all MP3 player users insist on carrying around their entire library. I think most don't. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and even so my old 1GB MP3 player holds several weeks worth of listening.
If I wanted to carry around more than a couple of gigabytes of library, I doubt that I'd want to do it on a device like this. That much data has to be organized somehow, and that's be a pain to do on a device that's as deliberately simple as this one. This is a device for casual reading; the portable Library of Congress hasn't reached its financial sweet spot yet.
Dude, try actually reading that sentence you quoted.
COBOL may not have much mindshare among slashdotters, but there's a lot of COBOL code out there. Most of those boring apps that do nothing but apply simple business logic, like the one that cuts your paycheck, are written in COBOL. Remember the Y2K crisis? That was mostly about COBOL apps.
Which isn't a defense for the continued existence of COBOL. I only disagree with your statement that it should've died off in the 80s because I think it never should have been invented, with its stupid pseudo-English syntax. But like Fortran and RPG, it's too well established to be disposed of.
Assuming that Borland still does IDEs and compilers (weren't they trying to spin off that business?) this is a really good fit. Borland's tools are really kewl, but they've never gained serious mindshare, and survive only because of a lot of diehard users. Not, strictly speaking, legacy tools, but really the same kind of marketplace.
Incidentally, I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which back in the early 80s sold a MicroFocus COBOL compiler for its 68010 UNIX boxes. This compiler was, weirdly enough, written in COBOL. Somebody once explained to me why this made sense, but I've forgotten the explanation.
Because every little bit of hardware you add to a device raises the price. Consumer devices are sold on paper-thin margins, so you aim on the likely use case. You don't add features, however cheap, that most of your users will never need.
The exception to this is legacy features, like those infrared ports you see on so many laptops. But this is a totally new application — there's no history to impose legacy features.
Disagree with your criticisms.
Here, network connectivity is a book delivery mechanism that's going to be off most of the time. You can use it for web browsing, but really this isn't a great web appliance even with a fast connection. So why bother with the weight, cost, and power drain of WiFi?
Don't really see the point of an SD card. Sneakernet? Use USB. Extra storage? Internal is over 3 GB; how many books do you need to carry around with you?
By "table of contents feature" I assume you mean the bookmark pane? Kind of hard to support when there's no mouse or touch screen. I suppose it's doable, but you'd complicate the user interface quite a bit. You might consider that a reasonable tradeoff, but this is not a geek device.
This is not an "early adopter" price. It's a luxury item, and priced accordingly. Notice that the 6-inch Kindle has done quite well at 75% of this price. Both will be out of the price range of a lot of people. But somebody who travels a lot can afford to drop this much on a device, and would probably find it worth it to have a ebook reader that goes days without recharging. If I fit that kind of profile, I'd consider the price more than reasonable.
And where, specifically does he say it's ok to buy access to someone else's SMTP server when said server uses non-Free software?
You might be able to find a provider who will guarantee that it's SMTP server is "free". (Though I don't know of a single provider that does this.) But how on earth do you guarantee that every server your email passes through is "free"?
And for what it's worth I owe you no explanation; I'm just trying to do my bit to kurb ignorant ranting by presenting the facts.
If you feel no obligation to listen to my arguments, why should I feel any obligation to listen to yours?
Oh I forgot, you don't have arguments, you have "facts". Grow up.
If NT were just an alternative way to run 16-bit Windows applications, then you'd have a point. But NT runs a lot of applications that won't run on Windows 98.
You're completely missing the point about tax rates. Whatever the figures and technicalities, the top tax bracket in the U.S. is a lot less than 52%. Perhaps the point would be more obvious if you lived in the U.S., where the pundits the writer mentions make a whipping boy of European "socialism", which they basically use as a code word for the high taxes (real and imagined) that rich Europeans pay.
Basically the guy is saying that an American who looks at the Dutch tax system is going to jump to the common misunderstanding that it's a soak-the-rich scheme. And he's right, we would.
As for vacation money, the fact that it's effectively part of your salary is kind of beside the point. In the U.S. (and everywhere except the Netherlands, if I'm not mistaken) there's no government mandate to make sure people have money for a proper vacation. You're expected to save or borrow your vacation money on your own; if you can't or don't, you're out of luck. Whereas in the Netherlands there seems to be an assumption that everybody, even people who are improvident or don't work, deserves a chance to get away for a short while. That's a very unusual and interesting point of view.
Oh jeez. Not everything MS does is part of some complex evil plan. Bill Gates may be dishonest and unprincipled, but he's no Professor Moriarity. He's not even Melvin Dummar. Most of his major successes come from blind luck. His domination of the desktop OS market especially, since he was doing his best to stay out of that market!
Anyway, what do licensing issues have to do with anything? MS may have written most of the code in OS/2, but I don't recall them using that fact to prevent IBM from selling it.
You act as if running that one missing Windows app under WINE is the equivalent of just using Linux as an app-launcher for Windows apps.
Oh please. I'm saying the exact opposite. I'd run through my argument agains, but with your reading skills, there's not really any point.
Well, since you put it that way, I'm all for it! What's freedom of speech against the sheer trauma of being forced to view the super-rectum?!