Every time KDevelop, Kylix, Code Warrior or another GUI programming tool is mentioned here, we always get comments like this saying something to the effect of, "The existence of GUI programming tools is bad. Good code can only be written from the command line."
I was interested to see Kernighan say, When I write code on Windows I use typically the Microsoft development environment: they know where all the files are, and how to get all the include files and the like, and I use them, even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business."
I can only say i have crashed windows 2000 serveral times but Microsoft have implemented "the not my fault system" so prevelant in Linux.
W2k still has lots of program crashes (netscape for example) just they dont take the whole operation system with them and so its not windows fault. You get to blame the specific program, much the way you hear Linux users complain about X or Netscape but rarely do they blame the OS.
I'm definitely one of the people who blames the app when it crashes and the OS goes on apparently untouched. Why is that wrong? (That's a sincere question, not a retort.) What is an example of a platform (in real-world use) where you don't see application crashes?
Three additional minor points: 1) For desktop users in particular, application crashes are vastly preferable to system crashes. 2) X probably ought to be considered a platform on its own, in this context. 3) When particular apps (e.g. Netscape) crash more than all others put together, is it still so unreasonable to blame its developers?
Going for the full GPL pleases the extremists, but it also has the side effect of allowing Troll Tech to protect their revenue stream.
At least I hope so. On the one hand, I'm thrilled to see this news because I really want to see Qt and KDE rise or fall on their technical merits. (Is that going to happen? Not likely, IMHO. Troll Tech has already moved to a certified free license, and it's still one of the arch-villains of the English-speaking free software world. The new GPL vs. LGPL issue is shaping up to be the next round of FUD.)
On the other hand, Troll Tech deserves to make money. They have a superb toolkit, and equally superb developer tools, documentation and tutorials. I'd hate to see them forced into unprofitability to keep pace with the dubious business plans of their media-darling competitors.
On the contrary, I'd say it's good manners to credit the source that pointed you to the link. Just like Slashdot credits the submitter of their stories.
That particular story, one year ago, was easily the low-point for/. Linux and Perl bigots were posting the foulest trash about Stevens. Moderators tried to keep things under control, but they were simply overwhelmed. I know that a lot of us were incredibly bothered by the whole thing. It was horrible.
As offensive and childish as that stuff was, the fact is that Stevens was no longer alive at that point. Meanwhile, trolls had for about a year been conducting a vendetta against a particular woman who worked for a Linux company. (I won't help them out by mentioning her name but she was the original "naked and petrified" woman.) Admittedly she was a twit, but she hardly deserved a systematic campaign of harassment, threats and much fouler abuse than anything directed at Stevens. It basically ruined her life and career. And no one thought there was anything particularly wrong with that; CmdrTaco thought it was funny in a stupid way.
But then the author of a Unix text dies, gets similar treatment and Rob writes an editorial about how horrible the trolls are. And people wonder why women find IT and CS unappealing career choices.
For that matter, Natalie Portman is a human being, too.
First of all, I agree that these remarks were petty and unnecessary. They hardly constitute an "unrealistic and irrational rant about GNOME", though.
How many volunteers work on the QT project? . . Also in the unrational realm is the constant intermixing of the idea of programming in QT with the idea of programming in KDE. KDE developers can not insist both that KDE is not affiliated with any corporation and that KDE is superior because it is built on QT.
You're missing the distinction between programming with and programming for. Qt is an open-source/free toolkit from Troll Tech. The KDE project uses Qt, along with automake, gcc, the C++ libraries and all the other standard tools. That doesn't make KDE affiliated with Troll Tech, the FSF, Bell Labs, Red Hat or any of the other companies and organizations that make those tools.
Now, several Troll Tech employees contribute to to KDE and a fair amount of code flows into Qt from KDE work. But fundamentally, Troll Tech makes Qt -- the KDE project makes KDE, using Qt.
OT: I needed to make a new dialog last night, and decided to try doing it in Qt Designer. That thing is unreal! A perfectly laid out dialog and clean, readable C++ source with all the signals and slots tied together, in about 10 minutes! 8 of which were spent reading the manual!
Why is it that they *always* rule against Microsoft but yet they are always ruling in favor of the MPAA and Amazon and all of these other bullshit lawsuits?
Because they rule according to what the law is, not according to what the Slashdot audience thinks the law should be?
You see, everything in italics was written by the submitter, and everything in normal type is editorial comment. Think of it more as a letter to the editor - you don't blame the Times for telling lies just because someone writes in with an untruth.
No, but I blame the Times for what their reporters write and they print. To my mind, the appropriate analogy here is: submitter == reporter, editor == editor, poster == letter to the editor. I don't blame/. when a poster says something I think is irresponsible - I do blame them when an editor turns a irresponsible statement into an article.
Huh? That article doesn't mention GNOME at all, except by implication in, "KDE was so successful that the FSF not only started to bash it, but also to clone it." There is an assertion that Qt is more pleasurable to code in than Gtk, which is debatable but hardly an "unrealistic and irrational rant". I don't know -- the link is above and people can decide for themselves.
The only potential flamebait I can see is, " If Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago. Now we are still waiting for a final release of Mozilla and what we will get ships with its own middleware, a new component system and yet another widget set. Compare Mozilla with Konqueror, compare the sizes of the development teams, the time they used and the results. Then judge for yourself."
Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday September 01, @11:55AM
from the can-we-lay-this-to-rest-already? dept
Rob, you said it yourself. Enough with this! Let the KDE developers finish 2.0 and let the Gnomes do their work on Star Office and we can check back at the end of the year to see how things stand. Meanwhile, whatever political issues exist, mediating them through Slashdot is completely counterproductive.
It seems to me CueCat's first step should be patching their server software to require a valid registration code. Next, maybe associating each ID with the IP or domain from which it was registered so the third-party software doesn't get rewritten with a valid ID hard coded in. (I don't have any problem with companies setting the terms on which their servers can be accessed.) At that point, let hackers write all the software they want! CueCat will be getting their ports done for free.
It seems to me CueCat's first step should be patching their server software so to require a valid registration code. Next, maybe associating each ID with the IP or domain from which it was registered so the third-party software doesn't get rewritten with a valid ID hard coded in. (I don't have any problem with companies setting the terms on which their servers can be accessed.) At that point, let hackers write all the software they want! CueCat will be getting their ports done for free.
Slashdot is constantly complaining about companies' legal activities. I think 95% of it is misinformed, hypocritical or just downright absurd, and I don't hesitate to say so.
But this business is just stupid. What does this company care? They own the patent on the device and the software is free, right? I don't see how this affects their revenue at all, even if it is illegal, which I doubt. (And before a swarm of people point to the DMCA, I know about that and I still doubt it's illegal.)
I've been working on KDE panel applets lately. Here's a port to add to my list...
thebaron writes "Here is a interesting back-pedaling by Sony in this article. One should think before opening mouth and inserting [ones] own foot, even if you're a company exec." Or perhaps especially then.*
This seems a bit unfair to Sony. For one thing, "Sony" isn't backpedaling at all - the issue here is what a particular individual from Sony may have said in an off-the-cuff remark. Secondly, it's still far from clear that the guy said any such thing at all. The news here is that a reader at The Register (which is where this report is really from) got an email from an unnamed individual at Sony that didn't explicitly say that those remarks absolutely were not made. That hardly means they were necessarily made as reported.
* Yes, I know, I'm combining the words of the submitter and Timothy. People seem to think this is a crucial distinction. To me, as long as the editor decides which submission to include and how much of the text to use, the editor takes responsibility for every word that winds up here.
Did an Italian CRANE OPERATOR just experience uninhibited sensations in a MALIBU HOT TUB?
I ask this every so often -- are Zippy fortunes SUPPOSED to be FUNNY? For that MATTER, is Zippy supposed TO be funny? Or is Scott Adams right and the only joke is on the reader?
Did those 3.3 million members actually put up money to join or just enter some information? If it's the latter, I'm inclined to think 70-80% are fake ID's entered by people trying to get warez site passwords. Does PayPals membership surge every time a new MacOS X build hits HotLine?
Trying to use a product in an unsupported manner is a DMCA violation...If it isn't supported, it's ILLEGAL. Welcome to the 21st Century bucko.
IANAL, but I'm guessing you get your legal advice at Slashdot, just like I do.
Anyway, I was intrigued enough by what you said to actually look up the relevant passage (Sec. 1201) of the DMCA. I very much doubt that this passage is in any way relevant, especially since the EFF's comments to the Copyright Office make no mention of anything remotely resembling the interpretation you're making. Presumably you can point to a legal ruling that using DAVE, Samba or Netatalk is ILLEGAL?
I have no idea how this thing works but it wasn't clear to me if the original poster really knows it doesn't work with Linux or if he just read the web page and saw that Linux isn't included in the list of "Supported Operating Systems". Just from reading the page, I'd guess it's saying that Linux isn't officially supported, not that you can't use it with Linux. You could probably use it with a Mac running DAVE, too.
Probably people will be irate even if it only means there's no official support. But realistically, it would be a huge additional expense for them to have to troubleshoot Samba configurations. I can see why they might not want to do that.
OK, that sounds really scary. Now are the rest of you plagued by all these menaces? I've had net access since 1987, been using the web since you had to telnet to the NeXT browser at CERN and had a Linux box on a full-time connection for three years, running telnetd, wu-ftpd and other services. I use the same (Crack-able) password all over the place, and for a while used my default web password as my Linux root password! I use FTP and telnet, send credit card data over unsecure http, check for security updates maybe every couple of months and use my real email address on Usenet. (Obviously if I were responsible for a server with real consequences I would keep much more up to date.) I would never dream of encrypting anything -- the only thing I can see that accomplishing is losing my own data.
And nothing bad has ever happened to me. Am I just lucky or is this article a little hyperventilated?
There are an average of five to 15 bugs in every thousand lines of code, which means that Windows 98 is riddled with somewhere between 90,000 and 270,000 oopsies.
It's probably the use of "oopsies" by an adult that set me off, but the first half of that statement seems exaggerated and the second half is just bad logic. What, that absurd claim about "65,000+" documented bugs in W2K isn't absurd enough?
Well, while you're trying your damnest to attack the GPL
Not at all - I'm a firm believer in "He who does the work gets to choose the license. If you don't like the license, don't buy or use the product and make something better. You can't steal it."
So if it were shown that the art of music were somehow improved if there were no copyrights on music, Congress would have no constitutional avenue but to rewrite copyright laws so that they didn't apply to music.
No. "Original intent" is meaningful according to many (most?) legal experts, but it's hardly sufficient to overturn music copyright. Anyway, the art of music would converge to the level of mp3.com in the absence of copyright.
Am I wrong, or is the RIAA trying to write-out fair use?
I'm pretty confident that you're wrong and that distribution of the "unauthorized recordings of a live concert, or a musical broadcast on radio or television" is implied in their statement. It's a web page, not legislation.
As long as I'm posting, could someone explain to me again why respect for music copyrights is always a target for sneering and ridicule here while every accidental, trivial violation of the GPL is cause for another jihad? I keep asking this and always lose a few karma points and attract some furious responses. Still, no one has ever offered an explanation beyond "Because the GPL is good. The RIAA is bad. The Constitution says copyright only applies to good stuff."
OK, but (for the most part) this begs the question. You make this policy clear to everyone - and someone violates it, and someone else sues you. Are you liable?
Buried in all the language about undestanding and respect, is the real answer to the question:
Members of the executive staff, the employee's supervisor, or another employee at the direction of a member of the executive staff, may access, monitor and act on any message or communication or data in any system at any time and may view and consider and act on the contents of any item provided for use in the normal course of company business...The Company reserves the right to inspect information and work environment at any time, with or without notice.
This is trite, but -- Americans created this insane system of liability and if we're not willing to live with the consequences then we all need to create a better one. Every time smokers sue tobacco companies, skiiers sue the areas whose ropes they ducked, sexual harassment suits are filed against employers who weren't at fault in the slightest, we all pay the bill.
What to do? I would say:
Serve on juries! Don't try to get out of it. It's part of being a good citizen and your chance to inject fairness and common sense into the judicial system.
Don't be part of the problem. I bet it's tempting when something bad happens to you to try to turn it into a lottery ticket. But the end result of your windfall is $59 lift tickets for the rest of us.
Discourage the people around you from filing stupid lawsuits.
If you're the victim, fight it! Insurance companies are usually happy to settle and pass the tab along to their customers. Make them fight!
Be's engineers kept on trucking, they released a version of their or for x86 and would still be kicking ass on the Mac is Apple hadn't started withholding specs from them.
Oh, not this again! Look, whatever, happened between Apple and Be (my impression is that Be understandably was looking to ditch the PPC and used the G3 specs as an excuse) Apple is absolutely not opposed to other OS's on their hardware. They funded the development of MkLinux, offer information on PowerPC Linuces on an apple.com page -- and the Disk Setup tool now includes options for Unix partitions and "recommended LinuxPPC" setup.
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Re:Let's face it, Windows is the best gaming OS.
on
Salon on the XBox
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure what this has to do with my sneering at the "teenage Photoshop expert and Linux advocate" but FYI, Macs ship with OpenGL and have since the blue&white G3's. (Maybe since the first iMac?) QD3D has been effectively dead for ages.
Slashdot Mirror
I was interested to see Kernighan say, When I write code on Windows I use typically the Microsoft development environment: they know where all the files are, and how to get all the include files and the like, and I use them, even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business."
See, you're allowed to use them! It's OK!
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W2k still has lots of program crashes (netscape for example) just they dont take the whole operation system with them and so its not windows fault. You get to blame the specific program, much the way you hear Linux users complain about X or Netscape but rarely do they blame the OS.
I'm definitely one of the people who blames the app when it crashes and the OS goes on apparently untouched. Why is that wrong? (That's a sincere question, not a retort.) What is an example of a platform (in real-world use) where you don't see application crashes?
Three additional minor points: 1) For desktop users in particular, application crashes are vastly preferable to system crashes. 2) X probably ought to be considered a platform on its own, in this context. 3) When particular apps (e.g. Netscape) crash more than all others put together, is it still so unreasonable to blame its developers?
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At least I hope so. On the one hand, I'm thrilled to see this news because I really want to see Qt and KDE rise or fall on their technical merits. (Is that going to happen? Not likely, IMHO. Troll Tech has already moved to a certified free license, and it's still one of the arch-villains of the English-speaking free software world. The new GPL vs. LGPL issue is shaping up to be the next round of FUD.)
On the other hand, Troll Tech deserves to make money. They have a superb toolkit, and equally superb developer tools, documentation and tutorials. I'd hate to see them forced into unprofitability to keep pace with the dubious business plans of their media-darling competitors.
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As offensive and childish as that stuff was, the fact is that Stevens was no longer alive at that point. Meanwhile, trolls had for about a year been conducting a vendetta against a particular woman who worked for a Linux company. (I won't help them out by mentioning her name but she was the original "naked and petrified" woman.) Admittedly she was a twit, but she hardly deserved a systematic campaign of harassment, threats and much fouler abuse than anything directed at Stevens. It basically ruined her life and career. And no one thought there was anything particularly wrong with that; CmdrTaco thought it was funny in a stupid way.
But then the author of a Unix text dies, gets similar treatment and Rob writes an editorial about how horrible the trolls are. And people wonder why women find IT and CS unappealing career choices.
For that matter, Natalie Portman is a human being, too.
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How many volunteers work on the QT project?
.
.
Also in the unrational realm is the constant intermixing of the idea of programming in QT with the idea of programming in KDE. KDE developers can not insist both that KDE is not affiliated with any corporation and that KDE is superior because it is built on QT.
You're missing the distinction between programming with and programming for. Qt is an open-source/free toolkit from Troll Tech. The KDE project uses Qt, along with automake, gcc, the C++ libraries and all the other standard tools. That doesn't make KDE affiliated with Troll Tech, the FSF, Bell Labs, Red Hat or any of the other companies and organizations that make those tools.
Now, several Troll Tech employees contribute to to KDE and a fair amount of code flows into Qt from KDE work. But fundamentally, Troll Tech makes Qt -- the KDE project makes KDE, using Qt.
OT: I needed to make a new dialog last night, and decided to try doing it in Qt Designer. That thing is unreal! A perfectly laid out dialog and clean, readable C++ source with all the signals and slots tied together, in about 10 minutes! 8 of which were spent reading the manual!
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Because they rule according to what the law is, not according to what the Slashdot audience thinks the law should be?
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No, but I blame the Times for what their reporters write and they print. To my mind, the appropriate analogy here is: submitter == reporter, editor == editor, poster == letter to the editor. I don't blame /. when a poster says something I think is irresponsible - I do blame them when an editor turns a irresponsible statement into an article.
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The only potential flamebait I can see is, " If Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago. Now we are still waiting for a final release of Mozilla and what we will get ships with its own middleware, a new component system and yet another widget set. Compare Mozilla with Konqueror, compare the sizes of the development teams, the time they used and the results. Then judge for yourself."
Honestly, I think he has a point there.
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from the can-we-lay-this-to-rest-already? dept
Rob, you said it yourself. Enough with this! Let the KDE developers finish 2.0 and let the Gnomes do their work on Star Office and we can check back at the end of the year to see how things stand. Meanwhile, whatever political issues exist, mediating them through Slashdot is completely counterproductive.
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It seems to me CueCat's first step should be patching their server software to require a valid registration code. Next, maybe associating each ID with the IP or domain from which it was registered so the third-party software doesn't get rewritten with a valid ID hard coded in. (I don't have any problem with companies setting the terms on which their servers can be accessed.) At that point, let hackers write all the software they want! CueCat will be getting their ports done for free.
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It seems to me CueCat's first step should be patching their server software so to require a valid registration code. Next, maybe associating each ID with the IP or domain from which it was registered so the third-party software doesn't get rewritten with a valid ID hard coded in. (I don't have any problem with companies setting the terms on which their servers can be accessed.) At that point, let hackers write all the software they want! CueCat will be getting their ports done for free.
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But this business is just stupid. What does this company care? They own the patent on the device and the software is free, right? I don't see how this affects their revenue at all, even if it is illegal, which I doubt. (And before a swarm of people point to the DMCA, I know about that and I still doubt it's illegal.)
I've been working on KDE panel applets lately. Here's a port to add to my list...
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This seems a bit unfair to Sony. For one thing, "Sony" isn't backpedaling at all - the issue here is what a particular individual from Sony may have said in an off-the-cuff remark. Secondly, it's still far from clear that the guy said any such thing at all. The news here is that a reader at The Register (which is where this report is really from) got an email from an unnamed individual at Sony that didn't explicitly say that those remarks absolutely were not made. That hardly means they were necessarily made as reported.
* Yes, I know, I'm combining the words of the submitter and Timothy. People seem to think this is a crucial distinction. To me, as long as the editor decides which submission to include and how much of the text to use, the editor takes responsibility for every word that winds up here.
Did an Italian CRANE OPERATOR just experience uninhibited sensations in a MALIBU HOT TUB?
I ask this every so often -- are Zippy fortunes SUPPOSED to be FUNNY? For that MATTER, is Zippy supposed TO be funny? Or is Scott Adams right and the only joke is on the reader?
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IANAL, but I'm guessing you get your legal advice at Slashdot, just like I do.
Anyway, I was intrigued enough by what you said to actually look up the relevant passage (Sec. 1201) of the DMCA. I very much doubt that this passage is in any way relevant, especially since the EFF's comments to the Copyright Office make no mention of anything remotely resembling the interpretation you're making. Presumably you can point to a legal ruling that using DAVE, Samba or Netatalk is ILLEGAL?
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Probably people will be irate even if it only means there's no official support. But realistically, it would be a huge additional expense for them to have to troubleshoot Samba configurations. I can see why they might not want to do that.
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And nothing bad has ever happened to me. Am I just lucky or is this article a little hyperventilated?
There are an average of five to 15 bugs in every thousand lines of code, which means that Windows 98 is riddled with somewhere between 90,000 and 270,000 oopsies.
It's probably the use of "oopsies" by an adult that set me off, but the first half of that statement seems exaggerated and the second half is just bad logic. What, that absurd claim about "65,000+" documented bugs in W2K isn't absurd enough?
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Not at all - I'm a firm believer in "He who does the work gets to choose the license. If you don't like the license, don't buy or use the product and make something better. You can't steal it."
So if it were shown that the art of music were somehow improved if there were no copyrights on music, Congress would have no constitutional avenue but to rewrite copyright laws so that they didn't apply to music.
No. "Original intent" is meaningful according to many (most?) legal experts, but it's hardly sufficient to overturn music copyright. Anyway, the art of music would converge to the level of mp3.com in the absence of copyright.
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I'm pretty confident that you're wrong and that distribution of the "unauthorized recordings of a live concert, or a musical broadcast on radio or television" is implied in their statement. It's a web page, not legislation.
As long as I'm posting, could someone explain to me again why respect for music copyrights is always a target for sneering and ridicule here while every accidental, trivial violation of the GPL is cause for another jihad? I keep asking this and always lose a few karma points and attract some furious responses. Still, no one has ever offered an explanation beyond "Because the GPL is good. The RIAA is bad. The Constitution says copyright only applies to good stuff."
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Buried in all the language about undestanding and respect, is the real answer to the question:
Members of the executive staff, the employee's supervisor, or another employee at the direction of a member of the executive staff, may access, monitor and act on any message or communication or data in any system at any time and may view and consider and act on the contents of any item provided for use in the normal course of company business...The Company reserves the right to inspect information and work environment at any time, with or without notice.
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What to do? I would say:
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What amazed me most about DP3 was the shutdown time (also about one second on a beige G3). How does a Unix-based system do that?
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Oh, not this again! Look, whatever, happened between Apple and Be (my impression is that Be understandably was looking to ditch the PPC and used the G3 specs as an excuse) Apple is absolutely not opposed to other OS's on their hardware. They funded the development of MkLinux, offer information on PowerPC Linuces on an apple.com page -- and the Disk Setup tool now includes options for Unix partitions and "recommended LinuxPPC" setup.
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