The recent events, however tragic, make it painfully clear what is wrong with the US. Within minutes after the crash the media machinery puts the video images in an infinite loop feeding them to their public, of course commercial breaks are inserted at regular intervals and CNN is likely to make significant profits in the next few weeks.
Now further opportunism dictates to nuke those damn arabs
Actually, as some people have already replied, most networks forfeited commercials (for whatever reasons they have had).
But am I the only one who thinks something is wrong when, that same afternoon, the networks had images of Palestinians partying around and the name of Bin Laden was bouncing back and forth, while the government was trying their best not to point fingers (yet)?
At a point when anger and outrage was the natural reaction, it seems a bit irresponsible to report on speculations without making it clear who is speculating what.
Within minutes everyone thought it was clear who was the enemy, long before any serious investigation could draw a conclusion.
Then they were all for "bomb Afghanistan/Palestine!", either because they linked both countried motivations, or because they didn't know they were talking of two different geographical locations.
If you're going to use steganography on the Internet to hide information in pictures, the only kind of pictures that makes sense to use are the most common, less regulated, more trafficked... that is, pornography. The whole point of steganography is to drown meaningful bits in a sea of information, and that's the most extensive sea.
In the same vein, if you want to avoid suspicions that you are a radical Muslim engaged in a Holy War, what do you do?
You shave your beard, make public appearances drinking alcohol, and meet with your accomplice in a strip club. They'll think you're a typical loser, maybe an antisocial pervert, but never a religious zealot.
For the people who found some way to excuse themselves from killing 5000 innocent citizens, and would be willing to force a war upon the Middle East that women and children would pay most dearly, it should have been easy to find some malinterpreted justification in the Koran to "do what must be done".
A big plus of giving your GF a UNIX account...
on
Linux on the Desktop
·
· Score: 1
...is that she can't find your porn if you don't giver her the file permissions.
God knows how many relationships Windows has destroyed because of that.
This is a question that is NEVER taught in schools, but should be. Any "holy" war is a economic war being excused for religious reasons. This is used to encite the people to fight. During any "holy" war you will hear a protest, "Would God want us doing this?". The Jerry Falwells of the world use the Bible to push their opinion; why can't the economy?
I'm a senior this year, yet I have never had a social studies teacher come out and say "God is their excuse for war".
If a teacher told you that he would probably be fired on the spot.
Someone would probably be offended by that statement, and/or the implication that Crusades, Holy Wars, Revolutions and Wars of Independence are made because of pragmatic interests, not religion/ideology.
After all, the education system exists to provide the population with a common myth-history and set of skills that will make them tame, productive members of society. Not to teach critical thinking or anything like that.
Somehow I find it hard to believe that changing Cartoon Networks schedule was "affecting us exactly the way they wanted".
I don't think there's any "victory" to claim there for the terrorist, I don't think it's even relevant. Other, bigger, changes to the daily routine (and legislation, security policy...) are worrying, indeed, but the delay of a Transformers episode?!
Somehow that just doesn's seem to have the scale of a priority.
The only thing that's a dilemma is the stupidity of network executives who waste money and time making such changes thinking they're "making a difference", just to feel better about themselves.
Surely the fanatical terrorist immolating himself along with a hundred innocent passengers did that because he watched Transformers too much when he was a kid. Surely terrorist organizations have depots full of Anime tapes for psychological conditioning of their members...
This was just a trivial and unimportant triumph of stupidity.
>It's a bit of a dilemma, you see. On the one
>hand, every time we make some change to our
>daily routine because of this despicable
>terrorist act--dropping episodes, delaying the
>premiere of shows [scifi.com], editing the World
>Trade Center out [scifi.com] of the Spiderman
>movie altogether--we are in some small sense
>handing the terrorists a victory, acknowledging
>that they've affected us exactly the way they
>wanted. On the other hand, people should have a
>right to watch TV to try to forget the tragedy
>for a while and destress from the whole thing
>without being reminded of it by what's on the
>set.
Not normally. But as you may see in my previous comment, Visual Age will NOT let you save if you're missing a comma, parenthesis, semicolon or whatever.
So, between writing a skeleton of a class, compiling ("analyzing" if we use VAJ terminology), reloading, write the implementation of a method, repeat ad absurdum, yes, you end up writing the full implementation and clicking save.
Or you do the rational thing: load a decent editor to write the code with compulsory saving, good error checking features, compile, cut, paste, save.
That is, of course, if you REALLY have to use VAJ. I had to because it was not my choice. It has great features I can live without, and lack basic features I would be hard pressed to.
If a significant percentage of the Slashdot readership is willing to buy an X-box for the sake of a Linux hack... maybe Microsoft finally found a way to make money out of this "Free Software" thingie...
I had the unfortunate experience of depending on IBM Visual Age for Java for a while.
While I agree that some of the features you mention were very convenient (the way it synchronizes the classes in the workspace and the export features particularly), very frequently Visual Age was a real nightmare.
The main issue I have with the system is its very vague (if not plain incompetent) "error checking" features when writing code on the class editor.
It's quite annoying to spend some time writing hundreds of lines of code just to be unable to save the class because I missed a semicolon or parenthesis SOMEWHERE, with no clue as to where it could be. "Unable to compile class because end of statement missing" is not a complete description of a problem. Even the CLI compiler gives more information than this.
I also don't understand the lack of syntax completion for the classes. Not that it's vital to write good code, but it could save some of us a lot of typos (length() vs length(), ridiculous but it happens a lot when typing quickly) and time, particularly with Java's verbosity (ArrayOutOfBoundsException anyone?).
Also because there is no reason for it to be missing on a product like Visual Age.
I ended up having two IDEs open: Visual Age for managing the projects and their packages, and JCreator to actually write the code.
BTW, I recommend JCreator to anyone who has to code Java in a Windows workstation.
http://www.jcreator.com
Fighting to import a repository after changing machines was a waste of time (export to/import from.java works fine, but it shouldn't be the way to go).
Having your development IDE run with the amazingly hasty speed of StarOffice unless you have a top-of-the-line machine gets irritating as well.
Unless new versions have changed dramatically since I tried that thing, I'd recommend against using it.
Visual Basic is NOT BASIC. It's hard to overstate this. It is NOT the BASIC Dijkstra was talking about, and it doesn't even share the same problems.
Yes, it is a mediocre programming language and it, too, mutilates programmers, but in a different way (I have been exposed to both, I hope the damage is not permanent).
Visual Basic's problems are different from BASIC's, and although it is possible to fall into some of the BASIC pits, I don't think it is more so than C, for that matter.
Visual Basics (particularly VBA) problems include:
- Inconsistency (damn thing behaves differently on every computer, application, OS version, etcetera, and the changes in the objects versus the changes in the code are not always coherent).
- Pathetic input/output system
- Poorly documented (partially compensated by the huge userbase, but the help usually comes in code with no explanation of why it works).
- A "magic word" feeling. If you know the "magic words" (undocumented functions or constants, etc) everything has been done for you. If you don't, you cannot do your job.
Most of these, I guess, comes from a disturbingly polluted namespace you cannot get rid of.
You end up feeling that you have to work for the language rather than the other way around, and you end up with an enormous set of undocumented libraries and great difficulties to create your own. The "programmer" is like a monkey in a weapons arsenal, looking for something to scratch his back.
The problem with BASIC is just that it encourages quick, not-well-thought, non-structured programming.
BASIC creates bad programmers. Visual Basic creates people who know how to make a function call, and consider themselves "programmers".
As the black mantle of communism spreads over the Internet under the guise of Free Software, the left-wing radicals of IBM place an Unamerican operating system in the middle of the cradle of capitalism!
This will surely begin the Armageddon, as the viral nature of the GPL infects every single transaction made in the stock market, "redistributing" the profits and replacing our ticker reports with communist propaganda.
Soon the booming Digital Economy will be trampled upon by the atheist masses directed by Comrade Stallman; it is inevitable now that the stock market will be consumed by the Satanic Pac-Man that is the combination of Linux and the GPL!
Good bye American Way of Life! Good bye Freedom!
I wonder if that will be the biggest problem KDE, GNOME or any other Linux desktop environment that aims to the general public will face in the long run.
Programmers are, as a rule and with few exceptions, lousy UI designers, making the wrong assumptions and satisfying the wrong needs. Yet programmers are the ones building the GUIs oriented not to the programmer (isn't KDE supposed to be so easy it doesn't require documentation?) but to the masses, the users.
Even good UI designers need to have their efforts checked with truthful reactions from real, typical users, and Linux development just doesn't have that.
Sure, the usability groups are active, and they're populated by people that may not even have any coding experience... but the fact that they are using Linux at all makes them atypical users. They're more daring and more willing to experiment.
More concretely, most of them had to go, at the very least, through the original installation process. This is not something to scoff at: even though distributions like Mandrake and SuSe hide most of the technicalities behind pretty pictures, there's no escaping part of the decision-making process.
Just mention the words "hard disk partition", "dual-boot", "root password" to a user and see the terror fill their eyes. If they take more than 15 seconds before giving up they show more tolerance than 90% of the computer user population.
It's necessary to remember that most people don't use Windows willingly. They do not consider it easy, or fun, but a hard and necessary task to do their job, and they consider it complicated enough to take classes, buy videos, get certifications for. On the other hand, Linux users are willing users, and as such take greater responsability for the difficulties, and have greater tolerance and not-as-keen eyes for defects.
Propietary shops can solve the problem by paying a bunch of people to play with their software, something which would be against their will without the check/contribution/school-donation/free-t-shirt. Or by obtaining a large user base so compromised to the system that it NEEDS to know how to use their software, and will even pay for the privilege.
Linux doesn't have a desktop user base to abuse, and I can't imagine RedHat locking up hundreds of paid unexperienced users in a room to click away in despair for months, taking notes. That could get expensive.
a) It is true that AMD does not offer Intel's performance. It offers better performance than Intel since the introduction of the Athlon. That's exactly why they have techie supporters these days.
The Athlon in its different iterations has proven itself to be superior to its equivalent (P-III), and (at least) equivalent to its "superior" (P-IV).
Unless you have the money to waste hundreds of dollars in RAMBUS memory and high-speed P-IV to get a very marginal difference, to say the Athlon is inferior doesn't make sense. If you do have that kind of money to waste, the x86 itself doesn't make sense.
AMD is cheaper because it cannot afford to be more expensive. Intel has brand-recognition and market domination. The traditional strategy for the player in Intel's situation is to exploit their brand and reap high profit margins, and for AMD's position it is to reduce their profit margins in a price war to gain market share. There's no mistery, and no performance rationale, around it.
b) AMD has not been catching up in advancements and extensions. Rather, it has done decently, while Intel has not done much at all since the P-III (the P-IV can be best described as "not much"). There has been nothing to "catch up" to since then.
About the only thing Intel has been able to offer is higher prices for the similar performance (RAMBUS, P-IV), motherboard recalls and lawsuits. Intel's new technology in the P-IV just doesn't seem to translate to performance.
One can only hope it's just they've been focusing on their upcoming products rather than on ye olde Pentium line... maybe then we'll see the actual results of their experiments.
c) Many slashdotters support space exploration financed by private agencies. They're not launching rockets full of tourists to Mars for more or less the same reasons they didn't put an Alpha in their boxes.
d) Yes, the x86 is a hacked , patched, overextended, underdesigned chip architecture. It feels like we've been forced to "upgrade" our Ford T's ever since they existed instead of getting new designs.
e) AMD doesn't care that much about Linux because it doesn't affect it's business enough. That's part of being a faceless multinational company with a single obligation to your shareholders.
However, they do befriend other technical communitites. Not all geeks are Linux zealots, and being technically knowlodgeable does not translate in being an card-carrying member of the Open Source community or reading Slashdot.
AMD cares about the techies that spend enough money for them to care about. Gamers, power-users, overclockers and hardware enthusiasts buy expensive processors. Linux geeks do so mostly when they belong to one of said communities. Intel would care more about Linux because it can make them money in other markets. Same goes for IBM. Same goes for Sun. For them to act in any other way would be simply illegal (they would betray their shareholder's interests)
Note, however, that AMD has (or had as far as I know) strong ties with SuSe with respect to their SledgeHammer development efforts and their Linux SledgeHammer simulator. I think their dealings with Transmeta also had a strong Linux flavor. All because it was on their shareholder's best interest (as in it made money for AMD). It may be that the lack of publicity of AMD's Linux endeavors has much to do with the end of the Itanium/SledgeHammer hype
I know it's a troll, but you still have a point...
There IS a problem with the survival-response programming. "Scratching an itch" is only enough assuming that there will be enough programmers to scratch complex itches properly, and that there will be programmers to scratch every necessary itch.
The internet solves the first problem, but not the second. Programmers have very different itches than typical, or even advanced users. The later don't have the expertise to scratch their own itches, and the work can be hard and extensive enough to discourage unpaid coders.
Assume there's no Open Source alternative to Dreamweaver (probably there is, abstract the example then). Personally I don't care, since I think looking at the HTML is much clearer (when properly indented). But I have seen fear in some web designer's eyes when they look at their own tags.
They understand it, but not immediately. They don't work that way, and they don't like it. It gets in their way, much in the same way the WYSIWYG gets in my way. My way would be madness at the scale they work on.
Can the designer "scratch his itch" and code Dreamweaver? No way. Can I? I don't think so, but if I could, what for? It's not my "itch"; even having the thing I don't really use it. It could increase his productivity a thousandfold, but that's not my problem. Not until he (or someone) pays me.
But will I give the source for free code then? Will he? It was expensive. Hell, it took a long time to make a decent WYSISYG HTML editor.
"Scratch an itch" is great to add features, fix bugs, etc. But to build an actual project requires a greater compromise and an actual design plan, deadlines, et al.
Your examples are crooked, though:
Konqueror lacks no features it actually needs. It's one hell of an integrated browser and file manager (and a bunch of other things). Quick, clean, effective.
I personally prefer not to have a bloated thing like IE or Netscape (or Mozilla, which takes a long while just to load on my machine) integrated to my file handling. Konqueror is much more responsive.
Maybe you haven't tried Konqueror since it's debut. It certainly lacked vital features then. Having to load Netscape to check a web mail account sucked. It still took very little time to build it into a decent release, compared to certain other browsers (both open and closed source).
Mozilla is also much, much, much, much, much nicer these days. It's finally usable. Definitely not horrible. But it was horrible for far too long.
I don't know that much FORTRAN, but I have to agree about F90. It's easier to read and follow that C (to me), and it handles arrays nicely. The problem is that even the people I have seen using FORTRAN think in and about F77.
I found F90 when one of my professors gave us some FORTRAN code as an example of the algorithms we studied in class. We had to implement a similar algorithm, so most of us, foolish as we are, thought it would be easier if we understood that F77 code. Out to the library to pick up the FORTRAN specification.
I learned three things from that class:
- Sometimes reverse engineering is not cost-effective.
- The FORTRAN 90 code I found was surprisingly readable and clean for a newbie.
- All FORTRAN 77 code I found was not, and they seem two different languages.
Maybe in better schools it's different, but for all I've seen if someone uses FORTRAN, they use FORTRAN 77 and nothing else, including more recent variants.
The question is not: is he a troll?
The question is: is he right?
For Open-Source solutions (which is what the article was about) I disagree completely. There are plenty of Open-Source tools that meet enterprise demands... but then again, enterprises are already using those tools.
If the post refered only to Linux (misunderstanding the article), I suspect he has a point. Corporations have different "itches" than Torvalds et al, and I think most programmers prefer to get paid for solving "corporate itches". A commercial UNIX (or any BSD, for that matter) is probably a better deal for them.
The government subsidizes the roads/services they think are needed, not whatever a company that wants to build a road says is needed.
To donate billions of dollars to the FSF would be totally different and would not make sense. The government should not subsidize the FSF anymore than they subsidize PETA.
What would be a good idea is to do exactly what the government does with any other project that benefits their citizens: pay someone to do it, and put some conditions.
Since the idea is to maximize the benefits to all taxpayers, it would make sense to give them the source code, and it would help to reduce maintenance and development costs. Therefore, an important condition would be to make it Open Source... and actually the GPL would be a good candidate for a license.
Whether the billions of dollars go to the FSF, IBM, or Microsoft doesn't matter. The developed software goes to the community, GLPed and everything.
The fact that the total budget gets dispersed among different entities that have to compete to provide the best results instead of a single, monolithic entity that gets billions of dollars dropped on its lap, is an advantage that cannot be overstated.
Or you go to an expensive restaurant, pay an exhorbitant amount of money, eat the best dish you have ever tasted in your life and still have no idea how it was made, maybe not even what it was.
Recipes can be propietary, expensive, and for good reason. Good luck trying to get that famous chef to tell the secret ingredient.
The lesson? If you're paying for prepared, closed-recipe food, and you're paying big money, it better be good. Really good, to be worth it.
It sounds like the best solution would have been a simple registration system. Those have been around ever since the concept of shareware/freeware existed.
Since you downloaded the ISO and you don't need a hard copy, you would "register" and send Mandrake a "registration fee" which, for all effects, would make you a retail customer.
No donations, they get money, and you get the services that they are actually selling: support and other nifties.
When they meet investors who want to know how rentable is the company, they'll show them lots of customers making up their revenue instead of lots of donations keeping them afloat because they have no customers.
It strikes me as odd that they didn't think of this system since it has been out there (and I think profitably) for decades, rather than make up a donation system which is hard to justify as part of a for-profit business model.
On the same line, a company doesn't get their money from donations, unless you donate enough money for the Lear jet too.
A company gets its money from its products, not its IPO. An IPO-based business model is a sure way to bankruptcy (sp?). The way to put money into a for-profit company is to invest in it. If it's not public, maybe they should have considered a way to allow their supporters to become investors.
The important thing is that Mandrake is, like it or not, a for-profit company that expects to make money out of Linux. If it cannot make money out of Linux, it should reconsider its business model or become a non-profit.
I happen to be a Mandrake fan, although I don't use that distribution anymore. But corporate charity is a bad idea, both for the users and for the company. We should not treat Linux-related companies differently than we tread any other for-profit, just because their Linux-related.
Of course businesses don't care about "communism" if they can make money out of it.
My point is that RMS tends to be against other people making money out of it... which would definitely worry the business community. That's exactly what Microsoft was "warning" about: GPL will not let you make money beacuse of it's "viral nature".
Of course that's not true, and there are more options than GPL, but RMS gives the impression sometimes he would like it to be true.
Some people have posted that RMS is less extremist as a speaker than his manifestos indicate; I certainly hope so. Using the same arguments and language to speak to MBAs and MISes would be like preaching Wicca at a Catholic church. Proselitism against the local faith is never welcome.
I don't see where the topic of "popularity of operating systems" came in, but the fact that corporations have been using gcc and other tools doesn't mean they're aware of that (usually not). Developers are, but for all most management knows their systems are 100% propietary and from big, centralized companies. If you're going to convince them that OSS (and/or FSF) is more profitable for them (which I happen to think is), you have to give the impression that you want them to make money, or at least have no problems with them making money.
You don't need to prove the business people that Linux (or any other Open Source OS) is profitable for the creators. You just have to prove it's profitable for them.
They could care less about whether someone can become the next Bill Gates by selling Linux, they're interested in becoming the next Bill Gates themselves.
Since a lot of people have been "wasting their time" on these OSes without worrying about profitability, if you convince them it will keep being that way for another quarter of a century, they'll be happy to take advantage (while mumbling "suckers!" to themselves).
Not that it's easy. But it has a precedent, Stallman being part of that precedent himself.
With all due respect to RMS, from the tone of the writings of his that I have read, he is NOT the speaker you want to speak to businesses and convince them to trust OSS.
Mr. Stallman's way of thinking seems very much anti-business at the personal level (as in he considers immoral to be selfish/greedy and benefit from it), and to convince business people you would need someone who speaks the same language as them. Talk to them about how "information wants to be free" and closed-source is immoral and they're going to hear "communism!".
If you send RMS in a tour to talk to business people, it would only take a couple of weeks before they start talking over each others' heads and Stallman "cofirms" Microsofts' FUD about OSS being handled by communists and what-not.
Actually, I suspect that was the whole point of Microsoft's FUD. Or at the very least, to point PHBs to most of the Slashdot posts on the Mundie article and say "See? They want to banish copyrights and IP laws! They want to destroy corporations! They're radicals that accept no compromises!".
Slashdot Mirror
The recent events, however tragic, make it painfully clear what is wrong with the US. Within minutes after the crash the media machinery puts the video images in an infinite loop feeding them to their public, of course commercial breaks are inserted at regular intervals and CNN is likely to make significant profits in the next few weeks.
Now further opportunism dictates to nuke those damn arabs
Actually, as some people have already replied, most networks forfeited commercials (for whatever reasons they have had).
But am I the only one who thinks something is wrong when, that same afternoon, the networks had images of Palestinians partying around and the name of Bin Laden was bouncing back and forth, while the government was trying their best not to point fingers (yet)?
At a point when anger and outrage was the natural reaction, it seems a bit irresponsible to report on speculations without making it clear who is speculating what.
Within minutes everyone thought it was clear who was the enemy, long before any serious investigation could draw a conclusion.
Then they were all for "bomb Afghanistan/Palestine!", either because they linked both countried motivations, or because they didn't know they were talking of two different geographical locations.
If you're going to use steganography on the Internet to hide information in pictures, the only kind of pictures that makes sense to use are the most common, less regulated, more trafficked... that is, pornography. The whole point of steganography is to drown meaningful bits in a sea of information, and that's the most extensive sea.
In the same vein, if you want to avoid suspicions that you are a radical Muslim engaged in a Holy War, what do you do?
You shave your beard, make public appearances drinking alcohol, and meet with your accomplice in a strip club. They'll think you're a typical loser, maybe an antisocial pervert, but never a religious zealot.
For the people who found some way to excuse themselves from killing 5000 innocent citizens, and would be willing to force a war upon the Middle East that women and children would pay most dearly, it should have been easy to find some malinterpreted justification in the Koran to "do what must be done".
...is that she can't find your porn if you don't giver her the file permissions.
God knows how many relationships Windows has destroyed because of that.
This is a question that is NEVER taught in schools, but should be. Any "holy" war is a economic war being excused for religious reasons. This is used to encite the people to fight. During any "holy" war you will hear a protest, "Would God want us doing this?". The Jerry Falwells of the world use the Bible to push their opinion; why can't the economy?
I'm a senior this year, yet I have never had a social studies teacher come out and say "God is their excuse for war".
If a teacher told you that he would probably be fired on the spot. Someone would probably be offended by that statement, and/or the implication that Crusades, Holy Wars, Revolutions and Wars of Independence are made because of pragmatic interests, not religion/ideology.
After all, the education system exists to provide the population with a common myth-history and set of skills that will make them tame, productive members of society. Not to teach critical thinking or anything like that.
Somehow I find it hard to believe that changing Cartoon Networks schedule was "affecting us exactly the way they wanted".
I don't think there's any "victory" to claim there for the terrorist, I don't think it's even relevant. Other, bigger, changes to the daily routine (and legislation, security policy...) are worrying, indeed, but the delay of a Transformers episode?!
Somehow that just doesn's seem to have the scale of a priority.
The only thing that's a dilemma is the stupidity of network executives who waste money and time making such changes thinking they're "making a difference", just to feel better about themselves.
Surely the fanatical terrorist immolating himself along with a hundred innocent passengers did that because he watched Transformers too much when he was a kid. Surely terrorist organizations have depots full of Anime tapes for psychological conditioning of their members...
This was just a trivial and unimportant triumph of stupidity.
>It's a bit of a dilemma, you see. On the one
>hand, every time we make some change to our
>daily routine because of this despicable
>terrorist act--dropping episodes, delaying the
>premiere of shows [scifi.com], editing the World
>Trade Center out [scifi.com] of the Spiderman
>movie altogether--we are in some small sense
>handing the terrorists a victory, acknowledging
>that they've affected us exactly the way they
>wanted. On the other hand, people should have a
>right to watch TV to try to forget the tragedy
>for a while and destress from the whole thing
>without being reminded of it by what's on the
>set.
Since the X-box is PC-based hardware-and-software-wise, isn't Microsoft already forfeiting the usual Sony businessmodel?
Or are there differences I don't know about?
Not normally. But as you may see in my previous comment, Visual Age will NOT let you save if you're missing a comma, parenthesis, semicolon or whatever.
So, between writing a skeleton of a class, compiling ("analyzing" if we use VAJ terminology), reloading, write the implementation of a method, repeat ad absurdum, yes, you end up writing the full implementation and clicking save.
Or you do the rational thing: load a decent editor to write the code with compulsory saving, good error checking features, compile, cut, paste, save.
That is, of course, if you REALLY have to use VAJ. I had to because it was not my choice. It has great features I can live without, and lack basic features I would be hard pressed to.
If a significant percentage of the Slashdot readership is willing to buy an X-box for the sake of a Linux hack... maybe Microsoft finally found a way to make money out of this "Free Software" thingie...
I had the unfortunate experience of depending on IBM Visual Age for Java for a while.
.java works fine, but it shouldn't be the way to go).
While I agree that some of the features you mention were very convenient (the way it synchronizes the classes in the workspace and the export features particularly), very frequently Visual Age was a real nightmare.
The main issue I have with the system is its very vague (if not plain incompetent) "error checking" features when writing code on the class editor.
It's quite annoying to spend some time writing hundreds of lines of code just to be unable to save the class because I missed a semicolon or parenthesis SOMEWHERE, with no clue as to where it could be. "Unable to compile class because end of statement missing" is not a complete description of a problem. Even the CLI compiler gives more information than this.
I also don't understand the lack of syntax completion for the classes. Not that it's vital to write good code, but it could save some of us a lot of typos (length() vs length(), ridiculous but it happens a lot when typing quickly) and time, particularly with Java's verbosity (ArrayOutOfBoundsException anyone?).
Also because there is no reason for it to be missing on a product like Visual Age.
I ended up having two IDEs open: Visual Age for managing the projects and their packages, and JCreator to actually write the code.
BTW, I recommend JCreator to anyone who has to code Java in a Windows workstation.
http://www.jcreator.com
Fighting to import a repository after changing machines was a waste of time (export to/import from
Having your development IDE run with the amazingly hasty speed of StarOffice unless you have a top-of-the-line machine gets irritating as well.
Unless new versions have changed dramatically since I tried that thing, I'd recommend against using it.
It would be neat to have a running Universal Turing Machine running with a couple of Moebius tapes at the memorial, per secula seculorum.
Actually, it would be neat to have it running with a single Moebius tape, and just see what happens.
Feed the output to the web, or something.
Visual Basic is NOT BASIC. It's hard to overstate this. It is NOT the BASIC Dijkstra was talking about, and it doesn't even share the same problems.
Yes, it is a mediocre programming language and it, too, mutilates programmers, but in a different way (I have been exposed to both, I hope the damage is not permanent).
Visual Basic's problems are different from BASIC's, and although it is possible to fall into some of the BASIC pits, I don't think it is more so than C, for that matter.
Visual Basics (particularly VBA) problems include:
- Inconsistency (damn thing behaves differently on every computer, application, OS version, etcetera, and the changes in the objects versus the changes in the code are not always coherent).
- Pathetic input/output system
- Poorly documented (partially compensated by the huge userbase, but the help usually comes in code with no explanation of why it works).
- A "magic word" feeling. If you know the "magic words" (undocumented functions or constants, etc) everything has been done for you. If you don't, you cannot do your job.
Most of these, I guess, comes from a disturbingly polluted namespace you cannot get rid of.
You end up feeling that you have to work for the language rather than the other way around, and you end up with an enormous set of undocumented libraries and great difficulties to create your own. The "programmer" is like a monkey in a weapons arsenal, looking for something to scratch his back.
The problem with BASIC is just that it encourages quick, not-well-thought, non-structured programming.
BASIC creates bad programmers. Visual Basic creates people who know how to make a function call, and consider themselves "programmers".
As the black mantle of communism spreads over the Internet under the guise of Free Software, the left-wing radicals of IBM place an Unamerican operating system in the middle of the cradle of capitalism!
This will surely begin the Armageddon, as the viral nature of the GPL infects every single transaction made in the stock market, "redistributing" the profits and replacing our ticker reports with communist propaganda.
Soon the booming Digital Economy will be trampled upon by the atheist masses directed by Comrade Stallman; it is inevitable now that the stock market will be consumed by the Satanic Pac-Man that is the combination of Linux and the GPL!
Good bye American Way of Life! Good bye Freedom!
I wonder if that will be the biggest problem KDE, GNOME or any other Linux desktop environment that aims to the general public will face in the long run.
Programmers are, as a rule and with few exceptions, lousy UI designers, making the wrong assumptions and satisfying the wrong needs. Yet programmers are the ones building the GUIs oriented not to the programmer (isn't KDE supposed to be so easy it doesn't require documentation?) but to the masses, the users.
Even good UI designers need to have their efforts checked with truthful reactions from real, typical users, and Linux development just doesn't have that.
Sure, the usability groups are active, and they're populated by people that may not even have any coding experience... but the fact that they are using Linux at all makes them atypical users. They're more daring and more willing to experiment.
More concretely, most of them had to go, at the very least, through the original installation process. This is not something to scoff at: even though distributions like Mandrake and SuSe hide most of the technicalities behind pretty pictures, there's no escaping part of the decision-making process.
Just mention the words "hard disk partition", "dual-boot", "root password" to a user and see the terror fill their eyes. If they take more than 15 seconds before giving up they show more tolerance than 90% of the computer user population.
It's necessary to remember that most people don't use Windows willingly. They do not consider it easy, or fun, but a hard and necessary task to do their job, and they consider it complicated enough to take classes, buy videos, get certifications for. On the other hand, Linux users are willing users, and as such take greater responsability for the difficulties, and have greater tolerance and not-as-keen eyes for defects.
Propietary shops can solve the problem by paying a bunch of people to play with their software, something which would be against their will without the check/contribution/school-donation/free-t-shirt. Or by obtaining a large user base so compromised to the system that it NEEDS to know how to use their software, and will even pay for the privilege.
Linux doesn't have a desktop user base to abuse, and I can't imagine RedHat locking up hundreds of paid unexperienced users in a room to click away in despair for months, taking notes. That could get expensive.
a) It is true that AMD does not offer Intel's performance. It offers better performance than Intel since the introduction of the Athlon. That's exactly why they have techie supporters these days.
The Athlon in its different iterations has proven itself to be superior to its equivalent (P-III), and (at least) equivalent to its "superior" (P-IV).
Unless you have the money to waste hundreds of dollars in RAMBUS memory and high-speed P-IV to get a very marginal difference, to say the Athlon is inferior doesn't make sense. If you do have that kind of money to waste, the x86 itself doesn't make sense.
AMD is cheaper because it cannot afford to be more expensive. Intel has brand-recognition and market domination. The traditional strategy for the player in Intel's situation is to exploit their brand and reap high profit margins, and for AMD's position it is to reduce their profit margins in a price war to gain market share. There's no mistery, and no performance rationale, around it.
b) AMD has not been catching up in advancements and extensions. Rather, it has done decently, while Intel has not done much at all since the P-III (the P-IV can be best described as "not much"). There has been nothing to "catch up" to since then.
About the only thing Intel has been able to offer is higher prices for the similar performance (RAMBUS, P-IV), motherboard recalls and lawsuits. Intel's new technology in the P-IV just doesn't seem to translate to performance.
One can only hope it's just they've been focusing on their upcoming products rather than on ye olde Pentium line... maybe then we'll see the actual results of their experiments.
c) Many slashdotters support space exploration financed by private agencies. They're not launching rockets full of tourists to Mars for more or less the same reasons they didn't put an Alpha in their boxes.
d) Yes, the x86 is a hacked , patched, overextended, underdesigned chip architecture. It feels like we've been forced to "upgrade" our Ford T's ever since they existed instead of getting new designs.
e) AMD doesn't care that much about Linux because it doesn't affect it's business enough. That's part of being a faceless multinational company with a single obligation to your shareholders.
However, they do befriend other technical communitites. Not all geeks are Linux zealots, and being technically knowlodgeable does not translate in being an card-carrying member of the Open Source community or reading Slashdot.
AMD cares about the techies that spend enough money for them to care about. Gamers, power-users, overclockers and hardware enthusiasts buy expensive processors. Linux geeks do so mostly when they belong to one of said communities.
Intel would care more about Linux because it can make them money in other markets. Same goes for IBM. Same goes for Sun. For them to act in any other way would be simply illegal (they would betray their shareholder's interests)
Note, however, that AMD has (or had as far as I know) strong ties with SuSe with respect to their SledgeHammer development efforts and their Linux SledgeHammer simulator. I think their dealings with Transmeta also had a strong Linux flavor. All because it was on their shareholder's best interest (as in it made money for AMD). It may be that the lack of publicity of AMD's Linux endeavors has much to do with the end of the Itanium/SledgeHammer hype
I know it's a troll, but you still have a point...
There IS a problem with the survival-response programming. "Scratching an itch" is only enough assuming that there will be enough programmers to scratch complex itches properly, and that there will be programmers to scratch every necessary itch.
The internet solves the first problem, but not the second. Programmers have very different itches than typical, or even advanced users. The later don't have the expertise to scratch their own itches, and the work can be hard and extensive enough to discourage unpaid coders.
Assume there's no Open Source alternative to Dreamweaver (probably there is, abstract the example then). Personally I don't care, since I think looking at the HTML is much clearer (when properly indented). But I have seen fear in some web designer's eyes when they look at their own tags.
They understand it, but not immediately. They don't work that way, and they don't like it. It gets in their way, much in the same way the WYSIWYG gets in my way. My way would be madness at the scale they work on.
Can the designer "scratch his itch" and code Dreamweaver? No way. Can I? I don't think so, but if I could, what for? It's not my "itch"; even having the thing I don't really use it. It could increase his productivity a thousandfold, but that's not my problem. Not until he (or someone) pays me.
But will I give the source for free code then? Will he? It was expensive. Hell, it took a long time to make a decent WYSISYG HTML editor.
"Scratch an itch" is great to add features, fix bugs, etc. But to build an actual project requires a greater compromise and an actual design plan, deadlines, et al.
Your examples are crooked, though:
Konqueror lacks no features it actually needs. It's one hell of an integrated browser and file manager (and a bunch of other things). Quick, clean, effective.
I personally prefer not to have a bloated thing like IE or Netscape (or Mozilla, which takes a long while just to load on my machine) integrated to my file handling. Konqueror is much more responsive.
Maybe you haven't tried Konqueror since it's debut. It certainly lacked vital features then. Having to load Netscape to check a web mail account sucked. It still took very little time to build it into a decent release, compared to certain other browsers (both open and closed source).
Mozilla is also much, much, much, much, much nicer these days. It's finally usable. Definitely not horrible. But it was horrible for far too long.
I don't know that much FORTRAN, but I have to agree about F90. It's easier to read and follow that C (to me), and it handles arrays nicely. The problem is that even the people I have seen using FORTRAN think in and about F77.
I found F90 when one of my professors gave us some FORTRAN code as an example of the algorithms we studied in class. We had to implement a similar algorithm, so most of us, foolish as we are, thought it would be easier if we understood that F77 code. Out to the library to pick up the FORTRAN specification.
I learned three things from that class:
- Sometimes reverse engineering is not cost-effective.
- The FORTRAN 90 code I found was surprisingly readable and clean for a newbie.
- All FORTRAN 77 code I found was not, and they seem two different languages.
Maybe in better schools it's different, but for all I've seen if someone uses FORTRAN, they use FORTRAN 77 and nothing else, including more recent variants.
The question is not: is he a troll?
The question is: is he right?
For Open-Source solutions (which is what the article was about) I disagree completely. There are plenty of Open-Source tools that meet enterprise demands... but then again, enterprises are already using those tools.
If the post refered only to Linux (misunderstanding the article), I suspect he has a point. Corporations have different "itches" than Torvalds et al, and I think most programmers prefer to get paid for solving "corporate itches". A commercial UNIX (or any BSD, for that matter) is probably a better deal for them.
The government subsidizes the roads/services they think are needed, not whatever a company that wants to build a road says is needed.
To donate billions of dollars to the FSF would be totally different and would not make sense. The government should not subsidize the FSF anymore than they subsidize PETA.
What would be a good idea is to do exactly what the government does with any other project that benefits their citizens: pay someone to do it, and put some conditions.
Since the idea is to maximize the benefits to all taxpayers, it would make sense to give them the source code, and it would help to reduce maintenance and development costs. Therefore, an important condition would be to make it Open Source... and actually the GPL would be a good candidate for a license.
Whether the billions of dollars go to the FSF, IBM, or Microsoft doesn't matter. The developed software goes to the community, GLPed and everything.
The fact that the total budget gets dispersed among different entities that have to compete to provide the best results instead of a single, monolithic entity that gets billions of dollars dropped on its lap, is an advantage that cannot be overstated.
Or you go to an expensive restaurant, pay an exhorbitant amount of money, eat the best dish you have ever tasted in your life and still have no idea how it was made, maybe not even what it was.
Recipes can be propietary, expensive, and for good reason. Good luck trying to get that famous chef to tell the secret ingredient.
The lesson? If you're paying for prepared, closed-recipe food, and you're paying big money, it better be good. Really good, to be worth it.
Win9x is the OS version of the Hungry Man dinner.
It sounds like the best solution would have been a simple registration system. Those have been around ever since the concept of shareware/freeware existed.
Since you downloaded the ISO and you don't need a hard copy, you would "register" and send Mandrake a "registration fee" which, for all effects, would make you a retail customer.
No donations, they get money, and you get the services that they are actually selling: support and other nifties.
When they meet investors who want to know how rentable is the company, they'll show them lots of customers making up their revenue instead of lots of donations keeping them afloat because they have no customers.
It strikes me as odd that they didn't think of this system since it has been out there (and I think profitably) for decades, rather than make up a donation system which is hard to justify as part of a for-profit business model.
On the same line, a company doesn't get their money from donations, unless you donate enough money for the Lear jet too.
A company gets its money from its products, not its IPO. An IPO-based business model is a sure way to bankruptcy (sp?). The way to put money into a for-profit company is to invest in it. If it's not public, maybe they should have considered a way to allow their supporters to become investors.
The important thing is that Mandrake is, like it or not, a for-profit company that expects to make money out of Linux. If it cannot make money out of Linux, it should reconsider its business model or become a non-profit.
I happen to be a Mandrake fan, although I don't use that distribution anymore. But corporate charity is a bad idea, both for the users and for the company. We should not treat Linux-related companies differently than we tread any other for-profit, just because their Linux-related.
It's even more simple than that.
If you downloaded the ISO and you feel you owe Mandrake something, go out and buy the retail version.
If you're too lazy to do that, order it from the Internet. You even get support.
If you feel you owe them even more than that, go ahead and buy some stock from the company and become an investor.
Of course businesses don't care about "communism" if they can make money out of it.
My point is that RMS tends to be against other people making money out of it... which would definitely worry the business community. That's exactly what Microsoft was "warning" about: GPL will not let you make money beacuse of it's "viral nature".
Of course that's not true, and there are more options than GPL, but RMS gives the impression sometimes he would like it to be true.
Some people have posted that RMS is less extremist as a speaker than his manifestos indicate; I certainly hope so. Using the same arguments and language to speak to MBAs and MISes would be like preaching Wicca at a Catholic church. Proselitism against the local faith is never welcome.
I don't see where the topic of "popularity of operating systems" came in, but the fact that corporations have been using gcc and other tools doesn't mean they're aware of that (usually not). Developers are, but for all most management knows their systems are 100% propietary and from big, centralized companies. If you're going to convince them that OSS (and/or FSF) is more profitable for them (which I happen to think is), you have to give the impression that you want them to make money, or at least have no problems with them making money.
You don't need to prove the business people that Linux (or any other Open Source OS) is profitable for the creators. You just have to prove it's profitable for them.
They could care less about whether someone can become the next Bill Gates by selling Linux, they're interested in becoming the next Bill Gates themselves.
Since a lot of people have been "wasting their time" on these OSes without worrying about profitability, if you convince them it will keep being that way for another quarter of a century, they'll be happy to take advantage (while mumbling "suckers!" to themselves).
Not that it's easy. But it has a precedent, Stallman being part of that precedent himself.
With all due respect to RMS, from the tone of the writings of his that I have read, he is NOT the speaker you want to speak to businesses and convince them to trust OSS.
Mr. Stallman's way of thinking seems very much anti-business at the personal level (as in he considers immoral to be selfish/greedy and benefit from it), and to convince business people you would need someone who speaks the same language as them. Talk to them about how "information wants to be free" and closed-source is immoral and they're going to hear "communism!".
If you send RMS in a tour to talk to business people, it would only take a couple of weeks before they start talking over each others' heads and Stallman "cofirms" Microsofts' FUD about OSS being handled by communists and what-not.
Actually, I suspect that was the whole point of Microsoft's FUD. Or at the very least, to point PHBs to most of the Slashdot posts on the Mundie article and say "See? They want to banish copyrights and IP laws! They want to destroy corporations! They're radicals that accept no compromises!".