If you have more than one octopus, they are octopii, not octopusses. Hence, virii.
But octopus isn't even a Latin noun. It's Greek: oktopous, meaning "eight-footed." The correct Greek plural would be octopodes, pronounced "oc-toh-poh-dees." So the plural "octopi," while admittedly not uncommon, is incorrect. The correct English plural is "octopuses."
There are many examples of Latin-derived or "Latin-sounding" irregular nouns: cactus (cacti), fungus (fungi), terminus (termini), nucleus (nuclei); but consider syllabus (syllabuses), hippopotamus (hippopotamuses), omnibus (omnibuses).
And to whomever it was up-thread who said that languages evolve, you're right. But that doesn't change the fact that right now, today, the correct English plural of "virus" is "viruses," not "virii." The possibility that this may change sometime in the next hundred years doesn't make any difference now; incorrect is still incorrect.
Actually, isn't "virii" is the correct proper english plural form of "virus" according to the "rules" of pluralization for the english language?
Nope. First of all, pluralization isn't a matter of applying rules; it's a matter of the declension of nouns. Nouns are declined in patterns, but those patterns aren't rules. Words that are declined differently than the common pattern aren't "exceptions," they're "irregularities."
Many of those irregularities come from words imported from other languages. For example, stimulus becomes stimuli, but genus becomes genera. Ignoramus is a Latin-sounding word, and indeed is of Latin origin. But it wasn't a noun in its original language; it was a first-person plural verb! So ignoramus is pluralized in the typical English fashion: ignoramuses.
And don't fob me off on the OED plz, talking about the actual proper rules of grammer. *shrugs*
Won't work. It's necessary for software installers to have the freedom to execute arbitrary scripts during installation or removal. For instance, if you installed an FTP server, it would be necessary for that server to modify your/etc/inetd.conf file. (Don't shoot holes in my example. It's the best one I could think of off the top of my head.)
All the install package has to do is install a little script or binary, execute it during an exitop, then remove it when it's finished running. The little script or binary has, in the meantime, searched out and deleted AdAware, or whatever.
Oh, for the love of god. For the nth time, it's viruses, not virii. One of the characteristics of the English-speaking geek culture is the use of specialized jargon or shibboleths; but another characteristic is an above-average emphasis on correctness and precision. Using a made-up word like "virii" doesn't make you cool; it makes you sound stupid.
First, the Latin word "virus" meant slimy liquid or offensive odor or taste. It was an abstract noun that didn't lend itself to pluralization, and in fact Latin had no plural for it. Modern languages have all invented their own plurals when "virus" entered their vocabulary: German, Viren, French and Italian, virus (they use the same word for singular and plural, like we use "deer").
Second, and most important, the OED gives only "viruses" as a proper plural for "virus."
More details on the etymology of "viruses" can be found here.
Oh, and before you ask, it's "boxes" and not "boxen."
Then why doesn't the Windows XP installer recognize my FreeBSD and Linux partitions and allow me to select them from its boot manager, or allow me to resize or create any non-Windows file system?
You know, I installed Debian Linux on a friend's PowerBook the other day, and I discovered something awful. The installer wouldn't let me resize or create any HFS+ filesystems! Dammit!
So we gave up and tried to re-install OS X... only to find that the OS X installer wouldn't let me resize or create any ext3 or ReiserFS filesystems!
Yes, but what happens when the Segway reaches it maximum speed? If you continue to lean forward, do you fall over? That's the question that's been on everybody's mind.;-)
Okay, I stand corrected. But I'm not entirely sure that you and I were answering the same question. I understood the question to be, "You lean forward to go forward. The further you lean, the faster you go. What are you leaning against? Why don't you fall over?"
My answer may have been totally wrong. But your answer seemed to apply to the question of what keeps you from falling over sideways, since you compared it to the forces acting on a motorcycle wheel.
I'll admit that I was almost certainly wrong. But are you sure you're right? Maybe a more complete explanation is in order.
As compared to what? Linux will handle as much memory as you want to throw at it.
Up to 4 GB. (Or 3.8, or whatever the actual limit for usable address space per process.) That's like saying you can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black.
There are not that many operating systems that scale better. Solaris, Iris, and AIX are the only three that come to mind. I'm sure that there are a few more (including the more specialized operating systems such as OS/390), but linux scales better than OSes such as windows and MacOS.
So what you're really saying is that Linux scales better than Windows or Mac OS, but not as well as... um... every other operating system in current use?
Just to add a few more to your list: UNICOS and UNICOS/MK, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS, OS/400. Hell, even VxWorks scales better than Linux does right now.
I wonder if you think that noone "sits in front of [GCC] all day", considering that that is in some ways what plenty of programmers do.
That's complete crap, and you know it. User interaction with GCC ends when you hit the "enter" key. If you program all day, you're spending most of your time in either your editor or your debugger. Even if it takes hours to compile your project, you're not sitting there interacting with the compiler during that time. At its heart, GCC is just a utility. Which explains its success: the programmers who worked on it were able to immerse themselves in the details of the compiler and ignore all the human factors.
Well, you at least have demonstrated that your opinion isn't worth very much.
I think this one statement sums up my biggest complaint about the open-source community: it's made up in large part of hobbyists and graduate students who couldn't care less about the requirements of real-world users.
As I understand it, gyroscopes. As you push forward on the handle-thingy, the Segway pushes back, powered by the internal gyroscopes. I don't have any info on the amount of force involved; presumably, if your objective is to knock the thing over, you'll find a way to do it.
I'll go up there as a volunteer! Chance of a lifetime. Who wouldn't?
Depends. What if the rocket is also being built by volunteers? That's even worse than the current situation, in which rockets are built by the lowest bidder.
For a start you need to be able to support some kick ass render boards and some rather expensive and specialised output boards..
What the hell are you talking about? What's a "render board?" Are you talking about rendering coprocessors? There's at least one company that's making those, but as far as I know nobody uses them.
Rendering is one of the only purely CPU-bound activities you'll find in the digital media problem space. Input file goes in, image file comes out. If you're rendering for TV, you probably generate TIFFs or TGAs. If you're rendering for film, you may generate DPX or Cineon images, but probably not. Probably just TIFFs or TGAs.
As for film output, there's really no such thing. What you do is write your DPX or Cineon images to a DLT or DTF and ship it over to a processing house that will record it on film for you. It's strictly data in, data out.
Now, if you're talking about coming out of your computer as video, you have the option of using something like an SDI or HD-SDI output board. But those are widely available for both Mac and other platforms; there's really nothing exotic there.
Basically, it sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.
huh, say foobar, do you reckon that writing Photoshop is harder than say writting an entire OS
Yes, it is. Sitting down and writing an operating system based on Unix isn't, conceptually, that hard a job. Don't misunderstand me: it's a big job. Vast. Worthy of praise. But nobody has done any significant revolutionary work on the Linux kernel. It's just the writing down, all in one place, of well-established ideas. And it's not even that great; it doesn't handle large memory effectively, and it can't scale very well. But it's impressive that it works at all. (See my previous post.)
Photoshop is different. It's fundamentally user productivity software. It's not sufficient that it should simply work. It must work in a good, consistent, user-friendly way. There is no such requirement for Apache, or the Linux kernel, or GCC. Nobody sits in front of the Linux kernel all day, except for the kernel developers themselves. But lots of people, including yours truly in a previous job, get paid to sit in front of Photoshop all day. So the standards for human-computer interaction in Photoshop are much higher.
i dont think there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the bazar development, or we would never have what we have today.
I don't disagree with that at all. Today we have some fantastic software that came from open-source efforts: the Linux kernel, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP, Emacs, TeX (especially TeX!), X, and so on. But what the open-source community has provided isn't as revealing as what it hasn't. There is no adequate open-source desktop; as a long-time user of both Gnome and KDE I assert that neither one of them is worth much right now compared to the Windows desktop, or either the Mac OS "Classic" or the OS X desktops. There is no adequate open-source illustration program: we use Illustrator, or even FreeHand, instead. There is no adequate user-friendly open-source publishing software: we use FrameMaker or QPS instead. There is no adequate open-source CRM software: we use Siebel. No ERP software: we use SAP. No page layout software: QuarkXPress, or even InDesign. No spreadsheet software: Excel. No PIM software: Outlook. It goes on and on.
Ultimately, you have to ask yourself the question, why hasn't the open-source community produced any of these things? I know my answer. What's yours?
From this background it's pretty simple why there isn't any commercially viable open source options available...
I think you're not seeing the forest for the trees, here. The reason there's no sufficient open-source Photoshop-alike is the same reason there's no sufficient open-source ERP system. For that matter, it's the same reason there's no all-volunteer space program, or an all-volunteer hospital.
Writing software that's a functional and of as high quality as Photoshop is hard. Unbelievably hard. As hard as open-heart surgery, or sending a person into orbit. Writing an image editor that's as complete and as good as Photoshop would require a tightly coordinated and managed team of hundreds working full-time on the project for years. That's something that the open-source community has simply been unable to provide. Compared to Photoshop, Apache (arguably one of the strongest open-source efforts out there, and some excellent software) is child's play, both in overall complexity and in the sheer number of function points.
Gimp? Don't even talk to me about Gimp. I have Photoshop 3.0.1 on my iBook, which I run in Classic mode. I also have Gimp on my Windows 2000 system, because I don't have Photoshop for Windows. I use Gimp when I can't use Photoshop, which is moderately often. Across the board, without exception, I find Photoshop 3.0.1-- vintage 1991 software!-- running under Classic mode on my Mac to be superior to Gimp under Windows. Lots of time and effort went into making Photoshop a well-thought-out, high-quality piece of software, and it shows. Gimp is worked on by a loosely coupled group of part-timers, and that also shows.
I don't mean to be insulting, but Gimp is kind of like the old saying about the dog that sings. It's not that the dog sings well, because it doesn't. It's impressive simply that the dog sings at all. That's fine for singing dogs and amateurs. Professional artists will hold us-- the community, I mean-- to a higher standard.
First of all, New Zealand is beautiful. I am an American, as it happens, but my company has an office in Sydney and I have a business partner in Auckland. I spend about half my time in that general area of the world. Wish I could spend more.
But the fact that you live in a nice place doesn't make you any less of an idiot. I don't mean that in a perjorative sense; I just mean it literally. Your posts and journal entries reveal you to be a person of less-than-average insight. Nothing personal.
Please, by all means, prove me wrong. Share some piece of wisdom that makes us all stop and think. Say something to make me reply, "Yeah, that's a good point." Throw me a bone here. My opinion will change quickly in the face of new information.
I really don't have time for petty personal disputes whenever there is a procedural expert or 'ideas person' around, I'm just trying to get things done & I have no time to waste on trivial matters raised during consultation.
Well, good luck with that. Let us all know how it works out for you.
My god. I spent ten minutes writing a lengthy reply about how external metadata databases are inherently flawed due to the primary key problem. Then I realized that you're an idiot. Sorry. My mistake.
I have had my new Mac for over three weeks now and have not had a single crash or kernel panic.
Just to weigh in with my (not entirely on-topic) experience. I've been running OS X on my iMac (G3 400 MHz, 640 MB RAM) since it first went on sale. Don't remember how long ago that was, but it's been a while. The only reason I ever rebooted into OS 9 was to burn CDs and play a couple of games. When 10.1 came out, that ended. I haven't booted OS 9 in forever. I also haven't suffered a single OS crash in forever.
I did make it kernel panic once. I think I was running 10.0.3 or 10.0.4; can't recall. I unplugged my FireWire CDRW while I had a CDROM in it. The Mac panicked. But that problem was apparently fixed months and months ago.
We don't need a special purpose filesystem for this; just one that supports metadata.
There are a lot of reasons why filesystem-level metadata is harder than it sounds. (XFS supports it, incidentally, though extended attributes. There are command-line tools, and also a C API. Dead simple.)
Filesystem-level metadata is usually stored in the inode itself. If it's not stored literally inside the inode, then it's tightly coupled to the inode. This is good; it makes it fast. Reading a big chunk of metadata (say, 128K) is about as fast as doing a stat(). So that's good.
But most applications do something tricky with their data files. Say, Photoshop for example. When you're working on a file (foo.tiff) in Photoshop and you tell it to "save," Photoshop doesn't truncate and write to the file foo.tiff. Instead it writes to a temporary file. When the write is complete, it unlinks foo.tiff and renames the temporary file "foo.tiff." This is also good, because it makes it very unlikely for a program or system crash to destroy foo.tiff, even if saving the file takes a really long time. A crash or other interruption during the save process leaves foo.tiff just as it was; at worst, it leaves a dangling temporary file laying around.
Here's the catch: when Photoshop saves that new temporary file it gets a new inode. That inode has no metadata in it. All the metadata associated with foo.tiff is in foo.tiff's inode. When the temp file has been written and Photoshop unlinks foo.tiff, that wonderful rich metadata disappears in a tiny puff of blue smoke.
Sure, there are ways to work around this. We could implement a system call like clone() or something that allows an application to get a new, empty file open for writing that has all the filesystem metadata from another file automatically copied to it. Or we could do any number of other clever things. But all of them-- at least to my knowledge-- would involve changing end-user applications. That makes it tough.
ID3 tags are different, because they're stored as part of the MP3 file itself. Copying the file's data, using any method you might choose, will also copy the ID3 tags. But inode-based filesystem-level metadata is something else entirely.
Actually, by definition, that disproves creationism (being the doctrine that the world, life and humans were created as described in the Bible). There is no way of reconciling this doctrine with contemporary scientific evidence of how life originated.
Well, that all depends on how you interpret things. IANABS (I am not a Biblical scholar) but I don't recall the Bible claiming that life was created by God and has remained unchanged ever since.
There are those who hold that opinion, of course. I'm just saying that that's not what I learned in Sunday School.
In other words, it seems that the creation belief and the evolution belief aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
I don't know about Windows, but on a Mac, you find the plugins folder (/Library/Internet Plug-Ins on OS X) and remove the Flash plug-in. That will disable Flash for every browser.
Alas, though, this is a carpet-bombing sort of approach. As you mentioned, there are a few sites that use Flash in a constructive way. It would be annoying in the extreme to have to quit my browser, move a plug-in, and re-open my browser to toggle Flash. If only there were a checkbox in the preferences dialog!
Not everyone is a raving, drooling anti-Flash lunatic out here...
Just my two cents: I despise Flash ads because they move. Maybe I'm just unique or weird or something, but when I'm trying to read, movement in my peripheral vision is very distracting. Must be some of that frog DNA that got spliced into me in utero.
Animated GIFs and Java applets have the same problem, but I can conveniently turn them off with my browser. Both IE for Windows and IE and OmniWeb for the Mac have options to turn off GIF animations (although IE for Windows buries it so deep you wonder if they ever meant anyone to use it), but none of those three browsers makes it easy for you to disable Flash.
So, in summary, browser options good, Flash ads bad. CBS great. (BANG!)
If the alternative to the Open Source software was proprietary software, your argument falls apart.
First of all, it's not an argument. It was more of a cautionary tale. I thought I made it explicitly clear that I was neither advocating nor opposing anything. Just commenting.
So your claim that somehow advocating the use of Open Source software was somehow misleading is wrong.
I fail to see how. I pointed out that the GPL specifically (as a well-known example of an open source license) is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you get something that you don't have to pay money for. On the other hand, you are required to accept certain responsibilities. Some of those responsibilities may be surprising and unpleasant. For example, GNU Readline, IMHO one of the most useful pieces of open source software in the world, is licensed with the full GPL. That means any program that links to GNU Readline must also be released under the GPL. Some months ago I was under the opinion that GNU Readline was licensed under LGPL. This was an unpleasant surprise for me.
If GPL advocates (which it sounds like the submitter of the article was) spend too much time emphasizing the benefits of open source software, and not enough time disclosing the responsibilities that come along for the ride, people can very easily get the wrong idea about the GPL in particular and open source or free software in general.
Incidentally, this process of spending more time talking about how great open source software is while down-playing its obligations is well illustrated by your post.
The GPL gives you the right to distribute it, provided you abide by one condition: the source code goes with it.
Fair enough. From my point of view, they're two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, you get the source code and the right to use it for no money. On the other hand, you accept certain obligations, such as making your changes to the source and the source to derivative works available to the public.
All I was saying is that it's important that we be equally open about both of these: the right, and the responsibility.
(Frankly, I wouldn't be disappointed at all if we could get away from the word "free" altogether. GPL-licensed software is not free in the sense of having no cost associated with it. It's also not free in the sense of having no restrictions on it. I'd be just as happy if we could avoid the discussion altogether by using a different term than "free" to describe software licensed under the GPL.)
I don't intend this as a flame-- or FUD, for that matter-- but it almost sounds like you may have inadvertently pulled a bait-and-switch on your company.
You said, "we've succeeded in getting Open Source packages approved for use within the company," and this implies that you yourself-- as part of your group or whatever-- advocated the use of Open Source software inside your company. Did you make it extremely clear to the people to whom you were advocating that Free software is not entirely free?
What I mean is this: when you download GNU SurfWriter from an FTP site, you don't have to pay anybody. You get to use the software for no money. But there's an opportunity cost attached. In using the software, you give up the ability to redistribute it in binary-only form. You give up the ability to incorporate any part of it in a closed-source application. You give up a number of "rights" as part of the "cost" of GNU SurfWriter.
Put yourself in your boss's shoes for a minute. One of your employees came in last month and convinced you to use GNU SurfWriter. It's free, he said. You get the sources, he said, so you can modify it as you need. All good reasons.
Now, just a few short weeks later, that same employee comes in and tells you that you either should or must (depending on the circumstances) release your company's changes to GNU SurfWriter to the public. He never said anything about having to give away company IP when he argued for GNU SurfWriter last month! Bastard! Now you've got to explain this to your boss!
Net result: your boss, maybe your whole company, has a bad impression of the GPL specifically, and Open Source and free software in general.
I'm neither trying to advocate or deride the GPL in this post. I'm just pointing out that that particular license is definitely two-sided, and failure to be very clear about its limitations can be a bad thing. Without knowing it, you yourself may have spread FUD by not telling the whole story.
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If you have more than one octopus, they are octopii, not octopusses. Hence, virii.
But octopus isn't even a Latin noun. It's Greek: oktopous, meaning "eight-footed." The correct Greek plural would be octopodes, pronounced "oc-toh-poh-dees." So the plural "octopi," while admittedly not uncommon, is incorrect. The correct English plural is "octopuses."
There are many examples of Latin-derived or "Latin-sounding" irregular nouns: cactus (cacti), fungus (fungi), terminus (termini), nucleus (nuclei); but consider syllabus (syllabuses), hippopotamus (hippopotamuses), omnibus (omnibuses).
And to whomever it was up-thread who said that languages evolve, you're right. But that doesn't change the fact that right now, today, the correct English plural of "virus" is "viruses," not "virii." The possibility that this may change sometime in the next hundred years doesn't make any difference now; incorrect is still incorrect.
Actually, isn't "virii" is the correct proper english plural form of "virus" according to the "rules" of pluralization for the english language?
;-)
Nope. First of all, pluralization isn't a matter of applying rules; it's a matter of the declension of nouns. Nouns are declined in patterns, but those patterns aren't rules. Words that are declined differently than the common pattern aren't "exceptions," they're "irregularities."
Many of those irregularities come from words imported from other languages. For example, stimulus becomes stimuli, but genus becomes genera. Ignoramus is a Latin-sounding word, and indeed is of Latin origin. But it wasn't a noun in its original language; it was a first-person plural verb! So ignoramus is pluralized in the typical English fashion: ignoramuses.
And don't fob me off on the OED plz, talking about the actual proper rules of grammer. *shrugs*
It's "grammar."
First, software installation should be passive.
/etc/inetd.conf file. (Don't shoot holes in my example. It's the best one I could think of off the top of my head.)
Won't work. It's necessary for software installers to have the freedom to execute arbitrary scripts during installation or removal. For instance, if you installed an FTP server, it would be necessary for that server to modify your
All the install package has to do is install a little script or binary, execute it during an exitop, then remove it when it's finished running. The little script or binary has, in the meantime, searched out and deleted AdAware, or whatever.
Oh, for the love of god. For the nth time, it's viruses, not virii. One of the characteristics of the English-speaking geek culture is the use of specialized jargon or shibboleths; but another characteristic is an above-average emphasis on correctness and precision. Using a made-up word like "virii" doesn't make you cool; it makes you sound stupid.
First, the Latin word "virus" meant slimy liquid or offensive odor or taste. It was an abstract noun that didn't lend itself to pluralization, and in fact Latin had no plural for it. Modern languages have all invented their own plurals when "virus" entered their vocabulary: German, Viren, French and Italian, virus (they use the same word for singular and plural, like we use "deer").
Second, and most important, the OED gives only "viruses" as a proper plural for "virus."
More details on the etymology of "viruses" can be found here.
Oh, and before you ask, it's "boxes" and not "boxen."
Thus endeth the lesson.
Then why doesn't the Windows XP installer recognize my FreeBSD and Linux partitions and allow me to select them from its boot manager, or allow me to resize or create any non-Windows file system?
You know, I installed Debian Linux on a friend's PowerBook the other day, and I discovered something awful. The installer wouldn't let me resize or create any HFS+ filesystems! Dammit!
So we gave up and tried to re-install OS X... only to find that the OS X installer wouldn't let me resize or create any ext3 or ReiserFS filesystems!
Somebody's gotta put a stop to this conspiracy!
Man, I'm jealous. I post pretty regularly, and nobody's ever offered to show me their "recturm."
Yes, but what happens when the Segway reaches it maximum speed? If you continue to lean forward, do you fall over? That's the question that's been on everybody's mind. ;-)
This is wrong.
Okay, I stand corrected. But I'm not entirely sure that you and I were answering the same question. I understood the question to be, "You lean forward to go forward. The further you lean, the faster you go. What are you leaning against? Why don't you fall over?"
My answer may have been totally wrong. But your answer seemed to apply to the question of what keeps you from falling over sideways, since you compared it to the forces acting on a motorcycle wheel.
I'll admit that I was almost certainly wrong. But are you sure you're right? Maybe a more complete explanation is in order.
As compared to what? Linux will handle as much memory as you want to throw at it.
Up to 4 GB. (Or 3.8, or whatever the actual limit for usable address space per process.) That's like saying you can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black.
There are not that many operating systems that scale better. Solaris, Iris, and AIX are the only three that come to mind. I'm sure that there are a few more (including the more specialized operating systems such as OS/390), but linux scales better than OSes such as windows and MacOS.
So what you're really saying is that Linux scales better than Windows or Mac OS, but not as well as... um... every other operating system in current use?
Just to add a few more to your list: UNICOS and UNICOS/MK, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS, OS/400. Hell, even VxWorks scales better than Linux does right now.
I wonder if you think that noone "sits in front of [GCC] all day", considering that that is in some ways what plenty of programmers do.
That's complete crap, and you know it. User interaction with GCC ends when you hit the "enter" key. If you program all day, you're spending most of your time in either your editor or your debugger. Even if it takes hours to compile your project, you're not sitting there interacting with the compiler during that time. At its heart, GCC is just a utility. Which explains its success: the programmers who worked on it were able to immerse themselves in the details of the compiler and ignore all the human factors.
Well, you at least have demonstrated that your opinion isn't worth very much.
I think this one statement sums up my biggest complaint about the open-source community: it's made up in large part of hobbyists and graduate students who couldn't care less about the requirements of real-world users.
As I understand it, gyroscopes. As you push forward on the handle-thingy, the Segway pushes back, powered by the internal gyroscopes. I don't have any info on the amount of force involved; presumably, if your objective is to knock the thing over, you'll find a way to do it.
I'll go up there as a volunteer! Chance of a lifetime. Who wouldn't?
Depends. What if the rocket is also being built by volunteers? That's even worse than the current situation, in which rockets are built by the lowest bidder.
For a start you need to be able to support some kick ass render boards and some rather expensive and specialised output boards..
What the hell are you talking about? What's a "render board?" Are you talking about rendering coprocessors? There's at least one company that's making those, but as far as I know nobody uses them.
Rendering is one of the only purely CPU-bound activities you'll find in the digital media problem space. Input file goes in, image file comes out. If you're rendering for TV, you probably generate TIFFs or TGAs. If you're rendering for film, you may generate DPX or Cineon images, but probably not. Probably just TIFFs or TGAs.
As for film output, there's really no such thing. What you do is write your DPX or Cineon images to a DLT or DTF and ship it over to a processing house that will record it on film for you. It's strictly data in, data out.
Now, if you're talking about coming out of your computer as video, you have the option of using something like an SDI or HD-SDI output board. But those are widely available for both Mac and other platforms; there's really nothing exotic there.
Basically, it sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.
huh, say foobar, do you reckon that writing Photoshop is harder than say writting an entire OS
Yes, it is. Sitting down and writing an operating system based on Unix isn't, conceptually, that hard a job. Don't misunderstand me: it's a big job. Vast. Worthy of praise. But nobody has done any significant revolutionary work on the Linux kernel. It's just the writing down, all in one place, of well-established ideas. And it's not even that great; it doesn't handle large memory effectively, and it can't scale very well. But it's impressive that it works at all. (See my previous post.)
Photoshop is different. It's fundamentally user productivity software. It's not sufficient that it should simply work. It must work in a good, consistent, user-friendly way. There is no such requirement for Apache, or the Linux kernel, or GCC. Nobody sits in front of the Linux kernel all day, except for the kernel developers themselves. But lots of people, including yours truly in a previous job, get paid to sit in front of Photoshop all day. So the standards for human-computer interaction in Photoshop are much higher.
i dont think there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the bazar development, or we would never have what we have today.
I don't disagree with that at all. Today we have some fantastic software that came from open-source efforts: the Linux kernel, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP, Emacs, TeX (especially TeX!), X, and so on. But what the open-source community has provided isn't as revealing as what it hasn't. There is no adequate open-source desktop; as a long-time user of both Gnome and KDE I assert that neither one of them is worth much right now compared to the Windows desktop, or either the Mac OS "Classic" or the OS X desktops. There is no adequate open-source illustration program: we use Illustrator, or even FreeHand, instead. There is no adequate user-friendly open-source publishing software: we use FrameMaker or QPS instead. There is no adequate open-source CRM software: we use Siebel. No ERP software: we use SAP. No page layout software: QuarkXPress, or even InDesign. No spreadsheet software: Excel. No PIM software: Outlook. It goes on and on.
Ultimately, you have to ask yourself the question, why hasn't the open-source community produced any of these things? I know my answer. What's yours?
From this background it's pretty simple why there isn't any commercially viable open source options available...
I think you're not seeing the forest for the trees, here. The reason there's no sufficient open-source Photoshop-alike is the same reason there's no sufficient open-source ERP system. For that matter, it's the same reason there's no all-volunteer space program, or an all-volunteer hospital.
Writing software that's a functional and of as high quality as Photoshop is hard. Unbelievably hard. As hard as open-heart surgery, or sending a person into orbit. Writing an image editor that's as complete and as good as Photoshop would require a tightly coordinated and managed team of hundreds working full-time on the project for years. That's something that the open-source community has simply been unable to provide. Compared to Photoshop, Apache (arguably one of the strongest open-source efforts out there, and some excellent software) is child's play, both in overall complexity and in the sheer number of function points.
Gimp? Don't even talk to me about Gimp. I have Photoshop 3.0.1 on my iBook, which I run in Classic mode. I also have Gimp on my Windows 2000 system, because I don't have Photoshop for Windows. I use Gimp when I can't use Photoshop, which is moderately often. Across the board, without exception, I find Photoshop 3.0.1-- vintage 1991 software!-- running under Classic mode on my Mac to be superior to Gimp under Windows. Lots of time and effort went into making Photoshop a well-thought-out, high-quality piece of software, and it shows. Gimp is worked on by a loosely coupled group of part-timers, and that also shows.
I don't mean to be insulting, but Gimp is kind of like the old saying about the dog that sings. It's not that the dog sings well, because it doesn't. It's impressive simply that the dog sings at all. That's fine for singing dogs and amateurs. Professional artists will hold us-- the community, I mean-- to a higher standard.
First of all, New Zealand is beautiful. I am an American, as it happens, but my company has an office in Sydney and I have a business partner in Auckland. I spend about half my time in that general area of the world. Wish I could spend more.
But the fact that you live in a nice place doesn't make you any less of an idiot. I don't mean that in a perjorative sense; I just mean it literally. Your posts and journal entries reveal you to be a person of less-than-average insight. Nothing personal.
Please, by all means, prove me wrong. Share some piece of wisdom that makes us all stop and think. Say something to make me reply, "Yeah, that's a good point." Throw me a bone here. My opinion will change quickly in the face of new information.
I really don't have time for petty personal disputes whenever there is a procedural expert or 'ideas person' around, I'm just trying to get things done & I have no time to waste on trivial matters raised during consultation.
Well, good luck with that. Let us all know how it works out for you.
My god. I spent ten minutes writing a lengthy reply about how external metadata databases are inherently flawed due to the primary key problem. Then I realized that you're an idiot. Sorry. My mistake.
I have had my new Mac for over three weeks now and have not had a single crash or kernel panic.
Just to weigh in with my (not entirely on-topic) experience. I've been running OS X on my iMac (G3 400 MHz, 640 MB RAM) since it first went on sale. Don't remember how long ago that was, but it's been a while. The only reason I ever rebooted into OS 9 was to burn CDs and play a couple of games. When 10.1 came out, that ended. I haven't booted OS 9 in forever. I also haven't suffered a single OS crash in forever.
I did make it kernel panic once. I think I was running 10.0.3 or 10.0.4; can't recall. I unplugged my FireWire CDRW while I had a CDROM in it. The Mac panicked. But that problem was apparently fixed months and months ago.
Pretty dang stable.
We don't need a special purpose filesystem for this; just one that supports metadata.
There are a lot of reasons why filesystem-level metadata is harder than it sounds. (XFS supports it, incidentally, though extended attributes. There are command-line tools, and also a C API. Dead simple.)
Filesystem-level metadata is usually stored in the inode itself. If it's not stored literally inside the inode, then it's tightly coupled to the inode. This is good; it makes it fast. Reading a big chunk of metadata (say, 128K) is about as fast as doing a stat(). So that's good.
But most applications do something tricky with their data files. Say, Photoshop for example. When you're working on a file (foo.tiff) in Photoshop and you tell it to "save," Photoshop doesn't truncate and write to the file foo.tiff. Instead it writes to a temporary file. When the write is complete, it unlinks foo.tiff and renames the temporary file "foo.tiff." This is also good, because it makes it very unlikely for a program or system crash to destroy foo.tiff, even if saving the file takes a really long time. A crash or other interruption during the save process leaves foo.tiff just as it was; at worst, it leaves a dangling temporary file laying around.
Here's the catch: when Photoshop saves that new temporary file it gets a new inode. That inode has no metadata in it. All the metadata associated with foo.tiff is in foo.tiff's inode. When the temp file has been written and Photoshop unlinks foo.tiff, that wonderful rich metadata disappears in a tiny puff of blue smoke.
Sure, there are ways to work around this. We could implement a system call like clone() or something that allows an application to get a new, empty file open for writing that has all the filesystem metadata from another file automatically copied to it. Or we could do any number of other clever things. But all of them-- at least to my knowledge-- would involve changing end-user applications. That makes it tough.
ID3 tags are different, because they're stored as part of the MP3 file itself. Copying the file's data, using any method you might choose, will also copy the ID3 tags. But inode-based filesystem-level metadata is something else entirely.
Actually, by definition, that disproves creationism (being the doctrine that the world, life and humans were created as described in the Bible). There is no way of reconciling this doctrine with contemporary scientific evidence of how life originated.
Well, that all depends on how you interpret things. IANABS (I am not a Biblical scholar) but I don't recall the Bible claiming that life was created by God and has remained unchanged ever since.
There are those who hold that opinion, of course. I'm just saying that that's not what I learned in Sunday School.
In other words, it seems that the creation belief and the evolution belief aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
I don't know about Windows, but on a Mac, you find the plugins folder (/Library/Internet Plug-Ins on OS X) and remove the Flash plug-in. That will disable Flash for every browser.
Alas, though, this is a carpet-bombing sort of approach. As you mentioned, there are a few sites that use Flash in a constructive way. It would be annoying in the extreme to have to quit my browser, move a plug-in, and re-open my browser to toggle Flash. If only there were a checkbox in the preferences dialog!
Aha! I know I'm on the right track when I learn that somebody smarter than me actually thought of it years ago.
<burns>Excellent.</burns>
Not everyone is a raving, drooling anti-Flash lunatic out here...
Just my two cents: I despise Flash ads because they move. Maybe I'm just unique or weird or something, but when I'm trying to read, movement in my peripheral vision is very distracting. Must be some of that frog DNA that got spliced into me in utero.
Animated GIFs and Java applets have the same problem, but I can conveniently turn them off with my browser. Both IE for Windows and IE and OmniWeb for the Mac have options to turn off GIF animations (although IE for Windows buries it so deep you wonder if they ever meant anyone to use it), but none of those three browsers makes it easy for you to disable Flash.
So, in summary, browser options good, Flash ads bad. CBS great. (BANG!)
If the alternative to the Open Source software was proprietary software, your argument falls apart.
First of all, it's not an argument. It was more of a cautionary tale. I thought I made it explicitly clear that I was neither advocating nor opposing anything. Just commenting.
So your claim that somehow advocating the use of Open Source software was somehow misleading is wrong.
I fail to see how. I pointed out that the GPL specifically (as a well-known example of an open source license) is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you get something that you don't have to pay money for. On the other hand, you are required to accept certain responsibilities. Some of those responsibilities may be surprising and unpleasant. For example, GNU Readline, IMHO one of the most useful pieces of open source software in the world, is licensed with the full GPL. That means any program that links to GNU Readline must also be released under the GPL. Some months ago I was under the opinion that GNU Readline was licensed under LGPL. This was an unpleasant surprise for me.
If GPL advocates (which it sounds like the submitter of the article was) spend too much time emphasizing the benefits of open source software, and not enough time disclosing the responsibilities that come along for the ride, people can very easily get the wrong idea about the GPL in particular and open source or free software in general.
Incidentally, this process of spending more time talking about how great open source software is while down-playing its obligations is well illustrated by your post.
The GPL gives you the right to distribute it, provided you abide by one condition: the source code goes with it.
Fair enough. From my point of view, they're two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, you get the source code and the right to use it for no money. On the other hand, you accept certain obligations, such as making your changes to the source and the source to derivative works available to the public.
All I was saying is that it's important that we be equally open about both of these: the right, and the responsibility.
(Frankly, I wouldn't be disappointed at all if we could get away from the word "free" altogether. GPL-licensed software is not free in the sense of having no cost associated with it. It's also not free in the sense of having no restrictions on it. I'd be just as happy if we could avoid the discussion altogether by using a different term than "free" to describe software licensed under the GPL.)
I don't intend this as a flame-- or FUD, for that matter-- but it almost sounds like you may have inadvertently pulled a bait-and-switch on your company.
You said, "we've succeeded in getting Open Source packages approved for use within the company," and this implies that you yourself-- as part of your group or whatever-- advocated the use of Open Source software inside your company. Did you make it extremely clear to the people to whom you were advocating that Free software is not entirely free?
What I mean is this: when you download GNU SurfWriter from an FTP site, you don't have to pay anybody. You get to use the software for no money. But there's an opportunity cost attached. In using the software, you give up the ability to redistribute it in binary-only form. You give up the ability to incorporate any part of it in a closed-source application. You give up a number of "rights" as part of the "cost" of GNU SurfWriter.
Put yourself in your boss's shoes for a minute. One of your employees came in last month and convinced you to use GNU SurfWriter. It's free, he said. You get the sources, he said, so you can modify it as you need. All good reasons.
Now, just a few short weeks later, that same employee comes in and tells you that you either should or must (depending on the circumstances) release your company's changes to GNU SurfWriter to the public. He never said anything about having to give away company IP when he argued for GNU SurfWriter last month! Bastard! Now you've got to explain this to your boss!
Net result: your boss, maybe your whole company, has a bad impression of the GPL specifically, and Open Source and free software in general.
I'm neither trying to advocate or deride the GPL in this post. I'm just pointing out that that particular license is definitely two-sided, and failure to be very clear about its limitations can be a bad thing. Without knowing it, you yourself may have spread FUD by not telling the whole story.