Since phoenix/firebird is going to become the default mozilla browser, this is all a non-issue. Firebird is basically just going to be an internal codename -- pretty soon everyone will be calling it Mozilla, or Mozilla Browser.
Having few axioms doesn't rule out syntactic sugar. If your axioms are universal, you can use them to write the syntactic sugar. (Having Lisp-style macros helps)
"I think the fundamental operators are the most important factor in a language's long term survival. The rest you can change."
It's critical to get the fundamental operators right, and it's easier to get them right if there are only a few of them.
Also, making the set of fundamental operators small forces you to make them universal, which means you can extend your language transparently. In java, for example, arrays were made part of the language, and not part of the libraries, and as a result they behave rather oddly (half like objects, half like primitive types), and you can't implement anything that behaves like an array yourself.
Oh, and it's only true that programmers can't tell what the fundamental operators are if you designed them well (again, consider arrays from java).
One other nice thing about XML is that closing tags are matched with ending tags. If you leave of a closing paren in Lisp, the parser will give you an error but it can't pinpoint where you screwed up. But an XML parser can spot which closing tag is missing, which means you don't have to hunt for it yourself.
Also, one of the major ideas of XML is to separate code from data, as opposed to Lisp where code and data are the same thing. Similar syntax, different philosophy, I guess.
If they are smart, they will use major and minor version numbers, with the convention that you don't break binary/API compatibility across minor versions. So, an application can say "I want libfoo v3.x", and not care whether it gets 3.1 or 3.5. Of course, this places the responsibility on DLL writers to not break the interface at random, which is probably too much to ask of MS.
As I see it, one reason for setting limits for you children is to teach them about what is right/wrong, appropriate or not, and so on. The fundamental problem with censorware (if we set aside unintentional or arbitrary blocking of sites as an implementation detail that might someday be fixed), is that it does not teach anything. When a parent catches their kid surfing for pr0n, they tell them to stop and (ideally) tell them _why_ it's wrong. When censorware blocks a site, it doesn't say why, so from a curious kid's point of view it's just an obstacle to be circumvented.
Hmm... with CDs you have to make a trip to the store, and pay for the CD (possibly including a bunch of songs you don't like), then you have to rip it to mp3s on your own time.
Downloading is much more convenient, and I'm perfectly happy to pay to do it (which is why I subscribe to EMusic).
Only if you have the time to adjust to it... I tried switching to Dvorak once, but I was spending like 4-5 hours a day at the computer, doing homework, talking on IM, etc. The result was a lot of tension and a lot of pain, and after a month there hadn't been a significant improvement so I gave it up.
I might try it again someday if I could restrict my computer use to half an hour of typing practice each day, for 3-4 weeks (like that will ever happen)
Have you ever used a paintball gun? The accuracy is atrocious. Even really nice, heavily-accessorized guns don't shoot all that straight. Also, the range is pretty limited. And finally, they are very unreliable. In particular, balls sometimes break in the chamber or the barrel as you are firing. If you're just shooting paint this results in a mess and your gun jamming. If you're firing tear gas this could get pretty unpleasant.
Just TRY decoupling Konqueror from KDE... you can't even (EASILY) build KDE without all the theme stuff.
Umm... apt-get remove konqueror? Then you can easily change the file associations for files, directories, html, etc to use other programs.
Admittedly, this required some work on the part of the debian folks to break up the monolithic kde packages, but clearly it can be done.
Yes, it's really hard indeed (N-O-T). './setup -net' as root, click 'next' a few times, then run $INSTALLDIR/setup as the user that wants to use Openoffice, and then you can start it using the KDE menu (or probably the Gnome menu, I suppose it supports that as well). Wow...exactly as the documentation describes you should do. Real hard, ain't it?
Ummm... compared to "apt-get install koffice", yes, it's hard. Also, it makes you do a separate install for each user, instead of one global install like a good Unix program. This confused the hell out of me and it took me most of an hour (and a couple of reinstalls) to get it working right.
Sure, this is all probably documented in a README somewhere that I should have looked at... but is it too much to ask that OpenOffice install like every other Linux program?
Re:Binary packages for just about every dist on th
on
KDE 3.0.1 Ships
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Debian is in a freeze right now, trying to get out a new stable release, so don't hold your breath. Once the new release is out the kde packages should hit unstable pretty quickly... there are already "unofficial" debs available.
I don't think so... the GPL only requires that you make the source available to anyone to whom you distribute the binary. Copying the software into RAM isn't distributing, it's just copying into RAM. I don't think anyone is going to sue you for failing to copy the source into RAM as well...
UI experts tend to focus on making UIs that work for the "average luser" and produce things that look a lot like Mac OS. Mac OS (10, which I haven't used) sucks! It chains you to a 1-button mouse, and takes longer to do everything that in KDE or Windows.
Of course, for someone who's not comfortable with a computer, KDE is probably strange and confusing, and Mac OS is easy. The difference here is that, with some work by an experienced user, KDE can be set up to work a lot like Mac OS (although it probably needs some work here), but it can grow with the user and accomodate people who know what they're doing.
If you try to write the One True GUI, you will end up annoying lots of people with your defaults, and, having no way to change them, they will go use a WM with more features.
Switch to debian;-) Ok, so it may take many long hours of work to get it to support your hardware, but then you can just apt-get install and get all the dependencies as well. Or use one of many graphical frontends -- it beats the hell out of windows installation.
On large projects it can be a big issue. Someone
puts an instance of class X in a vector that's
really meant to be holding class Y. No exception
is thrown until you access the bad data and try
to cast it to a Y, at which point there's no good
way to find out where the error occurred.
Now you have to dig through 100k lines of code
to find the mistake. With generics it's caught at
compile-time.
That said, generics should be implemented so as
to give you performance, too. If you know
everything in a collection is an X, there's no
reason to do any casting at all.
One of the links in the article describes a.NET version of Eifel that is able to both import.NET classes, and export classes to other.NET applications.
I don't know much about Eifel, except that it is a very high-level language. Apparently the features not supported by the CLR they were able to implement on top of.NET in such a way that everything works.
In other words, just about any language should be able to work with.NET, although some features (multiple inheritance) require some hacking.
On my PII 350 wi/ 128 megs of RAM, it made a big difference. The mouse used to get a little jerky when opening a big app, and if I was playing oggs it would often skip. After the patch both of these problems are gone.
It may not be such a big deal on somewhat newer systems, but I highly recommend it.
what really gives me hives with WP for Linux is looking at the horrible X fonts in WYSIWYG mode.
With Xft and the MS web fonts (or stolen truetype fonts from a windows installation), you can get pretty nice looking fonts.
With KOffice, you can even get them antialiased. Not sure how KOffice stacks up in terms of other features though -- it works for me but I generally only do very basic stuff
when it comes to word processing.
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Since phoenix/firebird is going to become the default mozilla browser, this is all a non-issue. Firebird is basically just going to be an internal codename -- pretty soon everyone will be calling it Mozilla, or Mozilla Browser.
Having few axioms doesn't rule out syntactic sugar. If your axioms are universal, you can use them to write the syntactic sugar. (Having Lisp-style macros helps)
From the article:
"I think the fundamental operators are the most important factor in a language's long term survival. The rest you can change."
It's critical to get the fundamental operators right, and it's easier to get them right if there are only a few of them.
Also, making the set of fundamental operators small forces you to make them universal, which means you can extend your language transparently.
In java, for example, arrays were made part of the language, and not part of the libraries, and as a result they behave rather oddly (half like objects, half like primitive types), and you can't implement anything that behaves like an array yourself.
Oh, and it's only true that programmers can't tell what the fundamental operators are if you designed them well (again, consider arrays from java).
One other nice thing about XML is that closing tags are matched with ending tags. If you leave of a closing paren in Lisp, the parser will give you an error but it can't pinpoint where you screwed up. But an XML parser can spot which closing tag is missing, which means you don't have to hunt for it yourself.
Also, one of the major ideas of XML is to separate code from data, as opposed to Lisp where code and data are the same thing. Similar syntax, different philosophy, I guess.
Basically all of the konqueror crashes happen during web browsing, and most of those are javascript related.
As a file manager, I have found it to be completely stable.
Even as a browser, the 3.x series is pretty stable -- I find it roughly comparable to Mozilla (although I have lately been using Phoenix instead).
If they are smart, they will use major and minor version numbers, with the convention that you don't break binary/API compatibility across minor versions.
So, an application can say "I want libfoo v3.x", and not care whether it gets 3.1 or 3.5.
Of course, this places the responsibility on DLL writers to not break the interface at random, which is probably too much to ask of MS.
As I see it, one reason for setting limits for you children is to teach them about what is right/wrong, appropriate or not, and so on.
The fundamental problem with censorware (if we set aside unintentional or arbitrary blocking of sites as an implementation detail that might someday be fixed), is that it does not teach anything. When a parent catches their kid surfing for pr0n, they tell them to stop and (ideally) tell them _why_ it's wrong.
When censorware blocks a site, it doesn't say why, so from a curious kid's point of view it's just an obstacle to be circumvented.
Hmm... with CDs you have to make a trip to the store, and pay for the CD (possibly including a bunch of songs you don't like), then you have to rip it to mp3s on your own time.
Downloading is much more convenient, and I'm perfectly happy to pay to do it (which is why I subscribe to EMusic).
Only if you have the time to adjust to it...
I tried switching to Dvorak once, but I was spending like 4-5 hours a day at the computer, doing homework, talking on IM, etc. The result was a lot of tension and a lot of pain, and after a month there hadn't been a significant improvement so I gave it up.
I might try it again someday if I could restrict my computer use to half an hour of typing practice each day, for 3-4 weeks (like that will ever happen)
Have you ever used a paintball gun?
The accuracy is atrocious. Even really nice, heavily-accessorized guns don't shoot all that straight.
Also, the range is pretty limited.
And finally, they are very unreliable. In particular, balls sometimes break in the chamber or the barrel as you are firing. If you're just shooting paint this results in a mess and your gun jamming. If you're firing tear gas this could get pretty unpleasant.
Umm... apt-get remove konqueror? Then you can easily change the file associations for files, directories, html, etc to use other programs. Admittedly, this required some work on the part of the debian folks to break up the monolithic kde packages, but clearly it can be done.
Ummm... compared to "apt-get install koffice", yes, it's hard. Also, it makes you do a separate install for each user, instead of one global install like a good Unix program. This confused the hell out of me and it took me most of an hour (and a couple of reinstalls) to get it working right.
Sure, this is all probably documented in a README somewhere that I should have looked at... but is it too much to ask that OpenOffice install like every other Linux program?
Debian is in a freeze right now, trying to get out a new stable release, so don't hold your breath.
Once the new release is out the kde packages should hit unstable pretty quickly... there are already "unofficial" debs available.
I don't think so... the GPL only requires that you make the source available to anyone to whom you distribute the binary.
Copying the software into RAM isn't distributing, it's just copying into RAM. I don't think anyone is going to sue you for failing to copy the source into RAM as well...
But the kernel module is still binary only. Last time I checked running x86 machine code on an Alpha didn't work too well...
UI experts tend to focus on making UIs that work for the "average luser" and produce things that look a lot like Mac OS. Mac OS (10, which I haven't used) sucks! It chains you to a 1-button mouse, and takes longer to do everything that in KDE or Windows.
Of course, for someone who's not comfortable with a computer, KDE is probably strange and confusing, and Mac OS is easy. The difference here is that, with some work by an experienced user, KDE can be set up to work a lot like Mac OS (although it probably needs some work here), but it can grow with the user and accomodate people who know what they're doing.
If you try to write the One True GUI, you will end up annoying lots of people with your defaults, and, having no way to change them, they will go use a WM with more features.
We've been wanting more tlds for years, and .xxx seems to be one of the most popular.
.xxx (or .prn or whatever), just like commercial sites should stick to .com, etc. That's what TLDs are for.
And porn sites should be required to stay in
First off, the RIAA fixes prices, etc, routinely and gets away with it.
Second, Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated a complete disregard for the law... why should we expect them to change just because they're broken up?
Actually, it's relatively easy to separate konqueror from KDE.
1) Delete konqueror
2) In the Control Center, go to File Associations and change the association for inode/directory to your file manager of choice.
Switch to debian ;-)
Ok, so it may take many long hours of work to get it to support your hardware, but then you can just apt-get install and get all the dependencies as well.
Or use one of many graphical frontends -- it beats the hell out of windows installation.
Yes, but is changing the arrangments of the pins
and shape of the connector on one end of normal
serial cable "innovative" or "non-obvious"?
Somehow it doesn't seem that way to me...
On large projects it can be a big issue. Someone
puts an instance of class X in a vector that's
really meant to be holding class Y. No exception
is thrown until you access the bad data and try
to cast it to a Y, at which point there's no good
way to find out where the error occurred.
Now you have to dig through 100k lines of code
to find the mistake. With generics it's caught at
compile-time.
That said, generics should be implemented so as
to give you performance, too. If you know
everything in a collection is an X, there's no
reason to do any casting at all.
One of the links in the article describes a .NET version of Eifel that is able to both import .NET classes, and export classes to other .NET applications.
.NET in such a way that everything works.
.NET, although some features (multiple inheritance) require some hacking.
I don't know much about Eifel, except that it is a very high-level language. Apparently the features not supported by the CLR they were able to implement on top of
In other words, just about any language should be able to work with
On my PII 350 wi/ 128 megs of RAM, it made a big difference. The mouse used to get a little jerky when opening a big app, and if I was playing oggs it would often skip. After the patch both of these problems are gone.
It may not be such a big deal on somewhat newer systems, but I highly recommend it.
With Xft and the MS web fonts (or stolen truetype fonts from a windows installation), you can get pretty nice looking fonts. With KOffice, you can even get them antialiased. Not sure how KOffice stacks up in terms of other features though -- it works for me but I generally only do very basic stuff when it comes to word processing.