(Incidentally, I think this is what people mean when they talk about the "meaning of life." On the face of it, this seems an odd idea. Life isn't an expression; how could it have meaning? But it can have a quality that feels a lot like meaning. In a project like a compiler, you have to solve a lot of problems, but the problems all fall into a pattern, as in a signal. Whereas when the problems you have to solve are random, they seem like noise. )
I think this is what you call a theological question. Besides than the Adams approach (Douglas or Scott), I think the other reasonable approach to the question is to humbly admit that it's like describing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter; the actual answer overflows the finite brain.
Walk humbly during all the days of your vanity, and look forward to an eternity when all will be revealed.
Oh, and use emacs.
Will you burn DVDs for offline users to purchase? I like buying GNU manuals in dead tree format, to fetish, and support the community. Worth considering.
Well, I flashed the BIOS in my laptop, and now it crashes at the end of the POST, especially when cold. This is with batteries in both modular bays. Gut feeling is that it's trying to boot off the battery where there had been a floppy; I haven't gone through the combinatorial gymnastics to troubleshoot this. To ATFQ, the chance to have the BIOS give me some sort of debug output would be pleasant.
Props to D Excellent Laptop Laborers who've helped me through a motherboard and harddrive replacement trying to troubleshoot this.
I think there is a difference between healthy diversity and utter fragmentation.
The march of F/OSS is impeded by the embarrassment of riches.
For a random example, consider build systems. Besides autoconf/automake, how many others can you name?
If I was Redmond, I'd be putting those cash reserves into funding hundreds of new, slightly incompatible, F/OSS projects on SourceForge. Them Indians may outnumber the cowboys, but, balkanized, they can't threaten the wagons...
The IT department that makes the network go regards the CS and IT departments just like every other acadmic department. They treat them no differently. They in fact dislike them because:
a) they aren't as smart as they are
I guess if the antecedents are treated as positional parameters, we don't get a read-time error here.
The hardware/software issues, at Stanford and elsewhere, are certainly challenging.
The real mother, though, is the people-ware.
Yeah. An external keyboard, more ram, emacs, and a GSM transceiver will make this the killer convergence device.
I didn't think anything could shame my 48GX...
The more you use it, the more you use it.
Out of the box, it might not do much of anything you want, but few problems you can envision haven't been solved.
Only thing I haven't seen yet is a PalmOS version, so I can run it on my Kyocera7135. Got one of those external keyboards; but, hey, that's motivation to figure out how to configure a GCC cross-compiler and add something to the emacs canon.
Other than PalmOS, emacs is OS and window-manager (if any) agnostic, and comes with a ridiculous menu of existing tools.
Go, emacs.
Stepping into your plumbing example, I'm saying that it's nice to pay a plumber to fix a problem, and kinda irritating to have the person manage the problem for an extremely long, financially draining time.
Who ever said charging for software was evil? Requiring a price is frequently a self defense mechanizm as much as anything else. See 'pay the piper'.
Who ever said there was anything wrong with commerce?
Consider a normal transaction, where free people exchange goods or services, with 0 subsequent dependencies in either direction, for an agreed price.
Consider an abnormal transaction between a drug dealer and an addict.
Now, proof by analogy is fraud (Stroustrup), so we'll let the reader decide to which degree either of these models apply to the Free or Proprietary model.
open source software doesn't seem to employ very many people
Software is an infrastructure cost. Whether or not you threw away another ~$500 for the latest version of the Mighty Spiffy Office suite has little noticeable affect on the quality of the memo you wrote, but it does have a vampiric effect on the quartely earnings statement.
That sucker really does suck, as in 'the life right out of you', when your company is laid out flat by the virus du jour.
Can we face some realities here? The basic protocols and application required to run a business are fairly well understood, and implemented.
I think that the price of MSFT over time, and the price of an MSDN Univerasl (scaled appropriately for the truckload of stuff it contains) pretty well argue that Moore's Law, tired of crunching silicon, has turned its Beholder-eye towards software prices.
And for all that cost, Visual Studio still hasn't got half the functionality of emacs...
I think there is a shred of merit in what parent says.
The DIY approach is always worth considering from a self-teaching standpoint.
Once you've understood all of the problems that the rest of the community has solved, though, pitch your idea and get behind something popular.
The only people benefitting from the Open Source fragmentation are the proprietary vendors. While a small number of choices may make sense, keep in mind the ancient architect who noted that houses divided against themselves don't stand...
Yeah, but can you hear the distant howls of derisive laughter echoing back through time from the alternate future where they actually did that?
Admittedly, I can't either, but it sounded kinda cool, so I wrote it.
That could have unintended meaning in the UK.
Either a radio to sack employees, or a defective radio letting the smoke out, which, as any/. reader knows, means it won't work anymore, unless you catch all the smoke and re-insert it. For the smoke is the spirit of the device...
Slashdot Mirror
With Blue Öyster Cult on the soundtrack:
"I'm Bournein', I'm Bournein', I'm Bournein' for you..."
OK, that was bad.
concur.
you might also have a look at boost::python
Will you burn DVDs for offline users to purchase? I like buying GNU manuals in dead tree format, to fetish, and support the community. Worth considering.
python drives COM objects nicely
Running emacs!
Well, I flashed the BIOS in my laptop, and now it crashes at the end of the POST, especially when cold. This is with batteries in both modular bays. Gut feeling is that it's trying to boot off the battery where there had been a floppy; I haven't gone through the combinatorial gymnastics to troubleshoot this. To ATFQ, the chance to have the BIOS give me some sort of debug output would be pleasant.
Props to D Excellent Laptop Laborers who've helped me through a motherboard and harddrive replacement trying to troubleshoot this.
I think there is a difference between healthy diversity and utter fragmentation.
The march of F/OSS is impeded by the embarrassment of riches.
For a random example, consider build systems. Besides autoconf/automake, how many others can you name?
If I was Redmond, I'd be putting those cash reserves into funding hundreds of new, slightly incompatible, F/OSS projects on SourceForge. Them Indians may outnumber the cowboys, but, balkanized, they can't threaten the wagons...
The One True Wiki has answers to some of your omissions...
you are foregoing compatibility with all of the old .tlb and .dll files holding that code, or
implementing a .Net compatibility layer, or
rolling out some unforseen technology to save us from the evils of ActiveX, .Net, and whatever other things do ail us. <your rumor here>
Yeah, and they base it on gecko for improved standards compliance and interoperability. Oh, wait...
What do you mean?
Ctrl-Alt-Del, itself, is an example of physical security. Tell me you've never hit the wronf key...
The hardware/software issues, at Stanford and elsewhere, are certainly challenging.
The real mother, though, is the people-ware.
Beyond the tactical self-teaching value, I'm curious about the strategic value to F/OSS of something like this.
At the risk of seeming to squash innovation, does this afford ammunition to the "no one fired for buying ___" community?
Fragmentation helps the Monolithic Scylla...
Yeah. An external keyboard, more ram, emacs, and a GSM transceiver will make this the killer convergence device.
I didn't think anything could shame my 48GX...
The more you use it, the more you use it.
Out of the box, it might not do much of anything you want, but few problems you can envision haven't been solved.
Only thing I haven't seen yet is a PalmOS version, so I can run it on my Kyocera7135. Got one of those external keyboards; but, hey, that's motivation to figure out how to configure a GCC cross-compiler and add something to the emacs canon.
Other than PalmOS, emacs is OS and window-manager (if any) agnostic, and comes with a ridiculous menu of existing tools.
Go, emacs.
Trust them. They are from and they are here to help.
Stepping into your plumbing example, I'm saying that it's nice to pay a plumber to fix a problem, and kinda irritating to have the person manage the problem for an extremely long, financially draining time.
Who ever said charging for software was evil? Requiring a price is frequently a self defense mechanizm as much as anything else. See 'pay the piper'.
Who ever said there was anything wrong with commerce?
Consider a normal transaction, where free people exchange goods or services, with 0 subsequent dependencies in either direction, for an agreed price.
Consider an abnormal transaction between a drug dealer and an addict.
Now, proof by analogy is fraud (Stroustrup), so we'll let the reader decide to which degree either of these models apply to the Free or Proprietary model.
Software is an infrastructure cost. Whether or not you threw away another ~$500 for the latest version of the Mighty Spiffy Office suite has little noticeable affect on the quality of the memo you wrote, but it does have a vampiric effect on the quartely earnings statement.
That sucker really does suck, as in 'the life right out of you', when your company is laid out flat by the virus du jour.
Can we face some realities here? The basic protocols and application required to run a business are fairly well understood, and implemented.
I think that the price of MSFT over time, and the price of an MSDN Univerasl (scaled appropriately for the truckload of stuff it contains) pretty well argue that Moore's Law, tired of crunching silicon, has turned its Beholder-eye towards software prices.
And for all that cost, Visual Studio still hasn't got half the functionality of emacs...
I think there is a shred of merit in what parent says.
The DIY approach is always worth considering from a self-teaching standpoint.
Once you've understood all of the problems that the rest of the community has solved, though, pitch your idea and get behind something popular.
The only people benefitting from the Open Source fragmentation are the proprietary vendors. While a small number of choices may make sense, keep in mind the ancient architect who noted that houses divided against themselves don't stand...
I contend with the characterization of the last para as 'ragging'.
The tone I got was of an affectionate tip o' the hat to what is surely one of the all-time classic flame wars.
Besides, when you >make menuconfig, and you go through there and choose whether you want various bits compiled into the kernel or loaded as modules,
isn't that an admission that the 'truth' on the modular/monolithic argument falls somewhere in the mote in the eye of the Tannenbaum/Torvalds Tempest?
Yeah, but can you hear the distant howls of derisive laughter echoing back through time from the alternate future where they actually did that?
Admittedly, I can't either, but it sounded kinda cool, so I wrote it.
Or heads stuck between their cheeks.
That could have unintended meaning in the UK. /. reader knows, means it won't work anymore, unless you catch all the smoke and re-insert it.
Either a radio to sack employees, or a defective radio letting the smoke out, which, as any
For the smoke is the spirit of the device...
4.5 Mozilla email, too.