Why would smaller ones have been better? Wouldn't it be better to remove the mutual dependency by restructuring the packages?
I would love to know a real-world example backing up your position. My position is amply supported by the normal "one-way" dependency of packages containing executables to packages containing shared libraries. It makes sense because many executable packages depend on the one shared library package, thus there is a high probability that you already have a required chunk of code installed for any particular executable package you might choose. This is a reasonable level of complexity, achieving a widely beneficial objective.
Suddenly splitting one piece of software into two chunks (which are useless on their own), to form mutually dependent packages, in order to save bandwidth in the case that one chunk changes but does not require a change in the other, is an unreasonable level of complexity, achieving a corner-case objective.
Because (normal) people don't navigate telephone exchanges, they just dial numbers. Towns and streets are things you move through, and we remember that Castle Street joins Princes Street with George Street and that number 9 is on the junction of Castle Street and George Street, but I have no idea how to get from 0131-669-0783 to 0131-425-6583, and I actually made that last number up because I can't remember the phone number of my previous residence, despite living there for the whole of 2004 and a chunk of 2005. The only reason I can remember the other number is that it was my phone number for around 8 years. People remember names a lot easier than they remember numbers. Or maybe you don't care about ease of fucking use. But maybe you were being ironic, I hope so.
Re:Remember Linus is a hands-on practical kind of
on
Linus Says No to 'Specs'
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The root word of "spec" is "speculation".
No. Spec is short for specification, and has nothing to do with speculation, other than that one aims to identify something distinctly, one type of seeing, and the other entails a flight of fancy, another type of seeing.
Please don't present your own mistaken speculations as facts.
No. At the time you speak of, word processing was not the ubiquitous task it is now. The people who used WordPerfect were generally professional typists, or did not have typists to whom they could delegate the task.
That is why you could still find WordPerfect for DOS being used in offices up to a few years ago, maybe even still now. The people who learnt it - professional typists - were used to it, knew all the keystrokes, and could use it very efficiently.
With the arrival of GUI word processing, it became something everyone and their dog could do. Gradually Word format documents became more prevalent than WordPerfect documents, and the squeeze was put on the die-hards due to interoperability demands.
So your comparing apples and oranges, I'm afraid. Shifting the MS Word mindset is a much harder problem than shifting the WordPerfect mindset, as everyone has it.
Mind you, this was almost exactly 20 years ago, so maybe it predates your experience of France. And I've been back to France since (not Dieppe) and seen no further cockroaches, so maybe they're gone now!
But still, I'm surprised by your comment about bottled water being a luxury. You must agree that French hypermarchés sell a shitload of bottled water. In the UK, it's simply not purchased in the same volume.
Interesting statement; why do you make it? My experience of UK tap water is that in terms of taste and colour it varies depending on where you are, but it's uniformly safe, outside of rare accidents, and some areas have excellent tap water.
Maybe you mean London tap water, which has passed through several other Londoners before it gets to you.
However, it's still safe to drink.
Compare that with France where people don't drink water from the tap. On my first visit to France, a cockroach came out of the tap in my hotel room.
We don't have cockroaches in Scotland.
You coldn't buy bottled water here until the mid-eighties, and it's still not a big thing. In France, the supermarkets have huge areas set aside just to bottled water. I remember being quite stunned when I saw it. But there's a simple reason why they have it and we don't, they need it. We don't.
Thanks for your logical, coherent reply; it's clear you've taken the time to back up your allegations with some solid evidence, and you've really thought through your position on the matter.
Yeah. He also cares about my rights, about software ethics and the most important, the children.
Yeah right. Because every single political activist out there is just thinking about my own good. Not about their own political agendas with nothing to do with "good" or "evil", as they're just political agendas.
Resort to hyperbole does not win arguments, though it may sound impressive.
The best way to care about other people is by doing (meaning: not whining about what you people think should do) good to them and allowing them to choose if they're going to be affected by what you're doing.
You can't define "doing good" as "not whining", sorry. The two are not mutually exclusive. Stallman does both, although the whining is simply the clear restatement of a case that many people choose to ignore because they can't be bothered facing up to questions which go beyond "how can I best get to the end of the day".
I think it's useless wanting to bring better "moral standards" (software-related ones, energy-related, nature-related, etc. etc.) to the world when you try to defend your cause with lies, half-truths and violence.
In what ways does Stallman defend his cause with lies, half-truths and violence? I mean come on, violence?
My point is: I don't want open source laws, forced open source government adoption, and I certainly don't want anyone caring about my "freedom" while making decisions about what's "best for me".
Tell me which open source laws you have a problem with?
Who is "forcing" the government to adopt open source? Or are you saying the government is forcing someone else to do so?
Who is making decisions about what's best for you? Well, people make those decisions all the time, because that's just a matter of adopting a moral position. The question really is, who is forcing decisions upon you?
So NO, Stallman's beliefs are not about freedom, the children, or anything like they. Stallman's belief's are just his beliefs. It's just his opinions about what he thinks how we all should act.
Yes, and he states those beliefs very clearly and people like you have a strong tendency to misrepresent them. I would have to think a willful tendency, or perhaps I should not put down to malice that which can be more simply explained by incompetence.
Why does giving credit where credit is due, or naming, or trademarking have anything to do with open source?
It has do with promoting the beliefs of the Free Software Foundation, which are not about open source, but about Free Software!
So why does RMS care?
Because he cares about your freedom, not about the openness of the source.
The FSF was set up to achieve political ends - software freedom. Linux was written to achieve personal ends - Linus wanted a Unix.
Linus doesn't make political statements because he doesn't have a political agenda.
Stallman makes political statements because he has a political agenda.
By the way there is nothing WRONG in having a political agenda, after all, politics is about how we set the world up for ourselves, whether it's going to be a pleasant place to live or a shitty place to live.
So Stallman bangs on about GNU because he wants people to remember freedom.
Presumably because the hypothetical Indian's intelligence hits a wall after he learns to read. There are plenty stupid people about; some of them must be Indian.
Look, the Rio Karma does not work with Linux under USB, only Ethernet. Yes, there are other Rio players but the Karma is the significant one because it does Ogg and FLAC and has a 20Gb hard drive.
Basically your posting to promote your web site. Why don't you fuck off?
I'm personally not sure I would like gapless but who knows, that could be a really nice feature I'm missing. I prefer more of a cross-fade I think as I like transitions.
Interesting; how do you feel about listening to albums on CD or vinyl?
The old Progman/Fileman duality couldn't do stuff like that.
Your memory does not serve you well. For a start it's winfile, not fileman, and I'm pretty sure double clicking on an executable (including a pif) in "file manager" would start the executable.
Setting up a pif file was achieved using pifedit. It had an icon the Main program group, but was independent of Program Manager itself.
You're right in that progman was not a file browser. But nor is Start Menu.
Achieving "progman independence" is just as possible as achieving "start menu" independence. Winfile sported a File/Run... option.
No, we'd make special machines that can take us to the sun.
Arguments like "if x was meant to y then z" are worthless, along with arguments of the form "x is natural so y" and "x is unnatural so y", because they stem from the delusion that the universe and it's contents have some purpose known to the speaker that we all must support, else some unspecified fate worse than death shall befall us.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would smaller ones have been better? Wouldn't it be better to remove the mutual dependency by restructuring the packages?
I would love to know a real-world example backing up your position. My position is amply supported by the normal "one-way" dependency of packages containing executables to packages containing shared libraries. It makes sense because many executable packages depend on the one shared library package, thus there is a high probability that you already have a required chunk of code installed for any particular executable package you might choose. This is a reasonable level of complexity, achieving a widely beneficial objective.
Suddenly splitting one piece of software into two chunks (which are useless on their own), to form mutually dependent packages, in order to save bandwidth in the case that one chunk changes but does not require a change in the other, is an unreasonable level of complexity, achieving a corner-case objective.
Are you sure it's 100% GPL and not just 100% Free? Let me put it this way, it's not 100% GPL.
That seems a bit stupid. If two packages are mutually dependent, why they hell are they not just *one* package?
I didn't say people can't memorise phone numbers. I said they are easier to forget than addresses. I am not as dumb as you think I am.
Because (normal) people don't navigate telephone exchanges, they just dial numbers. Towns and streets are things you move through, and we remember that Castle Street joins Princes Street with George Street and that number 9 is on the junction of Castle Street and George Street, but I have no idea how to get from 0131-669-0783 to 0131-425-6583, and I actually made that last number up because I can't remember the phone number of my previous residence, despite living there for the whole of 2004 and a chunk of 2005. The only reason I can remember the other number is that it was my phone number for around 8 years. People remember names a lot easier than they remember numbers. Or maybe you don't care about ease of fucking use. But maybe you were being ironic, I hope so.
The root word of "spec" is "speculation".
No. Spec is short for specification, and has nothing to do with speculation, other than that one aims to identify something distinctly, one type of seeing, and the other entails a flight of fancy, another type of seeing.
Please don't present your own mistaken speculations as facts.
No. At the time you speak of, word processing was not the ubiquitous task it is now. The people who used WordPerfect were generally professional typists, or did not have typists to whom they could delegate the task.
That is why you could still find WordPerfect for DOS being used in offices up to a few years ago, maybe even still now. The people who learnt it - professional typists - were used to it, knew all the keystrokes, and could use it very efficiently.
With the arrival of GUI word processing, it became something everyone and their dog could do. Gradually Word format documents became more prevalent than WordPerfect documents, and the squeeze was put on the die-hards due to interoperability demands.
So your comparing apples and oranges, I'm afraid. Shifting the MS Word mindset is a much harder problem than shifting the WordPerfect mindset, as everyone has it.
The cockroach was in a hotel in Dieppe.
Mind you, this was almost exactly 20 years ago, so maybe it predates your experience of France. And I've been back to France since (not Dieppe) and seen no further cockroaches, so maybe they're gone now!
But still, I'm surprised by your comment about bottled water being a luxury. You must agree that French hypermarchés sell a shitload of bottled water. In the UK, it's simply not purchased in the same volume.
Interesting statement; why do you make it? My experience of UK tap water is that in terms of taste and colour it varies depending on where you are, but it's uniformly safe, outside of rare accidents, and some areas have excellent tap water.
Maybe you mean London tap water, which has passed through several other Londoners before it gets to you.
However, it's still safe to drink.
Compare that with France where people don't drink water from the tap. On my first visit to France, a cockroach came out of the tap in my hotel room.
We don't have cockroaches in Scotland.
You coldn't buy bottled water here until the mid-eighties, and it's still not a big thing. In France, the supermarkets have huge areas set aside just to bottled water. I remember being quite stunned when I saw it. But there's a simple reason why they have it and we don't, they need it. We don't.
Sorry to pick on France.
Thanks for your logical, coherent reply; it's clear you've taken the time to back up your allegations with some solid evidence, and you've really thought through your position on the matter.
Consider me converted to your side.
And you've misrepresented the story for those who "don't want to read the link"; nice way to spread FUD.
Yes, wouldn't the world be a better place if everyone just did what they were told?
It's not about RMS wanting credit. It's about RMS wanting to raise the profile of software freedom.
If he wanted credit, he'd call it RMS/Linux. Notice that he doesn't.
Yeah right. Because every single political activist out there is just thinking about my own good. Not about their own political agendas with nothing to do with "good" or "evil", as they're just political agendas.
Resort to hyperbole does not win arguments, though it may sound impressive.
The best way to care about other people is by doing (meaning: not whining about what you people think should do) good to them and allowing them to choose if they're going to be affected by what you're doing.
You can't define "doing good" as "not whining", sorry. The two are not mutually exclusive. Stallman does both, although the whining is simply the clear restatement of a case that many people choose to ignore because they can't be bothered facing up to questions which go beyond "how can I best get to the end of the day".
I think it's useless wanting to bring better "moral standards" (software-related ones, energy-related, nature-related, etc. etc.) to the world when you try to defend your cause with lies, half-truths and violence.
In what ways does Stallman defend his cause with lies, half-truths and violence? I mean come on, violence?
My point is: I don't want open source laws, forced open source government adoption, and I certainly don't want anyone caring about my "freedom" while making decisions about what's "best for me".
Tell me which open source laws you have a problem with?
Who is "forcing" the government to adopt open source? Or are you saying the government is forcing someone else to do so?
Who is making decisions about what's best for you? Well, people make those decisions all the time, because that's just a matter of adopting a moral position. The question really is, who is forcing decisions upon you?
So NO, Stallman's beliefs are not about freedom, the children, or anything like they. Stallman's belief's are just his beliefs. It's just his opinions about what he thinks how we all should act.
Yes, and he states those beliefs very clearly and people like you have a strong tendency to misrepresent them. I would have to think a willful tendency, or perhaps I should not put down to malice that which can be more simply explained by incompetence.
Why does giving credit where credit is due, or naming, or trademarking have anything to do with open source?
It has do with promoting the beliefs of the Free Software Foundation, which are not about open source, but about Free Software!
So why does RMS care?
Because he cares about your freedom, not about the openness of the source.
The FSF was set up to achieve political ends - software freedom. Linux was written to achieve personal ends - Linus wanted a Unix.
Linus doesn't make political statements because he doesn't have a political agenda.
Stallman makes political statements because he has a political agenda.
By the way there is nothing WRONG in having a political agenda, after all, politics is about how we set the world up for ourselves, whether it's going to be a pleasant place to live or a shitty place to live.
So Stallman bangs on about GNU because he wants people to remember freedom.
Presumably because the hypothetical Indian's intelligence hits a wall after he learns to read. There are plenty stupid people about; some of them must be Indian.
Darwin never sleeps.
Must be a bug, OSX sleeps; what version are you running?
Look, the Rio Karma does not work with Linux under USB, only Ethernet. Yes, there are other Rio players but the Karma is the significant one because it does Ogg and FLAC and has a 20Gb hard drive.
Basically your posting to promote your web site. Why don't you fuck off?
I'm personally not sure I would like gapless but who knows, that could be a really nice feature I'm missing. I prefer more of a cross-fade I think as I like transitions.
Interesting; how do you feel about listening to albums on CD or vinyl?
just another view of the filesystem
No, it's a quite different view of some bits of the filesystem, with some special features like a Run... option.
a special instantiation of Explorer
Technically, yes. But as far as UI goes, there is a duality.
The old Progman/Fileman duality couldn't do stuff like that.
Your memory does not serve you well. For a start it's winfile, not fileman, and I'm pretty sure double clicking on an executable (including a pif) in "file manager" would start the executable.
Setting up a pif file was achieved using pifedit. It had an icon the Main program group, but was independent of Program Manager itself.
You're right in that progman was not a file browser. But nor is Start Menu.
Achieving "progman independence" is just as possible as achieving "start menu" independence. Winfile sported a File/Run... option.
with the strange Program Manager / File Manager duality
Come again? On my work Windows XP desktop there is a Start Menu / Explorer duality, in terms of UI anyway.
Same goes for any other GUI I know, including Mac, Gnome, KDE,...
Even the shell treats programs and data files differently; directories containing data files do not go in your PATH variable.
but that if it were patented and a big corp could make big bucks from it, then they would find a way of getting it legal.
Yes, well, what they did is fiddle with the chemical structure a bit and got Procaine aka Novocain.
Is that like your Ritalin idea? Because I have no experience or knowledge of Ritalin.
No they don't. They taste like chicken.
we'd be green and sprouting leaves.
No, we'd make special machines that can take us to the sun.
Arguments like "if x was meant to y then z" are worthless, along with arguments of the form "x is natural so y" and "x is unnatural so y", because they stem from the delusion that the universe and it's contents have some purpose known to the speaker that we all must support, else some unspecified fate worse than death shall befall us.