And, even as a GNOME user, I have to admit that C++ as a basis is a much superior choice to C, especially considering the kludge that seems to underly GNOME, separate libraries for GTK and GNOME applications with surprisingly few applications taking advantage of the GNOME-only libraries.
I strongly disagree. IMHO, using C++ is a big mistake. Most free software is written in C, and thus it's easiest and most straightforward (and thus less buggy) to interface with C libraries. A simple look at the number of language bindings for Qt versus gtk+ shows that the latter is far more portable (or at least ported).
One can always wrap C with C++; the reverse is not true. Indeed, one can write GNOME or gtk+ apps in C++; so far as I know, it is impossible to write KDE or Qt apps in C.
If one wishes to use a real object-oriented language, there are much better options than C++ (SmallTalk, Objective C and CLOS all leap to mind). If one wishes to use a good low-level language, there are much better options than C++ (C leaps to mind). If one wishes to use an ultra-powerful language, there are much better options than C++ (Common Lisp leaps to mind). C++ is a dead end.
The free software community contains some of the best hackers in the world: they have judged C++ and found it wanting. Their discernment should not be ignored lightly.
How can you possibly listen to so many lies per minute and not get sick to your stomach?
I should think that a leftist would have good advice for that kind of thing. What are the lies of the Left? Hitler's an effective leader; Stalin's a nice old guy; socialism is not communism; socialism works; the economy is a zero-sum game; mass-murder of humans is no big deal, but it's wrong to use animals; it's wrong to execute those who rape and murder children--and those are only just a few. Note that most of those are still being bandied about today.
But instead should the world be run by a religious extremist elected by a tiny percentage of the world's population and whose main goal in life is to enrich and empower that tiny minority at the expense of the rest of the world.
As for getting the UN out of the US and the US out of the UN, fine. It's an antiquated relic of the Second World War--we should leave that den of terrorists, dictators, megalomaniacs and loons.
And as for 'invading a country, based on lies,' can you demonstrate a single lie regarding our invasion of Iraq? Our invasion of Iraq was based quite soundly on international law, and had multiple reasons. The one which was sold the hardest--WMDs--now appears to have been incorrect, but please note that no-one disagreed at the time: the world agreed that Hussein had WMDs and WMD programmes; the world disagreed about what to do about them (we, the Brits and dozens of other states wanted to eliminate them; the French, Germans and the knee-jerk anti-American contingent wished to continue profiting therefrom).
Nope--the primary option should be where it is quickest to access (see Fitt's Law), which happens to be on the right. The mouse tends to spend most of its time on the right hand of the screen for most people, and thus the default button should be on the right hand side of the screen.
This has been demonstrated in usability study after usability study. Reading direction hasn't a thing to do with it (or at least, not in the sense you're thinking: I would be unsurprised to find that the most common item should come last because it will be the freshest in one's mind when read, and because it's most likely to mean that one will read the entire list of options).
The Macintosh usability team--until recently, an excellent one--tested this beyond a shadow of a doubt two decades ago.
User research has conclusively demonstrated that the OK button--which is most likely to be the one hit, and is thus the default--should be on the right hand side, since the mouse spends most of its time on the right hand side of the screen, adjusting scrollbars and the like. That's why the Mac has always had it on the right.
Windows did it bass-ackwards, unsurprisingly, and this has been blindly copied by those with no idea of what usability means, again unsurprisingly.
There have been stranger fashions throughout history. If fingerprint identification became a big deal, then yes it's quite likely that one might wear gloves as a matter of course.
It might even be a sign of trust to remove one's gloves in another's home.
Yeah, but I never just typed stuff into those other search engines and expected (rather than hoped) to get an answer. Google is part of what makes things like Linux possible: I can get technical information on my monitor even if I've lost my manual; I can read HOWTOs and debug problems in seconds.
Part of it, of course, is that the web was smaller when those other engines were around. But somehow I don't see them ever having the consistent and reliable quality of Google. Google has become a kind of information utility.
It's pretty cool--I wish you luck. Feel free to contact me with questions; while it's been awhile since I've done a lot with it (not much call for printed papers in the working world), I loved it in college.
Seriously, my grades shot up and I didn't change a whit. Spent more time in pubs, too:-)
Until you can actually click on a cell in a spreadsheet in LaTeX to change its value (there are other advantages to truly embedding a spreadsheed in a.doc) it will never be able to replace Word.
LaTeX isn't a GUI app: it's a language (like HTML or SGML) and a tool which generates a device-independent file (like PostScript or PDF) therefrom. A LaTeX document might look like this:
\documentclass{article}
\title{Sample Document} \author{Joe Blow}
\begin{document} \maketitle
\section{ Jabberwocky}
\emph{Jabberwocky} is the title of a poem which one is often made to read in grammar school. Despite what one's teachers might tell one, it's not really all that great. One's time is better spent reading \emph{Mad} magazine, probably.
\section{Cool Features}
\subsection{Diacritics} Here are some diacritics; some of these are impossible, or highly painful, in Word: \^p, \.h, \d{n}, \~q, \b{o}, \t{b}. Note that \th{}orn and e\dh{} (or do you prefer e\dj?) are easily written; also $\alpha$ and $\gamma$.
\subsection{Math}
Maybe you like to do mathematics---\LaTeX{} can do them inline, e.g.~$\int_a^b\sqrt{1\over2\times3}$.&nbs p; It can also do them in a `callout' format:
$$\int_a^b\sqrt{1\over2\times3}$$
An d of course it knows how to scale parentheses and brackets: $\left<{\left[{1\over2}\right]\over3}\r ight> \times 4$, which of course scale properly when called out:
Rendering it using pdflatex yields this document. Not terribly impressive, perhaps--but in larger documents it becomes Very Nice Indeed.
Things LaTeX buys one:
Automatically converts 'fi,' 'ff,' 'fl' &c. into the proper ligatures.
Inserts a slight space after sentence-ending punctuation (unless told otherwise).
Auto-numbering of sections; auto-renumbering of footnotes, tables of contents, page references.
More diacritics and mathematical symbols than you will ever use (the AMS requires LaTeX, last I checked).
Auto-hyphenation.
LaTeX calculates a visual 'badness' value for each line, and attempts to minimise badness; this means that each page has a uniform amount of greyness, and that rivers, orphans & widows are all avoided.
Proper dashes: minus, hyphen, n-dash and m-dash are all different characters.
Proper quotes: it doesn't do smart quotes, but real quotes.
Programmability: LaTeX is fully programmable.
It's not a word processor: it's a document creation system. It's a whole different workflow. I'll say this much, though: in college I switched from Word to emacs + LaTeX, and my grades when from low Bs to high As: my writing didn't get better, but my presentation did--LaTeX documents are more pleasant to read. I was able to typeset my math homework, instead of handing in hand-scrawled chicken scratch.
That's not what I took away. Linux is designed around being portable and having full access to source code. Thus things which require tight hardware coupling are more uncommon, and things which are necessitated by living in a closed-source world aren't.
But why would I use a half-assed tool when better ones exist? Sure, one can drive a screw with a hammer, but the results aren't gonna be pretty.
It's often useful to have full-fledged spreadsheets/charts embedded in your document that can be modified without a whole lot of copying, pasting,and reformating.
Never said that it's not. Which is why I use LaTeX. No copying, no pasting, no reformatting: I just change the source file and regenerate the.dvi. That's among the nice things offered by LaTeX.
Graphing doesn't belong in a word processor any more than bitmap-creation does--it belongs in a graphing program. There are excellent graphing programs out there (gnuplot, R, Gnumeric, and Maxima are all good in different ways): do the graphing in them, and then include the images in your document.
LaTeX produces the most visually attractive documents out there--there's no reason not to use it.
It's not like smoking or crack with no positive use.
Actually, smoking is quite positive: there's nothing like a relaxing evening pipe or cigar. Nicotine is a stimulant with the edge of caffeine. Now, nicotine can be abused, as is normally the case with cigarettes, but when used properly it's a very pleasant thing indeed.
I can't comment on crack, although I have read that cocaine is quite useful in certain fields as well.
In reality the ability to hold a meaningful and intelligent conversation is likely to be a lot more useful and important than the ability to accurately judge the bra-size of a female from across the room.
Not really. One doesn't get ahead in life by being intelligent or meaningful; one gets ahead by getting along with others, by fitting in and being normal. Which sucks for those of us who aren't normal.
To be fair, what is Sun's incentive to help a product that can eliminate its own operating system?
The incentive is that once the OS is commoditised a) they needn't spend as much money maintaining their OS (since everyone will be contributing to Linux) and b) they can compete on the quality of their hardware, which has typically been above average.
That's why IBM does it. The OS is a commodity, now. Why spend huge sums of cash funding development of your own OS when you could spend rather less in a co-operative venture?
I'm not defending Bush's position; I'm defending my position. I'm no automaton, mindlessly accepting the Republican platform. I happen to disagree with the president regarding IVF, but that's not a battle I can win right now. His policies, though, will in time--if continued by his successors--lead to the ends I seek. His opponents' policies, OTOH, will lead in exactly the wrong direction from my point of view.
There is no perfect candidate: there are only those which are more or less acceptable.
As I asked before--what is so magical about consciousness? Those in comas haven't any consciousness that we're aware of. You and I are unconscious for about a third of our lives. I don't see that a capacity for consciousness or for rational thought is what makes one human or not.
Slashdot editors--please consider posting Coral mirrors for stuff like this. It's one thing when it's a major business, but another thing entirely when it's a personal or small site.
The Libertarians for Life site addresses that very kind of argument. It boils down to this: given that the zygote/embryo/foetus is a human being, why should the mother have the right to kill him? Yes, he depends on her for sustenance--but doesn't an infant depend on his mother for sustenance, and doesn't a child depend on his parents for food, shelter & clothing?
More importantly, how did he get there? Either he's the result of consensual sex, or of rape. In the first case, conception is a foreseeable consequence; one has the ability to not have sex, and one hardly has the right to murder the results of one's free choice. The second case is somewhat more difficult, until one recognises that the conception is a second crime committed upon the mother by the rapist. Recall the saying of your own mother, though: two wrongs don't make a right. How does it make things right for the mother to kill her misbegotten child? What has he done which merits death?
An ectopic pregnancy is a lifeboat situation: there's no good answer, only a least-bad answer (similar to the case of rape): either both mother and chile die, or the child dies. Simple utilitarian calculus says that the child must die. Morality says that the necessity is to be mourned, but no blame can be attached to either mother or physician (although I imagine both would feel rotten).
I cannot accept that a parent should have the power of life and death of his or her children; I thought that sort of thing had gone out of style with the Romans.
If the embryo is human, abortion is a grave wrong; if the embryo is not, abortion is a right. Since I'm convinced the embryo is, in fact, human and that the initiation of violence is something to be avoided, I must therefor oppose abortion.
Regarding the goals of the pro-life movement, no doubt you are correct that a change of culture is required. As a matter of fact, I happen to believe that we are in the midst of exactly such a change. Just as scientists and physicians began to turn against abortion in the nineteenth century as they began to understand the nature of natal development, so too the general culture is beginning to turn against it as we all begin to understand the same thing.
Remember, though: if the unborn are as human as you and I, then abortion is worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot all put together. It's worse than the Moloch-worshipping Carthaginians. Some thirty-forty million or so in the US alone, not to mention Europe and Asia. Let's say seventy to one hundred million who never even got a chance. That's pretty awful.
But supposing you do believe that fertilized embryos deserve protection, as Bush claims to when justifying his opposition to new stem-cell lines. If so, then you should attack in-vitro fertilization first, since it's the much larger user of the technique.
It's a matter of fighting the battles one can win. Politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal.
So we forestall the use of humans in research today; that's better than doing nothing.
If that's true, then there's an even stronger case to be made against in-vitro fertilization.
As it is currently practised, yes. Lots of things have been very common, but are now considered beyond the pale; why should a particular reproductive practise not be one of those?
nice web site by the way, I wasn't aware that some Libertarians were pro-life, I would have thought the woman's rights had some value to Libertarians
Ummm...they are concerned with the mother's rights. They are also concerned with the child's rights. That's the whole thing. Everyone agrees that a parent has to care for a child which has been born, even if that child is a drain on resources (well, everyone except folks like Singer, who is honest enough to admit that arguments in favour of abortion apply to infanticide and killing of anyone one must provide for); the disagreement is on whether that same duty applies before birth.
What do you see as so mystical about passing through the birth canal that on one side of being born one may be destroyed, while on the other one is protected?
We're all collections of cells, after all. What makes us human is our genes (not our limbs: the congenitally crippled lack those; not our abilities: mental defectives lack those)--and those genes are there from the moment of conception.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly disagree. IMHO, using C++ is a big mistake. Most free software is written in C, and thus it's easiest and most straightforward (and thus less buggy) to interface with C libraries. A simple look at the number of language bindings for Qt versus gtk+ shows that the latter is far more portable (or at least ported).
One can always wrap C with C++; the reverse is not true. Indeed, one can write GNOME or gtk+ apps in C++; so far as I know, it is impossible to write KDE or Qt apps in C.
If one wishes to use a real object-oriented language, there are much better options than C++ (SmallTalk, Objective C and CLOS all leap to mind). If one wishes to use a good low-level language, there are much better options than C++ (C leaps to mind). If one wishes to use an ultra-powerful language, there are much better options than C++ (Common Lisp leaps to mind). C++ is a dead end.
The free software community contains some of the best hackers in the world: they have judged C++ and found it wanting. Their discernment should not be ignored lightly.
I should think that a leftist would have good advice for that kind of thing. What are the lies of the Left? Hitler's an effective leader; Stalin's a nice old guy; socialism is not communism; socialism works; the economy is a zero-sum game; mass-murder of humans is no big deal, but it's wrong to use animals; it's wrong to execute those who rape and murder children--and those are only just a few. Note that most of those are still being bandied about today.
Bush is most certainly not a religious extremist. As has been repeatedly shown, Bush makes fewer references to God per year than Clinton. Meanwhile, Kerry gets a free pass on religious language in his campaign (there's a better article out there, but I cannot find it atm).
As for getting the UN out of the US and the US out of the UN, fine. It's an antiquated relic of the Second World War--we should leave that den of terrorists, dictators, megalomaniacs and loons.
And as for 'invading a country, based on lies,' can you demonstrate a single lie regarding our invasion of Iraq? Our invasion of Iraq was based quite soundly on international law, and had multiple reasons. The one which was sold the hardest--WMDs--now appears to have been incorrect, but please note that no-one disagreed at the time: the world agreed that Hussein had WMDs and WMD programmes; the world disagreed about what to do about them (we, the Brits and dozens of other states wanted to eliminate them; the French, Germans and the knee-jerk anti-American contingent wished to continue profiting therefrom).
This has been demonstrated in usability study after usability study. Reading direction hasn't a thing to do with it (or at least, not in the sense you're thinking: I would be unsurprised to find that the most common item should come last because it will be the freshest in one's mind when read, and because it's most likely to mean that one will read the entire list of options).
The Macintosh usability team--until recently, an excellent one--tested this beyond a shadow of a doubt two decades ago.
User research has conclusively demonstrated that the OK button--which is most likely to be the one hit, and is thus the default--should be on the right hand side, since the mouse spends most of its time on the right hand side of the screen, adjusting scrollbars and the like. That's why the Mac has always had it on the right.
Windows did it bass-ackwards, unsurprisingly, and this has been blindly copied by those with no idea of what usability means, again unsurprisingly.
There have been stranger fashions throughout history. If fingerprint identification became a big deal, then yes it's quite likely that one might wear gloves as a matter of course.
It might even be a sign of trust to remove one's gloves in another's home.
Part of it, of course, is that the web was smaller when those other engines were around. But somehow I don't see them ever having the consistent and reliable quality of Google. Google has become a kind of information utility.
Seriously, my grades shot up and I didn't change a whit. Spent more time in pubs, too:-)
LyX attempts to do that. Really, though, WYSIWYG is not a very good paradigm for creating documents, and I believe that LyX suffers for that.
LaTeX isn't a GUI app: it's a language (like HTML or SGML) and a tool which generates a device-independent file (like PostScript or PDF) therefrom. A LaTeX document might look like this:
Rendering it using pdflatex yields this document. Not terribly impressive, perhaps--but in larger documents it becomes Very Nice Indeed.
Things LaTeX buys one:
It's not a word processor: it's a document creation system. It's a whole different workflow. I'll say this much, though: in college I switched from Word to emacs + LaTeX, and my grades when from low Bs to high As: my writing didn't get better, but my presentation did--LaTeX documents are more pleasant to read. I was able to typeset my math homework, instead of handing in hand-scrawled chicken scratch.
That's not what I took away. Linux is designed around being portable and having full access to source code. Thus things which require tight hardware coupling are more uncommon, and things which are necessitated by living in a closed-source world aren't.
It's often useful to have full-fledged spreadsheets/charts embedded in your document that can be modified without a whole lot of copying, pasting,and reformating.
Never said that it's not. Which is why I use LaTeX. No copying, no pasting, no reformatting: I just change the source file and regenerate the .dvi. That's among the nice things offered by LaTeX.
LaTeX produces the most visually attractive documents out there--there's no reason not to use it.
To my knowledge, George Bush has never argued in favour of a draft; to date, it's been (rather) liberal Democratic Senators...
Actually, smoking is quite positive: there's nothing like a relaxing evening pipe or cigar. Nicotine is a stimulant with the edge of caffeine. Now, nicotine can be abused, as is normally the case with cigarettes, but when used properly it's a very pleasant thing indeed.
I can't comment on crack, although I have read that cocaine is quite useful in certain fields as well.
Not really. One doesn't get ahead in life by being intelligent or meaningful; one gets ahead by getting along with others, by fitting in and being normal. Which sucks for those of us who aren't normal.
The incentive is that once the OS is commoditised a) they needn't spend as much money maintaining their OS (since everyone will be contributing to Linux) and b) they can compete on the quality of their hardware, which has typically been above average.
That's why IBM does it. The OS is a commodity, now. Why spend huge sums of cash funding development of your own OS when you could spend rather less in a co-operative venture?
There is no perfect candidate: there are only those which are more or less acceptable.
As I asked before--what is so magical about consciousness? Those in comas haven't any consciousness that we're aware of. You and I are unconscious for about a third of our lives. I don't see that a capacity for consciousness or for rational thought is what makes one human or not.
Slashdot editors, please consider using Coral mirrors when linking to this sort of thing. It's as easy as appending
to the host name portion of the URL.Slashdot editors--please consider posting Coral mirrors for stuff like this. It's one thing when it's a major business, but another thing entirely when it's a personal or small site.
More importantly, how did he get there? Either he's the result of consensual sex, or of rape. In the first case, conception is a foreseeable consequence; one has the ability to not have sex, and one hardly has the right to murder the results of one's free choice. The second case is somewhat more difficult, until one recognises that the conception is a second crime committed upon the mother by the rapist. Recall the saying of your own mother, though: two wrongs don't make a right. How does it make things right for the mother to kill her misbegotten child? What has he done which merits death?
An ectopic pregnancy is a lifeboat situation: there's no good answer, only a least-bad answer (similar to the case of rape): either both mother and chile die, or the child dies. Simple utilitarian calculus says that the child must die. Morality says that the necessity is to be mourned, but no blame can be attached to either mother or physician (although I imagine both would feel rotten).
I cannot accept that a parent should have the power of life and death of his or her children; I thought that sort of thing had gone out of style with the Romans.
If the embryo is human, abortion is a grave wrong; if the embryo is not, abortion is a right. Since I'm convinced the embryo is, in fact, human and that the initiation of violence is something to be avoided, I must therefor oppose abortion.
Regarding the goals of the pro-life movement, no doubt you are correct that a change of culture is required. As a matter of fact, I happen to believe that we are in the midst of exactly such a change. Just as scientists and physicians began to turn against abortion in the nineteenth century as they began to understand the nature of natal development, so too the general culture is beginning to turn against it as we all begin to understand the same thing.
Remember, though: if the unborn are as human as you and I, then abortion is worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot all put together. It's worse than the Moloch-worshipping Carthaginians. Some thirty-forty million or so in the US alone, not to mention Europe and Asia. Let's say seventy to one hundred million who never even got a chance. That's pretty awful.
It's a matter of fighting the battles one can win. Politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal.
So we forestall the use of humans in research today; that's better than doing nothing.
As it is currently practised, yes. Lots of things have been very common, but are now considered beyond the pale; why should a particular reproductive practise not be one of those?
Ummm...they are concerned with the mother's rights. They are also concerned with the child's rights. That's the whole thing. Everyone agrees that a parent has to care for a child which has been born, even if that child is a drain on resources (well, everyone except folks like Singer, who is honest enough to admit that arguments in favour of abortion apply to infanticide and killing of anyone one must provide for); the disagreement is on whether that same duty applies before birth.
What do you see as so mystical about passing through the birth canal that on one side of being born one may be destroyed, while on the other one is protected?
We're all collections of cells, after all. What makes us human is our genes (not our limbs: the congenitally crippled lack those; not our abilities: mental defectives lack those)--and those genes are there from the moment of conception.