"Write once, run anywhere" _achieved_ by _Java_???
on
Java Success Stories
·
· Score: 1
You wrote:
"Perhaps WORA [write once, run anywhere] really has been achieved, at least for server apps."
Even if WORA is true for Java on servers, Java has certainly not achieved it. Please remember Perl, please don't forget Python (which IMHO is at least as complete, consistent and clean as Java for building serious applications). Funny that one has to mention this on Slashdot!
Does the Debian project plan to offer sourcecode Debian packages? I'm aware that apt already supports downloading and building packages from source archives. However, since a dependency system for source packages is missing, this remains an error-prone process. The need to install software from sourcecode seems to become more urgent as Debian supports more CPU architectures. It would also be a welcome feature for those who want Pentium-optimized binaries.
Being a professional philologist, I must criticize the code quality of Gutenberg e-texts. Gutenberg texts rarely acknowledge the edition they rely upon and lack any structural markup (indicating the pagination, italics, spelling variants etc. of the original text). From the viewpoint of scholars and 'professional' readers, they are practically unusable because of that. Imagine Linux and GNU were not cleanly coded re-implementations of a sophisticated operating system (Unix), but a DOS clone hacked in BASIC, and you get the picture.
The question here isn't whether to use ASCII, HTML or LaTeX, because there already is a highly developed, sophisticated markup language for electronic text editions, TEI-SGML, specifically designed to preserve all structural information of the original text. Some e-text projects such as the Victorian Women Writers Project code in TEI-SGML. This is not only good for scholars/literature hacks, but also allows lossless reformatting of the source code into HTML, ASCII, PDF, RTF, etc..
The Gutenberg Project certainly was a good idea and a great achievement when it is founded, but might have to rethink its coding policy. Other e-text projects are already doing better here.
One of the major improvements of The Gimp vs. Imagemagick IMHO was resource-friendliness. I like Imagemagick, but it eats enormous amounts of RAM and thus easily chokes on big images (hi-res scans). The Gimp has a couple of shortcomings in its user interface (non-tearable menus...), but seems very good as a back-end application. It would be a pity if "KImageshop" had the better interface with worse core functionality. Another point (irrelevant perhaps because I don't code software, so don't misread it as a complaint): I see a stronger need for a fully GUI-based database application like FileMaker or Access which would use PostgreSQL or MySQL as a backend than for yet another image processing tool.
Apple's move seems quite pointless. "Darwin" boils down to a Mach-/BSD-Kernel, for which there's no need. We already have Linux, three BSDs, MkLinux (=Mach+Linux) and GNU Hurd (also Mach-based) as free kernels. I can't see a single advantage of "Darwin" to the above, except that it runs the (still proprietary, still close-source) Yellow Box/Open Step GUI APIs.
Apple could have down the Free Softare a _huge_ service by freeing the code of the Yellow Box/OpenStep which will be marginalized in MacOS X anyway. The free Unixes would have gained an open standard, technically supreme desktop which would by far surpass the reinvented wheels of KDE and Gnome. The GNUstep project is trying to accomplish this since years, but it doesn't seem as if their effort would benefit in any way from "Darwin".
Slashdot Mirror
Does the Debian project plan to offer sourcecode Debian packages? I'm aware that apt already supports downloading and building packages from source archives. However, since a dependency system for source packages is missing, this remains an error-prone process. The need to install software from sourcecode seems to become more urgent as Debian supports more CPU architectures. It would also be a welcome feature for those who want Pentium-optimized binaries.
The question here isn't whether to use ASCII, HTML or LaTeX, because there already is a highly developed, sophisticated markup language for electronic text editions, TEI-SGML, specifically designed to preserve all structural information of the original text. Some e-text projects such as the Victorian Women Writers Project code in TEI-SGML. This is not only good for scholars/literature hacks, but also allows lossless reformatting of the source code into HTML, ASCII, PDF, RTF, etc..
The Gutenberg Project certainly was a good idea and a great achievement when it is founded, but might have to rethink its coding policy. Other e-text projects are already doing better here.
One of the major improvements of The Gimp vs. Imagemagick IMHO was resource-friendliness. I like Imagemagick, but it eats enormous amounts of RAM and thus easily chokes on big images (hi-res scans). The Gimp has a couple of shortcomings in its user interface (non-tearable menus...), but seems very good as a back-end application. It would be a pity if "KImageshop" had the better interface with worse core functionality.
Another point (irrelevant perhaps because I don't code software, so don't misread it as a complaint): I see a stronger need for a fully GUI-based database application like FileMaker or Access which would use PostgreSQL or MySQL as a backend than for yet another image processing tool.
Apple could have down the Free Softare a _huge_ service by freeing the code of the Yellow Box/OpenStep which will be marginalized in MacOS X anyway. The free Unixes would have gained an open standard, technically supreme desktop which would by far surpass the reinvented wheels of KDE and Gnome. The GNUstep project is trying to accomplish this since years, but it doesn't seem as if their effort would benefit in any way from "Darwin".