I imagine it has a pointing device built in but I've never seen a keyboard pointing device with a satisfactory button placement.
You're right, it has a touchpad built in.
However, I'm using a keyboard with a pointing device built in which has satisfactory button placement.
It's a Trackpoint keyboard, and the buttons are right below the spacebar, where I naturally rest my thumbs.
To move the mouse, I just twitch either index finger over to the little eraser-thingie and push it, and the mouse moves. Twitch my thumb, and the mouse clicks (only two buttons, though; a pity).
And to make things even more wonderful, if I hold the shift down and move the mouse, the page which the mouse is over scrolls in two dimensions (without changing the focus). I haven't touched a scrollbar in ages.
I wonder -- is shift-mouse movement scrolling supported in Linux? It would _really_ be nice.
-Billy
Less and less relevant, Katz
on
ShutUp Software
·
· Score: 1
Katz is really marginalizing himself. I suppose that Usenet is a form of censorship too, since it's possible to not subscribe to every group?
Sheesh.
It's people like this that really hurt the fight against REAL censorship. "Viewer discretion" will never be stopped, thank goodness -- no matter how often you and others call it censorship.
I defended Katz back when; I thought it was silly to fight him posting. I still think it's silly, although now I see why the others fought. Katz is an empty talker, nothing more.
Right: and bees can't fly, nor was man ever meant to.
Let's try it and see what happens -- because we HAVE to.
Maybe we can't do it. Oh well; maybe it's because you were right. More likely it's some other reason; there are SO many of them, you know.
But how odd -- I'm writing a game. I don't itch for one, but I'm writing one nonetheless. There are itches which can be scratched by other things than writing code for my use -- I'm rewriting Omega because I used to like it so much.
Zips compressed? On the contrary -- they're ECCed. A raw Zip disk has a capacity of more than 100M, but thanks of the error correction codes they unly use most of that.
I'm kinda befuddled by this comment -- the previous poster has a concern about the GPL, and all you can do is claim that they're too stupid to understand Linux?
The concern is specifically that someone is trying to force him to use the GPL, and that someone is the FSF. They don't merely recommend that people use the GPL (which is praiseworthy); they also include legal language in the GPL which says that anything linked to a GPLed program must itself be GPLed. Why couldn't they have said "must be level $n$ free or better"?
However, as long as we've got the LGPL I'm happy. I wish there were a few clear choices, though. We could use:
- full GPL (total protection, only GPL) - half-GPL (freedom to link to free software) - demi-GPL (freedom to link to open source) - LGPL (freedom to link anywhere, including icky anti-free) - open source and I suppose: - icky closed-source - even ickier anti-free software
The reason why open source became and remains so popular is that it offers a wide range of options for licensing. The reason why it garners so much oposition is that it is almost capable of replacing free software, while allowing latitude in licensing above what free software can allow.
If the free software camp would officially offer a definition and license more restrictive than LGPL but less so than GPL, this problem would be moot. In addition, we could generally place any foreign license somewhere on that scale.
Thanks for your comments. I think several people have gotten the impression that I consider economic behavior, as a whole, to automatically be zero-sum or even negative-sum. That was not an impression I intended to create. But one of the weaknesses of economic transactions is that they are typically zero-sum in each direction.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'in each direction.' In fact, the only way in which they are zero-sum is with respect to a single commodity. If you consider anything more, they're highly positive sum, because both parties are more efficient than before (or at least believe that they are, and we can't contradict them).
Unfortunately, this essay, unlike Mises' "Human Action", stops far short of being in any way useful. Hopefully the author will publish a more complete treatment. And this time, perhaps explain his perspective of the free market a little more clearly.
I'm quoting myself here because I made a huge mistake -- I said that his essay "stopped far short of being useful." I meant to say "was far too short to be useful."
And that only underscores the importance I believe this subject has, and the competence I feel the author posesses to discuss it.
I look forward to seeing more depth in later postings, together with commentary on examples -- hopefully with the theory published before the examples happen (anyone can backdate a thesis;-).
The author of this essay appears to be making the point that some people/economists describe the market as being negative sum, and the best way to win as being to crush the competition.
This description is, as you say, false. But the author's point is nonetheless true, because the description nonetheless drives the behavior of some large companies (to be specific, Microsoft), who have come to believe that unless someone else loses something, they can't win anything.
It's fairly trivial to see, both theoretically and practically, that acting as though the market were a zero-sum game doesn't make it one, but does reduce the total growth of the market by hurting consumers as well as competitors.
This essay is very good, as far as it goes. Its tone reminds me very much of Mises' landmark work in economics. Unfortunately, this essay, unlike Mises' "Human Action", stops far short of being in any way useful. Hopefully the author will publish a more complete treatment. And this time, perhaps explain his perspective of the free market a little more clearly.
-Billy
Stallman's GPL is hurting programmers now.
on
Feature:Free Linux
·
· Score: 1
It absolutely does prevent those things. The best a programmer can do, once he or she has released a product under the GPL, is make money doing peripheral tasks such as making CD-ROMs or consulting.
(He also discusses the problem of competing against free software.)
What you fail to realize here is that if free software destroys proprietary software, it is because it is better. Period. You can't make it stop by complaining about losing your work; the lamp-oil manufacturers lost their jobs when gas became commonly used, and gas when elecrical lights became common.
You can NOT put the genie back in the bottle.
Deal with it.
How does one deal with it? A common answer is to go with the free software flow, but use a license that's less restrictive than the GPL. The LGPL works decently well; Perl's Artistic licence is good. The Open Source movement has prospered because of people who, I think, see this coming.
The GPL is bad, I believe, but not for any of the reasons you list. Rather, it's bad because it's hostile to perfectly good licenses.
A joke about a patently silly statement is dirty politics? Wake up. You may be able to fool some of the people into believing that, but not me. And I hope not the majority of voters.
Seriously, though, I wouldn't use Python -- I'd use Zope (www.zope.org). MAN that's a sweet program. And Open Source, too. It's based on Python (and tons of C), but then isn't everything?
It only takes a few minutes to install and fall in love -- try it!
All partisanship aside, Slashdot's stuck with Perl because that's the code they've got. Makes sense to me!
A pity about the changes, though; I'll spend even less time visiting those other web pages. And the Zope people will have to delay their official Slashdot clone a little.
Cute. Your little saying is not new. It originates in the same phrase with airplane pilots.
Yup. Of course! The copyright's expired:-).
However, it implies that bold pilots end up dead, not that old pilots are generally useless, like one would infer from your version.
Read again -- like you say, I'm quoting the saying almost verbatim, and my message was otherwise extolling the virtues of experienced programmers. Don't know how you got that interpretation.
Perl text-processing problems better than any language. There's 50% of web programming right there.
If I had a hammer...
Zope clearly shows that text mangling is not the only way to run a website (and in this case, not the easiest). There's more than one way to do this, and Perl's way isn't always the best way.
Perl does networking well. There's another 10%.
True, on a Unix box -- backquotes aren't considered good style. Still, 10% for CPAN support.
But now you're adding unlike units -- "50% of web programming" doesn't add to "10% of all programming" to equal 60% of anything.
Perl is a great replacement for shell scripting. Another 10%.
Shell scripting is a replacement for Perl programming. I'll grant you more than 10% on that one:-).
Perl is a great prototyping language. Another 10%.
I try to prototype everything, but not in Perl. Shudder. I'll give you 10% here, although Python walks away with about 50% by your style of counting.
Perl is an adequate (not great) approach to OO programming. Enough to clobber C++ for 10% of the problems, as it is more portable.
"Not great" isn't high praise. Adequate is about right, though; it'll work, as would Intercal-2 (you know, the one with subject orientation).
There's an easy 90%.
Work the math again. Even ignoring the fact that Python can handle all of these except text mangling in a nicer and more portable manner, your numbers add up to somewhere above 30% (ignoring your web estimates, so add in as much as 50% times whatever fraction of jobs are done on the web).
Now consider that Python does all this better.
Of course, you'd have to program to know this.
Thank you! But I think you DO know how to program, and you're just being modest.
Perl's design doesn't presume that one language can solve 100% of the problems out there very well. Perl solves 90% of them very well. For the other 10%, I'll gladly go to another language.
Perl solves 10% of the problems very well, and has been shoehorned into solving 50% more REALLY badly.
Golly, that makes it a majority, doesn't it? Majority rules! Let's all use Windows.
NT architecture is definitely more modern than UNIX, incorporating many desirable features (and some undesirables, as many of you have been expounding here for long time).
You're right.
however, nt seems to be the poster child (poster devil?) for E raymond's theory about how "cathedral" development model fails in reliability. ms recruited many many high quality talents with their market clouts, yet they still put out low quality products (at least in terms of reliability).
Actually, read "Rapid Development" (MS Press). Don't get too hung up on its advice, although by and large it's a very good book.
Anyhow, the author points out that MS did the opposite of this -- they didn't pay money to get the best, they instead used an internal hype campaign to get the excited programmers eager to work on the project. There's a saying about that -- there are old programmers, and there are bold programmers. But there are no old, bold programmers.
So MS traded enthusiasm for writing "the best OS ever" (their words) for experience and competance.
The result is self-evident.
Will bazaar-style open source ("open development", to coin a term) make it possible to be both experienced, competant, AND excited? Time will tell. I hope so.
I don't think so -- many compilers are written in themselves.
For interpreters, most Forths are written in themselves -- but then Forth isn't really interpreted (it's wordcoded). The Forthers call it metacompilation.
The definition of Christian constantly changes, but for purely political reasons.
I'm not sure what you mean by "purely political reasons". Most politics are pretty unclear/impure, involving as they do so many people, and some political results are good.
It is irresponsible and cowardly to claim that the Inquisition wasn't a Christian and purely Christian movement.
It was impurely political. Christianity was an important but not decisive concern. Look at what had just happened in Spain -- the Moslems had just left. The inquisition was a political defense. So was the Spanish conquest of the New World. Both emanated from the same basic root -- oppression under the occupation.
Even then, nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.
Every organization makes serious mistakes, don't deny Christianity is unique among them.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone wrote VSTa, an open-source microkernel OS using Plan9-style filesystem (and such).
It looked really nice, although the version I tried ran really slow.
I have no idea what happened to it.
-Billy
satisfactory button placement.
You're right, it has a touchpad built in.
However, I'm using a keyboard with a pointing device built in which has satisfactory button placement.
It's a Trackpoint keyboard, and the buttons are right below the spacebar, where I naturally rest my thumbs.
To move the mouse, I just twitch either index finger over to the little eraser-thingie and push it, and the mouse moves. Twitch my thumb, and the mouse clicks (only two buttons, though; a pity).
And to make things even more wonderful, if I hold the shift down and move the mouse, the page which the mouse is over scrolls in two dimensions (without changing the focus). I haven't touched a scrollbar in ages.
I wonder -- is shift-mouse movement scrolling supported in Linux? It would _really_ be nice.
-Billy
Katz is really marginalizing himself. I suppose that Usenet is a form of censorship too, since it's possible to not subscribe to every group?
Sheesh.
It's people like this that really hurt the fight against REAL censorship. "Viewer discretion" will never be stopped, thank goodness -- no matter how often you and others call it censorship.
I defended Katz back when; I thought it was silly to fight him posting. I still think it's silly, although now I see why the others fought. Katz is an empty talker, nothing more.
-Billy
Right: and bees can't fly, nor was man ever meant to.
Let's try it and see what happens -- because we HAVE to.
Maybe we can't do it. Oh well; maybe it's because you were right. More likely it's some other reason; there are SO many of them, you know.
But how odd -- I'm writing a game. I don't itch for one, but I'm writing one nonetheless. There are itches which can be scratched by other things than writing code for my use -- I'm rewriting Omega because I used to like it so much.
-Billy
That's a brilliant idea, IMO. Write it up and send it in to them. It might be possible to make it a subproject.
But think about it for a while first; how will you prevent abuses? How will they choose which projects to review and which to turn down?
-Billy
Zips compressed? On the contrary -- they're ECCed. A raw Zip disk has a capacity of more than 100M, but thanks of the error correction codes they unly use most of that.
-Billy
I'm kinda befuddled by this comment -- the previous poster has a concern about the GPL, and all you can do is claim that they're too stupid to understand Linux?
The concern is specifically that someone is trying to force him to use the GPL, and that someone is the FSF. They don't merely recommend that people use the GPL (which is praiseworthy); they also include legal language in the GPL which says that anything linked to a GPLed program must itself be GPLed. Why couldn't they have said "must be level $n$ free or better"?
However, as long as we've got the LGPL I'm happy. I wish there were a few clear choices, though. We could use:
- full GPL (total protection, only GPL)
- half-GPL (freedom to link to free software)
- demi-GPL (freedom to link to open source)
- LGPL (freedom to link anywhere, including icky anti-free)
- open source
and I suppose:
- icky closed-source
- even ickier anti-free software
The reason why open source became and remains so popular is that it offers a wide range of options for licensing. The reason why it garners so much oposition is that it is almost capable of replacing free software, while allowing latitude in licensing above what free software can allow.
If the free software camp would officially offer a definition and license more restrictive than LGPL but less so than GPL, this problem would be moot. In addition, we could generally place any foreign license somewhere on that scale.
-Billy
I'm not sure what you mean by 'in each direction.' In fact, the only way in which they are zero-sum is with respect to a single commodity. If you consider anything more, they're highly positive sum, because both parties are more efficient than before (or at least believe that they are, and we can't contradict them).
I'm quoting myself here because I made a huge mistake -- I said that his essay "stopped far short of being useful." I meant to say "was far too short to be useful."
And that only underscores the importance I believe this subject has, and the competence I feel the author posesses to discuss it.
I look forward to seeing more depth in later postings, together with commentary on examples -- hopefully with the theory published before the examples happen (anyone can backdate a thesis ;-).
-Billy
The author of this essay appears to be making the point that some people/economists describe the market as being negative sum, and the best way to win as being to crush the competition.
This description is, as you say, false. But the author's point is nonetheless true, because the description nonetheless drives the behavior of some large companies (to be specific, Microsoft), who have come to believe that unless someone else loses something, they can't win anything.
It's fairly trivial to see, both theoretically and practically, that acting as though the market were a zero-sum game doesn't make it one, but does reduce the total growth of the market by hurting consumers as well as competitors.
This essay is very good, as far as it goes. Its tone reminds me very much of Mises' landmark work in economics. Unfortunately, this essay, unlike Mises' "Human Action", stops far short of being in any way useful. Hopefully the author will publish a more complete treatment. And this time, perhaps explain his perspective of the free market a little more clearly.
-Billy
(He also discusses the problem of competing against free software.)
What you fail to realize here is that if free software destroys proprietary software, it is because it is better. Period. You can't make it stop by complaining about losing your work; the lamp-oil manufacturers lost their jobs when gas became commonly used, and gas when elecrical lights became common.
You can NOT put the genie back in the bottle.
Deal with it.
How does one deal with it? A common answer is to go with the free software flow, but use a license that's less restrictive than the GPL. The LGPL works decently well; Perl's Artistic licence is good. The Open Source movement has prospered because of people who, I think, see this coming.
The GPL is bad, I believe, but not for any of the reasons you list. Rather, it's bad because it's hostile to perfectly good licenses.
-Billy
A joke about a patently silly statement is dirty politics? Wake up. You may be able to fool some of the people into believing that, but not me. And I hope not the majority of voters.
Python, of course.
;-) :-)
Seriously, though, I wouldn't use Python -- I'd use Zope (www.zope.org). MAN that's a sweet program. And Open Source, too. It's based on Python (and tons of C), but then isn't everything?
It only takes a few minutes to install and fall in love -- try it!
All partisanship aside, Slashdot's stuck with Perl because that's the code they've got. Makes sense to me!
A pity about the changes, though; I'll spend even less time visiting those other web pages. And the Zope people will have to delay their official Slashdot clone a little.
-Billy
Yup. Of course! The copyright's expired :-).
However, it implies that bold pilots end up dead, not that old pilots are generally useless, like one would infer from your version.
Read again -- like you say, I'm quoting the saying almost verbatim, and my message was otherwise extolling the virtues of experienced programmers. Don't know how you got that interpretation.
-Billy
If I had a hammer...
Zope clearly shows that text mangling is not the only way to run a website (and in this case, not the easiest). There's more than one way to do this, and Perl's way isn't always the best way.
Perl does networking well. There's another 10%.
True, on a Unix box -- backquotes aren't considered good style. Still, 10% for CPAN support.
But now you're adding unlike units -- "50% of web programming" doesn't add to "10% of all programming" to equal 60% of anything.
Perl is a great replacement for shell scripting. Another 10%.
Shell scripting is a replacement for Perl programming. I'll grant you more than 10% on that one :-).
Perl is a great prototyping language. Another 10%.
I try to prototype everything, but not in Perl. Shudder. I'll give you 10% here, although Python walks away with about 50% by your style of counting.
Perl is an adequate (not great) approach to OO programming. Enough to clobber C++ for 10% of the problems, as it is more portable.
"Not great" isn't high praise. Adequate is about right, though; it'll work, as would Intercal-2 (you know, the one with subject orientation).
There's an easy 90%.
Work the math again. Even ignoring the fact that Python can handle all of these except text mangling in a nicer and more portable manner, your numbers add up to somewhere above 30% (ignoring your web estimates, so add in as much as 50% times whatever fraction of jobs are done on the web).
Now consider that Python does all this better.
Of course, you'd have to program to know this.
Thank you! But I think you DO know how to program, and you're just being modest.
-Billy
Perl solves 10% of the problems very well, and has been shoehorned into solving 50% more REALLY badly.
Golly, that makes it a majority, doesn't it? Majority rules! Let's all use Windows.
-Billy
"Complete wierdo?" "Whacked-out info?" This coming from the maintainer of Slashdot?
:-)
Now, really.
;-)
-Billy
I like what Wall says, and I try to read it a lot, because it makes being forced to work with Perl a little tiny bit less of a living hell.
I hate that language.
Except for short text-munching scripts, of course. Then I'll kill you if you keep it from me. Python works for everything else, but Perl rules there.
-Billy
You're right.
however, nt seems to be the poster child (poster devil?) for E raymond's theory about how "cathedral" development model fails in reliability. ms recruited many many high quality talents with their market clouts, yet they still put out low quality products (at least in terms of reliability).
Actually, read "Rapid Development" (MS Press). Don't get too hung up on its advice, although by and large it's a very good book.
Anyhow, the author points out that MS did the opposite of this -- they didn't pay money to get the best, they instead used an internal hype campaign to get the excited programmers eager to work on the project. There's a saying about that -- there are old programmers, and there are bold programmers. But there are no old, bold programmers.
So MS traded enthusiasm for writing "the best OS ever" (their words) for experience and competance.
The result is self-evident.
Will bazaar-style open source ("open development", to coin a term) make it possible to be both experienced, competant, AND excited? Time will tell. I hope so.
-Billy
I don't think so -- many compilers are written in themselves.
For interpreters, most Forths are written in themselves -- but then Forth isn't really interpreted (it's wordcoded). The Forthers call it metacompilation.
-Billy
I'm not sure what you mean by "purely political reasons". Most politics are pretty unclear/impure, involving as they do so many people, and some political results are good.
It is irresponsible and cowardly to claim that the Inquisition wasn't a Christian and purely Christian movement.
It was impurely political. Christianity was an important but not decisive concern. Look at what had just happened in Spain -- the Moslems had just left. The inquisition was a political defense. So was the Spanish conquest of the New World. Both emanated from the same basic root -- oppression under the occupation.
Even then, nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.
Every organization makes serious mistakes, don't deny Christianity is unique among them.
You're 100 percent right.
-Billy