iTunes already has flags next to songs to indicate explicit content, podcast availability, and so on. Something like this wouldn't be a big problem. Those who cared would know what it meant, those who didn't know what it meant probably wouldn't even notice it.
Well, I don't believe Jobs. It would be simple enough for iTunes to offer unDRMed downloads alongside the DRMed ones. A different download protocol could be used (say, simple HTTP), so there would be no danger of the unlocked download mechanism being used to help reverse engineer the locked one.
Well, I was slightly surprised by RedHat being listed above IBM, as I'm told IBM has more people working on improving Linux than RedHat has employees. I'm guessing that either a lot of IBM folk were in the "unknown" categories, or that lots of IBM work is now going into stuff other than just the kernel.
Back in the mists of time, Qt wasn't licensed under a free software license. Therefore, the GNOME project was started as a way to create a desktop environment that would be GPL/LGPL compatible. Rather than merely clone Qt as free software, the developers opted to start again from scratch.
Then TrollTech made Qt available under the GPL. Unfortunately, GNOME continued; by that point, there were too many egos involved, and too many wheels had been reinvented. These days GNOME is mostly there (a) as an ego trip, and (b) because it's more compatible with cheapskate proprietary software developers.
The latter needs some further explanation. Basically, GNOME and GTK+ are LGPL licensed, not GPL licensed, so you can develop proprietary closed-source software for GNOME for free. In contrast, you have to pay money to develop proprietary closed-source KDE software, because you need to negotiate a non-GPL license for Qt with TrollTech. GNOME also includes Mono as part of the core GNOME desktop, so you can use the patented proprietary Microsoft.NET technologies.
I just switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu, because Ubuntu is infected with Mono.
While KDE has way, way too many UI tweaks available in its preferences, I just switched the theme to Plastik and stopped fiddling with everything else. Other than that, KDE beats Gnome in every way.
Why should a commercial developer start using the official package manager if they have to do extra work to register their software for every package manager in use?
They don't have to "register" their software. They just need to package it in the appropriate format, just like for any other platform.
Why should they use the repository if they already have to implement their own registration service to insure a given item of software is up to date?
If they have their own up-to-date service, like Firefox does, then they can rely on that. However, in practice it's going to be more reliable to use the standard mechanisms. For instance, Firefox updates on Linux can fail because the user running the browser doesn't have write access to the directories where Firefox is installed.
Why design to target a dozen package managers and still have to develop your own registration/verification setup to prevent people from ripping you off, when you could just use a custom installer that takes care of all of it and you don't have to worry what package manager the end user has?
User experience. It's much easier for me to install PostgreSQL on a remote server than it is to install DB2, because the custom installer for DB2 requires X. Java is a PITA on Linux because if you install the official Java distribution, packages which require Java have no idea it's there, and try to install GCJ and GNU Classpath.
The whole point of my argument is if you design a package manager that does accommodate all the needs of a commercial developer...
I'm still waiting to hear what those needs are, what it is that a commercial developer needs to do but can't do today with APT or RPM. (Other than license handling, which nobody is going to want implemented in open source package management.)
Ever since I started using word processors (which for me was a long time after I started using web browsers), i've always thought, why doesn't updating this style make all text with that style update?
It does. Every word processor I've used has this feature--Apple Pages, Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, even AppleWorks. You just have to learn to use it.
Hint: Look up "style" in the help. (In OOo, hit F11 for a starting point.)
I volunteered to help with a Black Family Technology Awareness Week thing at a public school, showing city kids and their families computers, trying to get them interested.
I had naturally read endless horror stories about American schools. I was somewhat surprised when I turned up and found that there were no metal detectors I had to walk through. There was no bullet proof glass on the doors. I wasn't asked to hand over federal ID or submit to an anal probe. They didn't require a lengthy background check.
So I guess the question is, where do you live that the schools are that bad?
I want my package manager to know where these RPMs came from and be able to keep them up to date for starters, you know like all the other software.
Easy enough. The commercial vendors just need to provide repositories of their own. Have the installer or install script add their repository to the end of/etc/apt/sources.list.
Further, I want the package manager to accommodate discovering this application, downloading it, registering it with the vendor, and paying any licensing fees.
Click'n'run. Can be done with a web site, doesn't need any changes to the package manager.
...rather than having to mess with a different installer for each commercial program.
You'll never be able to get rid of the mess of different installers. Even on the Mac, where Apple provides a standard installer and documents the standard installation process, vendors still insist on building their own crappy installers that don't quite work right. Same on Linux. Commercial software vendors seem to think that a non-standard installer gives them a commercial edge.
The Stallman/Cox purist types seem to have conveniently forgotten that the GNU system was bootstrapped by proprietary software.
...which in turn, had been bootstrapped from v7 Unix, which had been given away to universities for free, with source code, resulting in lots of non-proprietary UCB software being incorporated into Unix.
Damn straight. My summary of the story is: "RPM sucks so bad, and RedHat's packaging discipline is so bad, that even Eric Raymond can't stand it any longer".
I've been saying it for years. I'm amazed that RedHat don't consider RPM important enough to fix.
(My most recent case of RPM crapping all over its own databases and totally hosing the entire system irrecoverably was last October, so don't anyone try and tell me it's fixed. No, --rebuilddb didn't fix it.)
Linux package managers do a terrible job of accommodating commercial software the vendor does not want added to someone else's repository.
Let's consider the two most common package managers: RPM and dpkg. Neither of them has any problem at all with letting you install commercial software without it being in a repository. In fact, commercial software like IBM DB2 is simply shipped in RPM files that are installed by a flashy graphical installer.
Hmm, I assumed that JRuby would speed up over the long term, like Java in general. Guess not.
YARV is in the CVS respository. Barring major disaster, I expect it will ship with the next major release. I haven't tried it myself yet, busy writing Java at the moment...
I meant double underscores on things which *aren't* messing with the magic of internal Python objects. Like __new__ and __init__ and __private_variables.
Unlike Java, Perl has support for a decent set of built in data structures, and the built in regular expression syntax is second to none.
Are we talking about the same Perl here? The one that doesn't even have multidimensional arrays? The one where there aren't real objects, just hacks using references and hashes? The one that has no standard data structure for dates, ?
Oh, and Java has had regex support for a couple of years now.
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iTunes already has flags next to songs to indicate explicit content, podcast availability, and so on. Something like this wouldn't be a big problem. Those who cared would know what it meant, those who didn't know what it meant probably wouldn't even notice it.
Well, I don't believe Jobs. It would be simple enough for iTunes to offer unDRMed downloads alongside the DRMed ones. A different download protocol could be used (say, simple HTTP), so there would be no danger of the unlocked download mechanism being used to help reverse engineer the locked one.
The UI could be really simple. I even posted a suggestion on Flickr.
If Jobs is really against DRM, he'll do it. Personally, I'm betting it's just posturing to try and defend against charges of monopoly.
Well, I was slightly surprised by RedHat being listed above IBM, as I'm told IBM has more people working on improving Linux than RedHat has employees. I'm guessing that either a lot of IBM folk were in the "unknown" categories, or that lots of IBM work is now going into stuff other than just the kernel.
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
last.fm
I run Ubuntu, and run VMware. Works fine in 6.10, out of the box.
Back in the mists of time, Qt wasn't licensed under a free software license. Therefore, the GNOME project was started as a way to create a desktop environment that would be GPL/LGPL compatible. Rather than merely clone Qt as free software, the developers opted to start again from scratch.
.NET technologies.
Then TrollTech made Qt available under the GPL. Unfortunately, GNOME continued; by that point, there were too many egos involved, and too many wheels had been reinvented. These days GNOME is mostly there (a) as an ego trip, and (b) because it's more compatible with cheapskate proprietary software developers.
The latter needs some further explanation. Basically, GNOME and GTK+ are LGPL licensed, not GPL licensed, so you can develop proprietary closed-source software for GNOME for free. In contrast, you have to pay money to develop proprietary closed-source KDE software, because you need to negotiate a non-GPL license for Qt with TrollTech. GNOME also includes Mono as part of the core GNOME desktop, so you can use the patented proprietary Microsoft
I just switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu, because Ubuntu is infected with Mono.
While KDE has way, way too many UI tweaks available in its preferences, I just switched the theme to Plastik and stopped fiddling with everything else. Other than that, KDE beats Gnome in every way.
No, I mean that in Ruby, constructors don't have special syntax and aren't covered in underscores or other ugly punctuation.
They don't have to "register" their software. They just need to package it in the appropriate format, just like for any other platform.
If they have their own up-to-date service, like Firefox does, then they can rely on that. However, in practice it's going to be more reliable to use the standard mechanisms. For instance, Firefox updates on Linux can fail because the user running the browser doesn't have write access to the directories where Firefox is installed.
User experience. It's much easier for me to install PostgreSQL on a remote server than it is to install DB2, because the custom installer for DB2 requires X. Java is a PITA on Linux because if you install the official Java distribution, packages which require Java have no idea it's there, and try to install GCJ and GNU Classpath.
I'm still waiting to hear what those needs are, what it is that a commercial developer needs to do but can't do today with APT or RPM. (Other than license handling, which nobody is going to want implemented in open source package management.)
Well, constructors and allocators don't have special syntax in Ruby, and I haven't heard anyone suggest that it's a problem...
The difference is you can install whatever software you want on a Treo, or even write your own.
It does. Every word processor I've used has this feature--Apple Pages, Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, even AppleWorks. You just have to learn to use it.
Hint: Look up "style" in the help. (In OOo, hit F11 for a starting point.)
The bullies I knew were already small time criminals, shoplifting and stealing bikes. I say jail the fuckers.
I volunteered to help with a Black Family Technology Awareness Week thing at a public school, showing city kids and their families computers, trying to get them interested.
I had naturally read endless horror stories about American schools. I was somewhat surprised when I turned up and found that there were no metal detectors I had to walk through. There was no bullet proof glass on the doors. I wasn't asked to hand over federal ID or submit to an anal probe. They didn't require a lengthy background check.
So I guess the question is, where do you live that the schools are that bad?
Writing initialization and allocation methods is a standard part of OO programming. It's not special internal magic.
Easy enough. The commercial vendors just need to provide repositories of their own. Have the installer or install script add their repository to the end of /etc/apt/sources.list.
Click'n'run. Can be done with a web site, doesn't need any changes to the package manager.
You'll never be able to get rid of the mess of different installers. Even on the Mac, where Apple provides a standard installer and documents the standard installation process, vendors still insist on building their own crappy installers that don't quite work right. Same on Linux. Commercial software vendors seem to think that a non-standard installer gives them a commercial edge.
Yeah, it wasn't when I tried it, and apt-get dist-upgrade didn't work.
...which in turn, had been bootstrapped from v7 Unix, which had been given away to universities for free, with source code, resulting in lots of non-proprietary UCB software being incorporated into Unix.
Liked it, but I was left with no upgrade path other than doing another CD-based install. Ubuntu upgrades can be done in the usual way with APT.
Damn straight. My summary of the story is: "RPM sucks so bad, and RedHat's packaging discipline is so bad, that even Eric Raymond can't stand it any longer".
I've been saying it for years. I'm amazed that RedHat don't consider RPM important enough to fix.
(My most recent case of RPM crapping all over its own databases and totally hosing the entire system irrecoverably was last October, so don't anyone try and tell me it's fixed. No, --rebuilddb didn't fix it.)
Let's consider the two most common package managers: RPM and dpkg. Neither of them has any problem at all with letting you install commercial software without it being in a repository. In fact, commercial software like IBM DB2 is simply shipped in RPM files that are installed by a flashy graphical installer.
What kind of accommodation are you expecting?
Hmm, I assumed that JRuby would speed up over the long term, like Java in general. Guess not.
YARV is in the CVS respository. Barring major disaster, I expect it will ship with the next major release. I haven't tried it myself yet, busy writing Java at the moment...
I meant double underscores on things which *aren't* messing with the magic of internal Python objects. Like __new__ and __init__ and __private_variables.
There's always JRuby, if you want C++-like performance.
YARV is faster than Parrot at running Ruby, according to the most recent benchmarks I've seen.
Are we talking about the same Perl here? The one that doesn't even have multidimensional arrays? The one where there aren't real objects, just hacks using references and hashes? The one that has no standard data structure for dates, ?
Oh, and Java has had regex support for a couple of years now.
I'm no Java enthusiast, but please...