This is why you need the development to be open, transperent and free as in freedom, so you're not running some mysterious black box made by someone who smiles until they have your money.
"It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
"This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed"
without caring about any Open Source ideolgies... The combination is simply outstanding.
The combination won't be so outstanding when it's illegal due to software patents (already likely) and when making it interoperable with closed products and file formats is also illegal (witness the bnetd "no reverse eng" EULA case and the Microsoft XML patents).
but is this a case of the "good guys" picking the wrong battle to fight over digital rights?
This is THE right battle, and a very important one - the case sets a precedent for being able to say "you can't reverse engineer to make compatible products" in EULAs. The judge said previously that such a EULA is valid.
This is very bad. If people can do that, then proprietary software companies can eliminate the possiblity of competitors by denying interoperability. Currently it's possible but damn hard (eg. Microsoft's DOC format, Novell Connector). But if making your product compatible with the competition is made illegal thanks to a few words in the EULA, then you have no chance.
I hate this war and I hate the reasons for it and I hate those who perpetrated it. But I won't hate the man that saves legions of my fellow Americans by taking out the enemy from safe distance.
There is much written about the effect that not having to fight a war face to face with the risk of great loss of life on your own part has on the way a society perceives war.
Additionally, are you okay with countries that perceive the US as the enemy sending suicide bombers or missles or biological weapons over to the US from a safe distance?
Depends what you mean by "you". It may not bother the end user, but it will bother everyone else who needs to do other things than just run your install script.
Now, this application is a quite performance hungry scientific comptation app wich makes heavy use of vector and matrix operations... I was quite surprised and discouraged to find that overall, compiled C++ was faster than Mono's JIT by several orders of magnitude (i.e. 0.018s vs. 1.2s)
The reason seems to be that pracically none of the operator overloaded operations were getting inlined.
Are you sure of this? My first thought would be that, for execution times of that duration, that the startup of the runtime engine and stuff would be a signifigant chunk of the mono version's process lifetime. You can't infer things from one data point, so have you tried running larger computations and seeing whether this constant startup overhead becomes insignifigant?
As Linus said and others have elaborated on (eg. http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0503.0/0512.html), having to juggle and review hundreds of incmoing patches which needed to be ported to/from a stable and development branch was apparently great pain and suffering in ways that they have probably explained better than I can.
Actually, for ages, the X strike force in Debian were the only people who were ensuring that X worked on 11 different architectures (as I'm sure you know everything in Debian needs to). This is a gigantic amount of work!
The reason is the release of Sarge
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Debian X people cannot change over to X.org until Sarge is released, otherwise Unstable will go bonkers, which will ruin the propagation of bugfixes to Sarge, which will make the release impossible. The focus now is on reducing the Release Critical bug count to as close to zero as possible so the release can happen, after which I seem to recall that X.org will be added to Debian Unstable ASAP.
So in summary, I hope the people complaining about the slow release of Debian aren't the same ones who keep asking why they aren't massively upheaving their package repositories during the release process:)
I used to suggest "unrestricted software", but someone was explaining why the GPL could be seen as "restrictive" last time I brought it up on Slashdot. I still think it's the least confusing English word to use to describe software-libre.
Then there's "freedom software", which I think is a bad term to start using. Idunno - how do you succinctly phrase "software which is guaranteed to let you do what you want as long as you let others to the same"?
I think you would be correct in the case where one installed Debian Woody using some dusty old CDs. However, the normal way of installing Debiean is to install over the internet from the Debian servers, which are by definition up to date with security patches.
In case you'd like to know, there are problems which the Debian KDE people are working to address so that KDE can migrate from the unstable repositories. Other distros throw just anything in without much QA but Debian has horrendously high standards =)
The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.
I would still fear working with binary formats (not that the example I cite is properly documented, but the bits people have figured out give me nightmares).
Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.
Fortunately, reality is much better :)
on
E17 Available From CVS
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· Score: 3, Informative
Erm, I hope you're just saying that because you haven't heard anything in the last several years about the several rewrites and the refocusing of the enlightenment project on producing a set of extensive, massively featured libraries for application development with state of the art graphical capabilities and the ability to build complex applications using their components.
The window manager mentioned here is the very start of the "2 lines of code" (a long runnign in-joke) that builds a window manager out of these libraries. If you want a fully featured window manager, e16 is quite mature already.
A majority of my CDs are independant rock, punk or very niche genre CDs that have very small quantities produced and are almost certainly unobtainable a year or so after they're released. If I had the money I'd be making several backups of each.
Of course, in politics nothing is certain, but this is about the best one could hope for. And if it's the official party line, well, everyone on Labor has to vote along party lines:D
Slashdot Mirror
This is why you need the development to be open, transperent and free as in freedom, so you're not running some mysterious black box made by someone who smiles until they have your money.
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/ OrwellGeorge/essay/politicaandenglish.html
"It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
"This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed"
Thanks for the info :)
"Give a man a Les Paul, and he doesn't become an Eric Clapton"? Eric Clapton doesn't characteristically play a Les Paul ;)
The combination won't be so outstanding when it's illegal due to software patents (already likely) and when making it interoperable with closed products and file formats is also illegal (witness the bnetd "no reverse eng" EULA case and the Microsoft XML patents).
Please start caring.
This is THE right battle, and a very important one - the case sets a precedent for being able to say "you can't reverse engineer to make compatible products" in EULAs. The judge said previously that such a EULA is valid.
This is very bad. If people can do that, then proprietary software companies can eliminate the possiblity of competitors by denying interoperability. Currently it's possible but damn hard (eg. Microsoft's DOC format, Novell Connector). But if making your product compatible with the competition is made illegal thanks to a few words in the EULA, then you have no chance.
There is much written about the effect that not having to fight a war face to face with the risk of great loss of life on your own part has on the way a society perceives war.
Additionally, are you okay with countries that perceive the US as the enemy sending suicide bombers or missles or biological weapons over to the US from a safe distance?
Depends what you mean by "you". It may not bother the end user, but it will bother everyone else who needs to do other things than just run your install script.
Are you sure of this? My first thought would be that, for execution times of that duration, that the startup of the runtime engine and stuff would be a signifigant chunk of the mono version's process lifetime. You can't infer things from one data point, so have you tried running larger computations and seeing whether this constant startup overhead becomes insignifigant?
As Linus said and others have elaborated on (eg. http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0503 .0/0512.html), having to juggle and review hundreds of incmoing patches which needed to be ported to/from a stable and development branch was apparently great pain and suffering in ways that they have probably explained better than I can.
Actually, for ages, the X strike force in Debian were the only people who were ensuring that X worked on 11 different architectures (as I'm sure you know everything in Debian needs to). This is a gigantic amount of work!
The Debian X people cannot change over to X.org until Sarge is released, otherwise Unstable will go bonkers, which will ruin the propagation of bugfixes to Sarge, which will make the release impossible. The focus now is on reducing the Release Critical bug count to as close to zero as possible so the release can happen, after which I seem to recall that X.org will be added to Debian Unstable ASAP.
:)
So in summary, I hope the people complaining about the slow release of Debian aren't the same ones who keep asking why they aren't massively upheaving their package repositories during the release process
My mate's undergrad thesis project was porting Darwin to L4. He got some interesting results too, if I recall correctly.
The Apple Product Life Cycle, which a Mac developer friend told me about.
It's Latin, meaning "thus", as in "I'm just repeating how this thing actually was written".
I used to suggest "unrestricted software", but someone was explaining why the GPL could be seen as "restrictive" last time I brought it up on Slashdot. I still think it's the least confusing English word to use to describe software-libre.
Then there's "freedom software", which I think is a bad term to start using. Idunno - how do you succinctly phrase "software which is guaranteed to let you do what you want as long as you let others to the same"?
I think you would be correct in the case where one installed Debian Woody using some dusty old CDs. However, the normal way of installing Debiean is to install over the internet from the Debian servers, which are by definition up to date with security patches.
In case you'd like to know, there are problems which the Debian KDE people are working to address so that KDE can migrate from the unstable repositories. Other distros throw just anything in without much QA but Debian has horrendously high standards =)
I would still fear working with binary formats (not that the example I cite is properly documented, but the bits people have figured out give me nightmares).
Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.
Erm, I hope you're just saying that because you haven't heard anything in the last several years about the several rewrites and the refocusing of the enlightenment project on producing a set of extensive, massively featured libraries for application development with state of the art graphical capabilities and the ability to build complex applications using their components.
The window manager mentioned here is the very start of the "2 lines of code" (a long runnign in-joke) that builds a window manager out of these libraries. If you want a fully featured window manager, e16 is quite mature already.
The trademark for "OpenOffice" belongs to someone else.
Evolution Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000/2003 (formerly Ximian Connector)
A majority of my CDs are independant rock, punk or very niche genre CDs that have very small quantities produced and are almost certainly unobtainable a year or so after they're released. If I had the money I'd be making several backups of each.
http://www.alp.org.au/media/0804/20008111.html
:D
Of course, in politics nothing is certain, but this is about the best one could hope for. And if it's the official party line, well, everyone on Labor has to vote along party lines