The Python code seems to be VERY clear, more so than a lot of Python code I see. You might want to use it to help you get a grip on the rest.
Even if you don't know Python it's very readable.
You know, it would be really cool to have Xanadu's source entered into Xanadu, with appropriate hyperlinks automatically (etags, versions, email references) and manually (explanations) entered.
That's fair. Perhaps I was too rushed in my judgement of the previous poster.:-)
Xanadu is (essentially) a hypertext system which makes the protocols used to build the WWW look like a bit of cotton lint.
Xanadu _will_ be used in a number of applications, and it's likely that those applications will be able to use the current web. Eventually (slowly, perhaps) Xanadu content might come to sit where web content is now.
Perhaps. It's technically good enough.
OTOH, some of the really interesting stuff here is technical details -- I would expect a lot of other projects to borrow stuff from the Udanax implementation. For example, Bitkeeper (the potential version control system for Linux kernel development) could use its version mapping and coloring.
From what I read, the technology advance is solid state. In order to really use it, you do have to use non-solid state stuff.
However, on the bright side, they imply that the precision needed for the head motion motor is much lower -- that should result in faster and cheaper drives.
I also wonder how much data could be stored if you couldn't move the head at all -- that would be truly solid state. If there's anything to the 2.3 TB figure and the statement that the head doesn't have to be positioned accurately, I would guesstimate several hundred megs.
Not to condone the gratuitous use of the words solid state, of course. You're 100% right about that.
wxWindows is a good multiplatform toolkit. There was even an ncurses binding for it (not enough interest, so it stopped being maintained, because it had special contraints)!
Its scripting language bindings are especially impressive.
I understand and appreciate your point here. However, you're dead wrong in this particular case -- Xanadu is VERY well described. You need to hold your horses a little, calm down, and understand that somethings do take more than 20 seconds of attention span to explain.
Mandrake does use RH's work, but they've done a LOT to really put it together in a solid, useful way. RH got a little too accustomed to doing things the same old accustomed way -- Mandrake is perhaps waking them up.
And Mandrake isn't being stingy about it, either -- they're putting cool stuff they make out there as free software.
Mind you, I'm a fanatical Debian user, but I still know what works and when:-). Mandrake is a good, solid distro, and currently, I would choose it before Redhat for any use.
Big hint: people can already sell free software. It's part of the definition. You know, 'free', as in "you can use this to help yourself in any way, so long as you don't use it to chain someone else."
What does it mean to "make money from your free software"? You can't stop people from benefiting from your software... Why do you want to stop them from benefiting in this particular way?
No, the restriction you want is legally impossible. Not to mention childish. It's been tried before, and the result is always more limited usage, because it's impossible to use the software to its full extant (for example, CD dsitributors can't include it on their disks if they want to be moral -- but if they want to be immoral they can do it without fear, by simply putting something else on the disk and claiming to charge all the money for IT).
The GPL has the same result -- slapping restrictions on the free use of software ALWAYS will reduce its usefulness, no matter what your intentions are.
Pardon, but the GPL _does_ dictate terms of usage. You can't give a GPLed program away without also giving the source -- and instructions, effectively commands, to continue distributing the source.
I'm glad to distribute source. But I'm not so glad to require other people to -- I'd rather they just include a link to my page.
I'm glad to have the GPL, but the very fact that UCITA helps it should serve as a warning sign that although its intention is good, and its results beneficial, its purpose is deliberately restrictive.
Let me rephrase that: the only thing that the GPL does which is not done by other licenses is take away people's freedom.
Perhaps this is pragmatic. But I believe that in the realm of morals, there's nothing worse than pragmatism.
The definition of open source makes no bones about its pragmatism, and I respect that. But FSF pretends to be especially moral.
If you really want to write free software, make it truly free. If you don't want someone to use your software in some special way (such as distributing it to teachers whom you'd rather not instruct on the finer points of source distribution), don't put it in the license -- instead, just ask politely.
I've been with Slashdot for a while (back when it was just a little announcments page on Rob's server, along with his homepage), and I have to disagree that Slashdot's getting worse.
We have problems, true. But we're getting better overall.
Anyhow, about Exchange: ouch. The worst part is that in order to use Exchange at work I _have_ to use Outlook. That alone makes it inconceivable to actually WANT to use Exchange. A real turnoff. Outlook 97 was a real bastard; 98 is passable.
I've got many Unix accounts, and I've had many others, and never lost past email. I only have one Exchange email address, and already I lost 30 megs.
You're talking about the dangers of censorship, but absolutely none of your arguments discuss censorship. Instead you're talking about buggy products (buggy including fundamental design flaws).
NOBODY with a brain (who doesn't already agree) is going to take you seriously if you keep indulging in this misdirection.
If this is bad because it's censorship, then argue against censorship (and I suppose you'll have to also persuade people that it actually is censorship -- many including myself don't buy that).
If it's bad because its buggy, argue that -- and for heaven's sake, don't pull the tabloid trick of exaggerating the headlines to say something the story can't.
That better not be what they're patenting -- I designed a processor using that a year ago.
It was a stack processor, every operation single-cycle. The ALU was hooked directly to the top two stack items, so the cycle was relatively fast (i.e. high MHz) because of the lack of need for instruction decoding and register muxing.
Anyhow, the important part was that memory access had two parts: set address register, and read data register.
Setting the address reg would start a memory read cycle, and while the cycle was going you could do other things. When you need the data, you would read the data register, and if the memory cycle wasn't finished the processor would stall.
Net effect: 2-cycle memory access. I also had a fetch-data-and-increment-address mode, of course, which made memory access essentially one-cycle.
My processor was the simplest and fastest in the class:).
I like stack-based processors. A pity there are so few of them on the market now -- Novix and Chuck Moore's P21 are the only two I know of. (The P21 is pretty amazing, though).
-Billy
Amiga trying to handle touchy situation
on
Amiga & Transmeta?
·
· Score: 2
Amiga made a bad choice (in their opinion) with QNX. Then QNX steamrolled them with a perfectly timed announcement, which would either force Amiga to admit to having switched without being able to produce the docs and SDK, or would force them to lay low and try to conceal the switch.
QNX knew that either choice would divide the Amiga community and leave more customers for them.
Clever.
Now why is the Amiga community falling for it? Don't abandon Amiga for QNX until QNX actually HAS something.
Perhaps they have aspirations? You hadn't heard about Corel Linux? It'll be developed openly, based on the best distribution currently available (Debian), and made much easier to install.
Looks fine indeed.
A pity about Amiga, but once again, if their marketing ineptitude doesn't kill them their community is going to destroy them. That community just never learns. But then neither does Amiga.
QNX learned their lesson well, though -- that was a BRILLIANTLY timed propaganda piece to force Amiga to reveal just the wrong amount of info at just the wrong time. If QNX had waited, Amiga would have had a complete development environment -- or at least acceptable docs -- ready with the announcement. QNX wouldn't have gotten much publicity, and the Amiga community wouldn't have split.
Perhaps they are. But consider that Perl has always been utterly Unix-specific in the past -- most Perlscripts call out to Unix commands to do basic things.
I prefer Unix to Windows, but that doesn't make me think that being unix-specific is more holy than being windows-specific.
Perhaps after the Windows people slam Perl around a while, and the Unix people grab it back and slam it around, they'll all come to their senses and simply write non-platform-specific code.
Or just use Python, which has been platform independant since day one. Not to mention looking MUCH more sexy, and doing everything aside from text parsing more tersely.
Of course registering makes you less anonymous -- if you _post_ with that ID consistently.
I don't use people's emails or read their stupid (or clever) nicks; I don't even care. To me, they are what they write -- and an AC is someone who doesn't want to be associated with what they've written in the past.
I agree with you WRT deb vs. RPM, even though I'm told that rpmfinder is a nice program which can be pointed to central distributions -- Redhat just isn't designed for that, and Debian is.
However, you asked "do people really find plain old fdisk THAT hard to use?"
People Do.
:)
Or more specifically, Linux typically asks people to partition their hard drive before it tells them what for. In my ideal installation, you'd choose the apps you wanted before you ever saw the partitioning screen. That way the installer could straight out tell you "you need to clear at least X amount of space -- that's n% of your hard drive. Here's a suggested area."
Until then, installs will require planning ahead, or dedicated systems. Planning ahead is wonderful, but it required knowledge, which is kind of a catch-22 for new Linux users (they're installing Linux so they can gain knowledge).
Strange. I've installed Debian many times on many machines, and only once had a problem (the mouse refused to work).
Compare this to my Redhat experience -- I've tried five different versions on four different computers more times than I care to count, with only three sucessful installs. Every other time, the installer corrupted the filesystem while doing the install. (Oops, make that six versions on five computers -- LinuxPPC installed perfectly without a glitch.)
My point?
Installing OSes sucks;-). Don't sweat it -- if the install doesn't take the first time, write to the maintainer(s) about it so they can fix it, then try again.
-Billy (A very happy Debian user -- although I do want a better install, I believe that ease of use and upgrading is FAR more important, and Red Hat just does not handle that.)
The GPL refuses the right to do silly things like make changes and distribute them in a proprietary manner.
That's its job; I'm not unhappy with that, because I agree entirely that proprietary is immoral. However, this reduces freedom for programmers.
Worse, the GPL also explicitly prohibits my linking a non-GPLed program with a GPLed library (even if the program's open source).
And even worse, the GPL mandates specific forms of distribution which put even _users_ in chains.
Let me explain that last paragraph.
My math professor wrote a Forth program to play with group theory. He then ported it to gforth (GNU Forth), and handed out the source for his program together with gforth.exe. Stallman called him and ordered him to stop; it seems that he was distributing gforth without also putting its source on diskettes and handing THEM out as well.
But what could he do? He wanted to get other teachers to hand these programs out to their students, but that would mean that they would also have to understand the GPL and be willing to distribute gForth source.
Even though his program was completely free of restriction, he wound up not being able to use it.
Countless other stories could be told, but the fact remains that the GPL reduces one aspect of freedom in HOPE that it will increase the total amount of freedom. Whether that hope is correct or not, the GPL's only actual action is to reduce freedom, both for the programmer and the distributor.
Again, I like the rest of the GPL, and I think that other licenses do its job much more morally. XFree and BSD, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
The Python code seems to be VERY clear, more so than a lot of Python code I see. You might want to use it to help you get a grip on the rest.
Even if you don't know Python it's very readable.
You know, it would be really cool to have Xanadu's source entered into Xanadu, with appropriate hyperlinks automatically (etags, versions, email references) and manually (explanations) entered.
-Billy
That's fair. Perhaps I was too rushed in my judgement of the previous poster. :-)
Xanadu is (essentially) a hypertext system which makes the protocols used to build the WWW look like a bit of cotton lint.
Xanadu _will_ be used in a number of applications, and it's likely that those applications will be able to use the current web. Eventually (slowly, perhaps) Xanadu content might come to sit where web content is now.
Perhaps. It's technically good enough.
OTOH, some of the really interesting stuff here is technical details -- I would expect a lot of other projects to borrow stuff from the Udanax implementation. For example, Bitkeeper (the potential version control system for Linux kernel development) could use its version mapping and coloring.
-Billy
From what I read, the technology advance is solid state. In order to really use it, you do have to use non-solid state stuff.
However, on the bright side, they imply that the precision needed for the head motion motor is much lower -- that should result in faster and cheaper drives.
I also wonder how much data could be stored if you couldn't move the head at all -- that would be truly solid state. If there's anything to the 2.3 TB figure and the statement that the head doesn't have to be positioned accurately, I would guesstimate several hundred megs.
Not to condone the gratuitous use of the words solid state, of course. You're 100% right about that.
-Billy
wxWindows is a good multiplatform toolkit. There was even an ncurses binding for it (not enough interest, so it stopped being maintained, because it had special contraints)!
Its scripting language bindings are especially impressive.
-Billy
...and no explorer needs it.
Modesty is a drawback in exploration.
Sure, a lack of it causes painful problems in marketing, but I think we're tought enough to look past marketing.
The question shouldn't be: is Nelson a windbag. The question should be: what has he done?
-Billy
I understand and appreciate your point here. However, you're dead wrong in this particular case -- Xanadu is VERY well described. You need to hold your horses a little, calm down, and understand that somethings do take more than 20 seconds of attention span to explain.
-Billy
Mandrake does use RH's work, but they've done a LOT to really put it together in a solid, useful way. RH got a little too accustomed to doing things the same old accustomed way -- Mandrake is perhaps waking them up.
:-). Mandrake is a good, solid distro, and currently, I would choose it before Redhat for any use.
And Mandrake isn't being stingy about it, either -- they're putting cool stuff they make out there as free software.
Mind you, I'm a fanatical Debian user, but I still know what works and when
-Billy
The Latin plural of virus is virus -- virus is a collective noun, like scum. In fact, that's essentially what it means.
-Billy
I'm glad we have free licenses like *BSD to go along with the pragmatic licenses like GPL.
-Billy
Big hint: people can already sell free software. It's part of the definition. You know, 'free', as in "you can use this to help yourself in any way, so long as you don't use it to chain someone else."
Making money is certainly helping yourself.
-Billy
I've been reading news items on this guy for a while, and I still don't know what he's charged with/done.
-Billy
Right! You can read.
Now try to think.
The FSF doesn't call itself the "Restricted Software Foundation" or the "Pragmatic Software Foundation". They call themselves "Free".
Yet even BSD is more free. The only thing they offer is bondage.
Python's license is more free. Yet because of the GPL, Python can't be distributed with GNU Readline.
-Billy
What does it mean to "make money from your free software"? You can't stop people from benefiting from your software... Why do you want to stop them from benefiting in this particular way?
No, the restriction you want is legally impossible. Not to mention childish. It's been tried before, and the result is always more limited usage, because it's impossible to use the software to its full extant (for example, CD dsitributors can't include it on their disks if they want to be moral -- but if they want to be immoral they can do it without fear, by simply putting something else on the disk and claiming to charge all the money for IT).
The GPL has the same result -- slapping restrictions on the free use of software ALWAYS will reduce its usefulness, no matter what your intentions are.
-Billy
Pardon, but the GPL _does_ dictate terms of usage. You can't give a GPLed program away without also giving the source -- and instructions, effectively commands, to continue distributing the source.
I'm glad to distribute source. But I'm not so glad to require other people to -- I'd rather they just include a link to my page.
I'm glad to have the GPL, but the very fact that UCITA helps it should serve as a warning sign that although its intention is good, and its results beneficial, its purpose is deliberately restrictive.
Let me rephrase that: the only thing that the GPL does which is not done by other licenses is take away people's freedom.
Perhaps this is pragmatic. But I believe that in the realm of morals, there's nothing worse than pragmatism.
The definition of open source makes no bones about its pragmatism, and I respect that. But FSF pretends to be especially moral.
If you really want to write free software, make it truly free. If you don't want someone to use your software in some special way (such as distributing it to teachers whom you'd rather not instruct on the finer points of source distribution), don't put it in the license -- instead, just ask politely.
-Billy
I've been with Slashdot for a while (back when it was just a little announcments page on Rob's server, along with his homepage), and I have to disagree that Slashdot's getting worse.
We have problems, true. But we're getting better overall.
Anyhow, about Exchange: ouch. The worst part is that in order to use Exchange at work I _have_ to use Outlook. That alone makes it inconceivable to actually WANT to use Exchange. A real turnoff. Outlook 97 was a real bastard; 98 is passable.
I've got many Unix accounts, and I've had many others, and never lost past email. I only have one Exchange email address, and already I lost 30 megs.
-Billy
There's a serious danger in the argument here.
You're talking about the dangers of censorship, but absolutely none of your arguments discuss censorship. Instead you're talking about buggy products (buggy including fundamental design flaws).
NOBODY with a brain (who doesn't already agree) is going to take you seriously if you keep indulging in this misdirection.
If this is bad because it's censorship, then argue against censorship (and I suppose you'll have to also persuade people that it actually is censorship -- many including myself don't buy that).
If it's bad because its buggy, argue that -- and for heaven's sake, don't pull the tabloid trick of exaggerating the headlines to say something the story can't.
-Billy
That better not be what they're patenting -- I designed a processor using that a year ago.
:).
It was a stack processor, every operation single-cycle. The ALU was hooked directly to the top two stack items, so the cycle was relatively fast (i.e. high MHz) because of the lack of need for instruction decoding and register muxing.
Anyhow, the important part was that memory access had two parts: set address register, and read data register.
Setting the address reg would start a memory read cycle, and while the cycle was going you could do other things. When you need the data, you would read the data register, and if the memory cycle wasn't finished the processor would stall.
Net effect: 2-cycle memory access. I also had a fetch-data-and-increment-address mode, of course, which made memory access essentially one-cycle.
My processor was the simplest and fastest in the class
I like stack-based processors. A pity there are so few of them on the market now -- Novix and Chuck Moore's P21 are the only two I know of. (The P21 is pretty amazing, though).
-Billy
Amiga made a bad choice (in their opinion) with QNX. Then QNX steamrolled them with a perfectly timed announcement, which would either force Amiga to admit to having switched without being able to produce the docs and SDK, or would force them to lay low and try to conceal the switch.
QNX knew that either choice would divide the Amiga community and leave more customers for them.
Clever.
Now why is the Amiga community falling for it? Don't abandon Amiga for QNX until QNX actually HAS something.
-Billy
Perhaps they have aspirations? You hadn't heard about Corel Linux? It'll be developed openly, based on the best distribution currently available (Debian), and made much easier to install.
Looks fine indeed.
A pity about Amiga, but once again, if their marketing ineptitude doesn't kill them their community is going to destroy them. That community just never learns. But then neither does Amiga.
QNX learned their lesson well, though -- that was a BRILLIANTLY timed propaganda piece to force Amiga to reveal just the wrong amount of info at just the wrong time. If QNX had waited, Amiga would have had a complete development environment -- or at least acceptable docs -- ready with the announcement. QNX wouldn't have gotten much publicity, and the Amiga community wouldn't have split.
-Billy
Perhaps they are. But consider that Perl has always been utterly Unix-specific in the past -- most Perlscripts call out to Unix commands to do basic things.
I prefer Unix to Windows, but that doesn't make me think that being unix-specific is more holy than being windows-specific.
Perhaps after the Windows people slam Perl around a while, and the Unix people grab it back and slam it around, they'll all come to their senses and simply write non-platform-specific code.
Or just use Python, which has been platform independant since day one. Not to mention looking MUCH more sexy, and doing everything aside from text parsing more tersely.
-Billy
Of course registering makes you less anonymous -- if you _post_ with that ID consistently.
I don't use people's emails or read their stupid (or clever) nicks; I don't even care. To me, they are what they write -- and an AC is someone who doesn't want to be associated with what they've written in the past.
Fine for them, fine for me.
-Billy
I agree with you WRT deb vs. RPM, even though I'm told that rpmfinder is a nice program which can be pointed to central distributions -- Redhat just isn't designed for that, and Debian is.
However, you asked "do people really find plain old fdisk THAT hard to use?"
People Do.
:)
Or more specifically, Linux typically asks people to partition their hard drive before it tells them what for. In my ideal installation, you'd choose the apps you wanted before you ever saw the partitioning screen. That way the installer could straight out tell you "you need to clear at least X amount of space -- that's n% of your hard drive. Here's a suggested area."
Until then, installs will require planning ahead, or dedicated systems. Planning ahead is wonderful, but it required knowledge, which is kind of a catch-22 for new Linux users (they're installing Linux so they can gain knowledge).
-Billy
Strange. I've installed Debian many times on many machines, and only once had a problem (the mouse refused to work).
;-). Don't sweat it -- if the install doesn't take the first time, write to the maintainer(s) about it so they can fix it, then try again.
Compare this to my Redhat experience -- I've tried five different versions on four different computers more times than I care to count, with only three sucessful installs. Every other time, the installer corrupted the filesystem while doing the install. (Oops, make that six versions on five computers -- LinuxPPC installed perfectly without a glitch.)
My point?
Installing OSes sucks
-Billy
(A very happy Debian user -- although I do want a better install, I believe that ease of use and upgrading is FAR more important, and Red Hat just does not handle that.)
The GPL refuses the right to do silly things like make changes and distribute them in a proprietary manner.
That's its job; I'm not unhappy with that, because I agree entirely that proprietary is immoral. However, this reduces freedom for programmers.
Worse, the GPL also explicitly prohibits my linking a non-GPLed program with a GPLed library (even if the program's open source).
And even worse, the GPL mandates specific forms of distribution which put even _users_ in chains.
Let me explain that last paragraph.
My math professor wrote a Forth program to play with group theory. He then ported it to gforth (GNU Forth), and handed out the source for his program together with gforth.exe. Stallman called him and ordered him to stop; it seems that he was distributing gforth without also putting its source on diskettes and handing THEM out as well.
But what could he do? He wanted to get other teachers to hand these programs out to their students, but that would mean that they would also have to understand the GPL and be willing to distribute gForth source.
Even though his program was completely free of restriction, he wound up not being able to use it.
Countless other stories could be told, but the fact remains that the GPL reduces one aspect of freedom in HOPE that it will increase the total amount of freedom. Whether that hope is correct or not, the GPL's only actual action is to reduce freedom, both for the programmer and the distributor.
Again, I like the rest of the GPL, and I think that other licenses do its job much more morally. XFree and BSD, for example.
-Billy