Would someone please mod the parent article "troll"? That diatribe gets posted again and again by Windows fanboys, and it contains many factual errors. It isn't even worth responding to that idiocy point by point.
On Ubuntu and some other distributions, browser mode seems to be the default anyway, so many users may not really care either way.
I don't think it has ever been established which mode is better or whether there aren't other, even better ways of interacting. Just because a bunch of vociferous programmers prefer one or the other doesn't mean it's objectively better. All desktop developers (and that includes Macintosh and Windows) seem to be groping around blindly in the dark, with programmers and "designers" picking and choosing according to personal preference rather than objective facts.
makes windows marginally bearable
on
Cygwin 1.7 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Even after all these years, Microsoft has nothing equivalent to the UNIX command line. The standard cmd.exe is too limited, and Powershell isn't a good interactive shell, it's more like typing at a Python or Ruby interpreter. Cygwin makes doing anything on Windows marginally tolerable and I install it on any Windows machine I happen to use.
Your brain adapts to stimulation and drugs by regulating the number of neuroreceptors; that's the origin of chemical and psychological drug dependence.
That mechanism doesn't work for direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure center since there are no receptors involved.
The device in TFA, on the other hand (and cocaine — even if to a smaller extent) does have this ability to completely take a member out of society. I will frown on people seeking pleasure this way
Why is that any of your business? If people want to stick electrodes into their pleasure centers, let them; they'll basically just starve themselves to death.
If you think you're under any obligation to help them, let me take that burden off your mind: they've made their choice, and not only are you under no obligation to help them, you don't have a right to interfere.
(Of course, the concept of personal liberty and free will may be alien to you, based on your signature.)
People have been able to stimulate the pleasure center electrically for decades, and the necessary electronics weren't that large even a few decades ago. People don't implant electrodes into their pleasure centers because (1) it's not good for them, (2) they can't do it themselves and surgeons won't do it for them, and (3) brain surgery isn't much fun.
That's a tired, old argument that was laid to rest long ago.
I'm not making an argument, I'm just stating a fact: Linux GUI tools don't have those functions because most Linux developers don't feel a need for them.
But, in a GUI environment, it's ridiculous -- GUIs are the interface to pull all the little tools together.
That's only one of many possible functions of a GUI. Many professional users don't need a GUI to "pull all the little tools together", they need a simple UI that does a few things really well and gets the routine work done quickly.
In fact, Adobe's "professional" tools often get in the way because they have so many functions squeezed into one UI that doing routine work requires many more clicks than it ought to.
Not to mention it's really ugly.
Who cares? The purpose of a GUI is to save me time, not to appeal to my sense of aesthetics. If an old Tcl/Tk GUI gets the job done quickly, I couldn't care less about how ugly it looks.
Long term, of course, it would be nice to support all possible audio, video, and imaging users on Linux. But Linux should find another way than Adobe-style bloatware.
I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998.
Audacity does everything I want it to do. It doesn't include some of the functionality of tools like Adobe Audition or Soundbooth because that functionality is provided by other tools within the Linux environment.
If you need all this functionality bundled up with point-and-click ease, free Linux tools aren't for you. Free software developers simply don't have much incentive to provide that kind of bundling because for anybody who is skilled enough to develop such tools, the Linux approach of multiple small tools actually works better than bloated all-in-one Windows tools. Of course, over time, open source tools like Audacity will slowly incorporate some of the Windows tools' functionality and UI ideas, but that's just not a priority.
So it's really your choice: either pay Adobe to give you all-in-one tools (inferior, in my opinion), or invest the time and effort to figure out how to use the free tools effectively (a better long-term solution).
Honestly, you are screwed in either country. It's just that the Chinese government is more open about how they're screwing you.
If you think that the US and China are anything alike in terms of liberties, you're totally insane and unfamiliar with the last few decades of history.
Maybe you should lay off the boulevard press and get an education.
No, it wouldn't be nice "for them", it would be nice for you because it would make it easy for you to switch phones and providers as you like. And that's why they don't do it.
IMHO, many C++ developers write bad code, because they don't use current techniques and libraries. That's the problem with C++ development
The problem with C++ development is that the language has become so enormously complex that nobody can write correct code in it. And what you call "current techniques and libraries" is a ridiculous set of workarounds for fundamental language design problems.
I've been using C++ as my primary development language for more than 20 years. It started out as a fairly reasonable set of C extensions, but it has turned into a complete and utter disaster.
I'm not going to start another open source project in C++, and I'm not going to accept any contracts for C++ development anymore either. C++ needs to die, and the sooner the better.
Fortunately, the dark ages are over and nobody has to give a damn anymore what the Pope says or thinks, and we can use his name and his image like that of any actor, politician, dictator, or common criminal.
C/C++ is mabye 10-100x faster and more efficient for carefully written inner loops. At the level of whole systems, it's an entirely different story. Because C++ lacks garbage collection, people end up retaining far more memory than they need to. Because algorithms are far harder to express in C++, people end up using brute force algorithms (linear search, etc.) a lot. Because templates need specially compiled versions for each combination of template arguments, you end up with dozens of different instances of basically the same code.
For web applications, there's probably not much of a difference either way; but in scripting languages like PHP, all the inner loops that are needed are already written in C. For scientific computing, C++ is acceptable because a lot of applications really are mainly about the inner loops.
But for many applications, like GUIs, C++ not only fails to be faster, it also ends up making everything a lot slower and more bloated. If our desktops were largely written in Python, Ruby, or Smalltalk, we'd be using a lot less energy and be able to get by with smaller, less-powerful machines. That's in addition to all the savings from the reduced number of bugs and reduced development costs.
Apple maintains total control over it, sticks to their guns, and the product isn't bad. Google gives the carriers complete control, and it turns to shit.
Whoa, stop right there. I've owned both, and let me tell you: I prefer any Android phone to an iPhone.
You wouldn't get email on your phone with out an extra $10/month charge from AT&T if it was in their control
That's because the US phone market isn't competitive. Apple has nothing to do with it; in fact, Apple has made carrier lock-in worse, rather than better. Bad Apple.
If there's hope for the US phone market, it comes from Google, not from Apple.
Nokia's "updates" are bug fix updates that fix egregious errors, the kind that should never have gone out in a shipping product to begin with. Other than that, Nokia's approach to software upgrades is "throw it away and buy a new one". Symbian itself is fragmented into three different user interfaces, and even within a particular user interface, there are significant incompatibilities between even minor releases.
I've had half a dozen Nokia Symbian phones; I'm never going to buy another one. Nokia's hardware is great, but their software, user interface, and software upgrades suck.
These people don't seem to understand that they are competing for limited attention. If the French don't want their literature noticed and accessible by the rest of the world, well, that's their business; the French language is already enough of a barrier to begin with.
France is making themselves more and more irrelevant, and wasting EU 1 billion of French taxpayers' money in the process.
When silverlight gains real marketshare the Mac client will fall behind and moonlight will be left out in the patent minefield.
Look, I think Silverlight sucks technically and the sooner it goes away the better. But if you want to talk about a "patent minefield", you either need to put up (i.e., show us what the patents are) or you should shut up.
And I wonder whether you have the same misgivings about, oh, Sun Java, for example, where Sun has many patents and effectively has only granted you a license for those with their implementation and its derivatives.
"No"? "No" what? I didn't say anything about what their promise covered, I merely pointed out that it is not equivalent to what quangdog said.
But since you bring it up, I don't see anything about "non-commercial" in there. Why are you making stuff like that up?
Microsoft's patent grant is really no different from Sun's patent grant on Java: it applies only to a single implementation and its derivative. Why are people like you whining about it when Microsoft does it and not when Sun does it?
Sun tried this with Java. Then it was Flash and Adobe's latest RIA junk. Now it's Silverlight. All this cross platform crap is ever used for is mindless little games and controls on movie players, and a few applications by developers who don't know any better and who end up producing horrid interfaces.
Give it up, guys. AJAX is as cross-platform as it's gonna get, and AJAX works because the browser isn't trying to be a desktop UI and because people invest a lot of time in making HTML work right across platform. Nothing that Java, Flash, or Moonlight are going to do are even going to come remotely close in terms of usability.
Much as I deplore overly restrictive copyrights themselves, holding the people who pay for the data transfer responsible for what is being transferred makes sense. What we need to change is the restrictive copyrights themselves (terms should expire much sooner), and who is actually responsible for the infringement.
In particular, the person doing the downloading should not usually be held responsible. I should be able to assume that anything that's accessible on the Internet for downloading without a password is something I have an implicit license to download. If there is no license, then the person owning the connection where it is being offered without a password should be held responsible (but only if downloading actually has taken place).
Holding the person downloading the information responsible is bad, because it basically creates a huge legal uncertainty. Am I now responsible for verifying the copyright status of every video on YouTube? What if someone puts a copyrighted image or video into an ad on some page that I visit?
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Would someone please mod the parent article "troll"? That diatribe gets posted again and again by Windows fanboys, and it contains many factual errors. It isn't even worth responding to that idiocy point by point.
On Ubuntu and some other distributions, browser mode seems to be the default anyway, so many users may not really care either way.
I don't think it has ever been established which mode is better or whether there aren't other, even better ways of interacting. Just because a bunch of vociferous programmers prefer one or the other doesn't mean it's objectively better. All desktop developers (and that includes Macintosh and Windows) seem to be groping around blindly in the dark, with programmers and "designers" picking and choosing according to personal preference rather than objective facts.
Even after all these years, Microsoft has nothing equivalent to the UNIX command line. The standard cmd.exe is too limited, and Powershell isn't a good interactive shell, it's more like typing at a Python or Ruby interpreter. Cygwin makes doing anything on Windows marginally tolerable and I install it on any Windows machine I happen to use.
Your brain adapts to stimulation and drugs by regulating the number of neuroreceptors; that's the origin of chemical and psychological drug dependence.
That mechanism doesn't work for direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure center since there are no receptors involved.
The device in TFA, on the other hand (and cocaine — even if to a smaller extent) does have this ability to completely take a member out of society. I will frown on people seeking pleasure this way
Why is that any of your business? If people want to stick electrodes into their pleasure centers, let them; they'll basically just starve themselves to death.
If you think you're under any obligation to help them, let me take that burden off your mind: they've made their choice, and not only are you under no obligation to help them, you don't have a right to interfere.
(Of course, the concept of personal liberty and free will may be alien to you, based on your signature.)
People have been able to stimulate the pleasure center electrically for decades, and the necessary electronics weren't that large even a few decades ago. People don't implant electrodes into their pleasure centers because (1) it's not good for them, (2) they can't do it themselves and surgeons won't do it for them, and (3) brain surgery isn't much fun.
That's a tired, old argument that was laid to rest long ago.
I'm not making an argument, I'm just stating a fact: Linux GUI tools don't have those functions because most Linux developers don't feel a need for them.
But, in a GUI environment, it's ridiculous -- GUIs are the interface to pull all the little tools together.
That's only one of many possible functions of a GUI. Many professional users don't need a GUI to "pull all the little tools together", they need a simple UI that does a few things really well and gets the routine work done quickly.
In fact, Adobe's "professional" tools often get in the way because they have so many functions squeezed into one UI that doing routine work requires many more clicks than it ought to.
Not to mention it's really ugly.
Who cares? The purpose of a GUI is to save me time, not to appeal to my sense of aesthetics. If an old Tcl/Tk GUI gets the job done quickly, I couldn't care less about how ugly it looks.
Long term, of course, it would be nice to support all possible audio, video, and imaging users on Linux. But Linux should find another way than Adobe-style bloatware.
I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998.
Audacity does everything I want it to do. It doesn't include some of the functionality of tools like Adobe Audition or Soundbooth because that functionality is provided by other tools within the Linux environment.
If you need all this functionality bundled up with point-and-click ease, free Linux tools aren't for you. Free software developers simply don't have much incentive to provide that kind of bundling because for anybody who is skilled enough to develop such tools, the Linux approach of multiple small tools actually works better than bloated all-in-one Windows tools. Of course, over time, open source tools like Audacity will slowly incorporate some of the Windows tools' functionality and UI ideas, but that's just not a priority.
So it's really your choice: either pay Adobe to give you all-in-one tools (inferior, in my opinion), or invest the time and effort to figure out how to use the free tools effectively (a better long-term solution).
Honestly, you are screwed in either country. It's just that the Chinese government is more open about how they're screwing you.
If you think that the US and China are anything alike in terms of liberties, you're totally insane and unfamiliar with the last few decades of history.
Maybe you should lay off the boulevard press and get an education.
I'm sorry, I don't understand why this is a good thing. What's wrong with pornography?
No, it wouldn't be nice "for them", it would be nice for you because it would make it easy for you to switch phones and providers as you like. And that's why they don't do it.
IMHO, many C++ developers write bad code, because they don't use current techniques and libraries. That's the problem with C++ development
The problem with C++ development is that the language has become so enormously complex that nobody can write correct code in it. And what you call "current techniques and libraries" is a ridiculous set of workarounds for fundamental language design problems.
I've been using C++ as my primary development language for more than 20 years. It started out as a fairly reasonable set of C extensions, but it has turned into a complete and utter disaster.
I'm not going to start another open source project in C++, and I'm not going to accept any contracts for C++ development anymore either. C++ needs to die, and the sooner the better.
Fortunately, the dark ages are over and nobody has to give a damn anymore what the Pope says or thinks, and we can use his name and his image like that of any actor, politician, dictator, or common criminal.
C/C++ is mabye 10-100x faster and more efficient for carefully written inner loops. At the level of whole systems, it's an entirely different story. Because C++ lacks garbage collection, people end up retaining far more memory than they need to. Because algorithms are far harder to express in C++, people end up using brute force algorithms (linear search, etc.) a lot. Because templates need specially compiled versions for each combination of template arguments, you end up with dozens of different instances of basically the same code.
For web applications, there's probably not much of a difference either way; but in scripting languages like PHP, all the inner loops that are needed are already written in C. For scientific computing, C++ is acceptable because a lot of applications really are mainly about the inner loops.
But for many applications, like GUIs, C++ not only fails to be faster, it also ends up making everything a lot slower and more bloated. If our desktops were largely written in Python, Ruby, or Smalltalk, we'd be using a lot less energy and be able to get by with smaller, less-powerful machines. That's in addition to all the savings from the reduced number of bugs and reduced development costs.
Joking aside, Java is multiplatform in practice and .Net is only in theory.
That's a joke. Java GUIs are horribly broken on Linux and on OS X.
Just let them have their drugs; they'll be quieter, better behaved, and easier to handle. The same works on the outside, by the way.
Apple maintains total control over it, sticks to their guns, and the product isn't bad. Google gives the carriers complete control, and it turns to shit.
Whoa, stop right there. I've owned both, and let me tell you: I prefer any Android phone to an iPhone.
You wouldn't get email on your phone with out an extra $10/month charge from AT&T if it was in their control
That's because the US phone market isn't competitive. Apple has nothing to do with it; in fact, Apple has made carrier lock-in worse, rather than better. Bad Apple.
If there's hope for the US phone market, it comes from Google, not from Apple.
Nokia's "updates" are bug fix updates that fix egregious errors, the kind that should never have gone out in a shipping product to begin with. Other than that, Nokia's approach to software upgrades is "throw it away and buy a new one". Symbian itself is fragmented into three different user interfaces, and even within a particular user interface, there are significant incompatibilities between even minor releases.
I've had half a dozen Nokia Symbian phones; I'm never going to buy another one. Nokia's hardware is great, but their software, user interface, and software upgrades suck.
Google got the better part of the product--the developers. Without good developers, the code is probably pretty much useless.
These people don't seem to understand that they are competing for limited attention. If the French don't want their literature noticed and accessible by the rest of the world, well, that's their business; the French language is already enough of a barrier to begin with.
France is making themselves more and more irrelevant, and wasting EU 1 billion of French taxpayers' money in the process.
When silverlight gains real marketshare the Mac client will fall behind and moonlight will be left out in the patent minefield.
Look, I think Silverlight sucks technically and the sooner it goes away the better. But if you want to talk about a "patent minefield", you either need to put up (i.e., show us what the patents are) or you should shut up.
And I wonder whether you have the same misgivings about, oh, Sun Java, for example, where Sun has many patents and effectively has only granted you a license for those with their implementation and its derivatives.
"No"? "No" what? I didn't say anything about what their promise covered, I merely pointed out that it is not equivalent to what quangdog said.
But since you bring it up, I don't see anything about "non-commercial" in there. Why are you making stuff like that up?
Microsoft's patent grant is really no different from Sun's patent grant on Java: it applies only to a single implementation and its derivative. Why are people like you whining about it when Microsoft does it and not when Sun does it?
Use your head, man.
Sun tried this with Java. Then it was Flash and Adobe's latest RIA junk. Now it's Silverlight. All this cross platform crap is ever used for is mindless little games and controls on movie players, and a few applications by developers who don't know any better and who end up producing horrid interfaces.
Give it up, guys. AJAX is as cross-platform as it's gonna get, and AJAX works because the browser isn't trying to be a desktop UI and because people invest a lot of time in making HTML work right across platform. Nothing that Java, Flash, or Moonlight are going to do are even going to come remotely close in terms of usability.
Just how effective is it to hear "use our stuff - we won't sue!" as the marketing message?
They're saying "we won't sue if you use someone else's implementation of our stuff". And that's legally quite effective: they are bound by it.
I promise not to sue anyone who buys my iphone apps [incredicode.com].
Why don't you promise not to sue anyone who makes an exact clone of your app? That would be the rough legal equivalent of what Microsoft has done.
Much as I deplore overly restrictive copyrights themselves, holding the people who pay for the data transfer responsible for what is being transferred makes sense. What we need to change is the restrictive copyrights themselves (terms should expire much sooner), and who is actually responsible for the infringement.
In particular, the person doing the downloading should not usually be held responsible. I should be able to assume that anything that's accessible on the Internet for downloading without a password is something I have an implicit license to download. If there is no license, then the person owning the connection where it is being offered without a password should be held responsible (but only if downloading actually has taken place).
Holding the person downloading the information responsible is bad, because it basically creates a huge legal uncertainty. Am I now responsible for verifying the copyright status of every video on YouTube? What if someone puts a copyrighted image or video into an ad on some page that I visit?