Well, I am a developer, I have a lot of experience in the MSWindows platform, and I can tell you that I feel much less limited now that I have the power of GNU/Linux software.
Before, I needed to buy, or get through my friends copies of proprietary software to do trivial things I needed. Now I have the software to do everything I do, and I can even sell what I produce, without paying royalties to anyone. That was a show-stopper, because a single project requires a lot of OCX components when developing for Windows, and it forces you to either reinvent the wheel every time, or to pay astronomical fees to develop software. Plus you need to study lots of strange licenses, and understand them. That, effectively, was limiting. Add to that the fact that I couldn't pay most of the software I used, and you will understand why I feel much less limited now that I use only free software. Even if I were rich, there is a limit to the amount of money one can reasonably throw at software.
Add to that the fact that the skills I learned on the GNU/Linux system give me lots of power over my computer that I couldn't dream to have on Windows. I can make my computer do exactly what I want, not just what some configuration wizard will allow me.
Absolute freedom cannot be attained. You (or at least somebody else) always have to lose some freedom in order to attain other. I believe people are less limited, and more free when running a free system.
I have a lot of trouble with 'off by one' type of errors. I used to think that I could fix that problem by studyin my code, and developin thinkin skills based on my own workin examples. I did actually think that my programming ability was dependand on that. And then came Java to my life, and I don't need to increment my iterators. Now I find that I can write much bigger software modules when I don't have to care about 'off-by-one' errors, and memory management!!!
That is an old issue, if you are a better programmer because you can deal easily with C's arrays, and malloc. I find those things are as useful as knowing x86 ASM. They can give you some power, but the skills required for good software development are much wider, and those are not critical and not even very important.
I say: " But you can't be government-neutral. By not going to vote, you are not fighting government. So you must be pro-government. Being anti-government is a valid position, when backed up by anti-government actions."
I mean, that you in fact do have a position in which kind of government you want: a representative democracy, communism, anarchy, corporativism, monarchy. I mean it's very difficult to be neutral in that direction. If you vote someone, or vote noone, or don't go to vote _in_a_country_where_that_is_an_option_ you are supporting the system. I am just pointing out that refusing to vote is one option in a representative democracy, so you are in fact being represented if you don't go to vote. I just say that the only way to fight that system is to actually do something against it. In the modern times most people (me included) prefer to fight from the inside of the broken but slightly democrativ system, but in the past people have emigrated countries, made revolutions, or at least gathered popular support for their ideas.
When you stay at your house in election day, you are in fact being represented, and support the system. Refusing to suppor the system (which requires fighting it) takes much work.
In my country, Uruguay, we fought it from the inside, for almost hundred years, and past Sunday we elected the first president with an acceptable social policy.
That was the start of it, I understand that. I say it's wrong. And I say it's not necessary or even ok to accept it. And wrong to expect others to comply with stupid policies where other people choose to work.
If company policy is against browsing news stories on their time, then you shouldn't do it, it's time paid by them.
But, if a woman showing some skin gets you fired, it's just some fucked up company policy. Don't try to make the world comply to your fucked up company policy, change your company policy, or the company you work for.
I don't understand why nudity is such an issue in the US, here in Uruguay, you get to see nude people on air TV, although it's not very usual. It's very funny when you turn to US-made MTV/E!, and they blur people ass-crack/nipples, or beep-out stuff people say, or middle-fingers!!
Nudity is not harmful for people. It would be stupid to waste your companies bandwidth downloading porn, but witch-hunting for nudity is pretty stupid.
But you can't be government-neutral. By not going to vote, you are not fighting government. So you must be pro-government. Being anti-government is a valid position, when backed up by anti-government actions.
Just refusing to vote is like proclaiming oneself "anticapitalistic" with a sweatshop-made chinese cotton T-shirt. You say you are against the system, but you don't fo anything against it.
I have a.com domain, thank you very much. And people outside of the US don't usually think that.com or.org means "from the US". In Uruguay, we register our own.com or.org for international sites, or for cheap sites (cheaper reg) and.com.uy &.org.uy for institutional sites, and local entities.
There are ways to make it safe by design, something like hooking up the power source to the movement of the mirrors, so you can't have power near a stopped mirror.
Hey!! The G-G-Parent was making conjectures, and I was just pointing out that they were possible. He was even implying a "cemetery" island. You say they are improbable. They are. But they are _possible_, human behaviour is proven to be very odd. I don't believe that is the case, either, but I refuse to dispose of views just because they are not the most common.
The grandparent's idea is not that great, but you fail to point out any incoherence.
There have been cases when a special kind of individuals have been exiled, or killed, even because of their sex. You talk about the improbability for a malformation of the same kind in many individuals. Down's syndrome, for example, is a malformation that looks similar in every individual that has it, and it has morphological particularities, too.
1. Ok, it's not free, in many aspects, but it is open, as you can see many people implement it.
2. I am not a native english speaker, I tried to say about the opposite: that the "openness" of the spec is real right now, but not assured in the future.
3. I didn't say I knew the answer to the question, I was just stating in a subtle way that the question was stated in a wrong way. From the question it could be implied that incompatibilities could be the fault of the app developer, when they couldn't, if they implement compliant Java software.
It requires an implementation of the open (by now) Java specification. Whether you use a free implementation or a proprietary, it's your problem. There could be trouble finding a complete free Java implementation, but the GCJ team is working on it.
Not voting (or blank voting, in my country, Uruguay, which has compulsory presidential/congress elections next Sunday) is just voting for the winner.
In a representative democracy, people who abstain _do_ legitimate the election of others. There's no difference between voting blank or non voting at all. You are just saying "I don't like the choices, so choose for me". The only way to choose for yourself would be to either vote, or a more radical stance, like actively working for some smaller party thatrepresents you, even creating your own! If you don't believe in representative democracy, maybe you'd like to overturn the system. That has been done, and can still be done. But don't say that by not voting you are not supporting the system, because you are, and there _is_ much you could do about it.
Free in the sense of money is not important. You could always have a "trial" copy, and start to pay, once you have actual work.
Free in the sense of freedom is more relevant. Other important issues arise. For example, a free tool is more useful with source code, because it can be in many cases a huge functional example of your development domain, such as Eclipse, or Tomcat have been for me. Free as in freedom is important for people that care about freedom, too. I happen to be one of them. So, no, Kylix doesn't count, it doesn't make much of a difference with Visual Basic, it is virtually equally free.
Well, the world is complex, and for many tasks, we have very easy ways to do them. Maybe the computer could emulate the world, and serve as a facilitator to let us accomplish a huge set of simple tasks, without adding to their complexity. Jef Raskin proposes many ways, in his book, in which that "simplicity" can be acomplished. Although his views are not final, and all-inclusive, he provides insights on simplyfing tasks that seem complex at first sight, and shows the complexity of some solutions that seemed simple, but end up being in fact very difficult.
Better implies comparability. What he means is that the whole metaphor is broken. If XP is broken from design, and OSX is better, then it's just less broken.
Of course, you can differ on whether they are broken, but the argument is that.
Which will serve, at least as a prototype so sample ideas already found in many books, and not implemented anywhere.
Other projects can take those ideas, and attach some aspects to their projects.
For example, as you yourself state, the GNU, as it was originally conceived, with a microkernel, was never finished. On the other hand, that "Linux" thing everybody is talking about would amount now to not much more than what Minix is now, just a toy kernel, if it werent for the huge part of the GNU system that was ready when Linus wrote a free kernel himself.
It is not always about shipping products, and achieving deadlines. The discipline advances further because of projects that do not have those restrictions, too.
That kind of attitude you are showing (releases, releases!!) is what has brought us to the current state of affairs, MS 95/98/2000/XP/2003/XXX(kde, mono) all implement short sighted goals, and not much is built taking into account the nature of the user. We only have bigger, more powerful systems, with beautiful interfaces, but year by year we don't get an improvement on interfaces. That's because developers need to focus on shipping in time, and releasing familiar, ready to use stuff. I like the fact that some other people are experimenting with future ways the interfaces could develop. I don't mina whether they ship something useful. Well, I _do_ mind but until I get my degree, I cannot help them so it's the same, for now.
You are right about the english/non-english distinction. I live in Uruguay, southern America, and happen to know that throughout America, the comma is the decimal separator, excepting english speaking countries like the US. The fact is that, as we can't get along and share a decimal separator, the least we could do would be to get rid of the thousands separator, and use spaces if we need to. The thousands separator has no mathematical meaning, so we can get rid of it, if we need to.
OS X is nice. It is also much more like MSWindows, in the bad sense. The guy (JR) is not saying OSX isn't cool, and os9.0 is. He is talking about fundamentals. Nowadays the desktop metaphor has foundations on our systems. That doesn't make it right. He says that the evolution went the wrong way. I believe so. It's stupid that by now we don't have systems implemented on better metaphors. For example, the desktop metaphor is good for a guy who wants to run MSOffice on his machine, but a home user doesn't need to be familiar even with a wooden desktop!!. I agree that OSX might be cool, and nice with mac users. Those users are already familiar with that, and know what to expect from their system. Anyway, there is a lot of learning involved, much of it unnecesary. In most of his rants, he talks about changing metaphors, and using systems based on cognitive particularities of the human mind. For example, files and folders are a nice way to represent a file cabinet, but lacking the real world aids they provide in the real world, they do not suffice to represent they way we want to store things. Thinking about drives in the first place is a complexity that the user shouldn't be thinking about, I believe the users should be thinking about their work, and not the underlying storage subsystem. Files and folders (and thus, the finder) are a broken metaphor, from that point of view. It would be much nicer to have accurately tagged information, and full text search throughout your files, so you can find whatever you need. He proposes some of that in his book. Think incremental google search throughout your full data. No need of structure, of finder, or file browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I am a developer, I have a lot of experience in the MSWindows platform, and I can tell you that I feel much less limited now that I have the power of GNU/Linux software.
Before, I needed to buy, or get through my friends copies of proprietary software to do trivial things I needed. Now I have the software to do everything I do, and I can even sell what I produce, without paying royalties to anyone.
That was a show-stopper, because a single project requires a lot of OCX components when developing for Windows, and it forces you to either reinvent the wheel every time, or to pay astronomical fees to develop software. Plus you need to study lots of strange licenses, and understand them. That, effectively, was limiting.
Add to that the fact that I couldn't pay most of the software I used, and you will understand why I feel much less limited now that I use only free software.
Even if I were rich, there is a limit to the amount of money one can reasonably throw at software.
Add to that the fact that the skills I learned on the GNU/Linux system give me lots of power over my computer that I couldn't dream to have on Windows. I can make my computer do exactly what I want, not just what some configuration wizard will allow me.
Absolute freedom cannot be attained. You (or at least somebody else) always have to lose some freedom in order to attain other.
I believe people are less limited, and more free when running a free system.
I have a lot of trouble with 'off by one' type of errors.
I used to think that I could fix that problem by studyin my code, and developin thinkin skills based on my own workin examples. I did actually think that my programming ability was dependand on that.
And then came Java to my life, and I don't need to increment my iterators.
Now I find that I can write much bigger software modules when I don't have to care about 'off-by-one' errors, and memory management!!!
That is an old issue, if you are a better programmer because you can deal easily with C's arrays, and malloc. I find those things are as useful as knowing x86 ASM. They can give you some power, but the skills required for good software development are much wider, and those are not critical and not even very important.
Excuse me, while I woute myself:
I say:
" But you can't be government-neutral.
By not going to vote, you are not fighting government. So you must be pro-government.
Being anti-government is a valid position, when backed up by anti-government actions."
I mean, that you in fact do have a position in which kind of government you want: a representative democracy, communism, anarchy, corporativism, monarchy. I mean it's very difficult to be neutral in that direction.
If you vote someone, or vote noone, or don't go to vote _in_a_country_where_that_is_an_option_ you are supporting the system.
I am just pointing out that refusing to vote is one option in a representative democracy, so you are in fact being represented if you don't go to vote.
I just say that the only way to fight that system is to actually do something against it.
In the modern times most people (me included) prefer to fight from the inside of the broken but slightly democrativ system, but in the past people have emigrated countries, made revolutions, or at least gathered popular support for their ideas.
When you stay at your house in election day, you are in fact being represented, and support the system. Refusing to suppor the system (which requires fighting it) takes much work.
In my country, Uruguay, we fought it from the inside, for almost hundred years, and past Sunday we elected the first president with an acceptable social policy.
That was the start of it, I understand that.
I say it's wrong.
And I say it's not necessary or even ok to accept it.
And wrong to expect others to comply with stupid policies where other people choose to work.
That's fucked up!!
If company policy is against browsing news stories on their time, then you shouldn't do it, it's time paid by them.
But, if a woman showing some skin gets you fired, it's just some fucked up company policy.
Don't try to make the world comply to your fucked up company policy, change your company policy, or the company you work for.
I don't understand why nudity is such an issue in the US, here in Uruguay, you get to see nude people on air TV, although it's not very usual.
It's very funny when you turn to US-made MTV/E!, and they blur people ass-crack/nipples, or beep-out stuff people say, or middle-fingers!!
Nudity is not harmful for people. It would be stupid to waste your companies bandwidth downloading porn, but witch-hunting for nudity is pretty stupid.
We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States
But you can't be government-neutral.
By not going to vote, you are not fighting government. So you must be pro-government.
Being anti-government is a valid position, when backed up by anti-government actions.
Just refusing to vote is like proclaiming oneself "anticapitalistic" with a sweatshop-made chinese cotton T-shirt.
You say you are against the system, but you don't fo anything against it.
Watch out for hidden gadgets in panties!!
They can be dangerous for your rear end.
The world is not passible of central organization.
I have a .com domain, thank you very much. .com or .org means "from the US". .com or .org for international sites, or for cheap sites (cheaper reg) and .com.uy & .org.uy for institutional sites, and local entities.
And people outside of the US don't usually think that
In Uruguay, we register our own
There are ways to make it safe by design, something like hooking up the power source to the movement of the mirrors, so you can't have power near a stopped mirror.
1:1 mapping with the rods an cones in the retina is, in practice, infinite. The universe is bounded by our capacity to perceive it.
SUVs can work in reverse.
Hey!!
The G-G-Parent was making conjectures, and I was just pointing out that they were possible.
He was even implying a "cemetery" island.
You say they are improbable. They are.
But they are _possible_, human behaviour is proven to be very odd.
I don't believe that is the case, either, but I refuse to dispose of views just because they are not the most common.
The grandparent's idea is not that great, but you fail to point out any incoherence.
There have been cases when a special kind of individuals have been exiled, or killed, even because of their sex. You talk about the improbability for a malformation of the same kind in many individuals. Down's syndrome, for example, is a malformation that looks similar in every individual that has it, and it has morphological particularities, too.
1. Ok, it's not free, in many aspects, but it is open, as you can see many people implement it.
2. I am not a native english speaker, I tried to say about the opposite: that the "openness" of the spec is real right now, but not assured in the future.
3. I didn't say I knew the answer to the question, I was just stating in a subtle way that the question was stated in a wrong way. From the question it could be implied that incompatibilities could be the fault of the app developer, when they couldn't, if they implement compliant Java software.
4. I believe you are a dumbass.
It requires an implementation of the open (by now) Java specification.
Whether you use a free implementation or a proprietary, it's your problem. There could be trouble finding a complete free Java implementation, but the GCJ team is working on it.
Not voting (or blank voting, in my country, Uruguay, which has compulsory presidential/congress elections next Sunday) is just voting for the winner.
In a representative democracy, people who abstain _do_ legitimate the election of others. There's no difference between voting blank or non voting at all. You are just saying "I don't like the choices, so choose for me". The only way to choose for yourself would be to either vote, or a more radical stance, like actively working for some smaller party thatrepresents you, even creating your own!
If you don't believe in representative democracy, maybe you'd like to overturn the system. That has been done, and can still be done.
But don't say that by not voting you are not supporting the system, because you are, and there _is_ much you could do about it.
Internet Explorer is not free. It is a part of a expensive piece of software program, Microsoft Windows.
Plus, it's not free in the sense of freedom. Firefox is.
Plus, it's not open, as in open standards. Open standards ensure web client independence.
So, it matters whether people use IE or Firefox.
It wouldn't matter if they chose between _free_ browsers.
Free in the sense of money is not important.
You could always have a "trial" copy, and start to pay, once you have actual work.
Free in the sense of freedom is more relevant. Other important issues arise. For example, a free tool is more useful with source code, because it can be in many cases a huge functional example of your development domain, such as Eclipse, or Tomcat have been for me.
Free as in freedom is important for people that care about freedom, too. I happen to be one of them.
So, no, Kylix doesn't count, it doesn't make much of a difference with Visual Basic, it is virtually equally free.
Well, the world is complex, and for many tasks, we have very easy ways to do them. Maybe the computer could emulate the world, and serve as a facilitator to let us accomplish a huge set of simple tasks, without adding to their complexity.
Jef Raskin proposes many ways, in his book, in which that "simplicity" can be acomplished. Although his views are not final, and all-inclusive, he provides insights on simplyfing tasks that seem complex at first sight, and shows the complexity of some solutions that seemed simple, but end up being in fact very difficult.
Better implies comparability.
What he means is that the whole metaphor is broken.
If XP is broken from design, and OSX is better, then it's just less broken.
Of course, you can differ on whether they are broken, but the argument is that.
Which will serve, at least as a prototype so sample ideas already found in many books, and not implemented anywhere.
Other projects can take those ideas, and attach some aspects to their projects.
For example, as you yourself state, the GNU, as it was originally conceived, with a microkernel, was never finished. On the other hand, that "Linux" thing everybody is talking about would amount now to not much more than what Minix is now, just a toy kernel, if it werent for the huge part of the GNU system that was ready when Linus wrote a free kernel himself.
It is not always about shipping products, and achieving deadlines. The discipline advances further because of projects that do not have those restrictions, too.
That kind of attitude you are showing (releases, releases!!) is what has brought us to the current state of affairs, MS 95/98/2000/XP/2003/XXX(kde, mono) all implement short sighted goals, and not much is built taking into account the nature of the user. We only have bigger, more powerful systems, with beautiful interfaces, but year by year we don't get an improvement on interfaces. That's because developers need to focus on shipping in time, and releasing familiar, ready to use stuff.
I like the fact that some other people are experimenting with future ways the interfaces could develop. I don't mina whether they ship something useful. Well, I _do_ mind but until I get my degree, I cannot help them so it's the same, for now.
You are right about the english/non-english distinction.
I live in Uruguay, southern America, and happen to know that throughout America, the comma is the decimal separator, excepting english speaking countries like the US.
The fact is that, as we can't get along and share a decimal separator, the least we could do would be to get rid of the thousands separator, and use spaces if we need to.
The thousands separator has no mathematical meaning, so we can get rid of it, if we need to.
OS X is nice.
It is also much more like MSWindows, in the bad sense.
The guy (JR) is not saying OSX isn't cool, and os9.0 is.
He is talking about fundamentals. Nowadays the desktop metaphor has foundations on our systems. That doesn't make it right.
He says that the evolution went the wrong way. I believe so. It's stupid that by now we don't have systems implemented on better metaphors.
For example, the desktop metaphor is good for a guy who wants to run MSOffice on his machine, but a home user doesn't need to be familiar even with a wooden desktop!!.
I agree that OSX might be cool, and nice with mac users. Those users are already familiar with that, and know what to expect from their system. Anyway, there is a lot of learning involved, much of it unnecesary.
In most of his rants, he talks about changing metaphors, and using systems based on cognitive particularities of the human mind. For example, files and folders are a nice way to represent a file cabinet, but lacking the real world aids they provide in the real world, they do not suffice to represent they way we want to store things.
Thinking about drives in the first place is a complexity that the user shouldn't be thinking about, I believe the users should be thinking about their work, and not the underlying storage subsystem. Files and folders (and thus, the finder) are a broken metaphor, from that point of view. It would be much nicer to have accurately tagged information, and full text search throughout your files, so you can find whatever you need.
He proposes some of that in his book. Think incremental google search throughout your full data. No need of structure, of finder, or file browsers.