The real question is would a move to GPL3 benefit your freedom?
In that case, I guess the answer depends on who "you" are. Suppose for a second that I am Linus. (Tall assumption, I know, but bear with me...) In your example, should I be more concerned about your freedom, or Sony's? Considering where we are having this discussion, I think that most people's initial reaction would be that we should be more concerned with your freedom, maybe because they love to hate on Sony, or because they have a mistrust of corporations in general, or maybe for some other reason. But logically, who is using my code in this case? Sony is my user. So is there a reason that I should limit their freedom in order to enhance yours? I understand that what distinguishes the GPL from some of the other free licenses is that it requires my users to extend the same freedoms to their users, but Sony has lived up to that obligation, have they not? I gave them code, and in exchange, they have made it and their modifications available to their users.
The fact that they won't allow you to install any software that you want to on the hardware that they manufactured is unfortunate, but that is a separate issue. If I buy a laptop with the intention of installing Linux on it, and I find out after I buy it that the hardware is not supported, is that the manufacturer's fault or mine? Or maybe for a little bit closer analogy, what if I discovered that the factory supplied OS was installed on write-only media? I believe some smartphones are currently being sold this way, so it's not a completely unrealistic scenario. In this case, whether or not the factory supplied OS is free or not is beside the point.
In this case, I guess my question is, what if Sony hadn't used Linux on their device? What if they had decided that they didn't want to abide by the terms of the GPL, and used some proprietary system. Would you still feel that you had the right (or should have the right) to install your own software on the device?
One could ask the same thing about where all the matter in the big bang came from. When you figure out the answer to that one, let me know, and I'll get back to you on where God came from.
In the meantime, there are plenty of things in the universe that defy human logic or explanation, in the scientific realm as well as otherwise. Some people are OK with having a god that is one of those things; others are not. You obviously are one of the ones who is not. To me, at least, there is nothing wrong with either group, but I think that both need to be a little bit more careful on what grounds they criticize the other. Glass houses and all that...
Amusing anecdote, but the second US nuclear submarine, USS Seawolf (SSN-575), did have a liquid Sodium reactor when it was commissioned. It was replaced with a water cooled reactor after about 4 years of service for maintenance reasons.
I'll agree that Silverlight is a neat platform that is pretty easy to work for, and shows a lot of promise. But Microsoft seems to be tryiong to use it in all the wrong places. You want to know what are by far the most annoying web sites in the world (to me at least)? Car manufacturers. Every one of them is written entirely in Flash, usually multiple flash applets which never seem to stack in just the right order unless you are using Windows/IE. For the sake of fancy animations and fade effects, they have sacrificed nearly every usability feature of the modern web, and Microsoft seems to be poised to do exactly the same thing.
Aside from a few fancy but ultimately pointless animations, they haven't done anything that couldn't have been done in plain HTML/CSS 8 years ago. And look at the cost to the user of that decision: Text selection and copying is broken, the find feature of your browser won't find anything, you can't copy link locations or open links in a new tab or window, and the status bar won't show you link locations. Not to mention, if they go through with this, I'm sure that it will make Googling for anything on Microsoft.com virtually useless. (which is about the only way I ever find anything on either Microsoft or MSDN, as their built in navigation and search functionality is surprisingly useless.)
So, yeah, Silverlight's a pretty cool platform, and you can do some really neat stuff with it. But building a whole site with it is definitely high up there on the ways to ensure that nobody visits your site, or that the people who have to visit hate every minute of it.
In my experience, that is generally somebody without cruise control trying to maintain an exact speed. They notice they're going slower than they want, so they step on the gas. After a few seconds, they let off, but sometimes it's a bit too late, and now they're going too fast! so rather than ease off the gas, they tap the brakes a bit to bring it back down and continue on their way. A few seconds later, they may notice that they are going too slow again and the cycle repeats itself...
Then it must have been an awful long time ago. I used mutt from about '99-'01, and while the first question is accurate, Mutt had great support for IMAP and as far as I recall, a decent address book. The SMTP thing wasn't that big a deal to me, at least - I only used it on Linux, where it was trivially easy to set Postfix to route outgoing email though my ISP. I've actually considered going back to Mutt from time to time, but I have to use Outlook at work, and I don't get enough email at my personal account to be worth it.
I'm assuming that you meant to say that "ClearType cannot be read by everyone." I won't argue on this point, but I do know that what you actually said (that it cannot be read by anyone) is completely false. I actually decided that I like ClearType enough that I was willing to give up the increased vertical resolution from running my 2 monitors in portrait mode in order to use it. (I had tried turning ClearType on while they were still running portrait, but it did create some strange color fringing because the subpixels were not in the correct order.)
There are a couple of things that can cause ClearType to look a lot worse than it should - running your monitor at it's non-native resolution, running your monitor in portrait mode, using a monitor with too low of resolution, or sitting too close to your monitor. It also seems to work a lot better with some fonts than others. I won't discount the fact that that some people may have good enough eyesight that they can actually pick out the individual subpixels, but as another poster pointed out, if that where actually the case, you would probably also be seeing little bits of red, green, and blue in place of the white background on this page, which I find unlikely.
The wikipedia article refers to a building that is 70x50x30 feet in size, plus a reactor sealed underground, that produces 10 MW of electricity. The design in TFA is much smaller physically, and produces about 200kW.
Hydro is clean, but it still wreaks massive havoc on both up and down river ecosystems. And several of the ones you mention are still being worked on, and we have no idea what kind of effects they will have on the surrounding environment because we haven't even been able to make them work yet.
Also, Hydro is the only one you mention that is actually able to scale. The largest wind farm in the entire United States produces about a quarter the power of a single average sized nuclear reactor.
Nested if/else are not really identical; there's not a clean way to fall through to the next case when using if/else. I suppose some might consider that a feature rather than a limitation, but there are some types of algorithms that I just can't bring myself to think about implementing without a switch statement.
They didn't overload anything; (.) isn't the dereference operator in perl, (->) is. I code almost exclusively in JavaScript for a living, and I have a lot of complaints about various language features of Perl, but I will readily admit that this is one area that Perl got right and JavaScript got absolutely wrong. It's OK to use the same operator for addition and concatenation in a typed language like Java or C#, but they are still distinct operations, and using the same operator in a language that freely interchanges one type for another is the height of stupidity.
I'm not so sure I agree. As somebody who's moving from JScript on the Server side to C#, I have yet to be convinced that using a compile time typed language makes testing and debugging any easier than using a run time typed language. While we are excited about the move for a number of reasons, they mostly involve performance (the tricks we've had to pull to get our ASP classic sites to handle are traffic load are ridiculous to say the least) and having a built in template / code behind system. None of us is excited about switching to a compile time typed language, though. If we could continue to use JScript (for all it's warts) as the code behind language and still get the same performance and SOC benefits, I think that we would in a heartbeat.
I have yet to encounter a case where a compiled language's type system has saved more work in testing than it created in writing the code in the first place. The kinds of bugs that compile time checking catches just aren't that hard to debug (for me at least). And the bugs that come from having to jump through ridiculous casting hoops (e.g. with system defined delegates) are often worse than their equivalent in an interpreted language.
Besides, in my opinion, a team of more than 3 or 4 people is a problem in any language. My solution would always be to switch to a smaller team before switching to a new language...
Without even a CompUSA around anymore, I don't know where you're going to pick up hardware in person?
MicroCenter?
I know they aren't available everywhere, but those that do have them, I would take them over CompUSA or Fry's. These days I usually go to Best Buy, as I've been rather unimpressed by the CompUSA near me, and there aren't Fry's or MicroCenter around here, but I can't help feeling a little dirty when I do.
Yes, developers will continue to have to develop for IE; that's a given. My point was that even with 90% of the market, Microsoft still wouldn't have the dominance that they used to. 5 years ago, if you used something other then Windows Internet Explorer as your primary browser, it was not uncommon to feel like a second class citizen on the web because so many developers would make it work on IE and never even bother testing anything else. That's the kind of control that Microsoft really wants - anybody not using their product is an outcast in the technology world. But as long as developers prefer using other tools to Internet Explorer, that will never happen. So yes, every new site written will still have to support Internet Explorer, but on the other hand, sites that only work in Internet Explorer are (for now, at least) a thing of the past, and even if Microsoft regained virtually all of the end user market that still wouldn't change unless they can win over the developers again, too.
And Internet Explorer has a long uphill climb to regain favored status as a development platform...
Whether Microsoft realizes it or not, they've pretty much lost this round of the browser wars. I don't know what their statistics are these days but even if they were still at 90% it wouldn't matter, because they've lost almost 100% of the mind share that actually matters - the developers. And oddly enough, it has very little to do with their awful support of standards. There was a time not long ago when it made financial sense to develop only for IE. IE was 90% of the market, and an average dev team could cut enough time off of their launch schedule that it more than made up for the number of users that you might lose by not fully supporting other browsers. Their buggy and nonstandard rendering wasn't a big deal, because you could still do reasonably well as a developer coding to the bugs and ignoring the standards.
Where Microsoft completely missed the boat was on the developer tools. First the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and now Firebug. The IE web developer toolbar is an utter joke. The script debugger is awful. Debugging through Visual Studio is pretty nice (if you have it) but it's not nearly as convenient as Firebug's integrated debugger, or even Venkman. It's been two years since I knew a web developer that used IE as their primary development platform. Even when working on sites that only have to target IE (the site that I am writing now will only be used on IE6 - ouch) we still develop on Firefox first and then fix it in IE once it works in Firefox.
Even if IE8 regains 95% of the market, they still won't have the same control over the web that they had with IE6 unless they drastically improve the developer experience. With IE6 one could argue that it made financial sense to ignore other browsers. As long as it's either to develop in other browsers than it is in IE, Microsoft will never achieve that kind of dominance again.
(I also have to agree with the poster quoted on the front page the other day. As long as Microsoft shows this level of neglect for IE developers, why in the world would we consider using any of their other technologies. Even as a.NET developer, I have zero motivation to even install Silverlight, much less develop against it.)
I don't know about python specifically, but in my experience "compiling" most interpreted languages only means that you are embedding the a copy of the interpreter and the source code (or the parse tree) of your program together into an executable format. It doesn't give you any benefit over interpreting the raw script other than that you don't have to have the standalone interpreter installed on the target machine. (and if the "compiler" generated the parse tree for you then you save a minor hit on parsing the script again, which only barely affects startup time of the program.)
I don't generally use the term "Scripting" language unless maybe I am talking about shell scripting, but saying that something isn't a scripting language because you can "compile" seems pretty meaningless.
because for people who are not geeks- that computer is a "brick".
Actually, people who are not geeks are the least likely to be affected by this, because they are the most likely to have XP installed on the primary partition of the primary drive, which XP will boot automatically if boot.ini is corrupt.
People who have more than one partition on their primary drive probably put it there intentionally, and probably know enough to figure out how to fix it.
Really, all Congress seems to be asking is for the Administration to be honest with its funding requests: ask for the money needed to do what you want, or stop claiming to be visionary in sending people to Mars. Congress is actually doing its job, in that case.
Not sure why anyone expects him to be any more responsible with our space program than he has been with our public education system...
I guess it was before WMP 11 was released the last time that I actually tried, so I suppose it could have been updated in the meantime. But I know that I had to download a third party codec to play the AAC songs that I ripped using iTunes a year or two ago. That was one of the main reasons I went back to ripping MP3 in a standalone application. (The awful job that iTunes does naming and organizing music files being the other.)
2. "Microsoft will never support AAC..." - except, it seems that they already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune (not to mention Windows Mobile....)
The Zune may support AAC, but oddly enough, Windows Media Player does not, and there's no obvious way that I've found to get the codecs for it from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, I guess the answer depends on who "you" are. Suppose for a second that I am Linus. (Tall assumption, I know, but bear with me...) In your example, should I be more concerned about your freedom, or Sony's? Considering where we are having this discussion, I think that most people's initial reaction would be that we should be more concerned with your freedom, maybe because they love to hate on Sony, or because they have a mistrust of corporations in general, or maybe for some other reason. But logically, who is using my code in this case? Sony is my user. So is there a reason that I should limit their freedom in order to enhance yours? I understand that what distinguishes the GPL from some of the other free licenses is that it requires my users to extend the same freedoms to their users, but Sony has lived up to that obligation, have they not? I gave them code, and in exchange, they have made it and their modifications available to their users.
The fact that they won't allow you to install any software that you want to on the hardware that they manufactured is unfortunate, but that is a separate issue. If I buy a laptop with the intention of installing Linux on it, and I find out after I buy it that the hardware is not supported, is that the manufacturer's fault or mine? Or maybe for a little bit closer analogy, what if I discovered that the factory supplied OS was installed on write-only media? I believe some smartphones are currently being sold this way, so it's not a completely unrealistic scenario. In this case, whether or not the factory supplied OS is free or not is beside the point.
In this case, I guess my question is, what if Sony hadn't used Linux on their device? What if they had decided that they didn't want to abide by the terms of the GPL, and used some proprietary system. Would you still feel that you had the right (or should have the right) to install your own software on the device?
One could ask the same thing about where all the matter in the big bang came from. When you figure out the answer to that one, let me know, and I'll get back to you on where God came from.
In the meantime, there are plenty of things in the universe that defy human logic or explanation, in the scientific realm as well as otherwise. Some people are OK with having a god that is one of those things; others are not. You obviously are one of the ones who is not. To me, at least, there is nothing wrong with either group, but I think that both need to be a little bit more careful on what grounds they criticize the other. Glass houses and all that...
Amusing anecdote, but the second US nuclear submarine, USS Seawolf (SSN-575), did have a liquid Sodium reactor when it was commissioned. It was replaced with a water cooled reactor after about 4 years of service for maintenance reasons.
I'll agree that Silverlight is a neat platform that is pretty easy to work for, and shows a lot of promise. But Microsoft seems to be tryiong to use it in all the wrong places. You want to know what are by far the most annoying web sites in the world (to me at least)? Car manufacturers. Every one of them is written entirely in Flash, usually multiple flash applets which never seem to stack in just the right order unless you are using Windows/IE. For the sake of fancy animations and fade effects, they have sacrificed nearly every usability feature of the modern web, and Microsoft seems to be poised to do exactly the same thing.
If you have Silverlight installed, check out their new Downloads Center: http://www.microsoft.com/beta/downloads/Default.aspx
Aside from a few fancy but ultimately pointless animations, they haven't done anything that couldn't have been done in plain HTML/CSS 8 years ago. And look at the cost to the user of that decision: Text selection and copying is broken, the find feature of your browser won't find anything, you can't copy link locations or open links in a new tab or window, and the status bar won't show you link locations. Not to mention, if they go through with this, I'm sure that it will make Googling for anything on Microsoft.com virtually useless. (which is about the only way I ever find anything on either Microsoft or MSDN, as their built in navigation and search functionality is surprisingly useless.)
So, yeah, Silverlight's a pretty cool platform, and you can do some really neat stuff with it. But building a whole site with it is definitely high up there on the ways to ensure that nobody visits your site, or that the people who have to visit hate every minute of it.
In my experience, that is generally somebody without cruise control trying to maintain an exact speed. They notice they're going slower than they want, so they step on the gas. After a few seconds, they let off, but sometimes it's a bit too late, and now they're going too fast! so rather than ease off the gas, they tap the brakes a bit to bring it back down and continue on their way. A few seconds later, they may notice that they are going too slow again and the cycle repeats itself...
Then it must have been an awful long time ago. I used mutt from about '99-'01, and while the first question is accurate, Mutt had great support for IMAP and as far as I recall, a decent address book. The SMTP thing wasn't that big a deal to me, at least - I only used it on Linux, where it was trivially easy to set Postfix to route outgoing email though my ISP. I've actually considered going back to Mutt from time to time, but I have to use Outlook at work, and I don't get enough email at my personal account to be worth it.
I'm assuming that you meant to say that "ClearType cannot be read by everyone." I won't argue on this point, but I do know that what you actually said (that it cannot be read by anyone) is completely false. I actually decided that I like ClearType enough that I was willing to give up the increased vertical resolution from running my 2 monitors in portrait mode in order to use it. (I had tried turning ClearType on while they were still running portrait, but it did create some strange color fringing because the subpixels were not in the correct order.)
There are a couple of things that can cause ClearType to look a lot worse than it should - running your monitor at it's non-native resolution, running your monitor in portrait mode, using a monitor with too low of resolution, or sitting too close to your monitor. It also seems to work a lot better with some fonts than others. I won't discount the fact that that some people may have good enough eyesight that they can actually pick out the individual subpixels, but as another poster pointed out, if that where actually the case, you would probably also be seeing little bits of red, green, and blue in place of the white background on this page, which I find unlikely.
The wikipedia article refers to a building that is 70x50x30 feet in size, plus a reactor sealed underground, that produces 10 MW of electricity. The design in TFA is much smaller physically, and produces about 200kW.
Hydro is clean, but it still wreaks massive havoc on both up and down river ecosystems. And several of the ones you mention are still being worked on, and we have no idea what kind of effects they will have on the surrounding environment because we haven't even been able to make them work yet.
Also, Hydro is the only one you mention that is actually able to scale. The largest wind farm in the entire United States produces about a quarter the power of a single average sized nuclear reactor.
No, actually, aside from the lack of tabs, the UI in IE6 is pretty good.
Nested if/else are not really identical; there's not a clean way to fall through to the next case when using if/else. I suppose some might consider that a feature rather than a limitation, but there are some types of algorithms that I just can't bring myself to think about implementing without a switch statement.
They didn't overload anything; (.) isn't the dereference operator in perl, (->) is. I code almost exclusively in JavaScript for a living, and I have a lot of complaints about various language features of Perl, but I will readily admit that this is one area that Perl got right and JavaScript got absolutely wrong. It's OK to use the same operator for addition and concatenation in a typed language like Java or C#, but they are still distinct operations, and using the same operator in a language that freely interchanges one type for another is the height of stupidity.
1 + "foo" == NaN
Oh, Please. He's not just doing this for money... ... He's doing it for a shitload of money!
Obviously a sign of Global Cooling...
I'm not so sure I agree. As somebody who's moving from JScript on the Server side to C#, I have yet to be convinced that using a compile time typed language makes testing and debugging any easier than using a run time typed language. While we are excited about the move for a number of reasons, they mostly involve performance (the tricks we've had to pull to get our ASP classic sites to handle are traffic load are ridiculous to say the least) and having a built in template / code behind system. None of us is excited about switching to a compile time typed language, though. If we could continue to use JScript (for all it's warts) as the code behind language and still get the same performance and SOC benefits, I think that we would in a heartbeat.
I have yet to encounter a case where a compiled language's type system has saved more work in testing than it created in writing the code in the first place. The kinds of bugs that compile time checking catches just aren't that hard to debug (for me at least). And the bugs that come from having to jump through ridiculous casting hoops (e.g. with system defined delegates) are often worse than their equivalent in an interpreted language.
Besides, in my opinion, a team of more than 3 or 4 people is a problem in any language. My solution would always be to switch to a smaller team before switching to a new language...
Maybe the Rails developers took a database design course from the MySQL developers?
MicroCenter?
I know they aren't available everywhere, but those that do have them, I would take them over CompUSA or Fry's. These days I usually go to Best Buy, as I've been rather unimpressed by the CompUSA near me, and there aren't Fry's or MicroCenter around here, but I can't help feeling a little dirty when I do.
You completely missed my point.
Yes, developers will continue to have to develop for IE; that's a given. My point was that even with 90% of the market, Microsoft still wouldn't have the dominance that they used to. 5 years ago, if you used something other then Windows Internet Explorer as your primary browser, it was not uncommon to feel like a second class citizen on the web because so many developers would make it work on IE and never even bother testing anything else. That's the kind of control that Microsoft really wants - anybody not using their product is an outcast in the technology world. But as long as developers prefer using other tools to Internet Explorer, that will never happen. So yes, every new site written will still have to support Internet Explorer, but on the other hand, sites that only work in Internet Explorer are (for now, at least) a thing of the past, and even if Microsoft regained virtually all of the end user market that still wouldn't change unless they can win over the developers again, too.
And Internet Explorer has a long uphill climb to regain favored status as a development platform...
Whether Microsoft realizes it or not, they've pretty much lost this round of the browser wars. I don't know what their statistics are these days but even if they were still at 90% it wouldn't matter, because they've lost almost 100% of the mind share that actually matters - the developers. And oddly enough, it has very little to do with their awful support of standards. There was a time not long ago when it made financial sense to develop only for IE. IE was 90% of the market, and an average dev team could cut enough time off of their launch schedule that it more than made up for the number of users that you might lose by not fully supporting other browsers. Their buggy and nonstandard rendering wasn't a big deal, because you could still do reasonably well as a developer coding to the bugs and ignoring the standards.
.NET developer, I have zero motivation to even install Silverlight, much less develop against it.)
Where Microsoft completely missed the boat was on the developer tools. First the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and now Firebug. The IE web developer toolbar is an utter joke. The script debugger is awful. Debugging through Visual Studio is pretty nice (if you have it) but it's not nearly as convenient as Firebug's integrated debugger, or even Venkman. It's been two years since I knew a web developer that used IE as their primary development platform. Even when working on sites that only have to target IE (the site that I am writing now will only be used on IE6 - ouch) we still develop on Firefox first and then fix it in IE once it works in Firefox.
Even if IE8 regains 95% of the market, they still won't have the same control over the web that they had with IE6 unless they drastically improve the developer experience. With IE6 one could argue that it made financial sense to ignore other browsers. As long as it's either to develop in other browsers than it is in IE, Microsoft will never achieve that kind of dominance again.
(I also have to agree with the poster quoted on the front page the other day. As long as Microsoft shows this level of neglect for IE developers, why in the world would we consider using any of their other technologies. Even as a
I don't know about python specifically, but in my experience "compiling" most interpreted languages only means that you are embedding the a copy of the interpreter and the source code (or the parse tree) of your program together into an executable format. It doesn't give you any benefit over interpreting the raw script other than that you don't have to have the standalone interpreter installed on the target machine. (and if the "compiler" generated the parse tree for you then you save a minor hit on parsing the script again, which only barely affects startup time of the program.)
I don't generally use the term "Scripting" language unless maybe I am talking about shell scripting, but saying that something isn't a scripting language because you can "compile" seems pretty meaningless.
Actually, people who are not geeks are the least likely to be affected by this, because they are the most likely to have XP installed on the primary partition of the primary drive, which XP will boot automatically if boot.ini is corrupt.
People who have more than one partition on their primary drive probably put it there intentionally, and probably know enough to figure out how to fix it.
Not sure why anyone expects him to be any more responsible with our space program than he has been with our public education system...
I guess it was before WMP 11 was released the last time that I actually tried, so I suppose it could have been updated in the meantime. But I know that I had to download a third party codec to play the AAC songs that I ripped using iTunes a year or two ago. That was one of the main reasons I went back to ripping MP3 in a standalone application. (The awful job that iTunes does naming and organizing music files being the other.)
The Zune may support AAC, but oddly enough, Windows Media Player does not, and there's no obvious way that I've found to get the codecs for it from Microsoft.