I suspect that Linux will not see another cool browser for years to come, while windows IE will evolve many times over and over in the next two years. W2K is an example of a brand new IE! Erm, how many things can you add to a Web browser? Personally, I think that the ideal Web browser would be released as an embeddable HTML-rendering widget so silly people who think that you need a mailreader and a video player in your Web browser can attach those and the rest of us can have a Web browser that uses standard UNIX conventions (like using the local mail transport and the user's mail program)
Oh, and it would have to be free software and un-crufty, so IE doesn't count:-)
But lynx is good enough for everything anyway, dunno why I need a 'better' browser:-)
Anyway, I said one year ago that mozilla.org will not bring anything to market in a reasonable time frame and I was right then and I?m still right about that.
Are you going to give references or just claim precognitive abilities? This also depends on your definition of a 'reasonable time frame'. Linux and NT took around five years to get to a useful state, and at Microsoft you folks consider browsers to be operating systems so why not give Mozilla a little more time?:-)
It took MS less than 6 months to develop IE and less than 3 months to bring out IE 5.0.
Oh, my. Can I have their time machine?:-)
Seriously, IE was useless for the first few revisions. Mozilla is a lot farther along than IE was at the same point, I suspect.
So if Open Source development of web browsers is better, then why is there not a fully functional web browser that supports all the possible web content that IE supports?
"all the possible web content" can be a pretty slippery phrase. Of course, there aren't really any good free web browsers at the moment.
Hmmm maybe lack of manpower, no incentive ($$$)
Well, right now Mozilla is, as far as I know, pretty much a Netscape project funded by Netscape and manned by Netscape developers. Probably the reason is that the design is too monolithic and un-Unixy to attract outside developers. But so far all the programmers are being paid and I believe there are a lot of them.
Even were it like most free software projects, that doesn't necessarily mean it would automatically be 'better' than other browsers, but it would probably acheive parity. The only person I know of who's spouting that "Free Software is always technically better" nonsense is ESR. (and maybe his disciples, why is it that the disciples are always more annoying than the master..?)
I suspect that the real reason is that most free software programmers aren't particularly interested in web browsers, especially ones designed the way the Netscape browsers are. I wouldn't mind working on one, but I don't see it as being a particularly imperative issue. (maybe if I could be convinced that it WASN'T going to go the 500-zillion-extra-features-and-tie-ins route, that those would be left to third parties if they really had to be made. Scheme extensibility, like in the Gimp:-) )
But then, why am I wasting my time replying to such an obvious troll..?
What I have a problem with is people who feel that just because a stand is different from theirs; it is automatically wrong.
Sometimes this is the essence of a position; eg, someone who believes that it is wrong to kill is likely to consider someone who allows killing in self-defense to be wrong. Of course I suppose that this doesn't count as a 'non-injurious idea':-)
I've noticed though that a large proportion (I suppose maybe not a majority) of people denouncing the "zealots" and the "extremists" on any particular issue are the ones who have a stand which can be followed by going along with the status quo. This really bothers me -- you just happened to get in the way of a pet peeve. Hope it didn't bite too badly:-)
If you have 3 or 4 'experts' you're guaranteed to have an average of about 3 to 4 different overall playing strategies and 6 to 8 different ideas about how to play the next move. Especially in the opening, but at other times as well. And because a style of play is so habitual and ingrained, it's really really hard to play along with someone else's ideas -- if I were watching a slow positional game I'd keep trying to point out tactical disruptions that could be made. 3 or 4 'experts' (hopefully really GMs) could maybe work, since you'd have a small enough field of ideas that you could agree on one theme consistently. Problem is, you'll probably have more than that, not to mention the lesser players who want to chip in (with plausible ideas probably)
The reason is that decisions in a chess game depend very much on one's own personal inclinations. Some people like elegant, slow games in which the object is to win by playing more thematic moves than the other player. Other people like to play lines which lead to muddled, knife-edge tactical positions in which it's unclear who will win. And of course the very best players will do both at once:-) But seriously, they'll have problems with conflicting styles of play; I doubt they'll even make it out of the opening [the beginning of the game for non-chess-players] without getting into trouble -- in fact the opening is the worst time since some people can be almost as religious about their decision of 'opening lines' (canned moves to start a game with) as computer users are about operating systems. [dunno if the best players are..] Imagine a FreeBSD user, a Linux user, and a Mac user working together to build a system from scratch, hardware and software, and you might begin to get the idea here:-)
A second problem is that good chess play requires a decision about goals and a commitment to them. This could be good of course -- if everyone decides on a goal together they can all agree on how to pursue it. However (see point 1) this is unlikely to happen -- if half the people decide they want to launch an all-out attack while the other half want to play a more strategic game, you could end up with a situation where the World is lurching back and forth between plans. And just two opinions about what should be done is unlikely -- you're probably always going to have at least 3 and at points where there are important decisions to be made you could have as many as 10 or 20 plausible moves. (and be assured that Kasparov will force his opponents to make as many decisions as possible -- even in normal chess this is good play..more decisions means more ways to screw up..but when your opponent is already not single-minded it is an even stronger idea)
I agree that Borland's IDEs (and RHIDE) are pretty good. You could look at RHIDE, or I can give you some quick advice.:-) The first thing to remember about Linux programming is that it takes time to become extremely proficient in it. HOWEVER, what this means is 'it takes time to learn to do bizarre regular-expression replacements in your programs that take every invocation of the function foo(int,void *) and change it to the invocation foo(int, bar(int)) where bar returns a void *' Generally you can learn how to get stuff done pretty quickly. In other words, don't panic if you don't learn all 100,000 keybindings of Emacs right away:-). [i'truth, I only know 20 or so, tops, and probably less..same for vi..and I'm an inveterate user of these things] Oh, and I recommend picking up the book _Beginning Linux Programming_. It's a useful collection of information on programming in Linux, from tools to APIs. Skip the chapter on Tcl/Tk though, that language must die:-)
Ok. So. Here are some thoughts about programming with Linux for an IDE:
-> Info and man are your friends. The info documentation is hard to use with the default viewer though, check out the "pinfo" program which makes info look like Lynx. A lot of documentation is in HTML these days to, you can use Lynx (my preference because of the low memory footprint) or another browser for it of course. Unfortunately, much software has little API documentation (eg, GTK+ and Gnome). If you do much programming for these you'll want to scan the headers a lot...luckily, the functions are usually well-named and commented (not that it makes up for a missing manual) -> Learn autoconf and automake at some point. You should probably write at least one Makefile by hand first (to know how much pain you're saving yourself:-) ) and learn shell scripting. -> Learn shell scripting. -> Find an editor you like. I personally recommend XEmacs and vim: I use XEmacs for 'real' programming and vim when I can't wait 30 seconds for my editor to start:-) Emacs' tab-indent feature, in particular, is light-years ahead of any IDE I've used. Basically, typing 'tab' indents a line correctly for wherever you are. (well, correctly for me..Emacs' idea of indentation coincides with mine quite well. I've heard you can customize it but never bothered) The keybindings are confusing at first, though, especially since some of them aren't necessary anymore (eg, C-something is the same as PgUp) There's a survival guide somewhere.
But basically, the rule is to learn the minimum amount to do a given task, at least at first, otherwise you'll be overwhelmed. So do this: * learn how to use an editor for basic operations (pretty simple unless you're trying vi:-) ) * learn how to use a compiler (shouldn't be too hard: 'gcc -o foo.o -c foo.c' to make an object file, 'gcc -o foo foo.o bar.o -llib' to link) * learn how to write Makefiles
Once you've done that you can start programming. Intermediate to advanced topics:-) are (in order of importance): * shell scripting (not too hard) and the other UNIX tools -- sed, grep, etc. These go together -- one is pretty useless without the other. * autoconf/automake (bliss!:-) ) * libtool (learned this this morning. Not bad if you've done everything else before)
I've noticed that generally UNIX users mean something very different from Windows users when they say "integration". Take mail as an example.
Windows: You have one mail program. Well, probably one. Unless someone else wants to use a different program on the computer. But probably one. It does everything. It receives email, stores it on the system, and sends it via SMTP..and it works most of the time. If you've gotten a really good one, it might even deliver mail in the background and do odd things like Kerberos. If you ever want to switch to another mail client, kiss your messages goodbye unless you convert them to the new format and location; the same goes for any POP settings, mailing list filters, and so on.
This is an 'integrated' program; all functions are in one place.
UNIX: The mail system comes in pieces. There is a mail delivery program, which takes mail and sticks it somewhere, a mail getting program, which speaks POP and all its variants, a mail client which reads one of a few mailbox formats (mbox and mh), a mail editor, and a mail transfer program. [some clients pick up, eg, the editor, but they usually let you use a different one] other mail-processing utilities may be installed as well. When you receive a message it is either sent directly to the delivery program via SMTP or gotten by fetchmail and then sent to the delivery program. The delivery program then either passes it to another mail-handler (procmail for example) or else delivers it directly to a mailbox. All (or most) mail clients read and write the mbox format, so any one can be used to access the messages. This means that changing mail clients does not require you to give up your history of correspondence, and since the mail client doesn't even handle POP and so on those naturally are also preserved. When you send mail, the mail client passes it to the mail-delivery software, which spools it for immediate or deferred delivery. The mail client need not be running while the mail is being delivered. Each of these programs generally is highly specialized and most users will only touch from five to ten percent of the features (not, please note, the same 5-10%) This is an integrated system: it has many pieces which work closely together to produce a finished result.
Ok. Back to complexity.:-) It would seem at first glance that the second system is more complex. This is not true, or at least not in the way you implied -- that it requires lots of 'getting your hands dirty'. There is more obvious complexity in the second system, but it is carefully contained. Each program is internally complex, but communicates with the others through (relatively) simple and well-defined interfaces. The first program looks simpler because there's only one obvious thing to consider, but it is more difficult to design and less flexible (because one group probably wrote the whole bloody thing instead of multiple independent groups concentrating on discrete, small bits of code and because you can easily isolate each piece of the system..this works both conceptually -- I can understand how fetchmail works without caring about how the POP server or the local mail delivery agent work -- and from the point of view of actually doing things: any piece can be replaced with a better one or reconfigured in bizarre ways if necessary)
Hmm. I had a point here but I ate supper in the middle and lost my train of thought.:-) But basically, my experience is that things people think are 'simpler' (like designing everything in one piece, or writing quick-and-dirty routines) generally turn out to be more complex (in the bad sense) in the long run. Witness the amount of time and effort spent designing defragmenters, disk checkers, virus scanners, memory protection libraries, etc for DOS [aka "Quick and Dirty Operating System"]. But as they say in these parts..YMMV.
-GUI design: Look, creating dialogs is not going to be an intellectually stimulating programming task. So do it with a visual editor in 5 minutes, rather than tweaking around manually for hours. Then automatically generate the message handlers for the dialog and get started with real programming.
Unfortunately, I generally include at least some element of programmatically generated stuff in my GUIs, and the stuff that I do this way generally is also the stuff that a visual editor would be useful for. For example, a preferences dialog in which items are registered by scripts that get run on startup. (think Emacs' Customize menu and you get the idea..) This doesn't map well into 'visual' design, unless you can show me a visual program that can predict every funky combination of widgets the user will come up with.:-) Besides..programming GUIs by hand was a nightmare in Windows but with a sane toolkit (GTK+ and Qt come to mind) I can make a good-looking dialog in a few minutes. That said, I wouldn't be averse to using something like Glade, it's just not worth the trouble. But even without a 'visual' editor, the 'GUI building' is so insignificant a proportion of the time spent on the program that it doesn't matter which I do. (it's not that I don't put thought into my GUIs, it's just that almost everything happens either in the backend or 'behind the scenes' in the GUI -- that is, in stuff that doesn't have anything to do with what widget goes where. Widget placement is the most visible part of an interface but the most trivial thing to do programmatically)
"A play about a man being crushed by a falling piano teaches us nothing, except that one ought not to walk under falling pianos." -- Arthur Miller
Tragedies do not have *happy* endings, in the sense that everyone gets together and has a barbeque on the back porch, but they have *good* endings. Example: in the Crucible, John Proctor finally overcomes his fear and confronts the witch hunters with the truth, refusing to back down or give a false confession even at the cost of his own life. It is intimated at the end of the film that his action may have prevented more innocent victims from being the target of the mob -- that the number of people who refused to 'confess' was too great to ignore. In another example -- in Hamlet, although the entire royal family dies, Hamlet does (finally!) kill his uncle and at the end a new era of (presumably) peace and prosperity is ushered in by Prince Fortinbras, lately arrived from Norway. Had Lucas intended it from the beginning, Vader could be an excellent tragic hero, although maybe not in the 'classical' sense -- but someone who has destroyed everything he once fought for seems pretty tragic to me. ROTJ would probably have to be darker but the rest would work fairly well. This could still be pulled off if Lucas avoids the urge to make the next two movies into action/comedy films and put dancing Ewoks (or Jar-Jars:-) ) all over them. One or two is accetable.:-)
* Anakin Skywalker is such a good little boy, without the slightest hint of a mean streak that might one day develop into a personality like Darth Vader's. Wouldn't it have been far more intriguing if his miraculous victories had been undeserved, his awesome proto-Jedi powers something of a fraud? Instead of having the simpleton bad guy in the pod race sabotage Anakin's pod, why not reverse the roles, and have Anakin cheat his way to success? Especially if Anakin's sabotage inadvertantly results in the bad guy's death - and the precocious little hero shows no remorse... Likewise, when Anakin just happens to make the right moves to blow up the space station in the final battle, wouldn't it have been far more satisfying if R2D2 had been silently pulling the space fighter's strings all along? And then the loyal droid lets Anakin disingenously take credit for the kill...
I thought that Anakin's flaw seemed to be less of a mean streak than a tendency to ignore people who weren't exciting or talented enough for him. Witness how he abandons C3PO -- "Bye, 3PO, sorry I couldn't finish you..guess you'll have to be left half-built.." -- right after 3PO finishes thanking him for his existence at that! ("You are my creator..") I thought this was actually one of the few good points of the movie:-)
* Darth Maul is obviously a pawn who's only genuine purpose is to take out Qui Gon. Instead of simply having Obi Wan dispatch Darth Maul in the end, Lucas could have deepened his plot by having Palpatine/Darth Sidious double-cross him. Here's the rationale: Palpatine forsees Anakin's destiny to become his apprentice and intuits Obi Wan's future role as Anakin's first mentor in the ways of the force. Palpatine intervenes at the critical moment as Darth Maul is about to nail Obi Wan, distracting the arrogant Sithling with his Phantom Projection Power, giving Obi Wan an opening to slice the bastard in half. George, if you need help, I'm available...
That's pretty good, but I have an even better suggestion: you remember that silly red time-lock thing? My first thought upon seeing it was that Qui Gon had driven Darth Maul into some sort of trap -- a stasis field or a radiation cooker or something -- and followed him to make sure it took. (thus the medatative pose, he was guarding the exit) I personally think this would have been much more Jedi-like, as well as an original plot twist relative to the other movies (the way it happened was, as this article points out, rather repetitive -- I like parallelisms but this wasn't the time for it)
Another suggestion -- if Lucas ever does a remake he should double the length. At least. The article scoffs at the idea of a sci-fi movie based on tariffs and politics, but I think this could have been an excellent way to do things. My biggest complaint, in fact, is that the Senate scenes and the other expansion of the backstory are too limited. (in fact, the whole movie feels rushed, but this is the worst offender) One of the best points of the first Star Wars movies was that there was always a well-developed backstory lurking behind the scenes, even if you only got to see bits and pieces of it ("The Emperor has dissolved the Senate...") Start the movie with the negotiations between the Federation and the Naboo, the opening of deliberations in the Senate, and the decision to send two Jedi to mediate the conflict.
Besides that, the usual suspects -- cut the silly accidental victories, trim Jar Jar, add some actual character development (and plot development but I just spent a paragraph talking about that:-) ) and the movie would be worthy of the Star Wars name.
Daniel [still grumpy about Lucas' screwing up of a potentially great story]
I'm going to try to keep my head here but I just spent all day trying to write programs for Win32 and MacOS so I may come off a little harsher than intended...:-)
i.There's a lot of baggage on the developer who wants to develop cool apps for the linux desktop, too. Even with GTK or QT, you're still writing to a wrapper to a library to a library to a driver, just to get a reasonably usable API.
I think that you're missing the point somewhere here, which is that this is a Good Thing. Let me repeat that: *THIS IS A GOOD THING*. [ in fact, this is how Win32 works as well..although much less elegantly.. ]
Here is the setup: X -- this is a display server. It has a single purpose for existance: accept requests to draw stuff and carry them out. The network-socket method of performing drawing operations allows a very flexible system. Often one sign (IMO) of a good design is that stuff that takes lots of hacking and kludging to get working in other systems simply arises as a natural offshoot of the way a given system works. For example, X's network transparency -- you can fake it in Win32 and MacOS with third-party software; X requires no modifications or special-casing.
Xlib: A simple (AFAIK) wrapper library which makes X protocol calls nicer by wrapping them in convenience functions. It has no other purpose.
Window Manager: One of the most villified aspects of the whole system because there are so many of them. A window manager (follow closely here) manages windows. It draws cute little frames around them, lets them be moved and resized, etc. This is generally its entire function. This may be accomplished with direct Xlib calls or not depending on the preferences of the window manager's author. Note that these are generally hairy beasts that people looking for an easy API probably want to avoid anyway:-)
Widget Set (Qt, GTK+, etc): These use Xlib to draw useful things on the screen, such as buttons, dialog boxes, etc. Most programmers will use these, and they generally (except for monstrosities like XForms) have a nice simple API. The underlying layers can be ignored for most purposes. Issues like the fact that GDK is just an Xlib wrapper aren't necessary for new programmers to immediately grok as long as they can understand how to use GDK. [ the reason for wrapping Xlib again is to provide greater platform independence ]
So, in sum: X server - displays stuff Xlib - lets programs talk to X server Window Manager - manages windows Widget set - draws cute buttons, scrollbars, etc.
The thing that marks this as UNIX is not any feature of the complexity of the interfaces -- they vary by interface -- nor is it a silly amount of layering -- Win32 does this..it has a window manager (hidden from the programmer) and the common controls are essentially a widget set which uses Win32 drawing calls (Xlib) to do stuff -- but this:
** EACH FUNDAMENTAL SET OF OPERATIONS IS CONCEPTUALLY AND PROGRAMMATICALLY SEPARATED FROM (although not independent of) THE OTHERS. ***
If you have the kind of godawful mess that the Win32 API makes, where all levels of functionality are mixed together in the same place, it ain't UNIX. If you have programs that try to do 500 different things poorly (think IDEs or mail readers that know about SMTP and POP) you're using programs which are not UNIXey. If the you're outside the aegis of UNIX.
Why is this good? Programs that do a single thing well are simpler, easier to write and debug, and easier to use in unanticipated circumstances.
I'm personally interested in the Hurd; it looks like they may be going to out-UNIX UNIX and probably eliminate the worst cruft at the same time. Remember what I said about features arising naturally from a design? In the Hurd, several features that people have been trying to hack into Linux 'just happen', the most notable examples being userfs-type stuff and [I believe] per-process mounts. This is a Good Sign, although the Hurd is currently about five or ten years from being ready for general consumption:-)
Last I looked, the Linux kernel didn't support the full PnP spec. It supported it just enough to turn the cards on at a specified configuration and needed manual tweaking if you changed things. Unless 2.2 has changed pretty radically in the last week or so I am assuming it is the same.
This is true, but this being Linux, we don't put everything and the kitchen sink into the kernel. Userland tools exist to configure PnP fairly well. It's certainly not as 'user-friendly' as Windows (or it wasn't when I created my configuration last year; an auto-configuration option has appeared in the program since then which I haven't bothered trying) but it works exceedingly well.
Comparing "in the box Linux" with "in the box NT" is not apples to apples. Linux distros tend to include things made by many different people and companies across the world, whereas NT ships with only MS products. If you start to include the 3rd party utilities and drivers available for NT (most of them free or quite low in price) then things start looking a little different. FAT32 drivers for NT are available at www.sysinternals.com, EXT2 drivers at www.cyco.nl/~andreys/ext2fsnt and so on - it really is just a matter of looking.
Hmm, ok. I haven't needed to mount ext2 drives from any Windows flavour for a while now so my information could be out of date:-P
I still maintain that Linux has much broader support for exotic filesystems than NT, if exotic filesystems are your cup of tea:-) The kernel itself ships with, as I said, ten to thirteen separate non-network filesystems, and at least a dozen more were listed on LinuxToday recently (admittedly, some of those were fairly specialized, like a driver that made audio CDs look like they contain.WAV files.. )
Your logic is fundamentally flawed, any program that is faster than another on a slower machine because it is less computationaly intensive and uses less resources will still be faster on a fast machine.
This is not necessarily true. Well, it is in the case you gave but not in his: you said a 'faster' machine but he said a 'nicer' one. It is well known that in programming you can often trade memory space for computational time; eg, precompute the results of a drawing operation and rubber-stamp it lots of times. In other words--a program that uses more memory may be making good use of its memory to improve speed.
In addition, most memory-intensive WM functions that I can think of offhand (eg storing pixmaps) aren't actually that computationally intensive [if coded well!!] -- modern PCs can redraw the whole screen at a rate limited only by the monitor's vertical refresh. With an X server of course this requires shared memory or server-side pixmaps to reach a reasonable level of efficiency. Which E does.
I assume that when the previous poster said 'nicer' he meant not only 'faster' but 'has more memory'. The above use of memory would actually be counterproductive on a RAM-limited system since you'd go into swap. However a 'nicer' system will likely have >32 MB of RAM and therefore be able to make use of whatever clever memory-eating (but CPU-sparing) algorithm the programmers can come up with.
All of this said, I can still believe that fvwm might be faster on my machine:-). But I don't think that it follows immediately from the fact that it is faster on slower machines.
I think that basically anything that has to be assumed falls in this catagory--eg, the axioms of Euclidian geometry. You can 'prove' some of them but IIRC to do so you have to assume others which were previously proven.
Non-Euclidian geometry is an example of what happens when you change the unprovable premises.:-)
Well, I'll try to say something here although after reading your post a few times I suspect that you won't listen...
I don't know where your from but teachers here make 30 grand to start. Only the teachers trying to start out doing part time work get lower. That's pretty good.
If my memory is correct, the local schools here start around $20,000 to $30,000 and max out at $50,000 to $70,000 (and this is for the teachers who have been around forever and have PhDs--our schools have set pay scales according to college degrees). So a prospective CS teacher will have to face the fact that he/she will never make more money per year as a teacher than in his/her *first year* elsewhere. And we are a fairly well-off district which is attractive to live in. (which may be why we do actually have a CS teacher, although AFAIK she was originally in math but she handles the CS pretty well) Other school systems are almost certainly less fortunate (just read the other comments here)
..of course, I'd hate to be taught by someone who was soley motivated by money, but even people who aren't will probably think twice about taking a job where they'll be reviled by students, administration, and taxpayers alike and (to add injury to insult) paid half what they could earn in a 'real world' job.
What school has classes 60 to 70 hrs a week?
You think teachers only work while the school is open?
They also get pay raises on the basis of their education. Regardless of what they learn, the more degrees they have, the higher they are paid. That is pretty silly, but IIRC teachers here can improve their standing by taking additional courses.
BTW Teachers are union.
--GASP--SHUDDER--horrible! horrible! Heaven forfend that unions should be allowed in our glorious country!
Does any other job have something as idiotic tenure?? *blink* I wasn't aware high schools offered tenure.
My most recent install, I simply choose EVERY PACKAGE which is over 400!
Not to knock on SuSE, I'm sure they're a wonderful distro for you, but if you think 400 packages is a lot you're sadly misinformed. Debian has somewhere around 2000 packages (is it 3000 now?) and I believe RedHat has nearly as many. Of course, this being Linux, if your distributor doesn't ship a program you can compile it yourself but it's still a lot easier to be able to do an automatic installation (or compile) of a program rather than manually fetching and compiling it...
Daniel
Re:Why don't we just call the complete system GNU?
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GNU Inside?
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Personally, I think that it really is the GNU system (although I call it Linux when comminicating with other people so they understand what I'm saying) However, AFAIK none of the 'adopted' programs have been 'adopted' over the protests of their maintainers. (please correct me if I'm wrong) Many Linux developers are..to say the least..rather hostile to RMS & Co and don't want their work to be called GNU. So GNU/Linux is a reasonable comprimise (IMO) that gives Linux a share of the credit too.
Daniel
We don't count I guess..
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GNU Inside?
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Perception is everything, and evidently no marketing department means we're percieved as a less 'serious' distribution. *shrug* I've given up worrying about it, there's no point in yelling "Debian is serious" every time a mistake is made. People just label you a fanatic.
Daniel
Re:Program output GPL'd??
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BSD vs GPL
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This clause doesn't expand the realm of things that get GPLed at all, contrary to the insinuation of that BSD guy. In fact, as far as I can tell it's there to make explicit the fact that just because, eg, I use gcc to compile something, the resulting program *isn't* necessarily GPLed. Notice the word only. They define 'work based on the Program' elsewhere and such things must be GPLed anyway--I believe that it means anything containing code from the program.
Oh, and I don't even have delusions of lawyerhood.:-P
The problem is that the changes that would be need to gmc are pretty major, and the last message I had from Miguel (on the MIME issue) was that he didn't have enough time to work on all the stuff that needed to be done. I'm seriously considering writing my own file manager (using libvfs of course!) this summer..time permitting as usual..
There are only three things that I can think of in Gnome that need work (in decreasing order of importance):
* gmc. The more I work with it, the more I get the feeling that we *have* to replace it entirely. The only thing I really like about the current version is the libvfs stuff (and the pretty icons). Currently it has (at least) the following architectural problems: singlethreaded (so one long operation bogs down the UI), poor handling of multiple selections (especially MIME type actions on them), inconsistent menus (the desktop icons behave differently from the rest of the program), and a general feeling of non-modularity and inextensibility. (see continual postings about "how do you add items to gmc right-click menus" on gnome-list..which brings me to my next topic..)
* Not modular enough. It's already pretty modular but it seems like CORBA isn't used in places where it would be useful or clever--for example, a CORBA interface for menu generators would be useful.
* Icky menu system (not that they're alone here..) A hierarchically configurable menu system was proposed on gnome-list a few months back (see "My Little Wish List for Gnome") but no-one has had time to finish it.
Once gmc gets its act together (or possibly gets rewritten) I think I'd feel fine about recommending Gnome to newer users; the rest of the core works perfectly well. It's kind of embarassing for something so central as the filemanager to feel as klunky as gmc does, though..
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect
:-)
:-)
:-)
:-)
:-) )
that Linux will not see another cool browser for years to come, while
windows IE will evolve many times over and over in the next two years.
W2K is an example of a brand new IE!
Erm, how many things can you add to a Web browser? Personally, I think that the ideal Web browser would be released as an embeddable HTML-rendering widget so silly people who think that you need a mailreader and a video player in your Web browser can attach those and the rest of us can have a Web browser that uses standard UNIX conventions (like using the local mail transport and the user's mail program)
Oh, and it would have to be free software and un-crufty, so IE doesn't count
But lynx is good enough for everything anyway, dunno why I need a 'better' browser
Anyway, I said one year ago that mozilla.org will not bring anything to
market in a reasonable time frame and I was right then and I?m still right
about that.
Are you going to give references or just claim precognitive abilities? This also depends on your definition of a 'reasonable time frame'. Linux and NT took around five years to get to a useful state, and at Microsoft you folks consider browsers to be operating systems so why not give Mozilla a little more time?
It took MS less than 6 months to develop IE and less than 3
months to bring out IE 5.0.
Oh, my. Can I have their time machine?
Seriously, IE was useless for the first few revisions. Mozilla is a lot farther along than IE was at the same point, I suspect.
So if Open Source development of web
browsers is better, then why is there not a fully functional web browser
that supports all the possible web content that IE supports?
"all the possible web content" can be a pretty slippery phrase. Of course, there aren't really any good free web browsers at the moment.
Hmmm maybe lack of manpower, no incentive ($$$)
Well, right now Mozilla is, as far as I know, pretty much a Netscape project funded by Netscape and manned by Netscape developers. Probably the reason is that the design is too monolithic and un-Unixy to attract outside developers. But so far all the programmers are being paid and I believe there are a lot of them.
Even were it like most free software projects, that doesn't necessarily mean it would automatically be 'better' than other browsers, but it would probably acheive parity. The only person I know of who's spouting that "Free Software is always technically better" nonsense is ESR. (and maybe his disciples, why is it that the disciples are always more annoying than the master..?)
I suspect that the real reason is that most free software programmers aren't particularly interested in web browsers, especially ones designed the way the Netscape browsers are. I wouldn't mind working on one, but I don't see it as being a particularly imperative issue. (maybe if I could be convinced that it WASN'T going to go the 500-zillion-extra-features-and-tie-ins route, that those would be left to third parties if they really had to be made. Scheme extensibility, like in the Gimp
But then, why am I wasting my time replying to such an obvious troll..?
Daniel
Hmm. Are ports, areas, and servers similar to entities in the Hurd? [ it occurs to me that they might map better to that system.. ]
Daniel
What I have a problem with is people who feel that just because a stand is
:-)
:-)
different from theirs; it is automatically wrong.
Sometimes this is the essence of a position; eg, someone who believes that it is wrong to kill is likely to consider someone who allows killing in self-defense to be wrong. Of course I suppose that this doesn't count as a 'non-injurious idea'
I've noticed though that a large proportion (I suppose maybe not a majority) of people denouncing the "zealots" and the "extremists" on any particular issue are the ones who have a stand which can be followed by going along with the status quo. This really bothers me -- you just happened to get in the way of a pet peeve. Hope it didn't bite too badly
Daniel
:-)
Has Meept been on vacation?
Daniel
[bafflement]
Daniel
See my post above :-) (or below..)
If you have 3 or 4 'experts' you're guaranteed to have an average of about 3 to 4 different overall playing strategies and 6 to 8 different ideas about how to play the next move. Especially in the opening, but at other times as well. And because a style of play is so habitual and ingrained, it's really really hard to play along with someone else's ideas -- if I were watching a slow positional game I'd keep trying to point out tactical disruptions that could be made. 3 or 4 'experts' (hopefully really GMs) could maybe work, since you'd have a small enough field of ideas that you could agree on one theme consistently. Problem is, you'll probably have more than that, not to mention the lesser players who want to chip in (with plausible ideas probably)
Daniel
I play chess. This will not work.
:-) But seriously, they'll have problems with conflicting styles of play; I doubt they'll even make it out of the opening [the beginning of the game for non-chess-players] without getting into trouble -- in fact the opening is the worst time since some people can be almost as religious about their decision of 'opening lines' (canned moves to start a game with) as computer users are about operating systems. [dunno if the best players are..] Imagine a FreeBSD user, a Linux user, and a Mac user working together to build a system from scratch, hardware and software, and you might begin to get the idea here :-)
The reason is that decisions in a chess game depend very much on one's own personal inclinations. Some people like elegant, slow games in which the object is to win by playing more thematic moves than the other player. Other people like to play lines which lead to muddled, knife-edge tactical positions in which it's unclear who will win. And of course the very best players will do both at once
A second problem is that good chess play requires a decision about goals and a commitment to them. This could be good of course -- if everyone decides on a goal together they can all agree on how to pursue it. However (see point 1) this is unlikely to happen -- if half the people decide they want to launch an all-out attack while the other half want to play a more strategic game, you could end up with a situation where the World is lurching back and forth between plans. And just two opinions about what should be done is unlikely -- you're probably always going to have at least 3 and at points where there are important decisions to be made you could have as many as 10 or 20 plausible moves. (and be assured that Kasparov will force his opponents to make as many decisions as possible -- even in normal chess this is good play..more decisions means more ways to screw up..but when your opponent is already not single-minded it is an even stronger idea)
In sum then: too many cooks will spoil the soup.
Daniel
I agree that Borland's IDEs (and RHIDE) are pretty good. You could look at RHIDE, or I can give you some quick advice. :-) :-). [i'truth, I only know 20 or so, tops, and probably less..same for vi..and I'm an inveterate user of these things] :-)
:-) ) and learn shell scripting. :-) Emacs' tab-indent feature, in particular, is light-years ahead of any IDE I've used. Basically, typing 'tab' indents a line correctly for wherever you are. (well, correctly for me..Emacs' idea of indentation coincides with mine quite well. I've heard you can customize it but never bothered) The keybindings are confusing at first, though, especially since some of them aren't necessary anymore (eg, C-something is the same as PgUp) There's a survival guide somewhere.
:-) )
:-) are (in order of importance): :-) )
The first thing to remember about Linux programming is that it takes time to become extremely proficient in it. HOWEVER, what this means is 'it takes time to learn to do bizarre regular-expression replacements in your programs that take every invocation of the function foo(int,void *) and change it to the invocation foo(int, bar(int)) where bar returns a void *' Generally you can learn how to get stuff done pretty quickly. In other words, don't panic if you don't learn all 100,000 keybindings of Emacs right away
Oh, and I recommend picking up the book _Beginning Linux Programming_. It's a useful collection of information on programming in Linux, from tools to APIs. Skip the chapter on Tcl/Tk though, that language must die
Ok. So. Here are some thoughts about programming with Linux for an IDE:
-> Info and man are your friends. The info documentation is hard to use with the default viewer though, check out the "pinfo" program which makes info look like Lynx. A lot of documentation is in HTML these days to, you can use Lynx (my preference because of the low memory footprint) or another browser for it of course. Unfortunately, much software has little API documentation (eg, GTK+ and Gnome). If you do much programming for these you'll want to scan the headers a lot...luckily, the functions are usually well-named and commented (not that it makes up for a missing manual)
-> Learn autoconf and automake at some point. You should probably write at least one Makefile by hand first (to know how much pain you're saving yourself
-> Learn shell scripting.
-> Find an editor you like. I personally recommend XEmacs and vim: I use XEmacs for 'real' programming and vim when I can't wait 30 seconds for my editor to start
But basically, the rule is to learn the minimum amount to do a given task, at least at first, otherwise you'll be overwhelmed. So do this:
* learn how to use an editor for basic operations (pretty simple unless you're trying vi
* learn how to use a compiler (shouldn't be too hard: 'gcc -o foo.o -c foo.c' to make an object file, 'gcc -o foo foo.o bar.o -llib' to link)
* learn how to write Makefiles
Once you've done that you can start programming. Intermediate to advanced topics
* shell scripting (not too hard) and the other UNIX tools -- sed, grep, etc. These go together -- one is pretty useless without the other.
* autoconf/automake (bliss!
* libtool (learned this this morning. Not bad if you've done everything else before)
Daniel
I've noticed that generally UNIX users mean something very different from Windows users when they say "integration". Take mail as an example.
:-) It would seem at first glance that the second system is more complex. This is not true, or at least not in the way you implied -- that it requires lots of 'getting your hands dirty'. There is more obvious complexity in the second system, but it is carefully contained. Each program is internally complex, but communicates with the others through (relatively) simple and well-defined interfaces. The first program looks simpler because there's only one obvious thing to consider, but it is more difficult to design and less flexible (because one group probably wrote the whole bloody thing instead of multiple independent groups concentrating on discrete, small bits of code and because you can easily isolate each piece of the system..this works both conceptually -- I can understand how fetchmail works without caring about how the POP server or the local mail delivery agent work -- and from the point of view of actually doing things: any piece can be replaced with a better one or reconfigured in bizarre ways if necessary)
:-) But basically, my experience is that things people think are 'simpler' (like designing everything in one piece, or writing quick-and-dirty routines) generally turn out to be more complex (in the bad sense) in the long run. Witness the amount of time and effort spent designing defragmenters, disk checkers, virus scanners, memory protection libraries, etc for DOS [aka "Quick and Dirty Operating System"]. But as they say in these parts..YMMV.
Windows: You have one mail program. Well, probably one. Unless someone else wants to use a different program on the computer. But probably one. It does everything. It receives email, stores it on the system, and sends it via SMTP..and it works most of the time. If you've gotten a really good one, it might even deliver mail in the background and do odd things like Kerberos. If you ever want to switch to another mail client, kiss your messages goodbye unless you convert them to the new format and location; the same goes for any POP settings, mailing list filters, and so on.
This is an 'integrated' program; all functions are in one place.
UNIX: The mail system comes in pieces. There is a mail delivery program, which takes mail and sticks it somewhere, a mail getting program, which speaks POP and all its variants, a mail client which reads one of a few mailbox formats (mbox and mh), a mail editor, and a mail transfer program. [some clients pick up, eg, the editor, but they usually let you use a different one] other mail-processing utilities may be installed as well.
When you receive a message it is either sent directly to the delivery program via SMTP or gotten by fetchmail and then sent to the delivery program. The delivery program then either passes it to another mail-handler (procmail for example) or else delivers it directly to a mailbox. All (or most) mail clients read and write the mbox format, so any one can be used to access the messages. This means that changing mail clients does not require you to give up your history of correspondence, and since the mail client doesn't even handle POP and so on those naturally are also preserved. When you send mail, the mail client passes it to the mail-delivery software, which spools it for immediate or deferred delivery. The mail client need not be running while the mail is being delivered.
Each of these programs generally is highly specialized and most users will only touch from five to ten percent of the features (not, please note, the same 5-10%)
This is an integrated system: it has many pieces which work closely together to produce a finished result.
Ok. Back to complexity.
Hmm. I had a point here but I ate supper in the middle and lost my train of thought.
Daniel
-GUI design: Look, creating dialogs is not going to be an intellectually stimulating
:-)
programming task. So do it with a visual editor in 5 minutes, rather than tweaking
around manually for hours. Then automatically generate the message handlers for
the dialog and get started with real programming.
Unfortunately, I generally include at least some element of programmatically generated stuff in my GUIs, and the stuff that I do this way generally is also the stuff that a visual editor would be useful for. For example, a preferences dialog in which items are registered by scripts that get run on startup. (think Emacs' Customize menu and you get the idea..) This doesn't map well into 'visual' design, unless you can show me a visual program that can predict every funky combination of widgets the user will come up with.
Besides..programming GUIs by hand was a nightmare in Windows but with a sane toolkit (GTK+ and Qt come to mind) I can make a good-looking dialog in a few minutes. That said, I wouldn't be averse to using something like Glade, it's just not worth the trouble. But even without a 'visual' editor, the 'GUI building' is so insignificant a proportion of the time spent on the program that it doesn't matter which I do. (it's not that I don't put thought into my GUIs, it's just that almost everything happens either in the backend or 'behind the scenes' in the GUI -- that is, in stuff that doesn't have anything to do with what widget goes where. Widget placement is the most visible part of an interface but the most trivial thing to do programmatically)
Daniel
I think he was talking about the other reply :-)
Daniel
"A play about a man being crushed by a falling piano teaches us nothing, except that one ought not to walk under falling pianos." -- Arthur Miller
:-) ) all over them. One or two is accetable. :-)
Tragedies do not have *happy* endings, in the sense that everyone gets together and has a barbeque on the back porch, but they have *good* endings. Example: in the Crucible, John Proctor finally overcomes his fear and confronts the witch hunters with the truth, refusing to back down or give a false confession even at the cost of his own life. It is intimated at the end of the film that his action may have prevented more innocent victims from being the target of the mob -- that the number of people who refused to 'confess' was too great to ignore. In another example -- in Hamlet, although the entire royal family dies, Hamlet does (finally!) kill his uncle and at the end a new era of (presumably) peace and prosperity is ushered in by Prince Fortinbras, lately arrived from Norway.
Had Lucas intended it from the beginning, Vader could be an excellent tragic hero, although maybe not in the 'classical' sense -- but someone who has destroyed everything he once fought for seems pretty tragic to me. ROTJ would probably have to be darker but the rest would work fairly well. This could still be pulled off if Lucas avoids the urge to make the next two movies into action/comedy films and put dancing Ewoks (or Jar-Jars
Daniel
* Anakin Skywalker is such a good little boy, without the slightest hint of a
:-)
:-) ) and the movie would be worthy of the Star Wars name.
mean streak that might one day develop into a personality like Darth
Vader's. Wouldn't it have been far more intriguing if his miraculous
victories had been undeserved, his awesome proto-Jedi powers something
of a fraud? Instead of having the simpleton bad guy in the pod race
sabotage Anakin's pod, why not reverse the roles, and have Anakin cheat
his way to success? Especially if Anakin's sabotage inadvertantly results in
the bad guy's death - and the precocious little hero shows no remorse...
Likewise, when Anakin just happens to make the right moves to blow up
the space station in the final battle, wouldn't it have been far more
satisfying if R2D2 had been silently pulling the space fighter's strings all
along? And then the loyal droid lets Anakin disingenously take credit for
the kill...
I thought that Anakin's flaw seemed to be less of a mean streak than a tendency to ignore people who weren't exciting or talented enough for him. Witness how he abandons C3PO -- "Bye, 3PO, sorry I couldn't finish you..guess you'll have to be left half-built.." -- right after 3PO finishes thanking him for his existence at that! ("You are my creator..") I thought this was actually one of the few good points of the movie
* Darth Maul is obviously a pawn who's only genuine purpose is to take out
Qui Gon. Instead of simply having Obi Wan dispatch Darth Maul in the
end, Lucas could have deepened his plot by having Palpatine/Darth Sidious
double-cross him. Here's the rationale: Palpatine forsees Anakin's destiny
to become his apprentice and intuits Obi Wan's future role as Anakin's
first mentor in the ways of the force. Palpatine intervenes at the critical
moment as Darth Maul is about to nail Obi Wan, distracting the arrogant
Sithling with his Phantom Projection Power, giving Obi Wan an opening
to slice the bastard in half. George, if you need help, I'm available...
That's pretty good, but I have an even better suggestion: you remember that silly red time-lock thing? My first thought upon seeing it was that Qui Gon had driven Darth Maul into some sort of trap -- a stasis field or a radiation cooker or something -- and followed him to make sure it took. (thus the medatative pose, he was guarding the exit) I personally think this would have been much more Jedi-like, as well as an original plot twist relative to the other movies (the way it happened was, as this article points out, rather repetitive -- I like parallelisms but this wasn't the time for it)
Another suggestion -- if Lucas ever does a remake he should double the length. At least. The article scoffs at the idea of a sci-fi movie based on tariffs and politics, but I think this could have been an excellent way to do things. My biggest complaint, in fact, is that the Senate scenes and the other expansion of the backstory are too limited. (in fact, the whole movie feels rushed, but this is the worst offender) One of the best points of the first Star Wars movies was that there was always a well-developed backstory lurking behind the scenes, even if you only got to see bits and pieces of it ("The Emperor has dissolved the Senate...") Start the movie with the negotiations between the Federation and the Naboo, the opening of deliberations in the Senate, and the decision to send two Jedi to mediate the conflict.
Besides that, the usual suspects -- cut the silly accidental victories, trim Jar Jar, add some actual character development (and plot development but I just spent a paragraph talking about that
Daniel [still grumpy about Lucas' screwing up of a potentially great story]
I'm going to try to keep my head here but I just spent all day trying to write programs for Win32 and MacOS so I may come off a little harsher than intended... :-)
:-)
:-)
i.There's a lot of baggage on the developer who wants to develop cool apps
for the linux desktop, too. Even with GTK or QT, you're still writing to a
wrapper to a library to a library to a driver, just to get a reasonably usable
API.
I think that you're missing the point somewhere here, which is that this is a Good Thing. Let me repeat that: *THIS IS A GOOD THING*. [ in fact, this is how Win32 works as well..although much less elegantly.. ]
Here is the setup:
X -- this is a display server. It has a single purpose for existance: accept requests to draw stuff and carry them out. The network-socket method of performing drawing operations allows a very flexible system. Often one sign (IMO) of a good design is that stuff that takes lots of hacking and kludging to get working in other systems simply arises as a natural offshoot of the way a given system works. For example, X's network transparency -- you can fake it in Win32 and MacOS with third-party software; X requires no modifications or special-casing.
Xlib: A simple (AFAIK) wrapper library which makes X protocol calls nicer by wrapping them in convenience functions. It has no other purpose.
Window Manager: One of the most villified aspects of the whole system because there are so many of them. A window manager (follow closely here) manages windows. It draws cute little frames around them, lets them be moved and resized, etc. This is generally its entire function. This may be accomplished with direct Xlib calls or not depending on the preferences of the window manager's author. Note that these are generally hairy beasts that people looking for an easy API probably want to avoid anyway
Widget Set (Qt, GTK+, etc): These use Xlib to draw useful things on the screen, such as buttons, dialog boxes, etc. Most programmers will use these, and they generally (except for monstrosities like XForms) have a nice simple API. The underlying layers can be ignored for most purposes. Issues like the fact that GDK is just an Xlib wrapper aren't necessary for new programmers to immediately grok as long as they can understand how to use GDK. [ the reason for wrapping Xlib again is to provide greater platform independence ]
So, in sum:
X server - displays stuff
Xlib - lets programs talk to X server
Window Manager - manages windows
Widget set - draws cute buttons, scrollbars, etc.
The thing that marks this as UNIX is not any feature of the complexity of the interfaces -- they vary by interface -- nor is it a silly amount of layering -- Win32 does this..it has a window manager (hidden from the programmer) and the common controls are essentially a widget set which uses Win32 drawing calls (Xlib) to do stuff -- but this:
** EACH FUNDAMENTAL SET OF OPERATIONS IS CONCEPTUALLY AND PROGRAMMATICALLY SEPARATED FROM (although not independent of) THE OTHERS. ***
If you have the kind of godawful mess that the Win32 API makes, where all levels of functionality are mixed together in the same place, it ain't UNIX. If you have programs that try to do 500 different things poorly (think IDEs or mail readers that know about SMTP and POP) you're using programs which are not UNIXey. If the you're outside the aegis of UNIX.
Why is this good? Programs that do a single thing well are simpler, easier to write and debug, and easier to use in unanticipated circumstances.
I'm personally interested in the Hurd; it looks like they may be going to out-UNIX UNIX and probably eliminate the worst cruft at the same time. Remember what I said about features arising naturally from a design? In the Hurd, several features that people have been trying to hack into Linux 'just happen', the most notable examples being userfs-type stuff and [I believe] per-process mounts. This is a Good Sign, although the Hurd is currently about five or ten years from being ready for general consumption
Daniel
Last I looked, the Linux kernel didn't support the full PnP spec. It
:-P
:-) The kernel itself ships with, as I said, ten to thirteen separate non-network filesystems, and at least a dozen more were listed on LinuxToday recently (admittedly, some of those were fairly specialized, like a driver that made audio CDs look like they contain .WAV files.. )
supported it just enough to turn the cards on at a specified configuration
and needed manual tweaking if you changed things. Unless 2.2 has changed
pretty radically in the last week or so I am assuming it is the same.
This is true, but this being Linux, we don't put everything and the kitchen sink into the kernel. Userland tools exist to configure PnP fairly well. It's certainly not as 'user-friendly' as Windows (or it wasn't when I created my configuration last year; an auto-configuration option has appeared in the program since then which I haven't bothered trying) but it works exceedingly well.
Comparing "in the box Linux" with "in the box NT" is not apples to
apples. Linux distros tend to include things made by many different people
and companies across the world, whereas NT ships with only MS products.
If you start to include the 3rd party utilities and drivers available for NT
(most of them free or quite low in price) then things start looking a little
different. FAT32 drivers for NT are available at www.sysinternals.com,
EXT2 drivers at www.cyco.nl/~andreys/ext2fsnt and so on - it really is just
a matter of looking.
Hmm, ok. I haven't needed to mount ext2 drives from any Windows flavour for a while now so my information could be out of date
I still maintain that Linux has much broader support for exotic filesystems than NT, if exotic filesystems are your cup of tea
Daniel
Your logic is fundamentally flawed, any program that is faster than another on a slower machine because it is less computationaly intensive and uses less resources will still be faster on a fast machine.
:-). But I don't think that it follows immediately from the fact that it is faster on slower machines.
This is not necessarily true. Well, it is in the case you gave but not in his: you said a 'faster' machine but he said a 'nicer' one. It is well known that in programming you can often trade memory space for computational time; eg, precompute the results of a drawing operation and rubber-stamp it lots of times. In other words--a program that uses more memory may be making good use of its memory to improve speed.
In addition, most memory-intensive WM functions that I can think of offhand (eg storing pixmaps) aren't actually that computationally intensive [if coded well!!] -- modern PCs can redraw the whole screen at a rate limited only by the monitor's vertical refresh. With an X server of course this requires shared memory or server-side pixmaps to reach a reasonable level of efficiency. Which E does.
I assume that when the previous poster said 'nicer' he meant not only 'faster' but 'has more memory'. The above use of memory would actually be counterproductive on a RAM-limited system since you'd go into swap. However a 'nicer' system will likely have >32 MB of RAM and therefore be able to make use of whatever clever memory-eating (but CPU-sparing) algorithm the programmers can come up with.
All of this said, I can still believe that fvwm might be faster on my machine
Daniel
Read his message again. He clearly meant to type 'no doubt drivers for...' but failed due to Evil Alien Mind Rays or some such thing.. :-)
Daniel
I think that basically anything that has to be assumed falls in this catagory--eg, the axioms of Euclidian geometry. You can 'prove' some of them but IIRC to do so you have to assume others which were previously proven.
:-)
Non-Euclidian geometry is an example of what happens when you change the unprovable premises.
Daniel
Well, I'll try to say something here although after reading your post a few times I suspect that you won't listen...
..of course, I'd hate to be taught by someone who was soley motivated by money, but even people who aren't will probably think twice about taking a job where they'll be reviled by students, administration, and taxpayers alike and (to add injury to insult) paid half what they could earn in a 'real world' job.
I don't know where your from but teachers here make 30 grand to start.
Only the teachers trying to start out doing part time work get lower. That's
pretty good.
If my memory is correct, the local schools here start around $20,000 to $30,000 and max out at $50,000 to $70,000 (and this is for the teachers who have been around forever and have PhDs--our schools have set pay scales according to college degrees). So a prospective CS teacher will have to face the fact that he/she will never make more money per year as a teacher than in his/her *first year* elsewhere. And we are a fairly well-off district which is attractive to live in. (which may be why we do actually have a CS teacher, although AFAIK she was originally in math but she handles the CS pretty well) Other school systems are almost certainly less fortunate (just read the other comments here)
What school has classes 60 to 70 hrs a week?
You think teachers only work while the school is open?
They also get pay raises on the basis of their education. Regardless of
what they learn, the more degrees they have, the higher they are paid.
That is pretty silly, but IIRC teachers here can improve their standing by taking additional courses.
BTW Teachers are union.
--GASP--SHUDDER--horrible! horrible! Heaven forfend that unions should be allowed in our glorious country!
Does any other job have something as idiotic tenure??
*blink* I wasn't aware high schools offered tenure.
Daniel
My most recent install, I simply choose EVERY PACKAGE which is over
400!
Not to knock on SuSE, I'm sure they're a wonderful distro for you, but if you think 400 packages is a lot you're sadly misinformed. Debian has somewhere around 2000 packages (is it 3000 now?) and I believe RedHat has nearly as many. Of course, this being Linux, if your distributor doesn't ship a program you can compile it yourself but it's still a lot easier to be able to do an automatic installation (or compile) of a program rather than manually fetching and compiling it...
Daniel
Personally, I think that it really is the GNU system (although I call it Linux when comminicating with other people so they understand what I'm saying) However, AFAIK none of the 'adopted' programs have been 'adopted' over the protests of their maintainers. (please correct me if I'm wrong) Many Linux developers are..to say the least..rather hostile to RMS & Co and don't want their work to be called GNU. So GNU/Linux is a reasonable comprimise (IMO) that gives Linux a share of the credit too.
Daniel
Perception is everything, and evidently no marketing department means we're percieved as a less 'serious' distribution. *shrug* I've given up worrying about it, there's no point in yelling "Debian is serious" every time a mistake is made. People just label you a fanatic.
Daniel
This clause doesn't expand the realm of things that get GPLed at all, contrary to the insinuation of that BSD guy. In fact, as far as I can tell it's there to make explicit the fact that just because, eg, I use gcc to compile something, the resulting program *isn't* necessarily GPLed. Notice the word only. They define 'work based on the Program' elsewhere and such things must be GPLed anyway--I believe that it means anything containing code from the program.
:-P
Oh, and I don't even have delusions of lawyerhood.
Daniel
The problem is that the changes that would be need to gmc are pretty major, and the last message I had from Miguel (on the MIME issue) was that he didn't have enough time to work on all the stuff that needed to be done. I'm seriously considering writing my own file manager (using libvfs of course!) this summer..time permitting as usual..
Daniel
There are only three things that I can think of in Gnome that need work (in decreasing order of importance):
* gmc. The more I work with it, the more I get the feeling that we *have* to replace it entirely. The only thing I really like about the current version is the libvfs stuff (and the pretty icons). Currently it has (at least) the following architectural problems: singlethreaded (so one long operation bogs down the UI), poor handling of multiple selections (especially MIME type actions on them), inconsistent menus (the desktop icons behave differently from the rest of the program), and a general feeling of non-modularity and inextensibility. (see continual postings about "how do you add items to gmc right-click menus" on gnome-list..which brings me to my next topic..)
* Not modular enough. It's already pretty modular but it seems like CORBA isn't used in places where it would be useful or clever--for example, a CORBA interface for menu generators would be useful.
* Icky menu system (not that they're alone here..) A hierarchically configurable menu system was proposed on gnome-list a few months back (see "My Little Wish List for Gnome") but no-one has had time to finish it.
Once gmc gets its act together (or possibly gets rewritten) I think I'd feel fine about recommending Gnome to newer users; the rest of the core works perfectly well. It's kind of embarassing for something so central as the filemanager to feel as klunky as gmc does, though..
Daniel