Whoa boy! I LIVE in Utah for the moment and I must object to you claiming that it would be inconvenient to turn Utah into a "gray goo". On the contrary, that would be the BEST thing you could do to Utah. Please. Start at Temple Square in Salt Lake.
What?! There is NO difference between carbon atom x and carbon atom y. That is like saying there is something different about "natural" vitamin C and synthetic vitamin C. No, there is NO difference except in the means of production. Biologically and atomically they are indistinguishable and IDENTICAL.
An atom-for-atom copy of anything is indistinguishable from the parent form in principal. The ONLY way you could tell one from the other is if the copy was made with different isotopes of some of the various component atoms and the isotopic signature was examined. Of course, what would be the point of doing that in the first place except as masturbation?
There is NO way to tell the copy from the original.
Huh? Nowhere in the US Constitution nor Declaration of Independence (as examples) which are the BASIS to US government in any way mention money as the keystone to government. Government is about shared ideals and mores among a group of people. The people who form that government agree on some basic foundations upon which the society is to be run.
Nanotech doesn't destroy this. You can have all the nanotech you want and it wont eliminate the need for housing (and the property upon which it sits). It wont eliminate any of the social/interactional problems that are NOT based on scarcity. Scarcity is merely the basis of our present ECONOMY, not our government or many (not all) of our social structures. They will remain.
Having nanotech wont make it suddenly "cool" to pave thousands of acres for new buildings. It wont magically make more space available for living on without totally dicking up the ecosystem and biosphere around us. Government will still remain necessary to fight against nano-attacks, regulate land use, and so forth. Just because you might have plenty of food because of a nano replicator system doesn't make ALL problems, social or environmental, suddenly vanish. You will need government and some of its machinery to handle/regulate/mediate that.
All Bill Gates' wealth would become crap, however, as would his empire, and this would make him cry like a little girl - which is reason enough to have nanotech tools abound.
Why the hell would I want to learn the law? I got a useful and interesting degree, not a crap degree. Besides, laws are written by lawyers for the enrichment of lawyers.
I don't give a crap for your "lawyer" laws.
If someone sends me an email intentionally or accidently, it is MINE. I would post it to the world if it contained interesting information - provided it isn't private personal information - UNLESS it is private, embarrassing, personal information about ANY Republican politico. If that, then it is going out worldwide...
Ah, then my question thrown back at you is twofold: Has no closed source software companies ever gone out of business? If so, then closed source is not a savior of business.
Second, is it only opensource startups that die? Or is it not that MOST startups die regardless of whether they are software-related, open or closed source related?
The answer to both questions is obvious - that one cannot extrapolate from the bad doo-doo that happened last year in regards to linux-related startups to mean that the opensource model is unsupportable in business. RedHat is doing quite well now, improving all the time and the kernel, so to speak, of their business is opensource-based, though they do add-on extras that bring in the money. In any case, it is not an automatic that opensource=bad business/dead business.
Well, the only aspect of it that would be nice to have now in KDE or Gnome (or any wm for that matter) was the ability to track links/software.
It has been a while but I always like the ability OS/2 had to keep links to apps working even when you moved the app or its directory to a new location. Have a game installed and a link to it on your desktop or taskbar? Move the game directory to a new partition or subdirectory and the link still works. It was automatically updated with the move. THAT was one of the nicest things about the OS/2 way of doing things.
Huh? Wha...? I'm a real person and a scientist. I didn't understand a word of that MBA-style gobbledygook. Are you sure you posted information about.NET from a real source and not Dilbert? Do MBA types REALLY talk like that? It's a wonder we aren't in a permanent recession or depression since no one can understand what is being said in the business world.
If THAT is what.NET is, then no one, including M$ knows what it is or what it is intended to do...or why. OK, the WHY part is simple - they wish to extend their monopoly on the desktop to a controlling position on all internet communication and commerce. THAT is the real purpose behind.NET. It is not to help anyone but M$ and it doesn't solve any real problem for anyone but M$ and their current lack of being in a position to control the internet and all commerce thereon.
So...I guess we are ALL still waiting to hear what.NET is other than a tool by a monopoly to extend its monopoly.
To some extent I would agree with you...stop COPYING M$ and do something better...but there is benefit to derive from some copying.
Since 90% of users are familiar with windoze and the way it does things, it makes it MUCH easier for people to move to linux if it behaves similarly (sans non-changeable GUI, BSODs, the idea that you do it our way or no way, and that you will pay mucho $$ for every possibe slight alteration to our apps, etc). You do not want there to be too steep or long a learning curve when someone tries linux.
No company or school (keeping the instructors/teachers in mind here - the kids are less resistant) is going to switch to linux for anything but servers if the learning curve is too steep and if they will have to take time away from productivity - more time than windoze already saps by just being windoze - to train personnel on a new system.
If you make many aspects of linux similar to windoze (or the Mac) then you reduce the learning curve, reduce the need, real or imagined, for re-training, and have much less resistance to changing.
Overall, the goal of copying crap from windoze should be strictly based on the idea of making it easy to switch, soften the false impression that linux is just too difficult to use, and make it obvious that it is not only cheap and well supported, but robust and BETTER on a lot of levels. There should never be a knee-jerk reaction to copy everything doze has just for the sake of copying. Throw some innovation of your own in there. Compete, don't just copy - AMD did the copy thing for years and remained a niche player for a good while, always a step or 3 behind intel, then they actually started doing things right and are truly a direct competitor with intel.
You are an ignorant fool. The WOMEN of Afghanistan do NOT like being treated the way they are. Do you READ? Do you do anything but knee-jerk react to anything you see as pro-democracy/pro-western? YOU move to Afghanistan and live happily with your women as property to do with as you wish.
Of course, you can't do what YOU wish - you have to do what the uneducated taliban religious police enforcers decide you can do.
Yeah!!! Don't judge other cultures...like Nazi Germany! Or the Soviet Union, or China. Make no mention of any civil/human rights abuses because such abuse can be covered by the "culture" nonsense - different culture so torture, rape, mass murder, FORCED suppression of their own citizens, etc are OK as long as the culture says it is. Don't say anything against it.
What kind of idiot are you? The Taliban are a minority of the country FORCING their beliefs and rules on the majority who do not share that belief system.
OK, let's say.NET works out the way M$ hopes. This DOES affect you, though you may not give a damn, but it also affects all other NOT you. Your coding, folded without condition into M$ stuff is now used to monopolize the internet in large swathes. People who do not use M$ are locked out of a lot of the altered/monopolized internet. Your BSD code, good and there for the taking, is perverted into something that locks people out of much of the internet if it isn't in the form M$ took and perverted without value (don't forget, their "value add" is to make it so you HAVE to use their OS and services if you want to get anything done). How is this good for all?
So, to you this is fine. YOU and yours get along happily in your internet and coding niche, damn the effects on everyone else. My concern is that BSD licensing and code allows someone like M$ to come along, take it, alter it without posting the alterations so it can be used freely by others (for the sake of compatibility). I am sick and tired of M$ altering HTML, Kerberos, etc, ONLY so as to try to lock in users to their OS. This is NOT value-adding. BSD licensing encourages, allows, doesn't give a damn that this happens - apparently because the coders don't give a damn about the ultimate consequences for others. They are happy in their little world, caring nothing about the wider world they can affect by their neutrality. I don't care about specific apps, they can alter those all they want, but when it impacts on the internet, internet commerce, connectivity, network interconnectivity, etc, then the BSD license is crap because it begs for M$ to leverage their monopoly in OS into locking up huge swathes of the internet and networking in general. This is a good thing? Perfectly OK and blase and ho-hum? To you perhaps, but what of the rest of us who don't live in that cozy little tiny world?
OK, then I mistook your point "rethink your goals". I like linux and related "free" software and I have nothing against the model. What I DO have a proble with, and what I meant by "you gain nothing" is that a company, let's call it Microsnot, takes BSD code, which YOU worked hard on for many months, alters it so that it will only work with their systems, and then doesn't give the alteration back to you so you can incorporate it and make your system intercompatible.
Again, I just don't see a benefit to BSD and BSD users for their license which allows alteration/perversion of code even if ALL it does is make the altered code totally incompatible with the original intent and design - feeding a monopoly more tools to remain a monopoly and lock out possible competitors in general.
So, MacOS X is now largely BSD-based. Big wup! That means that MacOS X can now run any/all generic BSD apps but BSD cannot run Mac apps because they require Quartz which is nice but is stuck on top of BSD such that it is incompatible. This isn't that bad but with M$, they take the code you and yours work hard on day after day, fold it into their crap, make their crap totally propriatory and exclusive and incompatible with you and yours - thus giving you nothing back. It isn't so much money, it is about taking YOUR work to feed their monopoly and stranglehold.
To me, giving back to BSD would be to make whatever alteration they want, but then returning that alteration to you gratis so there is no pointless incompatibility.
Are you saying that with ports, there is NEVER a dependency problem? You NEVER have problems with failed builds because you have libx-2.1 and the package you want requires libx-2.5? What about multiple dependencies? Ports will download each and every required lib in addition to the desired software itself? That itself is a problem. 56K modem downloading 75 megabytes of stuff to make the 200k package properly compile?
RPM or tarballs don't get around this, of course, and ports may reduce the amount of work ("make" instead of either "rpm --rebuild x.rpm" or "./configure, make, make install") but is that really THAT significant a difference? There are problems with rpm and tarballs vis a vis dependencies but I cannot imagine that ports is magically immune to dependencies - it just automatically gets them (all the many megabytes) automatically? Great, sure, but it isn't something that must only be confined to ports - there is no reason an RPM system or apt system couldn't do exactly what ports does - download an rpm you want, check to make sure you meet dependencies, download those too, install, done.
StarOffice work on "linux". It isn't Redhat-specific, or Debian-specific. It works on Windows (95/98/NT/2000/ME) and various Unices, and the generic linux. It is able to do this by being static rather than dynamic, where the major problems could arise between distros. It isn't absolutely certain, but then, neither is windows software assured of running properly on windows without a good deal of user alteration/updating.
It is possible to stick to fully cross-compatible code (or code that requires only minor alteration to work on doze vs linux - or MacOS X which you are going to have to deal with now). Installers aren't that difficult either. StarOffice handles this too - allowing the user to specify where it should install if they don't like the default.
The most you would likely need to "specify" or limit, depending on how static your code is is, perhaps the minimum glibc level. Again, it is possible to statically build your software to work regardless of glibc level. Perhaps the biggest item of any concern (again, it isn't insurmountable) is XFree86, depending on how fancy you want to get with graphics - and this could be handled to a large extent with static binaries.
First off, you don't need to make it for every distribution. They are not THAT different - if you have distro A and this software was tested/developed on distro B and C, then it is not that difficult to make A compatible to B and C (add some lib rpms or debs). On the other hand, you could simply develop statically-linked apps. They are bigger, sure (like most windoze software) but they would run on just about every distro. Then, all you'd need is to produce two statically linked packages: one for PC (perhaps based on Redhat or Mandrake, for instance, just to pick on to develop ON) and one for PPC (Yellowdog).
Your statically-linked app will install and run on other distros. The app size won't be a real problem for the sake of teachers and students. You wouldn't have to worry about updating your software as often, every time glibc changes, as you would if you wrote dynamic code.
I think it's time you reevaluated your goals. What do you want out of the software you write? The respect and admiration of your peers or a wad of cash?
I just have to add a question/comment to this statement. What good is admiration or cool points? Does it pay the rent? Pay health insurance? Buy plane tickets home for the holidays? Pay for a nice vacation every once in a while? Pay tuition? Buy food? Repair a broken-down car? Pay vet bills for a pet?
If I work, regardless of whether I like the work or am neutral about it, my sweat is worth something to me and cool points doesn't cut it. I don't work so someone can suck off me for nothing but a pat on the back. For a hobby that I enjoy, I am willing to forgo pay, naturally, but for a non-hobby? NOT!
If the world of software is supposed to be based on the kindness of strangers and charity, then the software world is in for woe.
Not to keep bringing up games as the end-all, be-all, but they have surpassed movies as the biggest money maker in entertainment recently. Name ONE game that is in high demand the way Doom was, Quake was/is, half-life is, etc, that comes out of donated work simply for cool points. Name a single such complicated software package that can keep up with the latest/greatest in software technology (game engines, AI, etc). There is not a single such creature on the planet that comes from hobbyist software coders who work for the sake of joy of coding and getting praise and coolpoints. Not. One.
Some software REQUIRES a company to create it and it requires that it pay for itself with cash rather than cool points. Hobbyist coders are too slow and lumbering and time-limited to do anything like this. The ones that get faster results are those sponsored (paid) by someone so they can devote more than simple free-time to a hobby.
Maybe engineers should forgo being paid and just accept cool points and admiration for their work. Maybe roadcrews should forgo being paid and accept thank yous for repairing potholes and paving streets. Maybe doctors should just accept a handshake. Biotech companies should just accept heartfelt thank yous for the immense expense involved in creating ANY drug. Why should software coders be singled out to be in some weird special catagory of no-pay? They (coders) are not superior beings. They need to pay expenses just like everyone else.
It's not even worrying about making money, though money IS necessary...unless you are a trust fund baby with buttloads of mommy and daddy's money to suck off of. The problem is that you (the collective you) do all this work for the sake of BSD only for a company like M$ to come along, fold YOUR work into their product and use it to make tons of money with a system that is totally incompatible with yours. They use your work to try to create a world in which your chosen BSD is all but useless but to a few.
The bigger problem is that the BSD license selects for fragmentation rather than cohesiveness. Apple takes BSD, folds it into their OS, software developers write programs to work with Apple's BSD - none of it will run on your personal BSD. Your hard work was used to create a system that doesn't support your chosen OS. You are left out in the cold vis a vis software developers (no games or any other possibly desirous apps for you - just whatever you and your relatively few buddies can spin up in a weekend).
This may be perfectly fine for a few hardcore BSD users but it is NOT in the best interests of standards and general end-users. They are, as they are now, shuttled into the propriatory M$ or Apple world if they want to run the apps they REALLY want to run. This does nothing for non-Apple, non-M$ users and it does nothing for BSD. It simply continues the present situation as it stands with, particularly, M$. No real competition (no courts actually doing anything to fix this situation), no apps that people actually want to use available for non-M$/Apple systems (in general I mean games and financial/productivity software), including your BSD.
Why is it better that companies like Apple and M$ do the very same thing they have always done (M$ being the worst but ONLY because they are in a position of a monopoly - if Apple were in that position, they would be equally bad) but instead of with Windows and MacOS, they are based on BSD? There is no difference! It doesn't make the situation better, doesn't increase user choice, doesn't increase software development for non-M$ or non-Apple OSes.
M$ CAN and WILL embrace, extend, extinguish ANYONE who tries to compete against them, whether they are offereng some BSD variant or not. On the other hand, M$ cannot legally do this to linux. They cannot embrace and extend it, thus marginalizing it - if they tried, they would be de facto violating copyright law and would be liable.
I really don't see how *BSD and its licensing is in any way an improvement on anything. It still allows monopolists like M$ to do business as usual whether they use BSD stuff or not.
The whole ports thing is not manna from heaven. The fact that it would require the generic user to download source and then build it... yeah right.
With the innumerable problems that often pop up when compiling sourcecode you think that joe and jane-blow user are going to simply be able to download and build? Hardly.
Ports is a godsend to in-the-know BSD/*nix users but not is worth jack to my father, brother, sisters, neighbors, all who barely know how to dialup to AOL or juno.
Nope,.NET is in no danger from ports for the standard, cookie-cutter, ignorant end-user. It is the other way around.
Re:Sick of hearing about "such a great design"
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Apple Dumps the Cube
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It isn't because PCs aren't liked or are "ugly". It is because at >95% of the market, it is saturated. The expansion curve for computer users is no longer in the exponential growth phase, it is flattening out.
For Apple, with a pittance in sales (relative), AND being the ONLY source for Apple computers, they are supply-limited and ANY sale is an exponential increase for them.
Apples and oranges, so to speak, to compare sales of the two. Even with PC sales slowing down, their overall sales are MUCH higher than Apple's. If 100% of your sales arena is made up of 2, and for me it is 100, the sale of 1 for you is a HUGE percentage increase but for me is merely a tenth of one percent increase, yet I still own the larger market.
The LAW serves the people, the people do not serve the law, regardless of what overblown lawyer assholes may desire.
When laws become overly burdensome, you toss them ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. If you are prevented from fixing their flaws through established channels, then you break the law, commit civil disobediance, revolt, etc, depending on the circumstances. Every civil war ever fought has included this fact in one way or another.
...What? Spaceships don't fly the way airplanes do? Who knew! Even "Space: Above and Beyond" didn't have that degree of "realism".
(A physics model I *ache for* in a space sim, by the way)
Try Terminus. The physics used is like those starfuries (turn off your inertial compensator, which itself acts realistically - just your ships computer nav system utilizing your ships thrusters to keep you moving in the direction you are pointed. Turn it off, as you should to properly maneuver and fight, and you get the real physics
You'll get my paper-bound books when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
Paper books do not require batteries or wires. They have sharper text than even the BEST monitor. You can drop them, spill coffee on them, sit on them and no real harm is done - they are still readable and re-readable. They do not decay at a rate anywhere NEAR as fast as digital media does.
PDF, schmee-DF. I download PDF files so I can then PRINT them out in paper form where they are MUCH easier to read, can be annotated and highlighted, packed into a briefcase or folder or pocket, and re-read later.
Digital books will go no where. I have tried to read a few online books...got little beyond the first page or two. Sitting at my laptop or desktop or with that faggy little palm pilot to read what SHOULD be printed on (recycled) paper is suboptimal and a major pain in the ass.
I live here and YOU are dead wrong. Things ARE different here, irrespective of the so-called Constitution. There is free and near-blatant mixing of church and state here. There is continuous work to silence ANYONE who has a remotely different viewpoint or idea. It is less so at the UofU where I attend but it still exists.
The mormons rule here, period. They constantly attempt to rule as if Utah were not really a state and Brigham Young were still the defacto king of the Utah territory.
You are ignorant of "life" and "culture" in Utah. I, unfortunately, have to try to tolerate the local dictatorship for another year or so before I can escape to the 21st century in virtually ANY other location in the USA.
As to flixs, I suggest (as did many others) having a chat with the ACLU. I doubt that the website portion can be won, since he was unfortunate enough to be using school servers rather than his own, but being barred from the campus and essentially prevented from finishing his degree...he could likely beat THAT. I also would like to see him spit in their faces and mirror the site to another (offshore?) location.
I didn't get a chance to see the site, and I cannot get to the cached pages thus far from google (I'm a grad student and generally don't give a flying fuck about student government here) but no doubt the "offending" texts were words like "condom", "sex education NOT based solely on abstinance", "Mormons suck!", and "premarital sex". Such words and phrases are certain to get Gayle Ruczycka on your ass (she is a local Mormon Nazi that runs the state government, playing the governor and all else like puppets - SUPER staunch facsistic, hate-filled conservative Scoop (slang for Mormon: when they are baptized, part of the ceremony is to "scoop" out part of their frontal cortex - this eliminates pesky things like independent thought).
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Whoa boy! I LIVE in Utah for the moment and I must object to you claiming that it would be inconvenient to turn Utah into a "gray goo". On the contrary, that would be the BEST thing you could do to Utah. Please. Start at Temple Square in Salt Lake.
What?! There is NO difference between carbon atom x and carbon atom y. That is like saying there is something different about "natural" vitamin C and synthetic vitamin C. No, there is NO difference except in the means of production. Biologically and atomically they are indistinguishable and IDENTICAL.
An atom-for-atom copy of anything is indistinguishable from the parent form in principal. The ONLY way you could tell one from the other is if the copy was made with different isotopes of some of the various component atoms and the isotopic signature was examined. Of course, what would be the point of doing that in the first place except as masturbation?
There is NO way to tell the copy from the original.
Huh? Nowhere in the US Constitution nor Declaration of Independence (as examples) which are the BASIS to US government in any way mention money as the keystone to government. Government is about shared ideals and mores among a group of people. The people who form that government agree on some basic foundations upon which the society is to be run.
Nanotech doesn't destroy this. You can have all the nanotech you want and it wont eliminate the need for housing (and the property upon which it sits). It wont eliminate any of the social/interactional problems that are NOT based on scarcity. Scarcity is merely the basis of our present ECONOMY, not our government or many (not all) of our social structures. They will remain.
Having nanotech wont make it suddenly "cool" to pave thousands of acres for new buildings. It wont magically make more space available for living on without totally dicking up the ecosystem and biosphere around us. Government will still remain necessary to fight against nano-attacks, regulate land use, and so forth. Just because you might have plenty of food because of a nano replicator system doesn't make ALL problems, social or environmental, suddenly vanish. You will need government and some of its machinery to handle/regulate/mediate that.
All Bill Gates' wealth would become crap, however, as would his empire, and this would make him cry like a little girl - which is reason enough to have nanotech tools abound.
Why the hell would I want to learn the law? I got a useful and interesting degree, not a crap degree. Besides, laws are written by lawyers for the enrichment of lawyers.
I don't give a crap for your "lawyer" laws.
If someone sends me an email intentionally or accidently, it is MINE. I would post it to the world if it contained interesting information - provided it isn't private personal information - UNLESS it is private, embarrassing, personal information about ANY Republican politico. If that, then it is going out worldwide...
Ah, then my question thrown back at you is twofold: Has no closed source software companies ever gone out of business? If so, then closed source is not a savior of business.
Second, is it only opensource startups that die? Or is it not that MOST startups die regardless of whether they are software-related, open or closed source related?
The answer to both questions is obvious - that one cannot extrapolate from the bad doo-doo that happened last year in regards to linux-related startups to mean that the opensource model is unsupportable in business. RedHat is doing quite well now, improving all the time and the kernel, so to speak, of their business is opensource-based, though they do add-on extras that bring in the money. In any case, it is not an automatic that opensource=bad business/dead business.
A frequency of 1.0e-03 is pretty damned often, at least in my book!
That frequency of error is almost 2 orders of magnitude higher than the error rate of HIV-1.
Well, the only aspect of it that would be nice to have now in KDE or Gnome (or any wm for that matter) was the ability to track links/software.
It has been a while but I always like the ability OS/2 had to keep links to apps working even when you moved the app or its directory to a new location. Have a game installed and a link to it on your desktop or taskbar? Move the game directory to a new partition or subdirectory and the link still works. It was automatically updated with the move. THAT was one of the nicest things about the OS/2 way of doing things.
Huh? Wha...? I'm a real person and a scientist. I didn't understand a word of that MBA-style gobbledygook. Are you sure you posted information about .NET from a real source and not Dilbert? Do MBA types REALLY talk like that? It's a wonder we aren't in a permanent recession or depression since no one can understand what is being said in the business world.
If THAT is what .NET is, then no one, including M$ knows what it is or what it is intended to do...or why. OK, the WHY part is simple - they wish to extend their monopoly on the desktop to a controlling position on all internet communication and commerce. THAT is the real purpose behind .NET. It is not to help anyone but M$ and it doesn't solve any real problem for anyone but M$ and their current lack of being in a position to control the internet and all commerce thereon.
So...I guess we are ALL still waiting to hear what .NET is other than a tool by a monopoly to extend its monopoly.
To some extent I would agree with you...stop COPYING M$ and do something better...but there is benefit to derive from some copying.
Since 90% of users are familiar with windoze and the way it does things, it makes it MUCH easier for people to move to linux if it behaves similarly (sans non-changeable GUI, BSODs, the idea that you do it our way or no way, and that you will pay mucho $$ for every possibe slight alteration to our apps, etc). You do not want there to be too steep or long a learning curve when someone tries linux.
No company or school (keeping the instructors/teachers in mind here - the kids are less resistant) is going to switch to linux for anything but servers if the learning curve is too steep and if they will have to take time away from productivity - more time than windoze already saps by just being windoze - to train personnel on a new system.
If you make many aspects of linux similar to windoze (or the Mac) then you reduce the learning curve, reduce the need, real or imagined, for re-training, and have much less resistance to changing.
Overall, the goal of copying crap from windoze should be strictly based on the idea of making it easy to switch, soften the false impression that linux is just too difficult to use, and make it obvious that it is not only cheap and well supported, but robust and BETTER on a lot of levels. There should never be a knee-jerk reaction to copy everything doze has just for the sake of copying. Throw some innovation of your own in there. Compete, don't just copy - AMD did the copy thing for years and remained a niche player for a good while, always a step or 3 behind intel, then they actually started doing things right and are truly a direct competitor with intel.
You are an ignorant fool. The WOMEN of Afghanistan do NOT like being treated the way they are. Do you READ? Do you do anything but knee-jerk react to anything you see as pro-democracy/pro-western? YOU move to Afghanistan and live happily with your women as property to do with as you wish.
Of course, you can't do what YOU wish - you have to do what the uneducated taliban religious police enforcers decide you can do.
Yeah!!! Don't judge other cultures...like Nazi Germany! Or the Soviet Union, or China. Make no mention of any civil/human rights abuses because such abuse can be covered by the "culture" nonsense - different culture so torture, rape, mass murder, FORCED suppression of their own citizens, etc are OK as long as the culture says it is. Don't say anything against it.
What kind of idiot are you? The Taliban are a minority of the country FORCING their beliefs and rules on the majority who do not share that belief system.
DO judge!
Hi. For a cross-platform multimedia lib, you might want to take a look at openSDL and perhaps openAL. Information for both can be found at:
http://www.lokigames.com/development/
OpenSDL is described as "...a cross-platform multimedia development API written and supported by Sam Lantinga, our lead developer."
OK, let's say .NET works out the way M$ hopes. This DOES affect you, though you may not give a damn, but it also affects all other NOT you. Your coding, folded without condition into M$ stuff is now used to monopolize the internet in large swathes. People who do not use M$ are locked out of a lot of the altered/monopolized internet. Your BSD code, good and there for the taking, is perverted into something that locks people out of much of the internet if it isn't in the form M$ took and perverted without value (don't forget, their "value add" is to make it so you HAVE to use their OS and services if you want to get anything done). How is this good for all?
So, to you this is fine. YOU and yours get along happily in your internet and coding niche, damn the effects on everyone else. My concern is that BSD licensing and code allows someone like M$ to come along, take it, alter it without posting the alterations so it can be used freely by others (for the sake of compatibility). I am sick and tired of M$ altering HTML, Kerberos, etc, ONLY so as to try to lock in users to their OS. This is NOT value-adding. BSD licensing encourages, allows, doesn't give a damn that this happens - apparently because the coders don't give a damn about the ultimate consequences for others. They are happy in their little world, caring nothing about the wider world they can affect by their neutrality. I don't care about specific apps, they can alter those all they want, but when it impacts on the internet, internet commerce, connectivity, network interconnectivity, etc, then the BSD license is crap because it begs for M$ to leverage their monopoly in OS into locking up huge swathes of the internet and networking in general. This is a good thing? Perfectly OK and blase and ho-hum? To you perhaps, but what of the rest of us who don't live in that cozy little tiny world?
OK, then I mistook your point "rethink your goals". I like linux and related "free" software and I have nothing against the model. What I DO have a proble with, and what I meant by "you gain nothing" is that a company, let's call it Microsnot, takes BSD code, which YOU worked hard on for many months, alters it so that it will only work with their systems, and then doesn't give the alteration back to you so you can incorporate it and make your system intercompatible.
Again, I just don't see a benefit to BSD and BSD users for their license which allows alteration/perversion of code even if ALL it does is make the altered code totally incompatible with the original intent and design - feeding a monopoly more tools to remain a monopoly and lock out possible competitors in general.
So, MacOS X is now largely BSD-based. Big wup! That means that MacOS X can now run any/all generic BSD apps but BSD cannot run Mac apps because they require Quartz which is nice but is stuck on top of BSD such that it is incompatible. This isn't that bad but with M$, they take the code you and yours work hard on day after day, fold it into their crap, make their crap totally propriatory and exclusive and incompatible with you and yours - thus giving you nothing back. It isn't so much money, it is about taking YOUR work to feed their monopoly and stranglehold.
To me, giving back to BSD would be to make whatever alteration they want, but then returning that alteration to you gratis so there is no pointless incompatibility.
Are you saying that with ports, there is NEVER a dependency problem? You NEVER have problems with failed builds because you have libx-2.1 and the package you want requires libx-2.5? What about multiple dependencies? Ports will download each and every required lib in addition to the desired software itself? That itself is a problem. 56K modem downloading 75 megabytes of stuff to make the 200k package properly compile?
RPM or tarballs don't get around this, of course, and ports may reduce the amount of work ("make" instead of either "rpm --rebuild x.rpm" or "./configure, make, make install") but is that really THAT significant a difference? There are problems with rpm and tarballs vis a vis dependencies but I cannot imagine that ports is magically immune to dependencies - it just automatically gets them (all the many megabytes) automatically? Great, sure, but it isn't something that must only be confined to ports - there is no reason an RPM system or apt system couldn't do exactly what ports does - download an rpm you want, check to make sure you meet dependencies, download those too, install, done.
StarOffice work on "linux". It isn't Redhat-specific, or Debian-specific. It works on Windows (95/98/NT/2000/ME) and various Unices, and the generic linux. It is able to do this by being static rather than dynamic, where the major problems could arise between distros. It isn't absolutely certain, but then, neither is windows software assured of running properly on windows without a good deal of user alteration/updating.
It is possible to stick to fully cross-compatible code (or code that requires only minor alteration to work on doze vs linux - or MacOS X which you are going to have to deal with now). Installers aren't that difficult either. StarOffice handles this too - allowing the user to specify where it should install if they don't like the default.
The most you would likely need to "specify" or limit, depending on how static your code is is, perhaps the minimum glibc level. Again, it is possible to statically build your software to work regardless of glibc level. Perhaps the biggest item of any concern (again, it isn't insurmountable) is XFree86, depending on how fancy you want to get with graphics - and this could be handled to a large extent with static binaries.
First off, you don't need to make it for every distribution. They are not THAT different - if you have distro A and this software was tested/developed on distro B and C, then it is not that difficult to make A compatible to B and C (add some lib rpms or debs). On the other hand, you could simply develop statically-linked apps. They are bigger, sure (like most windoze software) but they would run on just about every distro. Then, all you'd need is to produce two statically linked packages: one for PC (perhaps based on Redhat or Mandrake, for instance, just to pick on to develop ON) and one for PPC (Yellowdog).
Your statically-linked app will install and run on other distros. The app size won't be a real problem for the sake of teachers and students. You wouldn't have to worry about updating your software as often, every time glibc changes, as you would if you wrote dynamic code.
I think it's time you reevaluated your goals. What do you want out of the software you write? The respect and admiration of your peers or a wad of cash?
I just have to add a question/comment to this statement. What good is admiration or cool points? Does it pay the rent? Pay health insurance? Buy plane tickets home for the holidays? Pay for a nice vacation every once in a while? Pay tuition? Buy food? Repair a broken-down car? Pay vet bills for a pet?
If I work, regardless of whether I like the work or am neutral about it, my sweat is worth something to me and cool points doesn't cut it. I don't work so someone can suck off me for nothing but a pat on the back. For a hobby that I enjoy, I am willing to forgo pay, naturally, but for a non-hobby? NOT!
If the world of software is supposed to be based on the kindness of strangers and charity, then the software world is in for woe.
Not to keep bringing up games as the end-all, be-all, but they have surpassed movies as the biggest money maker in entertainment recently. Name ONE game that is in high demand the way Doom was, Quake was/is, half-life is, etc, that comes out of donated work simply for cool points. Name a single such complicated software package that can keep up with the latest/greatest in software technology (game engines, AI, etc). There is not a single such creature on the planet that comes from hobbyist software coders who work for the sake of joy of coding and getting praise and coolpoints. Not. One.
Some software REQUIRES a company to create it and it requires that it pay for itself with cash rather than cool points. Hobbyist coders are too slow and lumbering and time-limited to do anything like this. The ones that get faster results are those sponsored (paid) by someone so they can devote more than simple free-time to a hobby.
Maybe engineers should forgo being paid and just accept cool points and admiration for their work. Maybe roadcrews should forgo being paid and accept thank yous for repairing potholes and paving streets. Maybe doctors should just accept a handshake. Biotech companies should just accept heartfelt thank yous for the immense expense involved in creating ANY drug. Why should software coders be singled out to be in some weird special catagory of no-pay? They (coders) are not superior beings. They need to pay expenses just like everyone else.
It's not even worrying about making money, though money IS necessary...unless you are a trust fund baby with buttloads of mommy and daddy's money to suck off of. The problem is that you (the collective you) do all this work for the sake of BSD only for a company like M$ to come along, fold YOUR work into their product and use it to make tons of money with a system that is totally incompatible with yours. They use your work to try to create a world in which your chosen BSD is all but useless but to a few.
The bigger problem is that the BSD license selects for fragmentation rather than cohesiveness. Apple takes BSD, folds it into their OS, software developers write programs to work with Apple's BSD - none of it will run on your personal BSD. Your hard work was used to create a system that doesn't support your chosen OS. You are left out in the cold vis a vis software developers (no games or any other possibly desirous apps for you - just whatever you and your relatively few buddies can spin up in a weekend).
This may be perfectly fine for a few hardcore BSD users but it is NOT in the best interests of standards and general end-users. They are, as they are now, shuttled into the propriatory M$ or Apple world if they want to run the apps they REALLY want to run. This does nothing for non-Apple, non-M$ users and it does nothing for BSD. It simply continues the present situation as it stands with, particularly, M$. No real competition (no courts actually doing anything to fix this situation), no apps that people actually want to use available for non-M$/Apple systems (in general I mean games and financial/productivity software), including your BSD.
Why is it better that companies like Apple and M$ do the very same thing they have always done (M$ being the worst but ONLY because they are in a position of a monopoly - if Apple were in that position, they would be equally bad) but instead of with Windows and MacOS, they are based on BSD? There is no difference! It doesn't make the situation better, doesn't increase user choice, doesn't increase software development for non-M$ or non-Apple OSes.
M$ CAN and WILL embrace, extend, extinguish ANYONE who tries to compete against them, whether they are offereng some BSD variant or not. On the other hand, M$ cannot legally do this to linux. They cannot embrace and extend it, thus marginalizing it - if they tried, they would be de facto violating copyright law and would be liable.
I really don't see how *BSD and its licensing is in any way an improvement on anything. It still allows monopolists like M$ to do business as usual whether they use BSD stuff or not.
This is supposed to be a good thing?
The whole ports thing is not manna from heaven. The fact that it would require the generic user to download source and then build it... yeah right.
With the innumerable problems that often pop up when compiling sourcecode you think that joe and jane-blow user are going to simply be able to download and build? Hardly.
Ports is a godsend to in-the-know BSD/*nix users but not is worth jack to my father, brother, sisters, neighbors, all who barely know how to dialup to AOL or juno.
Nope, .NET is in no danger from ports for the standard, cookie-cutter, ignorant end-user. It is the other way around.
It isn't because PCs aren't liked or are "ugly". It is because at >95% of the market, it is saturated. The expansion curve for computer users is no longer in the exponential growth phase, it is flattening out.
For Apple, with a pittance in sales (relative), AND being the ONLY source for Apple computers, they are supply-limited and ANY sale is an exponential increase for them.
Apples and oranges, so to speak, to compare sales of the two. Even with PC sales slowing down, their overall sales are MUCH higher than Apple's. If 100% of your sales arena is made up of 2, and for me it is 100, the sale of 1 for you is a HUGE percentage increase but for me is merely a tenth of one percent increase, yet I still own the larger market.
The LAW serves the people, the people do not serve the law, regardless of what overblown lawyer assholes may desire.
When laws become overly burdensome, you toss them ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. If you are prevented from fixing their flaws through established channels, then you break the law, commit civil disobediance, revolt, etc, depending on the circumstances. Every civil war ever fought has included this fact in one way or another.
Try Terminus. The physics used is like those starfuries (turn off your inertial compensator, which itself acts realistically - just your ships computer nav system utilizing your ships thrusters to keep you moving in the direction you are pointed. Turn it off, as you should to properly maneuver and fight, and you get the real physics
You'll get my paper-bound books when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
Paper books do not require batteries or wires. They have sharper text than even the BEST monitor. You can drop them, spill coffee on them, sit on them and no real harm is done - they are still readable and re-readable. They do not decay at a rate anywhere NEAR as fast as digital media does.
PDF, schmee-DF. I download PDF files so I can then PRINT them out in paper form where they are MUCH easier to read, can be annotated and highlighted, packed into a briefcase or folder or pocket, and re-read later.
Digital books will go no where. I have tried to read a few online books...got little beyond the first page or two. Sitting at my laptop or desktop or with that faggy little palm pilot to read what SHOULD be printed on (recycled) paper is suboptimal and a major pain in the ass.
I live here and YOU are dead wrong. Things ARE different here, irrespective of the so-called Constitution. There is free and near-blatant mixing of church and state here. There is continuous work to silence ANYONE who has a remotely different viewpoint or idea. It is less so at the UofU where I attend but it still exists.
The mormons rule here, period. They constantly attempt to rule as if Utah were not really a state and Brigham Young were still the defacto king of the Utah territory.
You are ignorant of "life" and "culture" in Utah. I, unfortunately, have to try to tolerate the local dictatorship for another year or so before I can escape to the 21st century in virtually ANY other location in the USA.
As to flixs, I suggest (as did many others) having a chat with the ACLU. I doubt that the website portion can be won, since he was unfortunate enough to be using school servers rather than his own, but being barred from the campus and essentially prevented from finishing his degree...he could likely beat THAT. I also would like to see him spit in their faces and mirror the site to another (offshore?) location.
I didn't get a chance to see the site, and I cannot get to the cached pages thus far from google (I'm a grad student and generally don't give a flying fuck about student government here) but no doubt the "offending" texts were words like "condom", "sex education NOT based solely on abstinance", "Mormons suck!", and "premarital sex". Such words and phrases are certain to get Gayle Ruczycka on your ass (she is a local Mormon Nazi that runs the state government, playing the governor and all else like puppets - SUPER staunch facsistic, hate-filled conservative Scoop (slang for Mormon: when they are baptized, part of the ceremony is to "scoop" out part of their frontal cortex - this eliminates pesky things like independent thought).