The term "theory" in scientific sense means something else than you think. "Theory" is a word for any set of ideas which is logically consistent. The word for not yet proven theory is "hypothesis". String theory is a theory, and it's also a hypothesis.
Those people either use computer only as a glorified typewriter or they don't value their time. GUI works fine for one-off tasks or tasks which require a lot of human input from the beginning to the end. But when you're doing a task where you have to apply identical non-trivial changes to hundreds or thousands of data units (be it lines of text, files, directories or whatever else), GUI fails miserably at both performance and accuracy. The difference becomes hours of mindless clicking vs hacking together a simple script in a few minutes and going for a cup of coffee while it runs. The bonus is that the script can be reused immediately when you have to do this or similar task again.
You know, if Microsoft made cars, those cars would only have steering wheel. No shift lever, no pedals, no other controls or displays, just the steering wheel. And their marketing would claim that those extra controls and displays are only for professional racers and that the only thing average driver needs is the ability to hold and turn the steering wheel and that driving school is just waste of time and money.
This is how retarded the claim "GUI's all we're ever going to need from now on" is. CLI's here to stay. GUI can't replace CLI as well as CLI can't replace GUI. CLI is simply too powerful tool to dismiss it as obsolete. And its use is no more arcane than using the shift lever properly in a car with manual gearbox. Everybody can learn to do it, all it takes is just to try a few times.
Windows don't have fork() so most scripts are painfully slow there. I've had personal experience where replacing a few commands in a pipeline with equivalent bash built-ins sped up the whole script about 100 times.
By your own admission you've devoted half a lifetime or more to developing computer skills. Should everybody have to do that?
Yes, as much as everybody should spend several months in a driving school learning the basics of driving. Just because computer looks like a TV set doesn't mean that every moron is qualified to use it.
Actually, the single biggest advantage of CLI over GUI is that it doesn't matter whether you process one file, one million files or several billion files distributed over thousands of computers. GUI needs explicit support for things like that. In CLI, all you have to do is wrap the command that processes one file into another command which handles the loop over files and task distribution to other computers. No explicit support required.
Yes, Europe is broken and corrupt but at least we have some levers to make our politicians listen once in a while. And European politicians obviously don't like to bend over to US corporations too often. That's why software patents are not valid in Europe and ACTA will probably fail in European Parliament because it doesn't cover protected geographical indications.
The summary reads like this is of extra concern. Would there be concern if a previous Anti-Copyright campaigner got the seat? Would you rather someone with no knowledge on the topic got the position?
If an anti-copyright campaigner got the seat, the copyright lobby would obviously freak out WAY more than this. There are tons of lawyers out there who know the copyright and patent law inside out but are not affiliated with either side of the copyright war. Your argument about "someone with no knowledge on the topic" is a false dichotomy.
My point is that politicians seem to understand quite well how important balance is for patents while they don't even realize that there is a balance to consider for copyright. If a bunch of big corporations came to lobby for patent terms extension, they'd most likely get thrown out through closed door. Because patent term extension would hurt the rest of industry. But when content industry goes to lobby for copyright term extension and harsher enforcement, they get pretty much anything they ask for. Because politicians don't bother to check whether their claims are bogus or not. Because politicians don't even realize that there's some "rest of the industry" apart from those lobbyists that they should listen to and think about.
And this isn't just about pricing policy. It's also about simple availability. We live in the age of Internet. There's no reason to set different release dates in different parts of the world but the content industry still does that, sometimes even weeks or months apart (or even not at all). The demand for optical discs also decreases because the technology is dead. It was dead long before BluRay even entered the market. Yet the content industry still sees optical discs as the main distribution channel. I live in a European country where the only official supply is on optical discs. We've been part of European Union for almost a decade now but we don't even have iTunes store available like the rest of EU because Apple has decided to wait until we adopt Euro while our retarded politicians decided to back off from the adoption process (which was nearly complete BTW) and stick to national currency until some unspecified point in the future.
And while most politicians are well aware of how extending patent terms would hurt the entire industry and economy, they would be more than happy to extend copyright terms perpetually at the same time. They probably think that copyright balance isn't important, that culture doesn't matter for the economy. But they're terribly wrong. Copyright is no longer just about culture (which IS important whether they like it or not), it's also a huge hinderance to the entire IT sector which grows in importance every day.
And there's a very good reason behind Carmack's exclusive use of OpenGL for the past decade. When he first tried giving Quake a hardware accelerated video backend, he chose Rendition Verite's proprietary API (google for "vquake"). After VQuake's release, it turned out that Verite cards are horribly broken with no chance of being fixed in the near future so the entire project was a huge waste of time and money. So Carmack made the right decision to give up on proprietary API crap and stick with vendor-neutral open standards. If somebody wants to go down this road again, they'll simply discover all over again that Carmack was right 15 years ago.
Console game developers should realize that once they switch over to PCs, they no longer have the luxury of writing code for single unified combination of hardware. That's why they need some kind of abstract API.
If they want to make this experiment real, DVD as the only source of payments is a huge mistake. They need a theatrical release AND a simple donation system along with DVD release, all from day one. They'll learn that:
DVD is pretty much dead. Round pieces of shiny plastic are for collectors, not for general consumers anymore.
Theaters are here to stay. Free Internet release will make the movie fail in theaters only if it really sucks. If it's at least halfway decent, it's going to amplify its success in theaters instead.
The donation system works fine for users who'd want to buy DVD if it didn't include that round piece of plastic and a huge load of unskippable crap.
That's why the above poster said "the exact same version and patch level of MS Office". I know that crappy style system of MSO which juggles three different styles over the document (only one of which is actually part of the document) can still break the layout but it's still the only thing that has any chance to render the document exactly as its author intended.
I really hope that US government is going to implement this back home before they try to impose it on the rest of the world. If they do, I'm pretty sure that US hi-tech industry will collapse long before they manage to push it through here in Europe.
--depclean has been around for quite some time now. If you uninstall packages with --unmerge, don't blame the tools for giving you rope to hang yourself.
When vendor lock-in goes wrong, it ends up being version lock-in. Version lock-in only happens when you twist open standards. Once you lose market share to standard-adhering competition, you'll have to implement the standard properly as well and some of your customers will get stuck with the twisted implementation, unable to upgrade at all. Funny thing is that Microsoft still hasn't learned this lesson and they're trying all over again with OOXML. I really hope that one is going to backfire as well.
It's no surprise that Doom doesn't run on Windows 2000 because the first NT version of Windows which merged the complete 9x branch codebase was XP. And that was the biggest technological mistake Microsoft did in the past decade.
And yet, my computer's graphics chip STILL doesn't work. I'm sick of the excuses.
And which one is that? Because right now, the R300g driver (supporting R300-R500 chips) is about to pass Catalyst with a loud woosh in 3D performance. It has passed Catalyst with much louder woosh in 2D performance and stability ages ago. The R600c driver also makes Catalyst eat dust in 2D performance and 3D works fine on older cards (HD5xxx support is still weak because ATI released specs less than 6 months ago).
There is no "us vs. them" in this case. There are two software packages, one open source, the other proprietary. Why should developers of the open source package cripple their own software just to keep the proprietary one working? Developers of the propiretary one made the decision to prevent everybody else from contributing fixes and updates. If you're dissatisfied with results when they can't or don't want to keep up with changes in related open source packages, blame the proprietary developers for making wrong decisions.
X.org and Linux kernel developers don't care about any closed source software. When somebody chooses to release software as closed source, he decides that nobody else can update it themselves. Why should open source developers make his life easier by restricting the pace of development of their own software? Open source developers didn't force him to release the software as closed source. Open source software on the other hand can be easily updated to keep up with the pace of upstream development by anybody.
I own 3 generations of ATI hardware (Mach64/Rage 3D Pro, R200/Radeon 8500, M56/Mobility Radeon x1600) and in general, the closed source driver implements more hardware features but on the other hand, the open source driver is MUCH more stable. ATI is my graphics card brand of choice but I'd rather get Intel than deal with closed source driver again.
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The term "theory" in scientific sense means something else than you think. "Theory" is a word for any set of ideas which is logically consistent. The word for not yet proven theory is "hypothesis". String theory is a theory, and it's also a hypothesis.
Those people either use computer only as a glorified typewriter or they don't value their time. GUI works fine for one-off tasks or tasks which require a lot of human input from the beginning to the end. But when you're doing a task where you have to apply identical non-trivial changes to hundreds or thousands of data units (be it lines of text, files, directories or whatever else), GUI fails miserably at both performance and accuracy. The difference becomes hours of mindless clicking vs hacking together a simple script in a few minutes and going for a cup of coffee while it runs. The bonus is that the script can be reused immediately when you have to do this or similar task again.
You know, if Microsoft made cars, those cars would only have steering wheel. No shift lever, no pedals, no other controls or displays, just the steering wheel. And their marketing would claim that those extra controls and displays are only for professional racers and that the only thing average driver needs is the ability to hold and turn the steering wheel and that driving school is just waste of time and money.
This is how retarded the claim "GUI's all we're ever going to need from now on" is. CLI's here to stay. GUI can't replace CLI as well as CLI can't replace GUI. CLI is simply too powerful tool to dismiss it as obsolete. And its use is no more arcane than using the shift lever properly in a car with manual gearbox. Everybody can learn to do it, all it takes is just to try a few times.
Windows don't have fork() so most scripts are painfully slow there. I've had personal experience where replacing a few commands in a pipeline with equivalent bash built-ins sped up the whole script about 100 times.
By your own admission you've devoted half a lifetime or more to developing computer skills. Should everybody have to do that?
Yes, as much as everybody should spend several months in a driving school learning the basics of driving. Just because computer looks like a TV set doesn't mean that every moron is qualified to use it.
Actually, the single biggest advantage of CLI over GUI is that it doesn't matter whether you process one file, one million files or several billion files distributed over thousands of computers. GUI needs explicit support for things like that. In CLI, all you have to do is wrap the command that processes one file into another command which handles the loop over files and task distribution to other computers. No explicit support required.
Thank you for admitting EP doesn't give a rat's *** about people's rights!
Well, that was pretty much covered by "Yes, Europe is broken and corrupt", wasn't it?
Yes, Europe is broken and corrupt but at least we have some levers to make our politicians listen once in a while. And European politicians obviously don't like to bend over to US corporations too often. That's why software patents are not valid in Europe and ACTA will probably fail in European Parliament because it doesn't cover protected geographical indications.
The summary reads like this is of extra concern. Would there be concern if a previous Anti-Copyright campaigner got the seat? Would you rather someone with no knowledge on the topic got the position?
If an anti-copyright campaigner got the seat, the copyright lobby would obviously freak out WAY more than this. There are tons of lawyers out there who know the copyright and patent law inside out but are not affiliated with either side of the copyright war. Your argument about "someone with no knowledge on the topic" is a false dichotomy.
All you could use at the time it was built.
My point is that politicians seem to understand quite well how important balance is for patents while they don't even realize that there is a balance to consider for copyright. If a bunch of big corporations came to lobby for patent terms extension, they'd most likely get thrown out through closed door. Because patent term extension would hurt the rest of industry. But when content industry goes to lobby for copyright term extension and harsher enforcement, they get pretty much anything they ask for. Because politicians don't bother to check whether their claims are bogus or not. Because politicians don't even realize that there's some "rest of the industry" apart from those lobbyists that they should listen to and think about.
And this isn't just about pricing policy. It's also about simple availability. We live in the age of Internet. There's no reason to set different release dates in different parts of the world but the content industry still does that, sometimes even weeks or months apart (or even not at all). The demand for optical discs also decreases because the technology is dead. It was dead long before BluRay even entered the market. Yet the content industry still sees optical discs as the main distribution channel. I live in a European country where the only official supply is on optical discs. We've been part of European Union for almost a decade now but we don't even have iTunes store available like the rest of EU because Apple has decided to wait until we adopt Euro while our retarded politicians decided to back off from the adoption process (which was nearly complete BTW) and stick to national currency until some unspecified point in the future.
And while most politicians are well aware of how extending patent terms would hurt the entire industry and economy, they would be more than happy to extend copyright terms perpetually at the same time. They probably think that copyright balance isn't important, that culture doesn't matter for the economy. But they're terribly wrong. Copyright is no longer just about culture (which IS important whether they like it or not), it's also a huge hinderance to the entire IT sector which grows in importance every day.
And there's a very good reason behind Carmack's exclusive use of OpenGL for the past decade. When he first tried giving Quake a hardware accelerated video backend, he chose Rendition Verite's proprietary API (google for "vquake"). After VQuake's release, it turned out that Verite cards are horribly broken with no chance of being fixed in the near future so the entire project was a huge waste of time and money. So Carmack made the right decision to give up on proprietary API crap and stick with vendor-neutral open standards. If somebody wants to go down this road again, they'll simply discover all over again that Carmack was right 15 years ago.
Console game developers should realize that once they switch over to PCs, they no longer have the luxury of writing code for single unified combination of hardware. That's why they need some kind of abstract API.
If they want to make this experiment real, DVD as the only source of payments is a huge mistake. They need a theatrical release AND a simple donation system along with DVD release, all from day one. They'll learn that:
You should definitely rent one of his movies...
... if you liked Star Wars Holiday Special.
That's why the above poster said "the exact same version and patch level of MS Office". I know that crappy style system of MSO which juggles three different styles over the document (only one of which is actually part of the document) can still break the layout but it's still the only thing that has any chance to render the document exactly as its author intended.
I really hope that US government is going to implement this back home before they try to impose it on the rest of the world. If they do, I'm pretty sure that US hi-tech industry will collapse long before they manage to push it through here in Europe.
--depclean has been around for quite some time now. If you uninstall packages with --unmerge, don't blame the tools for giving you rope to hang yourself.
When vendor lock-in goes wrong, it ends up being version lock-in. Version lock-in only happens when you twist open standards. Once you lose market share to standard-adhering competition, you'll have to implement the standard properly as well and some of your customers will get stuck with the twisted implementation, unable to upgrade at all. Funny thing is that Microsoft still hasn't learned this lesson and they're trying all over again with OOXML. I really hope that one is going to backfire as well.
It's no surprise that Doom doesn't run on Windows 2000 because the first NT version of Windows which merged the complete 9x branch codebase was XP. And that was the biggest technological mistake Microsoft did in the past decade.
And yet, my computer's graphics chip STILL doesn't work. I'm sick of the excuses.
And which one is that? Because right now, the R300g driver (supporting R300-R500 chips) is about to pass Catalyst with a loud woosh in 3D performance. It has passed Catalyst with much louder woosh in 2D performance and stability ages ago. The R600c driver also makes Catalyst eat dust in 2D performance and 3D works fine on older cards (HD5xxx support is still weak because ATI released specs less than 6 months ago).
There is no "us vs. them" in this case. There are two software packages, one open source, the other proprietary. Why should developers of the open source package cripple their own software just to keep the proprietary one working? Developers of the propiretary one made the decision to prevent everybody else from contributing fixes and updates. If you're dissatisfied with results when they can't or don't want to keep up with changes in related open source packages, blame the proprietary developers for making wrong decisions.
X.org and Linux kernel developers don't care about any closed source software. When somebody chooses to release software as closed source, he decides that nobody else can update it themselves. Why should open source developers make his life easier by restricting the pace of development of their own software? Open source developers didn't force him to release the software as closed source. Open source software on the other hand can be easily updated to keep up with the pace of upstream development by anybody.
I own 3 generations of ATI hardware (Mach64/Rage 3D Pro, R200/Radeon 8500, M56/Mobility Radeon x1600) and in general, the closed source driver implements more hardware features but on the other hand, the open source driver is MUCH more stable. ATI is my graphics card brand of choice but I'd rather get Intel than deal with closed source driver again.
Yes, you've probably missed most images on those sites.