Exactly! I remember pointing this out when Miguel tried to justify Mono years ago.
What's "Flamebait" now, huh? Huh? Miguel has been utterly consistent in his unfounded trust of Microsoft and his thorough admiration of their technology.
The "sleeper cell" bit may have been a joke, but it's easy to see how that thinking arises.
That's complete nonsense. I use my iPod Nano EVERY DAY to listed to PODCASTS, not downloaded music. It's absurd to assume that every possible device that holds audio content is used for copyright violation (which isn't even stealing, but whatever).
Using multiple descriptive tags for each game might make the problem easier.
For example, a game can be a "platformer" and an "adventure" game. It might even be in "3D". So perhaps "3D platformer adventure" works as a set of tags for a game rather than an atomic category.
It would be interesting if John Carmack's views, if he jumps into this conversation. Afterall, he went from Objective-C (Quake 3) to C++ (DOOM 3).
It would be interesting, I agree with that. But John Carmack didn't write Quake 3 in Objective-C. He used a black-and-white NeXTstation during the development of the original DOOM, but that game and every game until DOOM 3 were actually written in C (and some assembly, presumably). All of the tools for these games were originally developed in Objective-C, because NeXTstep (and by extension, Cocoa) is a fantastic development system for that sort of thing. That's why there were no official tool releases for DOOM and Quake: Not enough people had a NeXT system to run it on so it wasn't worth it.
I think around Quake 2 or Quake 3 Arena they switched to Windows as their primary development platform. Carmack started writing his tools in C++ (again, I think), and eventually the game (DOOM 3) as well. But none of the Id games were written in Objective-C, just the tools. I'm sure John Carmack would have many nice things to say about Objective-C though, since he held on to his NeXT environment for a pretty long time.
Ubuntu on a laptop can be made to work quite well. Ubuntu is the only operating system on my G3 iBook as well as my desktop PC. While it's fairly simple to put together a 100% Linux-compatible desktop machine, many people are surprised to learn that an iBook can be a full-featured Linux machine as well. The only drawback is that since the open-source world is x86-centric, there are issues with multimedia support. While you can get proprietary video and audio formats chugging along on an x86 PC by wrapping Windows codecs, this option doesn't exist on PPC. However for most other tasks it's quite sufficient.
I'm in the market for another laptop, and I will be continuing to use Ubuntu as the primary OS. The new MacBook seems like an excellent choice, except that Linux support tends to follow behind a month or two behind Apple hardware releases. Probably the MacBook Pro has cleared the path a bit, but I'm skeptical that I'll be able to use all the hardware features in Linux right away, and in that case what is the point?
While I can't offer too much advice regarding what laptop to buy for yourself, I'll tell you what my decision will probably be. Simply being an x86 gives the MacBook an advantage over the iBook for multimedia support. Even though Linux support for the MacBook will lag behind, there's no reason why I can't dual-boot OSX and Ubuntu for a while until there's enough hardware support to allow me to run Ubuntu full-time. OSX is a pretty respectable unix system and I'm sure I'd have fun using it for a while, even though experience has taught me that I will eventually get frustrated and go back to a free-software OS. Seriously. It's a cultural thing.
So for me it'll be a maxed-out black MacBook. If Ubuntu isn't shiny enough right away I'll use OSX to hold me over. I'll probably try running GNOME on it just for fun. ^_^
It's not uncommon for someone to refer to module functions as though they were builtin. We perl geeks pretty much take CPAN for granted these days. It's one of the best thing about perl!
These might technically be considered "fantasy" rather than sci-fi but whatever.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series of books. I would highly recommend those to anyone's niece.
I would also like to re-raise the suggestion of Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy (starting with "The Crystal Caves"). One of the best fantasy series ever.
My regards for a very thoughtful gift-giving tradition.
They have web accounts with SSH login as a standard feature, and you can even get root access to your own personal VM and install whatever software you want.
Oh, and they run FreeBSD, which happens to be my favorite unix.
I thought the article was going to be about some wacked out church claiming to have scientific proof that you don't get to go to heaven if you die in an airbag-equipped car.
Thank goodness I'm not the only one!
Mod parent up! I can now stop reading this thread.
Both iTunes and the Finder in Mac OS X have context menus for songs and files, respectively. You can ctrl-click or right-click to see them. In fact, despite your unimformed (possibly out of date?) opinion, *most* applications for OS X have context menus where they're appropriate, including the apple ones. Just plug in a damn two-button mouse if you don't like using hte control key, but don't claim there are nocontext menus. You would be wrong.
However, windows often takes the right-click stuff too far. Some things in the Windows interface (some tray icons, network status comes to mind) can *only* be operated with a right-click. A "normal" click does nothing. Stupid stupid stupid.
As for keyboard navigation, Windows has been ahead on that front for far too long. It wasn't until the most recent release of OSX that keyboard navigation can be made to work the way it ought to.
I was using FreeBSD up until last year. When the time came for a new laptop, I decided to run MacOS X on an iBook. I bought the low-end (400mhz) 2001 dual-USB iBook, which retailed for exactly $1200. I got a 256MB upgrade for free when I bought it, which I feel is necessary to bring OS X performance up to a reasonable level. The software is everything I expected: a slick NeXT-based interface and development environment on top of a slightly devolved (but advancing quickly!) FreeBSD variant.
It's very easy to find software for the new OS, whether it's Carbon (converted from OS9), Cocoa (native OpenStep program) or some unix/xfree86 app. Occasionally I'll start up GNOME on my iBook to launch the GIMP or use XMMS. I've found that I don't use XFree86 as often as I expected to, but it's always there when I need it.
It sounds like you have a pretty clear idea of your expectations, and being in the same boat you were, I made this decision and have been very happy with it.
Over and over again, Miguel De Icaza has displayed the same sort of breathless excitement over Microsoft technologies that I'd expect to see from a newbie, not a developer of his caliber. It's extraordinarily short-sighted for him to believe that he'll be able to keep up with Microsoft. This isn't a matter of talent. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that it has no problem locking out other vendors using API changes and whatever other means available.
Miguel seems to be ignoring the fact that Microsoft will very likely do everything it can to keep Mono uselessly lagging. They've embraced and extended every technology they've adopted, and even their own APIs shift constantly. I realize that the.NET Framework looks like a different approach, and Microsoft is acting like it's going to start playing nice. If it happens, it'd be a first for Microsoft. I personally have my doubts, and history backs me up. What a shame that a talented developer like Miguel doesn't know better than to trust them.
I am a long-time unix user (first Linux, then FreeBSD) who recently decided to buy my first Mac, a low-end iBook. I'm running Mac OS X on it exclusively (I despise the old Mac OS).
It runs nearly all of my favorite open source unix apps, including the X applications. I am personally using mutt, gvim (that's vim with the GTK frontend), nethack and a few others. I like the new operating system very much, and even though bits of it don't look like unix, that's usually because they're NeXTish instead.
It's also probably reelevant to mention that the GNUstep libraries are mostly source-compatible with Apple's Cocoa API, so you can compile GNUstep apps and they'll work just like "native" OS X apps. Plus the development tools are all completely free (unlike the other major commercial desktop OS).
So many posters demand to know why vi key binding are so important. For some reason people seem to forget that vi-like keybindings are not out of place or unusual for command-line interfaces.
The readline library supports vi-like keybindings. As a result, most of the command-line operated free software I use works that way. Put set editing-mode vi in your.inputrc and be happy.
So please stop asking silly questions about why vi's input method is useful. I for one would like to see some relevant answers in this thread instead of a bunch of Windows slaves wondering why can't all just use the mouse. ^_^
Re:There already IS secure IRC
on
Secure IRC?
·
· Score: 1
I currently have a pretty secure IRC setup, when I connect to IRC, I pass my connection through my NetBSD gateway, well as the IRC related packets are passed, they are sent through a program called "Stunnel" Stunnel provides SSL encyrted connections to IRC, thusly my connection/text is always pretty damn secure.
Hee hee. Right, until it gets to the server and is sent (unencrypted) to everyoen on the channel. IRC will never be end-to-end secure unless we build some sort of PGP-style layer on top of it. Or we could just use SILC...
Loki Games, the primary (only?) sponsor of SDL development, created the library for use in their porting work. If you want to see whether or not SDL has what it takes to make it in "professional" software, go down to your local software store and buy the Linux versions of Soldier of Fortune, Quake 3 Arena, Myth 2 and a ton of other great games.
I can't believe this question even made it to Ask Slashdot...
Of course it's a joke. By the time you get to be an MIT undergrad, you have the necessary biology and engineering training to know that this is an absurd concept. I knew immediately that it was a joke when I pulled up the site.
You know what? I still didn't think it was funny.
I don't advocate wasting FBI resources on a something as stupid as this, but I certainly reserve the right to be disgusted by it. Hell, if the FBI wants a dumb site to interfere with, they should track down the guy that owns goatse.cx. As far as I'm concerned, that site is about as funny as Bonsai Kitten.
So to the FBI I say: Get a life.
To the people who keep shouting "IT'S A JOKE" every time someone expresses disgust, I have this to say: Duh. Now get a life.
To the guy who created the Bonsai Kitten site: Get to work on Bonsai Hamster! That would be funny.
Open it up in ahex editor; I bet they didn't even encrypt it. change www.aol.com to www.slashdot.com or equiv. Keep trying each instance till it works. My experience with hex editing / dissasembling is limited, but I'll bet you need to keep the number of characters the same. Anyway, worht a try for those "advanced" users.
You can't replace a string in compiled code with a string of a different length. You'll either clobber the bytes following the string (like the null terminator, oops) or you'll screw up the addressing and execute the wrong instructions.
I know it wasnt written by the Mozilla team. I was just saying that before anyone gets to concerned with themes we should have a working browser first.
Did it ever occur to you that the Alphanumerica developers are mainly designers, and not hardcore C++ hackers equipped to work on a complex project like Mozilla?
Non-coders are always asking what they can do to help with a project. The folks at Alphanumerica are taking it upon themselves to build some very interesting software based on Mozilla. Haven't you ever used beta software for development?
I'm getting tired of poeple complaining about software getting bloated just because they want it to run responsively on their 386. This is getting a little absurd. I'm not advocating pointless software bloat, but there are a lot of interesting features that require more power than your 10 year old computer can provide.
Okay, so Mozilla's XPI is slow and unresponsive compared to other GUI toolkits. A bunch of people complained that this feature is "useless and bloated." Mozilla responded by saying "so embed Gecko." The Galeon folks did this, and are doing a great job so far. What's the first thing we hear in this thread? "Galeon is too bloated! They should be using plain GTK+!" Oh for Christ's sake, give it a rest!
If you want a Gecko browser for your favorite toolkit/platform, then write one! But please, stop telling hard-working volunteer developers what they should be doing just because you disagree on what features are useful!
Slashdot Mirror
I love when this comes up... I get to trot out my old "Miguel has misjudged Microsoft" post.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=27589&cid=2962653
Still flamebait? YOU decide.
Exactly! I remember pointing this out when Miguel tried to justify Mono years ago.
What's "Flamebait" now, huh? Huh? Miguel has been utterly consistent in his unfounded trust of Microsoft and his thorough admiration of their technology.
The "sleeper cell" bit may have been a joke, but it's easy to see how that thinking arises.
That's complete nonsense. I use my iPod Nano EVERY DAY to listed to PODCASTS, not downloaded music. It's absurd to assume that every possible device that holds audio content is used for copyright violation (which isn't even stealing, but whatever).
Won't SOMEONE PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!?!
Using multiple descriptive tags for each game might make the problem easier.
For example, a game can be a "platformer" and an "adventure" game. It might even be in "3D". So perhaps "3D platformer adventure" works as a set of tags for a game rather than an atomic category.
It would be interesting, I agree with that. But John Carmack didn't write Quake 3 in Objective-C. He used a black-and-white NeXTstation during the development of the original DOOM, but that game and every game until DOOM 3 were actually written in C (and some assembly, presumably). All of the tools for these games were originally developed in Objective-C, because NeXTstep (and by extension, Cocoa) is a fantastic development system for that sort of thing. That's why there were no official tool releases for DOOM and Quake: Not enough people had a NeXT system to run it on so it wasn't worth it.
I think around Quake 2 or Quake 3 Arena they switched to Windows as their primary development platform. Carmack started writing his tools in C++ (again, I think), and eventually the game (DOOM 3) as well. But none of the Id games were written in Objective-C, just the tools. I'm sure John Carmack would have many nice things to say about Objective-C though, since he held on to his NeXT environment for a pretty long time.
Ubuntu on a laptop can be made to work quite well. Ubuntu is the only operating system on my G3 iBook as well as my desktop PC. While it's fairly simple to put together a 100% Linux-compatible desktop machine, many people are surprised to learn that an iBook can be a full-featured Linux machine as well. The only drawback is that since the open-source world is x86-centric, there are issues with multimedia support. While you can get proprietary video and audio formats chugging along on an x86 PC by wrapping Windows codecs, this option doesn't exist on PPC. However for most other tasks it's quite sufficient.
I'm in the market for another laptop, and I will be continuing to use Ubuntu as the primary OS. The new MacBook seems like an excellent choice, except that Linux support tends to follow behind a month or two behind Apple hardware releases. Probably the MacBook Pro has cleared the path a bit, but I'm skeptical that I'll be able to use all the hardware features in Linux right away, and in that case what is the point?
While I can't offer too much advice regarding what laptop to buy for yourself, I'll tell you what my decision will probably be. Simply being an x86 gives the MacBook an advantage over the iBook for multimedia support. Even though Linux support for the MacBook will lag behind, there's no reason why I can't dual-boot OSX and Ubuntu for a while until there's enough hardware support to allow me to run Ubuntu full-time. OSX is a pretty respectable unix system and I'm sure I'd have fun using it for a while, even though experience has taught me that I will eventually get frustrated and go back to a free-software OS. Seriously. It's a cultural thing.
So for me it'll be a maxed-out black MacBook. If Ubuntu isn't shiny enough right away I'll use OSX to hold me over. I'll probably try running GNOME on it just for fun. ^_^
The GP post is probably referring to functionality in the Storable module.
http://perldoc.perl.org/Storable.html
It's not uncommon for someone to refer to module functions as though they were builtin. We perl geeks pretty much take CPAN for granted these days. It's one of the best thing about perl!
If your code is not commented it's not complete. My advice is to fire every developer that doesn't think that comments are necessary.
These might technically be considered "fantasy" rather than sci-fi but whatever.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series of books. I would highly recommend those to anyone's niece.
I would also like to re-raise the suggestion of Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy (starting with "The Crystal Caves"). One of the best fantasy series ever.
My regards for a very thoughtful gift-giving tradition.
-zack
I'm a customer of hub.org.
They have web accounts with SSH login as a standard feature, and you can even get root access to your own personal VM and install whatever software you want.
Oh, and they run FreeBSD, which happens to be my favorite unix.
> 1. Anger most of the population
> 2. Attempt to win them over with cheap internet
> 3. ???
> 4. Pro...Re-election!
Isn't it obvious?
3. Election fraud
Thank goodness I'm not the only one!
Mod parent up! I can now stop reading this thread.
-zack
However, windows often takes the right-click stuff too far. Some things in the Windows interface (some tray icons, network status comes to mind) can *only* be operated with a right-click. A "normal" click does nothing. Stupid stupid stupid.
As for keyboard navigation, Windows has been ahead on that front for far too long. It wasn't until the most recent release of OSX that keyboard navigation can be made to work the way it ought to.
-zack
I was using FreeBSD up until last year. When the time came for a new laptop, I decided to run MacOS X on an iBook. I bought the low-end (400mhz) 2001 dual-USB iBook, which retailed for exactly $1200. I got a 256MB upgrade for free when I bought it, which I feel is necessary to bring OS X performance up to a reasonable level. The software is everything I expected: a slick NeXT-based interface and development environment on top of a slightly devolved (but advancing quickly!) FreeBSD variant.
It's very easy to find software for the new OS, whether it's Carbon (converted from OS9), Cocoa (native OpenStep program) or some unix/xfree86 app. Occasionally I'll start up GNOME on my iBook to launch the GIMP or use XMMS. I've found that I don't use XFree86 as often as I expected to, but it's always there when I need it.
It sounds like you have a pretty clear idea of your expectations, and being in the same boat you were, I made this decision and have been very happy with it.
Regards,
-zack
Over and over again, Miguel De Icaza has displayed the same sort of breathless excitement over Microsoft technologies that I'd expect to see from a newbie, not a developer of his caliber. It's extraordinarily short-sighted for him to believe that he'll be able to keep up with Microsoft. This isn't a matter of talent. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that it has no problem locking out other vendors using API changes and whatever other means available.
Miguel seems to be ignoring the fact that Microsoft will very likely do everything it can to keep Mono uselessly lagging. They've embraced and extended every technology they've adopted, and even their own APIs shift constantly. I realize that the .NET Framework looks like a different approach, and Microsoft is acting like it's going to start playing nice. If it happens, it'd be a first for Microsoft. I personally have my doubts, and history backs me up. What a shame that a talented developer like Miguel doesn't know better than to trust them.
-zack
It runs nearly all of my favorite open source unix apps, including the X applications. I am personally using mutt, gvim (that's vim with the GTK frontend), nethack and a few others. I like the new operating system very much, and even though bits of it don't look like unix, that's usually because they're NeXTish instead.
It's also probably reelevant to mention that the GNUstep libraries are mostly source-compatible with Apple's Cocoa API, so you can compile GNUstep apps and they'll work just like "native" OS X apps. Plus the development tools are all completely free (unlike the other major commercial desktop OS).
So many posters demand to know why vi key binding are so important. For some reason people seem to forget that vi-like keybindings are not out of place or unusual for command-line interfaces.
The readline library supports vi-like keybindings. As a result, most of the command-line operated free software I use works that way. Put set editing-mode vi in your .inputrc and be happy.
So please stop asking silly questions about why vi's input method is useful. I for one would like to see some relevant answers in this thread instead of a bunch of Windows slaves wondering why can't all just use the mouse. ^_^
Hee hee. Right, until it gets to the server and is sent (unencrypted) to everyoen on the channel. IRC will never be end-to-end secure unless we build some sort of PGP-style layer on top of it. Or we could just use SILC...
-zack
I can't believe this question even made it to Ask Slashdot...
-zack
Of course it's a joke. By the time you get to be an MIT undergrad, you have the necessary biology and engineering training to know that this is an absurd concept. I knew immediately that it was a joke when I pulled up the site.
You know what? I still didn't think it was funny.
I don't advocate wasting FBI resources on a something as stupid as this, but I certainly reserve the right to be disgusted by it. Hell, if the FBI wants a dumb site to interfere with, they should track down the guy that owns goatse.cx. As far as I'm concerned, that site is about as funny as Bonsai Kitten.
So to the FBI I say: Get a life.
To the people who keep shouting "IT'S A JOKE" every time someone expresses disgust, I have this to say: Duh. Now get a life.
To the guy who created the Bonsai Kitten site: Get to work on Bonsai Hamster! That would be funny.
-zack
-zack
It's better to always practice "safe hex!" Heh.
-zack
Did it ever occur to you that the Alphanumerica developers are mainly designers, and not hardcore C++ hackers equipped to work on a complex project like Mozilla?
Non-coders are always asking what they can do to help with a project. The folks at Alphanumerica are taking it upon themselves to build some very interesting software based on Mozilla. Haven't you ever used beta software for development?
-zack
Okay, so Mozilla's XPI is slow and unresponsive compared to other GUI toolkits. A bunch of people complained that this feature is "useless and bloated." Mozilla responded by saying "so embed Gecko." The Galeon folks did this, and are doing a great job so far. What's the first thing we hear in this thread? "Galeon is too bloated! They should be using plain GTK+!" Oh for Christ's sake, give it a rest!
If you want a Gecko browser for your favorite toolkit/platform, then write one! But please, stop telling hard-working volunteer developers what they should be doing just because you disagree on what features are useful!
-zack