What is almost-Linux? If it doesn't use the Linux kernel, it is NOT Linux. So, some BSD distros use GNU libraries, compilers and utilities, and now you call this distro almost-linux? If an OEM vendor distributes Windows and bundles it with GNU utilities, you'll call it almost-linux too?
Re:Did you expect any differently?
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
Hey, you mean that the profits earned by Microsoft cannot be used to invest ANYWHERE? This doesn't make sense to me. Retail shops are only encouraged to bundle Microsoft games - they are still free to sell PS2, GameCube and whatever console machine they wish. Consumers are free to choose the console.
Re:Did you expect any differently?
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
Microsoft hardware console marketshare is 0. This kind of tactic for this market is completely LEGAL. However, arbitrary bundling is illegal for Windows, as the Court of Appeals has concluded recently.
...
<i>As both Bruce Perens and Tim O'Reilly have pointed out, it is possible to publicly deploy a web-app that is derived from GPL'd
software without having to distribute your modifications.<p>...
What I am thinking is the following: should there be any HTML checker (unbalanced italic tag in this case) for slashdot editors? I mean, the former can be dispensed if we have a WYSIWYG web-based HTML editor or an X-Window app. Writing directly HTML is becoming a nuisance these days. I am against a spelling checker, because we will miss funny comments from readers.
... step-by-step instructions on configuring and running FreeBSD, connecting to the Internet, setting up an internal network, and setting up sound, X Window System (the graphical user interface), and printing....
Apart from printing and setting up an internal network, everything ought to be done by the installation program by default, with minimal user intervention. Why should I read a book to do something like that? To be honest, this is where FreeBSD and Linux still scare many people away. Windows may not be the easiest, but at least, it makes the things mentioned above easy enough that most people (except those that don't even know how to use a mouse) don't need to read a book at all, with self-help wizards.
But making something too easy to install is also troublesome (e.g. IIS)...
My only problem with this is that Microsoft lacks the motivation to fix the hole if no one else knows what it is.
No, eEye notified first Microsoft. Microsoft released a patch and after that eEye made public its exploit.
Personally, I am against making public the sample exploit code. Why? Yeah, a hacker might eventually find the hole as long as you describe it but making the code public makes the hacker's life much much easier, because developing exploit templates takes time and patience and reduces a lot of debugging efforts!
So, this is something like what NVIDIA did to 3DFX? But, how useful is the BeOS to the Palm community? I mean, they are targeted for different audience and I fail to see the deficiency of the existing Palm OS that would require features from BeOS (mostly multimedia and fancy colors) and until the day multimedia stuff saves power and relieves me from eyestrain when viewing movies from a small device, it won't be very useful.
Perhaps, to fight the colorful PocketPC's media player?
I don't see how sizeof (and it's sizeof, not sizeof(); sizeof is an operator, not a function or macro) is inconsistent or unpretty. Personally I think "sizeof foo" is prettier than "foo.size", and more consistent since I would expect "foo.size" to refer to a member. I can see the switch() thing, though.
IIRC, sizeof is the only C operator that uses English alphabets == inconsistency!
Also, as dynamic arrays and strings have a length property, having foo.size makes the syntax more consistent and makes foo look like a first-class variable, similar to other OOP languages (not C++).
The thing is though, as he says in the overview, these "nothing special" things save time. Sure, they're not necessary, and we live with C's little oddities without problem at the moment. But, if we don't have to worry about those then we can be more productive, and hopefully less coding mistakes are made.
Yeah, the new syntax breaks legacy C code. Your existing libraries won't compile. If the compiler allows dual mode, it will be even more confusing. How productive is that?
Java took almost five years to get more or less a complete framework and library functions. OK, this D language is more C-like, but you'll still need to wait at least one year.
Dynamic arrays - Some juicy stuff that frees the programmer from using malloc, realloc. Copied from Java or Ada or _________________ ( fill in the blank, strip out unused characters)
Fixing some inconsistency issues of C's syntax - some purification to make it prettier - like switch/case accepting strings, using something.size, instead of sizeof(). Nothing by itself is absolutely necessary. Syntactic sugar.
Unicode character support - Interesting, but usually people just got used not to embed Unicode strings in the source code. Besides, they simply renamed wchar_t to unicode just to make sure that D supports Unicode.
IIS is not installed by default, nor comes it is factory installed on desktop computers. Sure, during Setup, the system asks you whether you want to install or not IIS (but only on W2K server), but if he/she says yes, it's the user's problem, especially for home computers hooked on a cable modem. It's a mystery how they got W2K servers installed on personal computers in the first place (piracy?). Most of these cable modem users mindlessly answer yes to everything and they are the very ones who don't know that they need security patches because they are simply unaware that they are hosting a web site!
For W2K professional, it really takes an extra step in Add/Remove to add IIS and therefore it should have been a deliberate action. However, many people do not have a habit of subscribing to security mailing lists (well, why should they?) and if it were not the mass media reporting Code Red, most of them would have not even noticed that their machines had been hacked.
No need to apologize . Your inference is a near miss, because I admit that my experience with Smalltalk is certainly not in the same level as yours and limited to simple Hello World-type programs, ifTrue and collections stuff. Why? The first time I touched Smalltalk, I have immediately placed it in the category of academic curiosity (just like Prolog) because it is an interpreted language. Considering it productive was nearly the same, IMHO, as considering QuickBASIC to be productive.
Before the explosion of the Internet, I don't think the performance of computers was enough in such a way that could make Smalltalk productive. Yeah, I know that Smalltalk can be JIT compiled, just like Java, but it doesn't help too much until recently with computers that have sufficient memory and CPU power. The most popular OSes (Unix and Windows) were written in C/C++, the documentation and examples were in C too. Earlier programmers have a need to be as close as much possible to the OS, and you know why (speed, direct hardware control, avoiding syntactic conversions between different languages, blah blah blah... )
You can be proficient and productive for your own specific apps in Smalltalk (in theory, every programming language has a chance of being productive), but I don't believe that this language can be productive to the general mass in practice. However, if a IDE like VB was made for Smalltalk during early 1990s, the scenario might be completely different now.
Let me recapitulate:
C/C++ - difficult to learn but language of choice of OS makers => popular => more people use it => more libraries => more productive.
VB - easy to learn; RAD; integrated with the OS so the interface barriers are reduced; marketed on time when GUIs was becoming popular => more libraries => more productive
Smalltalk seems to be lost somewhere in the middle and certainly became much less appealing.
Apache's decrease is minimal and fluctuations like this happened before. Netcraft's survey indicates that Apache is still growing and its marketshare healthy. Unlike Netscape's case, MS has not been able to grab easily this market. Mr. Prasad is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and is simply luring Apache people to jump to Java before.NET takes off. Not that I dislike Java because JSP runs quite well with Apache+Tomcat in my intranet site and Mr. Prasad does have some valid points to ponder, but using Apache and Linux community as a Sun weapon against MS is disgusting to me, especially when he mentioned all the nonsense about dotGNU and Mono, the Open Source implementations of.NET. So it makes sense to him to make an opensource J2EE framework and nonsense to make an opensource.NET framework, when both are controlled by proprietary companies and when C# was submitted to ECMA and Java not?
1st quote:
Why didn't Smalltlak take off? There are a lot of reasons, including:
2nd quote:
Not being able to spell the language's name correctly is a sign you've never actually had any experience with it.
I spelled correctly Smalltalk in the first sentence. It was just my habit of capitalizing symbols that led me make that mistake. Try to infer something like that from your own typo.
Re:Microsoft and NVIDIA arens as chummy as all tha
on
ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 1
When it is something that is mostly related to hardware, MS acts fairly. MS mouse, keyboard, SideWinders et al are quite nice products. I applause MS for being hardware vendor independent.
Hey, you are using the wrong association. Stability does not guarantee popularity (besides, Linux is still playing catchup), but productivity can. I don't think I am more productive using Linux instead of Windows, especially with desktop apps, despite that the latter crashes more. Smalltalk came before C, yet didn't grow up as much - if you don't think productivity is an issue, please tell me the reasons behind of SmallTalk's failure (bad luck doesn't count).
You are looking for the wrong target audience. One of the reasons most people used Linux instead of other OSes is that they don't want to pay and they are usually willing to tweak the stuff by themselves. Linux games are no better than Windows ones because they are ported and Windows comes bundled anyway with most brand-name machines - so why bother buying Linux games, knowing that you'll have more driver headaches in advance? The market share for desktop Linux is still too small. I bet you wouldn't have suggested paypal accounts if Loki were developing games for Mac.
Well, the problem is that the pure language doesn't do anything essential other than simple "Hello world" programs or computer science exercises. The basic syntax only covers loops, if/then/elses. However, the real gem of a language lies in the libraries, calling conventions and they really differ from language to language. While it is relatively easy to learn a new language, it is counterproductive to remember that the exact argument positions of library function calls and idiosyncrasies of each. Bugs really happen when you cram too many things in your brain. Besides, why do you want to become a jack of all trades, master of none?
Here's a perfect example of where the free cost of Linux should have been an advantage, yet they decided to go with Windows instead. Does this mean that the costs of running Linux are higher than the cost to purchase Windows?
At the end of the article, they say they are going to install Linux on the newer machines that come with external modems! Besides, academic licenses of Windows aren't THAT expensive (usually 30% of the retail price, but it depends really on the school and the MS "niceness" of the day). You have to take into account that the costs of finding the right people who know how to deal with linux effectively + hardware costs of replacing winmodems outweigh the Windows license costs.
7) The most important IMHO: The simple things are hard, the hard things are easy. Yes, you don't need to defrag, virus scan, worry about privacy issues, 'registration', or worry about BSODs, but yes, it will take us 2 hours to get yout ghetto ass CD burner working right.....
In Linux, you STILL need to care about:
Defragging - ext2fs is not perfect
Privacy issues - you still have cookies in your browsers...
Security issues - if you are not careful to stay current with the latest daemons, your machine is as susceptible to security breaches as Windows machines.
BSODs - although extremely unlikely, kernel panics still exist and badly written apps will core dump.
Moving to Linux is a good try, but don't treat it as a solution to your Windows problems, especially when half of the Windows problems are related to hardware. You just add a little bit more when you use Linux because you cannot find enough drivers...
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What is almost-Linux? If it doesn't use the Linux kernel, it is NOT Linux. So, some BSD distros use GNU libraries, compilers and utilities, and now you call this distro almost-linux? If an OEM vendor distributes Windows and bundles it with GNU utilities, you'll call it almost-linux too?
Hey, you mean that the profits earned by Microsoft cannot be used to invest ANYWHERE? This doesn't make sense to me. Retail shops are only encouraged to bundle Microsoft games - they are still free to sell PS2, GameCube and whatever console machine they wish. Consumers are free to choose the console.
Microsoft hardware console marketshare is 0. This kind of tactic for this market is completely LEGAL. However, arbitrary bundling is illegal for Windows, as the Court of Appeals has concluded recently.
What I am thinking is the following: should there be any HTML checker (unbalanced italic tag in this case) for slashdot editors? I mean, the former can be dispensed if we have a WYSIWYG web-based HTML editor or an X-Window app. Writing directly HTML is becoming a nuisance these days. I am against a spelling checker, because we will miss funny comments from readers.
Apart from printing and setting up an internal network, everything ought to be done by the installation program by default, with minimal user intervention. Why should I read a book to do something like that? To be honest, this is where FreeBSD and Linux still scare many people away. Windows may not be the easiest, but at least, it makes the things mentioned above easy enough that most people (except those that don't even know how to use a mouse) don't need to read a book at all, with self-help wizards.
But making something too easy to install is also troublesome (e.g. IIS)...
No, eEye notified first Microsoft. Microsoft released a patch and after that eEye made public its exploit.
Personally, I am against making public the sample exploit code. Why? Yeah, a hacker might eventually find the hole as long as you describe it but making the code public makes the hacker's life much much easier, because developing exploit templates takes time and patience and reduces a lot of debugging efforts!
Perhaps, to fight the colorful PocketPC's media player?
IIRC, sizeof is the only C operator that uses English alphabets == inconsistency!
Also, as dynamic arrays and strings have a length property, having foo.size makes the syntax more consistent and makes foo look like a first-class variable, similar to other OOP languages (not C++).
Simple answer: because anything that is VB-like is not C-like and anything that is C-like is not VB-like.
Yeah, the new syntax breaks legacy C code. Your existing libraries won't compile. If the compiler allows dual mode, it will be even more confusing. How productive is that?
Java took almost five years to get more or less a complete framework and library functions. OK, this D language is more C-like, but you'll still need to wait at least one year.
For W2K professional, it really takes an extra step in Add/Remove to add IIS and therefore it should have been a deliberate action. However, many people do not have a habit of subscribing to security mailing lists (well, why should they?) and if it were not the mass media reporting Code Red, most of them would have not even noticed that their machines had been hacked.
Before the explosion of the Internet, I don't think the performance of computers was enough in such a way that could make Smalltalk productive. Yeah, I know that Smalltalk can be JIT compiled, just like Java, but it doesn't help too much until recently with computers that have sufficient memory and CPU power. The most popular OSes (Unix and Windows) were written in C/C++, the documentation and examples were in C too. Earlier programmers have a need to be as close as much possible to the OS, and you know why (speed, direct hardware control, avoiding syntactic conversions between different languages, blah blah blah... )
You can be proficient and productive for your own specific apps in Smalltalk (in theory, every programming language has a chance of being productive), but I don't believe that this language can be productive to the general mass in practice. However, if a IDE like VB was made for Smalltalk during early 1990s, the scenario might be completely different now.
Let me recapitulate:
- C/C++ - difficult to learn but language of choice of OS makers => popular => more people use it => more libraries => more productive.
- VB - easy to learn; RAD; integrated with the OS so the interface barriers are reduced; marketed on time when GUIs was becoming popular => more libraries => more productive
Smalltalk seems to be lost somewhere in the middle and certainly became much less appealing.This is not true, PHP can run under IIS as an ISAPI extension, which is an in-process DLL, IIRC.
Apache's decrease is minimal and fluctuations like this happened before. Netcraft's survey indicates that Apache is still growing and its marketshare healthy. Unlike Netscape's case, MS has not been able to grab easily this market. Mr. Prasad is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and is simply luring Apache people to jump to Java before .NET takes off. Not that I dislike Java because JSP runs quite well with Apache+Tomcat in my intranet site and Mr. Prasad does have some valid points to ponder, but using Apache and Linux community as a Sun weapon against MS is disgusting to me, especially when he mentioned all the nonsense about dotGNU and Mono, the Open Source implementations of .NET. So it makes sense to him to make an opensource J2EE framework and nonsense to make an opensource .NET framework, when both are controlled by proprietary companies and when C# was submitted to ECMA and Java not?
2nd quote: Not being able to spell the language's name correctly is a sign you've never actually had any experience with it.
I spelled correctly Smalltalk in the first sentence. It was just my habit of capitalizing symbols that led me make that mistake. Try to infer something like that from your own typo.
When it is something that is mostly related to hardware, MS acts fairly. MS mouse, keyboard, SideWinders et al are quite nice products. I applause MS for being hardware vendor independent.
Hey, you are using the wrong association. Stability does not guarantee popularity (besides, Linux is still playing catchup), but productivity can. I don't think I am more productive using Linux instead of Windows, especially with desktop apps, despite that the latter crashes more. Smalltalk came before C, yet didn't grow up as much - if you don't think productivity is an issue, please tell me the reasons behind of SmallTalk's failure (bad luck doesn't count).
You are looking for the wrong target audience. One of the reasons most people used Linux instead of other OSes is that they don't want to pay and they are usually willing to tweak the stuff by themselves. Linux games are no better than Windows ones because they are ported and Windows comes bundled anyway with most brand-name machines - so why bother buying Linux games, knowing that you'll have more driver headaches in advance? The market share for desktop Linux is still too small. I bet you wouldn't have suggested paypal accounts if Loki were developing games for Mac.
Well, the problem is that the pure language doesn't do anything essential other than simple "Hello world" programs or computer science exercises. The basic syntax only covers loops, if/then/elses. However, the real gem of a language lies in the libraries, calling conventions and they really differ from language to language. While it is relatively easy to learn a new language, it is counterproductive to remember that the exact argument positions of library function calls and idiosyncrasies of each. Bugs really happen when you cram too many things in your brain. Besides, why do you want to become a jack of all trades, master of none?
Huh, Smalltalk productive? Where? If it were productive, everybody would be using it instead of C.
IE always uses the "Mozilla" prefix string in user_agent to impersonate Mozilla. Now Mozilla wants to fight back the impersonation...
In Linux, you STILL need to care about:
Moving to Linux is a good try, but don't treat it as a solution to your Windows problems, especially when half of the Windows problems are related to hardware. You just add a little bit more when you use Linux because you cannot find enough drivers...
We have a case with slashdot readers gaining ESP superpowers that can "sense" a slashdot article before getting posted!.