And they were interviewing one of the members of the Reform party whose job it was to arrange the vote and they also interviewed the folks at eballet.com for small time.
Firstly, this wasn't only online. They conducted the ballot via mail, phone, as well as online. Also, the way they verified the votes is the same way they verify all votes whether online or not: the voting registration numbers. The internet voting was only open for a short window of time anyway...like 3 days if I recall correctly and the dates were mailed to reform party members.
As to the validity of the vote, both people interviewed assured that no votes were counted twice. Even so, the validity of the vote has been questioned and has something to do with the breakup of the reform party. I don't know enough about what happened to comment on that aspect.
"Apparently there is an endless supply of engineers willing to participate in the mass production of crap. Any given toaster is a piece of crap. Any given computer is a piece of crap. There are of course exceptions, but by and large the mass-produced output of engineers the world over is crap."
Do you really think them are true engineers that designed them?
"They are fundamentally different things - to pretend otherwise is not constructive, since that assumption will lead to misunderstandings."
No, you are wrong. They are the same. FTP contains files and directories...so does your local file system. Web Pages are simply files in your filesystem. The differences between them are mere technicalities.
"A similar interface will just lead people to believe that it is a similar function. I'm sorry, but there is a big difference between files on your PC and files on some server across the Atlantic."
They *are* a similar function! Are you blind! Can you not percieve the similarity! They are simply different machines!
"TROLL!"
I am looking for you to back this one up.
"Save your amateur psychology for another day."
Okay. I deserve that one.
"And this is a good thing, why exactly?. Playing an MP3 is a very different thing to moving files around. It requires a very different interface."
Consistancy. Yes playing mp3 is a little different but Nautilus changes its interface slightly to compensate. But look at the advantages: the mp3 file is just like any other file...it has an icon associated with it. When the user clicks on it, the user sees a control to play and change tracks. The user expects it! It is natural and intuitive to the user! You can't get much better results than that.
"Oh right. So when it's done with a GUI, it's real power, but when it's done with a command-line, it's, what - fake power?"
Okay. Now you are responding to my words and not my meaning. I mean that piping flat files to each other might have been cool in the 1970's, we need something more for the 2000's. Nautilus seems to be there. We *need* applications that borrow the capabilities of other applications to fit their needs. And users are no longer programmers and computers are no longer stuck in a one-dimensional text-based world. We need the computer to obey the user and show the user what he needs to see---let the user *visualize* what the computer is trying to show him---and *interact* with the user. Computers are more complicated things now. And we need applications that deal with this complexity and present it comfortably to the user. It is the nature of the industry.
"Ever thought about not taking things so personally?"
Okay. It was the posts that got to me...not the poster.
But could you please try to respond to my meaning instead of taking pot shots at my choice of words?
I guess it can be interpreted as a flame. But I really hate zealotry.
> 1) MSIE is componentized as well.
Yes. I don't understand the point though.
> 2) You make claims about power and ease-of-use
> based on some screenshots. Is this because the
> icons are prettier than MSIE's? Seems to me you
> can't talk about either property without having
> used the system to do something.
This is a GUI app. Much of the functionality is apparent from screenshots! The power claim is easy. Do you see the web browser? Do you see the mp3 player? That is power. Ease-of-use claim is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.
> 3) I agree that there is utility in blending
> functionality within a single GUI. But there is
> much greater utility in the command line because
> the command line can be utilized remotely, over
> a modem if need be, with very little loss of
> power or responsiveness. The UI you choose
> depends on the purpose for which you are using
> the system. If you're using it to replace a
> bunch of Windows terminals, then Nautilus is for
> you.
Nautilus *can* be used remotely (from others who have used it, I haven't). I am not here to tell you the command line is obsolete. There are thousands of people who are used to this interface and there will be things that can only be done in this form for quite some time. What I *am* trying to do is open your eyes. This isn't about Microsoft and it never was. It is about making more use out of the capabilities of modern computers. And bringing everyone else with us.
This by far not the first time I am well disappointed with the slashdot crowd. Perhaps someday I will quit posting here. That day is not today.
Nautilus is great! Maybe some of you can step back a moment to see what Nautilus really it...of course not! this is slashdot! The only one who is allowed to include web browsing functionality into the file manager is Microsoft, right? Wrong! It just makes sense! FTP, HTML, file directories...they all are dependent on each other...they all make *sense* to exist together. Has anyone ever browsed an FTP site in IE? Notice how it looked *exactly* like any other folder in Windows Explorer? That is the *point*! It is called usability, people. It is called ease of use, people. The best interface is when everything looks the same! It is also called power.
You see, soon novice users will have the power to do some of things you *can't* on the command-line. And that makes you mad. And makes you label Nautilus a Windows clone. Grow up.
But lets just say for a moment, that you can, theoretically, think out of the box. Then you will see that Nautilus is more than just fancy file manager with web functionality. Did you see the screenshot with the mp3 player? You can play mp3's directly in the file browser! And don't tell me about big Microsoftian applications (again, another stupid comparison with Microsoft) that are monoliths. Nautilus uses components. That means that the web browser is a separate component, the mp3 player is a separate component, and maybe the file browser is a separate component...I don't know! But it is the Unix way, right? Except for the "easy" part which, as we all know...is way to Microsoftian for our own good, right?
So instead of piping|our|outdated|legacy|flat-text|utilities|to| each-other, we have real power in the OS. Now we can have a powerful yet easy application. Now we can have our cake and eat it too.
(Note: My hostility is towards several posters who have already posted. I clicked in this story to see if others have seen what I saw in the screenshots of Nautilus. Instead I see anti-Microsoft zealotry. I just think the folks at Eazel deserve a little more. They have actually gone quite a ways beyond Microsoft in both power and ease-of-use. There. I said something bad about Microsoft. You can like me now.)
I was going to post the same thing until I found your post.
A lot of people, especially users of Unix-like operating systems, spend a non-trivial amount of time moving, creating, renaming, and deleting stupid little files. And these stupid little files often have stupid names and belong in stupid places or the stupid OS won't work right.
What the user should be doing is telling the system what he wants done and not *how* he wants it done. It is a simple and powerful concept but will require quite a bit of AI, but will be worth it. Things like moving files around are operations that shouldn't need to be said...it is implied. Tell the system "I am moving to a new hard drive and disposing the old one." should transfer the files automatically. Telling it "Okay, I need more space on my disk." should have the response "Do you want me to delete all non-priority files not used in 5 months?" Answer "Yes."
You see? It makes sense. This is where the Unix shell would be now if Unix was completely different. This both makes the system easier and more powerful at the same time! Isn't this what so many geeks have been asking for?
But file management is one of the least worries of such a system. You should be able email, browse the web, manage users, and communicate with application with such an interface.
It is always interesting when I read articles like theses. Especially when there are discussions afterwords. Because every so often there is a gem of an idea hidden somewhere deep in a slashdot thread. I have been looking for them gems for a long time now. I fear I may forgotten some of them, but still.
So what is the the next GUI paradigm. I am not sure---indeed, how could anyone be. Some people are of the opinion that everything is going to end up on the web in HTML and Javascript. Please. That would be a horrible interface. HTML is meant as documentation markup language and Javascript was for those who thought it should be more.
Then there are those who beleive we are going into the VUI era. While I am inclined to agree, in part, some people take it too far. There are certain things that voice is suited to and that is simple commands and queries. But even the crew of the Enterprise-D went to a console to get the real work done. I would never want navigate a filesystem by voice, it would take too much memorization (provided you are not at the computer) and would be much slower to what we have today.
Then there are the advocates of the 3D interface. It is the logical succession of the 2D interface afterall, right? Well that is true but unfortunately it is not so simple. The eye can only see things in 2 and a half dimensions (the half because the two eyes can somewhat percieve distance) and any more than that then we might as well be wondering around a 4th dimensional maze (an exageration to make a point). A principle of UI design is that there should be visual clues as to the presence of interface objects but if such objects are behind other objects, how is the user suppose to know that they are there?
So is the interface stuck? Perhaps. But we must consider what it is users do with their computers that requires an interface.
Forget about the word processor and the spreadsheet. Personal Computers have been able to perform these tasks from the beginning, even in the age of DOS. People do email and browse information, often on the web. People play games. But this only the average user. The interface of the future should consider all users. This is perhaps the largest difference between the interface of the future and that of the past.
Consider the tasks of all users. From the software developer to the web developer to the engineer to the secratary to the airport personel. The thing you should notice is that the interface must be different for each. One overpowering interface, in the future, will no longer do. In fact, the merits of the windowing enviroment seems to only be useful to a subset of all users. Certainly airport personel should not need a taskbar or a main menu with a list of applications when they would only need one application at all.
But these kinds of considerations seem to go against many of today's principles of user interface design. As of now, I do not know how this can be reconciled but the Anti-Mac article does foster a clue. That perhaps the usability principles need to be changed. I like what the guy has to say. He questions every common convention in modern user interfaces. He puts us well on the way toward the next GUI Paradigm.
"One of the main reasons Unix is so fragmented and inconsistent, which really is what he's complaining about, is that the whole system (kernel, libs, user interface) never been under a single entity's control. Someone above cited MacOS X as a great example of what Unix can become if it's done right. This is true -- it's easy to be consistent when a single entity controls every aspect of the platform. The problem is, that's not what most Linux users want."
No, that is not what he was complaining about. He was complaining about software not sharing much code and nothing enforcing policy.
He can't twist his words around until he is wrong.
"Where he is completely wrong is his claim that Unix is no longer a platform for innovation. He's got that completely backwards -- indeed, the whole reason for the inconsistency of user interfaces is the very openness and relative simplicity of Unix. Each layer is separate from the next, so it's easy to write a new GUI system on top of the OS without changing any of the underlying layers. And people have done just that, which has led to several generations of X and other apps lying around (Xaw, Motif, OffiX, etc) -- people see a problem with the existing GUI and they reinvent the wheel, leading to a proliferation of incompatible interfaces."
The problem is that all them permutations of interfaces are not innovative, really. They are just different and most often of poor quality.
"The upshot is, because it's open, we have a choice. And choice can lead to inconsistency. So if he wants to work on a platform where everything will always be consistent, he can go work for Apple or Microsoft. Otherwise, he'll just have to make Gnome so good that no one will want to use anything else, because there isn't any way to shove things down people's throats in the *nix world."
"Its open source. Do something about it. If you don't like it, change it. If its broken, fix it. Its the open source mantra."
There *is* no mantra.
"Actually, Miguel is one of the few people who is in a position where doing something about it is actually feasable. Whatever happened to that KDE & GNOME common component archetecure? That would have been a step in the right direction."
Bonobo is toolkit independent.
"I do believe that there is to much ego flying about for a lot of good things to get done. It takes a big man to climb down and say, okay, lets merge. Lets reuse. You can do it better than me, and with OS development kudo is currency, and to loose ego is to loose currancy."
I don't see anymore ego than that of spoiled children. But this is not comming from Miguel.
Never have I seen so many misleading and incorrect posts moderated so high. I know why this is, though. Because of the combination of three things:
* He said something bad about UNIX. * He said something good about Microsoft. * It was Miguel who said it.
Now by this combination and the hive-like mind of GNU/Linux zealots, rational thought is left aside.
Look people, think for yourselves. Miguel made very valid and very true statements. He has made a number of widely used programs in his past, GNOME only being one of his recent.
Look. I urge you people to think a little. Consider a little. And go back to rational thought. Miguel is also trying solve the problems he finds as well, rather than ignore them like others on this board do.
"I have been reading dotslash for over a year and have decided that most of the posters here are either in highshool or at best very limited work experience (not a flame - there are some very intelligent posters here - but they are outweighed 10:1 by non-intelligible types)."
So, being in high school implies a "non-intelligible" type?
That kind of sucks. Because I thought I had a chance at being of the intelligent posters if posted intelligently. I am glad you straightened that up for me, because I was just about post more garbage on this forum, you know; one of them "non-intelligible" posts.
Otherwise, I agree with you about the downhill trend of slashdot. That is, once you ignore the bigotry.
While my experience is primarily with imperitive languages, I suspect the same is true of functional languages - providing the type safety doesn't get in the way of code reuse (as it did to a small extent in C++ before templates, though this could be easily worked around with macros).
I am definitely not any kind of expert in functional languages, but I have been studying them for a while now. You see, the types in functional languages, at least Haskell, are quite different from what you would experience in C or Pascal. Types are in a class system. You have your most generic polymorphic types and then the set of values can be restricted as much as the programmer needs. I can't explain it exactly, but I think it is this that prevents the need for them weird hacks you described.
Why do we need yet another C-like language. Why couldn't they be the least bit inventive something similar to scheme, haskell, or eiffel. But no. We must catter to all of the java, c and c++ programmers out there, many whom don't know that there are other, perhaps superior, things out there.
Please, someone start a movement to make functional languages more widespread! If one has already begun, let me know!
"Well, Motif is free now, Netscape is still free, and pine is free.. so is the JDK. Hmm.. Oh yea, I forgot.. everything has to "conform" to their GPL or it is not "free"."
The only problem with your theory is that it doesn't make any sense. The GPL is only one example of a free license. The BSD license and X license are other example. You should read the GNU site sometime (www.gnu.org).
Thus far, only one person in this thread has understood that when the poster said that the application isn't free, he meant the application doesn't preserve his freedom---and that person was moderated down! No one cares how much the program costs!
This isn't any operating system. We have principles to uphold. GNU/Linux was based on the principle that the users have the same rights to the software as the developer or vendor. This is why community development is possible. This is why Kylix isn't a good thing.
It is here to encourage us to give up what we have.
The article gives a summary of Plan 9's features. It seems that is has better networking and sharing of resources and graphics support. It really sounds like UNIX on steroids (that is a weird analogy to make, considering UNIX has been known as DOS on steroids).
But quite frankly, I am speaking out of my ass. I'll look more into the OS sometime later. I have never used it.
So, does anyone who knows about Plan 9 want to give us a link to a comparision between it and GNU/Linux? Or write a brief comparison themselves? *sheepish smile*
Slashdot Mirror
And they were interviewing one of the members of the Reform party whose job it was to arrange the vote and they also interviewed the folks at eballet.com for small time.
Firstly, this wasn't only online. They conducted the ballot via mail, phone, as well as online. Also, the way they verified the votes is the same way they verify all votes whether online or not: the voting registration numbers. The internet voting was only open for a short window of time anyway...like 3 days if I recall correctly and the dates were mailed to reform party members.
As to the validity of the vote, both people interviewed assured that no votes were counted twice. Even so, the validity of the vote has been questioned and has something to do with the breakup of the reform party. I don't know enough about what happened to comment on that aspect.
"Apparently there is an endless supply of engineers willing to participate in the mass production of crap. Any given toaster is a piece of crap. Any given computer is a piece of crap. There are of course exceptions, but by and large the mass-produced output of engineers the world over is crap."
Do you really think them are true engineers that designed them?
"They are fundamentally different things - to pretend otherwise is not constructive, since that assumption will lead to misunderstandings."
No, you are wrong. They are the same. FTP contains files and directories...so does your local file system. Web Pages are simply files in your filesystem. The differences between them are mere technicalities.
"A similar interface will just lead people to believe that it is a similar function. I'm sorry, but there is a big difference between files on your PC and files on some server across the Atlantic."
They *are* a similar function! Are you blind! Can you not percieve the similarity! They are simply different machines!
"TROLL!"
I am looking for you to back this one up.
"Save your amateur psychology for another day."
Okay. I deserve that one.
"And this is a good thing, why exactly?. Playing an MP3 is a very different thing to moving files around. It requires a very different interface."
Consistancy. Yes playing mp3 is a little different but Nautilus changes its interface slightly to compensate. But look at the advantages: the mp3 file is just like any other file...it has an icon associated with it. When the user clicks on it, the user sees a control to play and change tracks. The user expects it! It is natural and intuitive to the user! You can't get much better results than that.
"Oh right. So when it's done with a GUI, it's real power, but when it's done with a command-line, it's, what - fake power?"
Okay. Now you are responding to my words and not my meaning. I mean that piping flat files to each other might have been cool in the 1970's, we need something more for the 2000's. Nautilus seems to be there. We *need* applications that borrow the capabilities of other applications to fit their needs. And users are no longer programmers and computers are no longer stuck in a one-dimensional text-based world. We need the computer to obey the user and show the user what he needs to see---let the user *visualize* what the computer is trying to show him---and *interact* with the user. Computers are more complicated things now. And we need applications that deal with this complexity and present it comfortably to the user. It is the nature of the industry.
"Ever thought about not taking things so personally?"
Okay. It was the posts that got to me...not the poster.
But could you please try to respond to my meaning instead of taking pot shots at my choice of words?
> nice attempt at flame, but hell, I'll bite.
I guess it can be interpreted as a flame. But I really hate zealotry.
> 1) MSIE is componentized as well.
Yes. I don't understand the point though.
> 2) You make claims about power and ease-of-use
> based on some screenshots. Is this because the
> icons are prettier than MSIE's? Seems to me you
> can't talk about either property without having
> used the system to do something.
This is a GUI app. Much of the functionality is apparent from screenshots! The power claim is easy. Do you see the web browser? Do you see the mp3 player? That is power. Ease-of-use claim is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.
> 3) I agree that there is utility in blending
> functionality within a single GUI. But there is
> much greater utility in the command line because
> the command line can be utilized remotely, over
> a modem if need be, with very little loss of
> power or responsiveness. The UI you choose
> depends on the purpose for which you are using
> the system. If you're using it to replace a
> bunch of Windows terminals, then Nautilus is for
> you.
Nautilus *can* be used remotely (from others who have used it, I haven't). I am not here to tell you the command line is obsolete. There are thousands of people who are used to this interface and there will be things that can only be done in this form for quite some time. What I *am* trying to do is open your eyes. This isn't about Microsoft and it never was. It is about making more use out of the capabilities of modern computers. And bringing everyone else with us.
This by far not the first time I am well disappointed with the slashdot crowd. Perhaps someday I will quit posting here. That day is not today.
| each-other, we have real power in the OS. Now we can have a powerful yet easy application. Now we can have our cake and eat it too.
Nautilus is great! Maybe some of you can step back a moment to see what Nautilus really it...of course not! this is slashdot! The only one who is allowed to include web browsing functionality into the file manager is Microsoft, right? Wrong! It just makes sense! FTP, HTML, file directories...they all are dependent on each other...they all make *sense* to exist together. Has anyone ever browsed an FTP site in IE? Notice how it looked *exactly* like any other folder in Windows Explorer? That is the *point*! It is called usability, people. It is called ease of use, people. The best interface is when everything looks the same! It is also called power.
You see, soon novice users will have the power to do some of things you *can't* on the command-line. And that makes you mad. And makes you label Nautilus a Windows clone. Grow up.
But lets just say for a moment, that you can, theoretically, think out of the box. Then you will see that Nautilus is more than just fancy file manager with web functionality. Did you see the screenshot with the mp3 player? You can play mp3's directly in the file browser! And don't tell me about big Microsoftian applications (again, another stupid comparison with Microsoft) that are monoliths. Nautilus uses components. That means that the web browser is a separate component, the mp3 player is a separate component, and maybe the file browser is a separate component...I don't know! But it is the Unix way, right? Except for the "easy" part which, as we all know...is way to Microsoftian for our own good, right?
So instead of piping|our|outdated|legacy|flat-text|utilities|to
(Note: My hostility is towards several posters who have already posted. I clicked in this story to see if others have seen what I saw in the screenshots of Nautilus. Instead I see anti-Microsoft zealotry. I just think the folks at Eazel deserve a little more. They have actually gone quite a ways beyond Microsoft in both power and ease-of-use. There. I said something bad about Microsoft. You can like me now.)
Yeah. But if your greatest weakness was that you were bad procastinator? I don't think people hire procastinators :(
I was going to post the same thing until I found your post.
A lot of people, especially users of Unix-like operating systems, spend a non-trivial amount of time moving, creating, renaming, and deleting stupid little files. And these stupid little files often have stupid names and belong in stupid places or the stupid OS won't work right.
What the user should be doing is telling the system what he wants done and not *how* he wants it done. It is a simple and powerful concept but will require quite a bit of AI, but will be worth it. Things like moving files around are operations that shouldn't need to be said...it is implied. Tell the system "I am moving to a new hard drive and disposing the old one." should transfer the files automatically. Telling it "Okay, I need more space on my disk." should have the response "Do you want me to delete all non-priority files not used in 5 months?" Answer "Yes."
You see? It makes sense. This is where the Unix shell would be now if Unix was completely different. This both makes the system easier and more powerful at the same time! Isn't this what so many geeks have been asking for?
But file management is one of the least worries of such a system. You should be able email, browse the web, manage users, and communicate with application with such an interface.
It is always interesting when I read articles like theses. Especially when there are discussions afterwords. Because every so often there is a gem of an idea hidden somewhere deep in a slashdot thread. I have been looking for them gems for a long time now. I fear I may forgotten some of them, but still.
So what is the the next GUI paradigm. I am not sure---indeed, how could anyone be. Some people are of the opinion that everything is going to end up on the web in HTML and Javascript. Please. That would be a horrible interface. HTML is meant as documentation markup language and Javascript was for those who thought it should be more.
Then there are those who beleive we are going into the VUI era. While I am inclined to agree, in part, some people take it too far. There are certain things that voice is suited to and that is simple commands and queries. But even the crew of the Enterprise-D went to a console to get the real work done. I would never want navigate a filesystem by voice, it would take too much memorization (provided you are not at the computer) and would be much slower to what we have today.
Then there are the advocates of the 3D interface. It is the logical succession of the 2D interface afterall, right? Well that is true but unfortunately it is not so simple. The eye can only see things in 2 and a half dimensions (the half because the two eyes can somewhat percieve distance) and any more than that then we might as well be wondering around a 4th dimensional maze (an exageration to make a point). A principle of UI design is that there should be visual clues as to the presence of interface objects but if such objects are behind other objects, how is the user suppose to know that they are there?
So is the interface stuck? Perhaps. But we must consider what it is users do with their computers that requires an interface.
Forget about the word processor and the spreadsheet. Personal Computers have been able to perform these tasks from the beginning, even in the age of DOS. People do email and browse information, often on the web. People play games. But this only the average user. The interface of the future should consider all users. This is perhaps the largest difference between the interface of the future and that of the past.
Consider the tasks of all users. From the software developer to the web developer to the engineer to the secratary to the airport personel. The thing you should notice is that the interface must be different for each. One overpowering interface, in the future, will no longer do. In fact, the merits of the windowing enviroment seems to only be useful to a subset of all users. Certainly airport personel should not need a taskbar or a main menu with a list of applications when they would only need one application at all.
But these kinds of considerations seem to go against many of today's principles of user interface design. As of now, I do not know how this can be reconciled but the Anti-Mac article does foster a clue. That perhaps the usability principles need to be changed. I like what the guy has to say. He questions every common convention in modern user interfaces. He puts us well on the way toward the next GUI Paradigm.
Wow. This is one of the few highly moderated post in this forum that aren't misleading!
:)
I am glad that I am not the only starry-eyed person around here
You may want to search for the Vapour OS Project on Google to see another idea for an OS.
"One of the main reasons Unix is so fragmented and inconsistent, which really is what he's complaining about, is that the whole system (kernel, libs, user interface) never been under a single entity's control. Someone above cited MacOS X as a great example of what Unix can become if it's done right. This is true -- it's easy to be consistent when a single entity controls every aspect of the platform. The problem is, that's not what most Linux users want."
No, that is not what he was complaining about. He was complaining about software not sharing much code and nothing enforcing policy.
He can't twist his words around until he is wrong.
"Where he is completely wrong is his claim that Unix is no longer a platform for innovation. He's got that completely backwards -- indeed, the whole reason for the inconsistency of user interfaces is the very openness and relative simplicity of Unix. Each layer is separate from the next, so it's easy to write a new GUI system on top of the OS without changing any of the underlying layers. And people have done just that, which has led to several generations of X and other apps lying around (Xaw, Motif, OffiX, etc) -- people see a problem with the existing GUI and they reinvent the wheel, leading to a proliferation of incompatible interfaces."
The problem is that all them permutations of interfaces are not innovative, really. They are just different and most often of poor quality.
"The upshot is, because it's open, we have a choice. And choice can lead to inconsistency. So if he wants to work on a platform where everything will always be consistent, he can go work for Apple or Microsoft. Otherwise, he'll just have to make Gnome so good that no one will want to use anything else, because there isn't any way to shove things down people's throats in the *nix world."
Choice isn't an excuse for poor quality.
"Its open source. Do something about it. If you don't like it, change it. If its broken, fix it. Its the open source mantra."
There *is* no mantra.
"Actually, Miguel is one of the few people who is in a position where doing something about it is actually feasable. Whatever happened to that KDE & GNOME common component archetecure? That would have been a step in the right direction."
Bonobo is toolkit independent.
"I do believe that there is to much ego flying about for a lot of good things to get done. It takes a big man to climb down and say, okay, lets merge. Lets reuse. You can do it better than me, and with OS development kudo is currency, and to loose ego is to loose currancy."
I don't see anymore ego than that of spoiled children. But this is not comming from Miguel.
You either didn't read what Miguel said or didn't understand it.
You were only moderated up because you conformed to what the hive mind expects.
Now I know Slashdot is going downhill.
Never have I seen so many misleading and incorrect posts moderated so high. I know why this is, though. Because of the combination of three things:
* He said something bad about UNIX.
* He said something good about Microsoft.
* It was Miguel who said it.
Now by this combination and the hive-like mind of GNU/Linux zealots, rational thought is left aside.
Look people, think for yourselves. Miguel made very valid and very true statements. He has made a number of widely used programs in his past, GNOME only being one of his recent.
Look. I urge you people to think a little. Consider a little. And go back to rational thought. Miguel is also trying solve the problems he finds as well, rather than ignore them like others on this board do.
Fuck the zealotry.
"I have been reading dotslash for over a year and have decided that most of the posters here are either in highshool or at best very limited work experience (not a flame - there are some very intelligent posters here - but they are outweighed 10:1 by non-intelligible types)."
So, being in high school implies a "non-intelligible" type?
That kind of sucks. Because I thought I had a chance at being of the intelligent posters if posted intelligently. I am glad you straightened that up for me, because I was just about post more garbage on this forum, you know; one of them "non-intelligible" posts.
Otherwise, I agree with you about the downhill trend of slashdot. That is, once you ignore the bigotry.
Best Regardsm,
Kevin Holmes
While my experience is primarily with imperitive languages, I suspect the same is true of functional languages - providing the type safety doesn't get in the way of code reuse (as it did to a small extent in C++ before templates, though this could be easily worked around with macros).
I am definitely not any kind of expert in functional languages, but I have been studying them for a while now. You see, the types in functional languages, at least Haskell, are quite different from what you would experience in C or Pascal. Types are in a class system. You have your most generic polymorphic types and then the set of values can be restricted as much as the programmer needs. I can't explain it exactly, but I think it is this that prevents the need for them weird hacks you described.
Of course isn't inside !
... >
... >
:)
It goes:
<!doctype
<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>...</body>
</html>
not:
<!doctype
<html>
<head><body>...</body></head>
</html>
That's just silly
6 megs = 6144 kb = 6291456 bytes
which is the same as
2 1/2 paragraphhs = 1 side of a sheet of paper (about)
and about 250 words per paragraph
so that's 625 words per page
so mozilla will fit the same amount of information as 10066 pages of information
that is *way* to big
if the OS provides all kinds of libraries, then it doesn't make sense to redo all of that code for GUIs, Pngs, etc.
all for ease of development I suppose
(note: this isn't very informed about Mozillaso it really shouldn't be here, but the numbers I hope are somewhat interesting)
Why do we need yet another C-like language. Why couldn't they be the least bit inventive something similar to scheme, haskell, or eiffel. But no. We must catter to all of the java, c and c++ programmers out there, many whom don't know that there are other, perhaps superior, things out there.
Please, someone start a movement to make functional languages more widespread! If one has already begun, let me know!
"Well, Motif is free now, Netscape is still free, and pine is free.. so is the JDK. Hmm.. Oh yea, I forgot.. everything has to "conform" to their GPL or it is not "free"."
The only problem with your theory is that it doesn't make any sense. The GPL is only one example of a free license. The BSD license and X license are other example. You should read the GNU site sometime (www.gnu.org).
"Doing it in maybe 2 years time - THAT would be ok. But, don't remove it before we've got tools to replace it."
That is EXACTLY their proposal. The move will affect the Woody distribution, which they estimate will be released in 2 years.
The AC is absolutely right. Some of you people don't get it at all. :(
Thus far, only one person in this thread has understood that when the poster said that the application isn't free, he meant the application doesn't preserve his freedom---and that person was moderated down! No one cares how much the program costs!
This isn't any operating system. We have principles to uphold. GNU/Linux was based on the principle that the users have the same rights to the software as the developer or vendor. This is why community development is possible. This is why Kylix isn't a good thing.
It is here to encourage us to give up what we have.
The article gives a summary of Plan 9's features. It seems that is has better networking and sharing of resources and graphics support. It really sounds like UNIX on steroids (that is a weird analogy to make, considering UNIX has been known as DOS on steroids).
But quite frankly, I am speaking out of my ass. I'll look more into the OS sometime later. I have never used it.
So, does anyone who knows about Plan 9 want to give us a link to a comparision between it and GNU/Linux? Or write a brief comparison themselves? *sheepish smile*
Thanks.
I have to wonder:
What would happen if RMS was hit by a bus?
Sounds like Berlin. The API is exposed through CORBA so all languages with CORBA bindings have equal footing.