Start up threads, and all cross-platform compatibility goes out the window.
Different java implementations have WILDLY different dynamic performance characteristics.
Face it, for any real program it's "write once test everywhere"
Tell me with CONFIDENCE that your "cross-platform" java code is gonna run without failure on OpenVMS's java implementation.
OK. I'm confident. Subject only to the constraint that the OpenVMS JVM is Sun-compliant. I speak from long experience.
ANY multi-threaded environment is subject to synchronicity issues, and it's considered an axiom that multi-threaded code is 10x harder to work with than single-threaded code (and that interrupt service code is 10x harder than that).
You don't have to move to a different platform to get screwed by multi-threading, just change CPU speeds. Or peripheral speeds. Or system loads.
IF a multi-threaded application is properly designed and implemented, it should run on any compliant JVM. How well it runs will depend on how good a match the multi-threaded design is for the target environment. That's a whole different matter. Presumably one is multi-threading to obtain performance advantages inherent in parallel processing over the single-threaded model, so if there's a mismatch between the thread expectations and the target machine enviroment, that advantage may be neutralized. That's an architectural fault, however, not a language fault. It would work just as miserably in any language.
> I'm not a java expert (I'm a C#/RoR guy) but if fortune 500 companies can't get it right, can you really say that java is cross version compatible?
Is that your argument? Just because corporate developers (including a lot of C# guys, but there are always exceptions) are often morons doesn't mean Java blows - these guys can and do butcher any technology when they build stuff (hell, even after giving one guy proper code for calculating any date he come back with his shitty VB.NET that was an abomination and had so many holes).
I've written a *lot* of different systems in Java. From embedded, web, graphical, network, rich client etc and the version gotchas (there are minor things you learn to avoid) are nothing in Java compared to the C, C++ and C# systems I used to work on. Hence, my statements.
Java is pretty much unique in its inherent support for cross-version support. There's a special deprecation annotation you can attach to any function or class that causes warnings if you attempt to use downgraded features. You won't find that in C/C++ or VB. In fact, one reason I bailed from Microsoft was that not only was I routinely getting nailed on MS apps to the degree that in extreme cases, I was looking at re-installing an old OS so I could install an old IDE so I could use an old compiler to make a 2-line emergency change, MS would routinely replace an entire API with a totally incompatible one. I got nailed hard on this with SOAP, but the Database API-of-the-day way outright comical - they wouldn't even have the kinks out of the previous one before the next one came along.
With Java's deprecation, you can make your panic fixes, note the deprecation warnings, and make proper version-related updates when things are less stressful (yeah, like that ever happens). The actual Sun-supplied deprecations tend to live forever, so even some items deprecated from Java Version 1 can still be used/abused today. They are a bit weak on the clairvoyance features, however, so forward version dependencies are a bit hit and miss.
The primary reason that major vendors are so picky about JVM brands and versions is that they want to keep their support costs down and even in a strict version-supportive environment like Java, the smaller the number of permutations, the better. Even when the language itself is supportive, the bugs vary from release to release, and yes, some "clever" application programmers do code to internal implementation details or mis-read specs.
Would be nice to actually see this great quality java code in the wild.
We have a ton of server-side java *crap*. It is all crap. I have never seen a java server app that did proper logging-- seems all server-side java coders think uncaught exceptions leading to stack traces are "super cool".
On the client side, things like the java app to manage Brocade FC switches will sometimes show 90% of the zones missing! Oh, you kill all java instances and re-run it, and all is cool. Yeah, java is great.
In the early 90s I was a believer, but too many crappy experiences with java-- now, when I hear java, I just assume total piece of shit until proven otherwise (which is _super rare_; being generous-- I can't think of anything great written in java off the top of my head)
There's no point in singling out Java for any of that. As long as the order of the day is cheaper software produced faster instead of spending time and money to get quality, software is going to be garbage.
I do know some really excellent java apps, and a very large quantity of excellent open-source java support libraries, but the finest tools in the hands of 15-rupee/hour junior programmers working to a fantasy schedule aren't going to produce them.
I provide a lot of advice to Java programmers, and one of the top items I warn them to do is use logging. My own stuff not only logs extensively, it even sends me email for the really dire stuff. As far as letting exceptions fall out on the floor goes, that's a mortal sin in my book.
Of course, because I DO have quality standards, I just get yelled at for not being "productive" enough.
Why would we ever waste police resources on this kind of person?
Because most of the civilized world has public health care, and it costs less to talk him out of it than it would to fix it after the fact.
In in the US, I wouldn't give good odds on private insurance paying out on the medical bills for a deliberately-inflicted wound. So the hospital, EMT services, et al. have to absorb the expense (unless you can squeeze it out of someone who already has proven to be less than competent), thus it becomes "public health care" (a/k/a "socialized medicine") - paid for courtesy of our taxes.
It's cheaper to pay the taxes for socialized police services and nip the problem in the bud.
(for the record, this left/right, liberal/conservative, tweedledum/tweedledee polarization is bullshit. When you actually talk to people, you find a range of viewpoints. Know any concealed weapon carrying liberal democrats? I do. How about social conservative republicans who buy contraceptives? Yep. Or even worse, programmers who use the Visual Studio C#.NET WPF paradigm at work, and then use a Linux desktop coding open source at home. Probably so.)
But liberal and conservative ARE polar opposites. One group will eat your babies. The other group will eat their OWN babies. Opposites, see?
You mean, like, if an employer-provided insurance plan covers it?
There's quite a few million people out there who will have to, you know, get a job first before they can get that.
There's also that "employer-provided insurance plan" - fact is, most of them suck. Instead of my previous catastrophic plan that was dirt cheap ( > $100/mo plus $5k sitting around in the bank to cover the deductible)? The required changes my employer made will mean that my health insurance bill will now cost more per month than a car payment, and I'd still have to pay $3,500 out of pocket* before it actually kicked in and did anything.
So, thanks to the government, instead of my regular salary? I have to dock it by the annual insurance payments.
Way to reduce my fucking wages, Mr President. Anything else I can do to further your short-sighted partisan agenda?
* (That $3,500 becomes a $7,000 annual out-of-pocket max if I got stuck with using an out-of-network provider)
Believe it or not, once upon a time people had jobs. And the jobs frequently carried decent insurance.
But two things happened since 1980. First, jobs stopped being "permanent" and benefits went out the window. Secondly, medical rates skyrocketed because people didn't pay for health care, insurance did. Well, the second item I'm pretty sure predates 1980, actually.
That's where the whole deal from "Hilarycare" on down came in. If you can't keep a job, you get jacked around by the insurance. Worse, for those of us where the inter-job intervals are fairly long, there were intervals where insurance wasn't easy to come by - especially with no income to speak of. Plus you'd get nailed on "pre-existing conditions" when you changed jobs and insurance companies. It's going to take a LOT of Obama-theft to equal what was already done to me via that particular scam.
You always had money "stolen" from you for medical care - it was just mostly invisible pre-paycheck theft. Now we're cranking the honesty up a notch. The only real way to avoid being "robbed" was to be in good health, not involved in a health insurance program, and be willing to play Russian Roulette... with 3-4 bullets in the gun instead of 1.
Does the current setup suck? Yes it does. It just sucks a little less than continuing to operate under a system based on an employment scheme that died when they invented the word "perma-temping". Most of the faults people find with Obamacare are faults that existed already but were hidden under the carpet, such as people using emergency rooms instead of preventitative care, thereby tapping your tax bill by stealth.
You'd think it was the freaking Apocalypse the way people go on about this. Should we bleed to death slowly or make mistakes and try to correct them? I don't care what party does what, as long as they do something constructive. Predicting the end of the world and vetoing everything - or more commonly, poisoning attempts to make progress (however misguided) is worse than anything we're likely do do wrong. When did helplessness become so fashionable?
Turns out not. Ever notice people who don't smoke get lung cancer too?
Smoke is one of a number of things that a carcinogenic and mutagenic but the body usually takes care of this. in 2004 we found out there's a cytochrome B enzyme, the CYP1B1 variant, and that it only occurs in cancer cells, and a phytoallexin in some foods is converted to picotaneol which happens to kill cancer cells but not regular cells. Gene 53 controls this and low and behold gene 53 is deactived in nearly all cancer patients. This theory just panned out with trials in SF of Potters new prostate drug, so good they stopped the trials and just gave it to everyone and that was V1.0 of his drug, V2.0 works in the general case. So it's not so much smokes cause cancer (so does gasoline, those organics are generally why non-smokers get it) as it is the body lacks the raw materials to make the molecules that get rid of cancer. Long story short, spraying fugicides since wwii did it, since plants make this phytolallexin in response to mold.
So, bad example, try a car analogy, they go over well here.
Ah. So Global Warming is a myth, Smoking doesn't cause cancer and your day job is in a pretzel factory.
...than hard sci-fi, but Jack Vance is amazing. He has an extensive body of work, with some personal favorites being:
The Dying Earth series The Demon Princes series The Lyonesse trilogy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance
Plenty of sci-fi in his Gaean Reach novels. Maybe not hard fiction, but generally nothing more fantastic than FTL drives and exotic drugs. IIRC, the Demon Princes fits in there. While Lyonesse was specifically intended to be classic fantasy, the magic of the Dying Earth can be considered as the ultimate expression of Clarke's Law about Magic and Technology. Also vote me up for The Last Castle - genetic engineering.
Define global warming. Define stoped. The last ten years the sun e.g. was in a cold cycle is noww slowly gettig hotter again. There are dozens of effects finally defining the local temperature. That has nothing to do with GLOBAL warming. Why don't you look a bit around over the rest of the GLOBE to get an idea how bad it already is?
There are also dozens of effects finally defining whether you get lung cancer.
However, we're pretty sure that smoking is one of the more significant ones now.
1: It's not happening. 2: It's happening, but it's no big deal. 3: It's happening, it's a big deal, but there's nothing we can do. 4: It's happening, it's a big deal, this is what we can do, but it's too expensive. 5: It's happening, it's a big deal, it's too late to do what we could have done earlier, next time be rich like us so you can insulate yourself from the consequences 6. It's happening. We're DOOMED! Why didn't those damned greenie hippies DO something about this while there was still time????
Are you telling me you did NOT search for a shutdown button in the initial GNOME release? I mean, who the fuck presses Alt just to see "logoff" change to "shutdown" (It was the default, don't know about the current GNOME release. I hope they fixed it)
Support your statement with facts.
To tell the truth, by the time I was ready to shut down, I was in a mood to throw the whole machine against the wall. That's ONE way to turn it off!
But you're right. I was terminating the OS with extreme prejudice until I accidentally stumbled across the hint about the ALT button. I believe its fixed now, but I switched to Cinnamon because I cannot live without the toolbar applets. Cinnamon was freezing frequently, but now that all appears fixed. And from what I can tell, it's actually a lot easier to write applets for Cinnamon than for Gnome.
If you're downloading, you don't need a CD at all, just do the net install so you only install the things you want/need. The only reason you should want a CD is because you're buying it and having it shipped to you in the mail, or your friend is burning it for you and sending it to you, because you have no net access, or very slow access, and don't want to even bother with the net install.
And if someone is actually mailing you a physical disc, then why bother limiting yourself to a CD? Have them send you a DVD instead. Or even a USB thumb drive.
... Or the destination machine isn't the machine that has the Internet connection.
Why is a CD's capacity the deciding factor for a component with such broad repercussions throughout the OS? It's 2012, folks. How many new installations are really made or broken on what works from a 700MB CD when a 4.7GB DVD is an incredibly common substitute?
I'm not ridiculing this decision, despite my surprised tone. I'm actually interested in learning more about the reasoning behind it, if anyone has some more background.
Believe it or not, not all of us have ultra-high speed Internet connections. Or a desire to install the world at one go, for that matter.
and her ideas worked so well that she died penniless and living off the socialism she so despised (look it up, she did).
Come off it. Ayn was just a scared little woman frightened by dictators. I could spend hours recounting the holes in her philosophy, but others have done it much better than I ever could.
Never mind the holes in her philosophy, how much credence can you put in a "30-minute speech" that probably takes 2 hours even when read?
I don't normally skip over parts of a book, but Galts's speech was not only absurdly long, you'd have to be terminally dim not to have gotten the point by the time he made it, so it's redundant.
I thought PJ closed Groklaw. Did she change her mind?
No, she handed it off. Still pops in sometimes, though.
Thanks to such shenanigans as the Apple sueage machine and Oracle v. Android, there's more than enough fodder to keep Groklaw going even if SCO could finally be reduced to its component atoms.
If someone is reading at a company with a filter so invasive that it's counting the number of fucks on a random web site, then perhaps they shouldn't be reading slashdot at work. I'm generally not very profane, but I will not bowdlerize myself for the convenience of people fucking around on paid time.
Baen was pretty much DRM-free from the get-go - a personal decision by Jim Baen himself, who alas, is no longer with us.
TOR has been working on it, but as I understand it, there were existing obligations to be cleared. Effective July 2012, however, all new TOR offerings are supposed to be DRM-free. Sadly, older purchases are not generally convertable.
I was looking on a bookseller's catalog today and noticed that the latest in a series of TOR books offered by them carried an explicit notification that due to publisher stipulations, that the book in question would NOT contain DRM. So kudos to TOR!
True ROI includes a lot more than just how fast the code got written. It includes how easy it is to maintain, how reliable it is, and these days, almost invariably how secure it is.
Beware of bean-counters. Anything that doesn't look like a bean, they ignore.
eBooks should be a CONVENIENCE format AS WELL as your paper copy.
It should NOT be REPLACING your paper copy.
Anybody who buys an ebook without a paper copy is just a mug and is welcome to jump blindly off the cliff to the CLOUD.
My parents came in with this leaflet about FREE CLOUD from the purchase of a new computer and asked me to install it lol.
FOOLS.
You can pry my paper books from my dead cold hands.
You obviously haven't had a shelf full of books fall on you recently. I had to cut back on book purchases because I didn't have physical space to store them all and I re-read books over and over so I don' get rid of them. I almost never bought hardbound editions for the same reason (plus the expense, of course). So having them in electronic form instead has been a real life-saver.
On the other hand, when I "buy" a book, I expect it to STAY bought. If Amazon or B&N does a "Borders" and goes belly up, I would be greatly displeased if a major chunk of my libary evaporated overnight. So I make it a policy that anything I do buy has a crackable DRM scheme AND that I should be able to offload the book onto a generic file storage system of my own.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, that's what they'd like you to believe, isn't it?
Start up threads, and all cross-platform compatibility goes out the window.
Different java implementations have WILDLY different dynamic performance characteristics.
Face it, for any real program it's "write once test everywhere"
Tell me with CONFIDENCE that your "cross-platform" java code is gonna run without failure on OpenVMS's java implementation.
OK. I'm confident. Subject only to the constraint that the OpenVMS JVM is Sun-compliant. I speak from long experience.
ANY multi-threaded environment is subject to synchronicity issues, and it's considered an axiom that multi-threaded code is 10x harder to work with than single-threaded code (and that interrupt service code is 10x harder than that).
You don't have to move to a different platform to get screwed by multi-threading, just change CPU speeds. Or peripheral speeds. Or system loads.
IF a multi-threaded application is properly designed and implemented, it should run on any compliant JVM. How well it runs will depend on how good a match the multi-threaded design is for the target environment. That's a whole different matter. Presumably one is multi-threading to obtain performance advantages inherent in parallel processing over the single-threaded model, so if there's a mismatch between the thread expectations and the target machine enviroment, that advantage may be neutralized. That's an architectural fault, however, not a language fault. It would work just as miserably in any language.
> I'm not a java expert (I'm a C#/RoR guy) but if fortune 500 companies can't get it right, can you really say that java is cross version compatible?
Is that your argument? Just because corporate developers (including a lot of C# guys, but there are always exceptions) are often morons doesn't mean Java blows - these guys can and do butcher any technology when they build stuff (hell, even after giving one guy proper code for calculating any date he come back with his shitty VB.NET that was an abomination and had so many holes).
I've written a *lot* of different systems in Java. From embedded, web, graphical, network, rich client etc and the version gotchas (there are minor things you learn to avoid) are nothing in Java compared to the C, C++ and C# systems I used to work on. Hence, my statements.
Java is pretty much unique in its inherent support for cross-version support. There's a special deprecation annotation you can attach to any function or class that causes warnings if you attempt to use downgraded features. You won't find that in C/C++ or VB. In fact, one reason I bailed from Microsoft was that not only was I routinely getting nailed on MS apps to the degree that in extreme cases, I was looking at re-installing an old OS so I could install an old IDE so I could use an old compiler to make a 2-line emergency change, MS would routinely replace an entire API with a totally incompatible one. I got nailed hard on this with SOAP, but the Database API-of-the-day way outright comical - they wouldn't even have the kinks out of the previous one before the next one came along.
With Java's deprecation, you can make your panic fixes, note the deprecation warnings, and make proper version-related updates when things are less stressful (yeah, like that ever happens). The actual Sun-supplied deprecations tend to live forever, so even some items deprecated from Java Version 1 can still be used/abused today. They are a bit weak on the clairvoyance features, however, so forward version dependencies are a bit hit and miss.
The primary reason that major vendors are so picky about JVM brands and versions is that they want to keep their support costs down and even in a strict version-supportive environment like Java, the smaller the number of permutations, the better. Even when the language itself is supportive, the bugs vary from release to release, and yes, some "clever" application programmers do code to internal implementation details or mis-read specs.
Would be nice to actually see this great quality java code in the wild.
We have a ton of server-side java *crap*. It is all crap. I have never seen a java server app that did proper logging-- seems all server-side java coders think uncaught exceptions leading to stack traces are "super cool".
On the client side, things like the java app to manage Brocade FC switches will sometimes show 90% of the zones missing! Oh, you kill all java instances and re-run it, and all is cool. Yeah, java is great.
In the early 90s I was a believer, but too many crappy experiences with java-- now, when I hear java, I just assume total piece of shit until proven otherwise (which is _super rare_; being generous-- I can't think of anything great written in java off the top of my head)
There's no point in singling out Java for any of that. As long as the order of the day is cheaper software produced faster instead of spending time and money to get quality, software is going to be garbage.
I do know some really excellent java apps, and a very large quantity of excellent open-source java support libraries, but the finest tools in the hands of 15-rupee/hour junior programmers working to a fantasy schedule aren't going to produce them.
I provide a lot of advice to Java programmers, and one of the top items I warn them to do is use logging. My own stuff not only logs extensively, it even sends me email for the really dire stuff. As far as letting exceptions fall out on the floor goes, that's a mortal sin in my book.
Of course, because I DO have quality standards, I just get yelled at for not being "productive" enough.
Why would we ever waste police resources on this kind of person?
Because most of the civilized world has public health care, and it costs less to talk him out of it than it would to fix it after the fact.
In in the US, I wouldn't give good odds on private insurance paying out on the medical bills for a deliberately-inflicted wound. So the hospital, EMT services, et al. have to absorb the expense (unless you can squeeze it out of someone who already has proven to be less than competent), thus it becomes "public health care" (a/k/a "socialized medicine") - paid for courtesy of our taxes.
It's cheaper to pay the taxes for socialized police services and nip the problem in the bud.
/. has hit rock bottom.
(for the record, this left/right, liberal/conservative, tweedledum/tweedledee polarization is bullshit. When you actually talk to people, you find a range of viewpoints. Know any concealed weapon carrying liberal democrats? I do. How about social conservative republicans who buy contraceptives? Yep. Or even worse, programmers who use the Visual Studio C# .NET WPF paradigm at work, and then use a Linux desktop coding open source at home. Probably so.)
But liberal and conservative ARE polar opposites. One group will eat your babies. The other group will eat their OWN babies. Opposites, see?
You mean, like, if an employer-provided insurance plan covers it?
There's quite a few million people out there who will have to, you know, get a job first before they can get that.
There's also that "employer-provided insurance plan" - fact is, most of them suck. Instead of my previous catastrophic plan that was dirt cheap ( > $100/mo plus $5k sitting around in the bank to cover the deductible)? The required changes my employer made will mean that my health insurance bill will now cost more per month than a car payment, and I'd still have to pay $3,500 out of pocket* before it actually kicked in and did anything.
So, thanks to the government, instead of my regular salary? I have to dock it by the annual insurance payments.
Way to reduce my fucking wages, Mr President. Anything else I can do to further your short-sighted partisan agenda?
* (That $3,500 becomes a $7,000 annual out-of-pocket max if I got stuck with using an out-of-network provider)
Believe it or not, once upon a time people had jobs. And the jobs frequently carried decent insurance.
But two things happened since 1980. First, jobs stopped being "permanent" and benefits went out the window. Secondly, medical rates skyrocketed because people didn't pay for health care, insurance did. Well, the second item I'm pretty sure predates 1980, actually.
That's where the whole deal from "Hilarycare" on down came in. If you can't keep a job, you get jacked around by the insurance. Worse, for those of us where the inter-job intervals are fairly long, there were intervals where insurance wasn't easy to come by - especially with no income to speak of. Plus you'd get nailed on "pre-existing conditions" when you changed jobs and insurance companies. It's going to take a LOT of Obama-theft to equal what was already done to me via that particular scam.
You always had money "stolen" from you for medical care - it was just mostly invisible pre-paycheck theft. Now we're cranking the honesty up a notch. The only real way to avoid being "robbed" was to be in good health, not involved in a health insurance program, and be willing to play Russian Roulette ... with 3-4 bullets in the gun instead of 1.
Does the current setup suck? Yes it does. It just sucks a little less than continuing to operate under a system based on an employment scheme that died when they invented the word "perma-temping". Most of the faults people find with Obamacare are faults that existed already but were hidden under the carpet, such as people using emergency rooms instead of preventitative care, thereby tapping your tax bill by stealth.
You'd think it was the freaking Apocalypse the way people go on about this. Should we bleed to death slowly or make mistakes and try to correct them? I don't care what party does what, as long as they do something constructive. Predicting the end of the world and vetoing everything - or more commonly, poisoning attempts to make progress (however misguided) is worse than anything we're likely do do wrong. When did helplessness become so fashionable?
If you think healthcare is expensive now wait until people don't have to pay for it.
You mean, like, if an employer-provided insurance plan covers it?
Turns out not. Ever notice people who don't smoke get lung cancer too?
Smoke is one of a number of things that a carcinogenic and mutagenic but the body usually takes care of this. in 2004 we found out there's a cytochrome B enzyme, the CYP1B1 variant, and that it only occurs in cancer cells, and a phytoallexin in some foods is converted to picotaneol which happens to kill cancer cells but not regular cells. Gene 53 controls this and low and behold gene 53 is deactived in nearly all cancer patients. This theory just panned out with trials in SF of Potters new prostate drug, so good they stopped the trials and just gave it to everyone and that was V1.0 of his drug, V2.0 works in the general case. So it's not so much smokes cause cancer (so does gasoline, those organics are generally why non-smokers get it) as it is the body lacks the raw materials to make the molecules that get rid of cancer. Long story short, spraying fugicides since wwii did it, since plants make this phytolallexin in response to mold.
So, bad example, try a car analogy, they go over well here.
Ah. So Global Warming is a myth, Smoking doesn't cause cancer and your day job is in a pretzel factory.
Care to explain why the Earth is flat, next?
His writing wasn't 100% Science Fiction but close enough and since it's either that or Fantasy we'll have to allow it I think.
I'd vote poetry. Lafferty and Avram Davidson were as much fun to read for the way they expressed things as the actual story.
...than hard sci-fi, but Jack Vance is amazing. He has an extensive body of work, with some personal favorites being:
The Dying Earth series
The Demon Princes series
The Lyonesse trilogy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance
Plenty of sci-fi in his Gaean Reach novels. Maybe not hard fiction, but generally nothing more fantastic than FTL drives and exotic drugs. IIRC, the Demon Princes fits in there. While Lyonesse was specifically intended to be classic fantasy, the magic of the Dying Earth can be considered as the ultimate expression of Clarke's Law about Magic and Technology. Also vote me up for The Last Castle - genetic engineering.
Define global warming. Define stoped.
The last ten years the sun e.g. was in a cold cycle is noww slowly gettig hotter again.
There are dozens of effects finally defining the local temperature.
That has nothing to do with GLOBAL warming.
Why don't you look a bit around over the rest of the GLOBE to get an idea how bad it already is?
There are also dozens of effects finally defining whether you get lung cancer.
However, we're pretty sure that smoking is one of the more significant ones now.
The 5 XXXx 6 stages of denial:
1: It's not happening.
2: It's happening, but it's no big deal.
3: It's happening, it's a big deal, but there's nothing we can do.
4: It's happening, it's a big deal, this is what we can do, but it's too expensive.
5: It's happening, it's a big deal, it's too late to do what we could have done earlier, next time be rich like us so you can insulate yourself from the consequences
6. It's happening. We're DOOMED! Why didn't those damned greenie hippies DO something about this while there was still time????
Software isn't hard. Everyone constantly tells me so. "It's simple! All You Have To Do Is...".
"Oh, those preliminary mockup screens look almost perfect". So you'll have the entire system ready for production deployment next Tuesday, right?"
"Just git 'er DUN!"
Gnome3 is probably a LOT more intuitive.
Are you telling me you did NOT search for a shutdown button in the initial GNOME release? I mean, who the fuck presses Alt just to see "logoff" change to "shutdown" (It was the default, don't know about the current GNOME release. I hope they fixed it)
Support your statement with facts.
To tell the truth, by the time I was ready to shut down, I was in a mood to throw the whole machine against the wall. That's ONE way to turn it off!
But you're right. I was terminating the OS with extreme prejudice until I accidentally stumbled across the hint about the ALT button. I believe its fixed now, but I switched to Cinnamon because I cannot live without the toolbar applets. Cinnamon was freezing frequently, but now that all appears fixed. And from what I can tell, it's actually a lot easier to write applets for Cinnamon than for Gnome.
If you're downloading, you don't need a CD at all, just do the net install so you only install the things you want/need. The only reason you should want a CD is because you're buying it and having it shipped to you in the mail, or your friend is burning it for you and sending it to you, because you have no net access, or very slow access, and don't want to even bother with the net install.
And if someone is actually mailing you a physical disc, then why bother limiting yourself to a CD? Have them send you a DVD instead. Or even a USB thumb drive.
... Or the destination machine isn't the machine that has the Internet connection.
Why is a CD's capacity the deciding factor for a component with such broad repercussions throughout the OS? It's 2012, folks. How many new installations are really made or broken on what works from a 700MB CD when a 4.7GB DVD is an incredibly common substitute?
I'm not ridiculing this decision, despite my surprised tone. I'm actually interested in learning more about the reasoning behind it, if anyone has some more background.
Believe it or not, not all of us have ultra-high speed Internet connections. Or a desire to install the world at one go, for that matter.
Whether Gnome2 was intuitive, I'm not sure. Gnome3 is probably a LOT more intuitive.
It's just also useless.
And not all of the missing Gnome2 features can switched back into existence. As far as I can tell, Gnome3 won't do toolbar applets at all.
Have you tried Unity or KDE or the other stuff out there?
They're all crap.
Gnome at least is moving forward.
Not forward. Definitely not forward. Not even Brownian. Very definitely retrograde. It lost critical features of the earlier Gnome desktops.
Between that and the obsession of Gnome's original creator on Things Microsoft, I'd expect a Gnome OS to be a lot like Windows ME.
and her ideas worked so well that she died penniless and living off the socialism she so despised (look it up, she did).
Come off it. Ayn was just a scared little woman frightened by dictators. I could spend hours recounting the holes in her philosophy, but others have done it much better than I ever could.
Never mind the holes in her philosophy, how much credence can you put in a "30-minute speech" that probably takes 2 hours even when read?
I don't normally skip over parts of a book, but Galts's speech was not only absurdly long, you'd have to be terminally dim not to have gotten the point by the time he made it, so it's redundant.
I thought PJ closed Groklaw. Did she change her mind?
No, she handed it off. Still pops in sometimes, though.
Thanks to such shenanigans as the Apple sueage machine and Oracle v. Android, there's more than enough fodder to keep Groklaw going even if SCO could finally be reduced to its component atoms.
If someone is reading at a company with a filter so invasive that it's counting the number of fucks on a random web site, then perhaps they shouldn't be reading slashdot at work. I'm generally not very profane, but I will not bowdlerize myself for the convenience of people fucking around on paid time.
The children! Think of the f_cking children!
Baen was pretty much DRM-free from the get-go - a personal decision by Jim Baen himself, who alas, is no longer with us.
TOR has been working on it, but as I understand it, there were existing obligations to be cleared. Effective July 2012, however, all new TOR offerings are supposed to be DRM-free. Sadly, older purchases are not generally convertable.
I was looking on a bookseller's catalog today and noticed that the latest in a series of TOR books offered by them carried an explicit notification that due to publisher stipulations, that the book in question would NOT contain DRM. So kudos to TOR!
ROI talks, bullshit walks.
True ROI includes a lot more than just how fast the code got written. It includes how easy it is to maintain, how reliable it is, and these days, almost invariably how secure it is.
Beware of bean-counters. Anything that doesn't look like a bean, they ignore.
eBooks should be a CONVENIENCE format AS WELL as your paper copy.
It should NOT be REPLACING your paper copy.
Anybody who buys an ebook without a paper copy is just a mug and is welcome to jump blindly off the cliff to the CLOUD.
My parents came in with this leaflet about FREE CLOUD from the purchase of a new computer and asked me to install it lol.
FOOLS.
You can pry my paper books from my dead cold hands.
You obviously haven't had a shelf full of books fall on you recently. I had to cut back on book purchases because I didn't have physical space to store them all and I re-read books over and over so I don' get rid of them. I almost never bought hardbound editions for the same reason (plus the expense, of course). So having them in electronic form instead has been a real life-saver.
On the other hand, when I "buy" a book, I expect it to STAY bought. If Amazon or B&N does a "Borders" and goes belly up, I would be greatly displeased if a major chunk of my libary evaporated overnight. So I make it a policy that anything I do buy has a crackable DRM scheme AND that I should be able to offload the book onto a generic file storage system of my own.