You're still not going to be able to attach a name to every byte of kernel code. Seriously, you're not. There are a myriad reasons for this, which I won't bother enumerating. One example though: a committer is not necessarily the author. A second one to sate your curiosity: hacker handles probably don't count as legal names under this NC law.
And that's just the kernel! What about the rest of the system? Unless this is a very minimal embedded system, you're still going to need all the names for authors dozens of other software projects. GNU is very good about keeping meticulous records in this regard, but only a tiny part of the underlying system is going to GNU software.
Moreover, how do you supply the names of every developer who worked on it? In the case of Windows that's still within the realm of possibility. In the case of a major free OS like Linux or FreeBSD, that's impossible.
If this law in any way reads like the story blurb, the only alternative is going to be a small homebrewed embedded OS.
They have the right to increase prices 7% each year. When you think about it in reference to everything else in the world, that's very restrictive on them, because most things have no such restrictions. For example, Dell has the right to increase their laptop prices by whatever they want. Microsoft has the right to increase Windows prices by whatever they want. Farmer Brown has the right to increase the prices for his turnips by whatever he wants.
The reason most prices don't go up dozens of percentage points per year is because of market forces: the customers will go to the competition; if there is no competition they'll seek out alternative goods. There is this thing called supply and demand that limits how much a company can charge for their products. The problem comes when you have a monopoly in a product with high demand and a lack of alternatives. (Windows would have this problem except for the abundance of alternatives).
Do domain names fit into this category? Sort of (depending on whether you consider alternative domains to be alternatives). However, the price for domain names is currently very low. Paying $50 a year instead of $35 for a.com or.net domain is a huge percentage increase but still a rather insignificant outlay for the average.com/.net customer. For individuals and nonprofit organizations, however, the alternative domains are true alternatives. As a member of the latter group, I'm not too terribly concerned by this "right" to increase prices.
Except that RAIInvoc isn't a part of most languages, meaning I have to write them myself. Don't forget, RAIInvoc isn't just for memory, it's used for all resources, including files, threads, etc. The invocation idiom is a part of some languages, but not all. For those myriad langauges for which it is not a part, are we supposed to do all the extra work of implementing it?
p.s. So where's the big push for file handle collection? If deallocating memory automatically is necessary, then where is the concern over closing files automatically? What makes calling free() so much more evil than calling close()?
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Let's just have one Linux desktop
Sure, go for it! You Linux users can do whatever you want. In the meantime I'll be using KDE with FreeBSD.
Re:If KDE is so advanced, why gnome?
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's called "freedom". You can't coerce everyone into a single desktop without destroying freedom. I realize that this is a politically incorrect idea, but since when has reality been politically correct?
All you people desiring authoritarian conformity should stick with Windows. You'll be happier.
This is not a ripoff of Microsoft anymore than the Mac OSX auto run feature is a ripoff. Sigh. If this were truly a ripoff, then the option to disable it would not exist, forcing you to edit an undocumented registry key or download a separate piece of software.
Funny thing is, set KDE up with a non-blue color scheme and those complaints dissapear.
Wow! A light just exploded in my head! For years I've been confused by all these gnomies bitching that KDE was a Windows clone. Being in possession of two eyes capable of visually comparing the two, I always thought the complaint was rather specious.
But now that I think about it, color does affect the subconscious rather strongly. Imagine a gray color scheme (ala NeXT) and the complaints that the desktop is too outdated. Or a lilac and pink scheme and the complaints about being too frivolous for corporate settings. I say we fire all those usability "experts" and hire a professional colorist.
Re:Adblocking is nothing new...
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
That's way too difficult! KDE will never be accepted by the unwashed ignorant masses until it gets rid of its horribly convoluted interface. Instead of that nasty sequence of steps to use a custom stylesheet, what is needed is a single button that says "Use my custom stylesheet (and read my mind to figure out where I've hidden it)". Of course, since we've gotten rid of the menu bar, limited the toolbar to three icons, and started executing developers who use context menus, there's no room for this button. Therefore logic dictates that the custom stylesheets must always be the default.
It's time to wake up and join the world of 2005. Heck, wake up and join the world of 2004! Keramik is old hat. The new default theme is Plastik, which is wholly unlike Keramik. There's also Phase and Lipstik which are original themes and still wholly unlike Keramik (or Windows or Aqua). Then there's Baghira for your eye candy needs. Check out www.kde-look.org for dozens of high quality KDE themes.
To repeat, Keramik is old. It's still there if you want it, but you're only showing your ignorance by bitching about it.
For a trivial example, consider FTP. Under Windows I need to get a third party shareware app (or use the command line) to use FTP. It's not integrated into the desktop. If I want to edit a webpage, I need to explicitly transfer the html file to the local machine and edit it here, then explicitly transfer it back. Under KDE it's so fully integrated into the desktop that FTP use is completely transparent. Another example: no need for an explicit audio ripper program, I merely drag and drop songs off of the CD and into my flash drive player.
An idiom is a way of thinking. Initializing resources versus invoking resources are two different ways of thinking about resources. Neither one of them is wrong. What is wrong is to limit yourself to only one way of thinking.
The RAII link used files as an example. In most such cases invoking makes sense, because that's how you use a file. Rarely do you actually "initialize" a file. But you do it with data all the time. Getting rid of initialization is to get rid of object constructors. Even in vanilla C your data is conceptually composed of objects that need initialization. Since there is a high correspondence between data and memory in most software, it makes sense to allocate memory with the initialization idiom. (But not always, which is why you should never limit your way of thinking).
It hangs my Firefox. Trying IE now... a bunch of Trend Micro warnings about stopping a virus, but after closing all the popup windows, the calculator still comes up.
I think a hanging Firefox is better than a compromised system, though I would prefer neither.
I can't get this popup to happen, but logic tells me that you can't get spammed by a clicking "cancel" unless you've given it your email address. So don't give it your email address!
sometimes it would really be nice to have more direct control
Bingo. This is the major point that all the GC zealots overlook. They might have a point if every piece of software out there was a high level business app running on a system with unlimited resources, but reality is different. I'm a systems software developer writing code for embedded systems, so I need direct control over my memory allocation and deallocation.
If all you're doing is shunting data and messages back and forth, then GC is nice. But when you start writing low level code the lack of control becomes a major hindrance.
p.s. I've got this vision of GC as the result of a rotten banana. Some developer left a banana in his cubicle over vacation and it stunk up the whole building. Because he forget to deallocate his banana to the trashcan, the entire development team has been forbidden from eating snacks in their cubicles ever again. Most of us are capable of throwing away our trash and deallocating our memory, but the lazy ass incompentents ruined it for everyone.
It would be nice if more people believed this, but unfortunately there's language religion involved. When the preacher sermonizes on the glories of your chosen language, and the choir sings rhapsodic hymns to its built in GC, then you're going to view every other language out there as heretical, apostate or heathen.
This is a pipe dream. The OS will continue to matter as long as there is money to be had by locking customers into a specific platform. As odd as it sounds, many customers WANT to be locked in to a specific vendor.
Platforms will matter because your applications will remain platform specific. The big push in corporations right now is to migrate everything to.NET. Despite the propaganda from Mono,.NET is a Windows-only platform, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Mono is merely the Wine of the.NET world: you'll hear stories about.NET apps that will run on it, but try as you might you can't get any of the ones you need to run under it. What good is a crossplatform backend when the front end GUI is still inextricably tied to one OS?
If major web sites and applications are still coding for specific browsers, my hopes for a cross-platform world where OS doesn't matter are very very slim.
There's no link to OSM there. All I can find is a link to wikipedia. Your guilt-by-accusation ploy isn't working. While OSM has a few neocon sites, many of its headliners are solidly libertarian.
All blogs are "right wing". Even those blogs on the far left fringe like Kos and Atrios are funded by right wing billionaires just to give the illusion of diversity.
Slashdot Mirror
Embedded XP and Windows CE dev kits come with source code.
Bullshit
You're still not going to be able to attach a name to every byte of kernel code. Seriously, you're not. There are a myriad reasons for this, which I won't bother enumerating. One example though: a committer is not necessarily the author. A second one to sate your curiosity: hacker handles probably don't count as legal names under this NC law.
And that's just the kernel! What about the rest of the system? Unless this is a very minimal embedded system, you're still going to need all the names for authors dozens of other software projects. GNU is very good about keeping meticulous records in this regard, but only a tiny part of the underlying system is going to GNU software.
Moreover, how do you supply the names of every developer who worked on it? In the case of Windows that's still within the realm of possibility. In the case of a major free OS like Linux or FreeBSD, that's impossible.
If this law in any way reads like the story blurb, the only alternative is going to be a small homebrewed embedded OS.
They have the right to increase prices 7% each year. When you think about it in reference to everything else in the world, that's very restrictive on them, because most things have no such restrictions. For example, Dell has the right to increase their laptop prices by whatever they want. Microsoft has the right to increase Windows prices by whatever they want. Farmer Brown has the right to increase the prices for his turnips by whatever he wants.
.com or .net domain is a huge percentage increase but still a rather insignificant outlay for the average .com/.net customer. For individuals and nonprofit organizations, however, the alternative domains are true alternatives. As a member of the latter group, I'm not too terribly concerned by this "right" to increase prices.
The reason most prices don't go up dozens of percentage points per year is because of market forces: the customers will go to the competition; if there is no competition they'll seek out alternative goods. There is this thing called supply and demand that limits how much a company can charge for their products. The problem comes when you have a monopoly in a product with high demand and a lack of alternatives. (Windows would have this problem except for the abundance of alternatives).
Do domain names fit into this category? Sort of (depending on whether you consider alternative domains to be alternatives). However, the price for domain names is currently very low. Paying $50 a year instead of $35 for a
Except that RAIInvoc isn't a part of most languages, meaning I have to write them myself. Don't forget, RAIInvoc isn't just for memory, it's used for all resources, including files, threads, etc. The invocation idiom is a part of some languages, but not all. For those myriad langauges for which it is not a part, are we supposed to do all the extra work of implementing it?
p.s. So where's the big push for file handle collection? If deallocating memory automatically is necessary, then where is the concern over closing files automatically? What makes calling free() so much more evil than calling close()?
Let's just have one Linux desktop
Sure, go for it! You Linux users can do whatever you want. In the meantime I'll be using KDE with FreeBSD.
It's called "freedom". You can't coerce everyone into a single desktop without destroying freedom. I realize that this is a politically incorrect idea, but since when has reality been politically correct?
All you people desiring authoritarian conformity should stick with Windows. You'll be happier.
This is not a ripoff of Microsoft anymore than the Mac OSX auto run feature is a ripoff. Sigh. If this were truly a ripoff, then the option to disable it would not exist, forcing you to edit an undocumented registry key or download a separate piece of software.
Funny thing is, set KDE up with a non-blue color scheme and those complaints dissapear.
Wow! A light just exploded in my head! For years I've been confused by all these gnomies bitching that KDE was a Windows clone. Being in possession of two eyes capable of visually comparing the two, I always thought the complaint was rather specious.
But now that I think about it, color does affect the subconscious rather strongly. Imagine a gray color scheme (ala NeXT) and the complaints that the desktop is too outdated. Or a lilac and pink scheme and the complaints about being too frivolous for corporate settings. I say we fire all those usability "experts" and hire a professional colorist.
That's way too difficult! KDE will never be accepted by the unwashed ignorant masses until it gets rid of its horribly convoluted interface. Instead of that nasty sequence of steps to use a custom stylesheet, what is needed is a single button that says "Use my custom stylesheet (and read my mind to figure out where I've hidden it)". Of course, since we've gotten rid of the menu bar, limited the toolbar to three icons, and started executing developers who use context menus, there's no room for this button. Therefore logic dictates that the custom stylesheets must always be the default.
</sarcasm>
I print to PDF all the time.
p.s. Besides, I like getting rid of trees. Especially those nasty trees raised on a farm for the paper industry. Renewal resources are so eeeevil!
It's time to wake up and join the world of 2005. Heck, wake up and join the world of 2004! Keramik is old hat. The new default theme is Plastik, which is wholly unlike Keramik. There's also Phase and Lipstik which are original themes and still wholly unlike Keramik (or Windows or Aqua). Then there's Baghira for your eye candy needs. Check out www.kde-look.org for dozens of high quality KDE themes.
To repeat, Keramik is old. It's still there if you want it, but you're only showing your ignorance by bitching about it.
But Windows and OSX don't. That's the point.
For a trivial example, consider FTP. Under Windows I need to get a third party shareware app (or use the command line) to use FTP. It's not integrated into the desktop. If I want to edit a webpage, I need to explicitly transfer the html file to the local machine and edit it here, then explicitly transfer it back. Under KDE it's so fully integrated into the desktop that FTP use is completely transparent. Another example: no need for an explicit audio ripper program, I merely drag and drop songs off of the CD and into my flash drive player.
Translation: "T think KDE is a crapfest, but instead of offering supporting data for my argument, I'm just going to rant a bit..."
An idiom is a way of thinking. Initializing resources versus invoking resources are two different ways of thinking about resources. Neither one of them is wrong. What is wrong is to limit yourself to only one way of thinking.
The RAII link used files as an example. In most such cases invoking makes sense, because that's how you use a file. Rarely do you actually "initialize" a file. But you do it with data all the time. Getting rid of initialization is to get rid of object constructors. Even in vanilla C your data is conceptually composed of objects that need initialization. Since there is a high correspondence between data and memory in most software, it makes sense to allocate memory with the initialization idiom. (But not always, which is why you should never limit your way of thinking).
It hangs my Firefox. Trying IE now... a bunch of Trend Micro warnings about stopping a virus, but after closing all the popup windows, the calculator still comes up.
I think a hanging Firefox is better than a compromised system, though I would prefer neither.
I can't get this popup to happen, but logic tells me that you can't get spammed by a clicking "cancel" unless you've given it your email address. So don't give it your email address!
sometimes it would really be nice to have more direct control
Bingo. This is the major point that all the GC zealots overlook. They might have a point if every piece of software out there was a high level business app running on a system with unlimited resources, but reality is different. I'm a systems software developer writing code for embedded systems, so I need direct control over my memory allocation and deallocation.
If all you're doing is shunting data and messages back and forth, then GC is nice. But when you start writing low level code the lack of control becomes a major hindrance.
p.s. I've got this vision of GC as the result of a rotten banana. Some developer left a banana in his cubicle over vacation and it stunk up the whole building. Because he forget to deallocate his banana to the trashcan, the entire development team has been forbidden from eating snacks in their cubicles ever again. Most of us are capable of throwing away our trash and deallocating our memory, but the lazy ass incompentents ruined it for everyone.
But what if you need/want the initialization idiom?
It depends on what you are trying to make, duh.
It would be nice if more people believed this, but unfortunately there's language religion involved. When the preacher sermonizes on the glories of your chosen language, and the choir sings rhapsodic hymns to its built in GC, then you're going to view every other language out there as heretical, apostate or heathen.
Do I still have to pay royalties to Fraunhofer if I don't use a commercial MP3 player? Seriously, I would like to know.
This is a pipe dream. The OS will continue to matter as long as there is money to be had by locking customers into a specific platform. As odd as it sounds, many customers WANT to be locked in to a specific vendor.
.NET. Despite the propaganda from Mono, .NET is a Windows-only platform, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Mono is merely the Wine of the .NET world: you'll hear stories about .NET apps that will run on it, but try as you might you can't get any of the ones you need to run under it. What good is a crossplatform backend when the front end GUI is still inextricably tied to one OS?
Platforms will matter because your applications will remain platform specific. The big push in corporations right now is to migrate everything to
If major web sites and applications are still coding for specific browsers, my hopes for a cross-platform world where OS doesn't matter are very very slim.
There's no link to OSM there. All I can find is a link to wikipedia. Your guilt-by-accusation ploy isn't working. While OSM has a few neocon sites, many of its headliners are solidly libertarian.
All blogs are "right wing". Even those blogs on the far left fringe like Kos and Atrios are funded by right wing billionaires just to give the illusion of diversity.
Except that Qt Designer already DOES all of that stuff. Xcode is good but it's Mac only. It depends on who what your market is.