are both tools of beauty that have taught me more about programming and problem-solving than all other languages combined. SICP and PAIP are both classics in this regard that everyone should rush out and get now.
It's just such a pity that, since they're both standards which anyone can implement, lots of people do, and as a result, finding one you like and then getting it to talk to other languages and libraries can be a very frustrating experience. And languages like Python with one canonical implementation driven by a BDFL and with exceptional library support are just getting more Lisp-like, which can't be good news for for a renaissance in Lisp or Scheme. Pity really, since I really like 'em both...
...Xara Xtreme. Yes I'm biased. I used Xara 1.5 to create production quality graphics for a magazine nearly ten years ago and I still haven't come across an illustration program that was as fast or as easy to use until I grabbed the latest build of Xtreme. See here for the Web-specific features. Ignore the Windows-only requirements menu - there's a very stable Linux build in the Downloads section.
For a nice quick design prototype, I'd love to hear if there's anything better.
but when it comes to debugging, there is just no comparison...Dev Studio smokes anything Linux has to offer by such a wide margin as to be embarrassing.
Including ddd? Can you give any specific examples? I'm not trolling or being sarcastic, I just want to know what Dev Studio has on the debugging front that ddd hasn't.
IBM hired lawyers because SCO's claims were mainly about contracts. It also calculated - very accurately as it turns out - that the SCO case was an ideal opportunity to create a legal precedent where the GPL could be shown to be ironclad.
I agree with the GP; SCO has bumped its head against the GPL at every turn:
Original claim: misappropriation of trade secrets. Dropped after it was pointed out that SCO continued to distribute the code under the GPL.
If you think that then Herbert caught you as he did me and so many others. You need to read the first three of the series as a single piece of work whose overarching theme is: superheroes - whether good or evil - are dangerous to humanity. It's easy to stop at the end of Dune and rejoice in the final triumph of Paul and the defeat of the bad guys, and then miss his decline and eventual humiliation in the next two books, because the events he triggered have gone beyond his control.
Tim O'Reilly's biography of Herbert explains the author's purpose very well. It's available online here.
There's a big difference though. Guido is allowed - nay, encouraged - to spend half of his work time at Google improving Python, an language from which anyone can benefit thanks to its license. Microsoft on the other hand have a long track record of buying up threats. Off the top of my head I remember a company called Coopers and Peters who had developed an Office clone in Java in 1997, a pretty incredible piece of work. Microsoft bought them and that was the last we heard of that.
But the track record of Firefox vs IE disagrees with Joel. Paradoxically I think his stance is still generally right but this is a special case: in the long run Netscape's code benefited from being opened up and IE's was deliberately allowed to languish.
In your one experiance you beat the experiance of someone who's been in computers for quite a bit of his life... erm, yeah
Not one experience - many, many experiences covering the SA telecoms markets for a variety of publications, some of them as editor. Besides, what has experience got to do with it? This issue - that ISPs can carry IP traffic without having to do it through a Telkom server - goes back more than a decade, probably before your correspondent was even graced with pubic hair. My current connection does not go through TelkomInternet and neither did the Sentech VSAT one I had before go through TelkomInternet. Hence his complaint that 45 million people can't post to Slashdot is demonstrably false.
try doing anything from the University of Pretoria Campus, the same thing happens to them, they get forced through the same cache that Gldm is being forced through, and they have a 5MB Pipe
And yet I, and thousands of others like me who don't use Telkom as our ISP, are not. What does that tell you?
Also i've seen them transparently using cache.saix.net and dsl-cache.saix.net to monitor your usage on ADSL, yes, this happens but no-one knows about it, heck the fewer people who know the more telcom can get away with it!
It's Telkom with a 'k'. It would help your credibility (and his) if you could spell and put full stops and capital letters in more or less the right places.
It doesn't. So the conclusion I must draw is that somehow I can reach (and post to) Slashdot from within South Africa without passing through Telkom's caching server (leaving aside the fairly compelling evidence to me that I'm sitting in my home office posting to Slashdot). So clearly not everyone in South Africa is subject to the ban on TelkomInternet's cache and thus your claims about the Internet landscape in this country must be false.
I'm not particularly interested in people's opinions about Open Source - they're perfectly entitled to them and of course all of our perceptions (mine included) are shaped by our own personal experience. But your piece is so riddled with factual errors that any valid criticisms you do have (and you do have quite a few) get lost in the noise. Michael needs a good kick for publishing it:)
I will write a proper critique of it this weekend.
He's wrong - take it from the former editor of Communications Week South Africa:) If you want to see how clueless he is in general, you can read his laughable article on FLOSS here.
TelkomInternet powered by ADSL
This is the key phrase. I have an ADSL connection but I don't use Telkom as an ISP - I use a Tier 2 who has an upstream Tier 1 provider with their own link to the US. The Tier 1 must buy his half circuit from Telkom but it's just bandwidth - it doesn't get IP services from them and it certainly doesn't go through Telkom's cache. In fact, there's an additional carrier with its own license that doesn't have to use Telkom at all.
Maybe TelkomInternet's cache is banned but that's hardly Slashdot's problem and it certainly doesn't affect me. *hits Submit button*
Nonsense. I'm from Johannesburg with an ADSL connection through DataPro and I've never been banned from posting on Slashdot and neither does the Internet landscape in this country look remotely like what you claim. Before I got ADSL I had a satellite connection from Sentech and before that it was an ISDN connection direct from Telkom. A traceroute to Slashdot shows Datapro->IS->Alternet in New York and then on to Santa Clara via savvis. No giant abusive caching server anywhere in sight.
I'm sure I still have a recording somewhere of you, me and Dipstick clearing out E1M4:] Good to see you're still active and say hello to the other guys for me.
...being an active member of this clan for almost as long as it lasted. Good guys, never afraid to take on the cable and T1 players. Greetings Zaphoid, wherever you are, and thanks for the nick.
...weekend-long frag sessions with friends in every room plus some in the garage. Starting a huge file copy from someone's machine just to slow down his frame rate.
...realising the whole Quake 1 soundtrack was on the shareware CD. Buying the Doom Music CD by Booby Prince just to play Quake while listening to it.
...getting a $1200 phone bill but not caring because you made it to the top of the local server rankings.
...sniggering as a friend released a home-made map which he called DM7 guessing (correctly) that the local community would think that it was an extra map by American McGee.
...beating Perkele's time for a speedrun through a particular level by a second and then losing because he discovers a new route.
...analysing outdoor shopping centres in terms of their deathmatch possibilities.
Mod parent up. As succinct a description of good tech journalism as I've read, although I'm an IDG-syndicated columnist and have been for the last ten years so I'm just biased as well:)
Honestly, the stealth gameplay chemistry of Thief 1 didn't truly come together till very close to ship, possibly as close as a few weeks. Although we all had our suspicions, it wasn't until then that it was clear which types of content would be a good match for the game systems
This is an incredible statement. Thief 1 to me has always been an example of a game design done right from the very beginning. For the designer to say that the "stealth gameplay chemistry" only came together right at the end of the process boggles my mind. If so, it was very fortuitous: Thief 1 remains for me an all-time classic, possibly one of the best first-person perspective games ever made.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be modest, creators are the people least qualified to judge their own work.
I snorted Mocca Java right out my left nostril.
are both tools of beauty that have taught me more about programming and problem-solving than all other languages combined. SICP and PAIP are both classics in this regard that everyone should rush out and get now.
It's just such a pity that, since they're both standards which anyone can implement, lots of people do, and as a result, finding one you like and then getting it to talk to other languages and libraries can be a very frustrating experience. And languages like Python with one canonical implementation driven by a BDFL and with exceptional library support are just getting more Lisp-like, which can't be good news for for a renaissance in Lisp or Scheme. Pity really, since I really like 'em both...
Come come, my dear boy, We're wasting time.
Know what a turtle is?
Duh - it is, thanks.
...Xara Xtreme. Yes I'm biased. I used Xara 1.5 to create production quality graphics for a magazine nearly ten years ago and I still haven't come across an illustration program that was as fast or as easy to use until I grabbed the latest build of Xtreme. See here for the Web-specific features. Ignore the Windows-only requirements menu - there's a very stable Linux build in the Downloads section.
For a nice quick design prototype, I'd love to hear if there's anything better.
but when it comes to debugging, there is just no comparison...Dev Studio smokes anything Linux has to offer by such a wide margin as to be embarrassing.
Including ddd? Can you give any specific examples? I'm not trolling or being sarcastic, I just want to know what Dev Studio has on the debugging front that ddd hasn't.
Mod +1 - Appropriately Cruel and Unusual Punishment
I agree with the GP; SCO has bumped its head against the GPL at every turn:
If you think that then Herbert caught you as he did me and so many others. You need to read the first three of the series as a single piece of work whose overarching theme is: superheroes - whether good or evil - are dangerous to humanity. It's easy to stop at the end of Dune and rejoice in the final triumph of Paul and the defeat of the bad guys, and then miss his decline and eventual humiliation in the next two books, because the events he triggered have gone beyond his control.
Tim O'Reilly's biography of Herbert explains the author's purpose very well. It's available online here.
Q: How many Newton users does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Foo! To axe gravy soup
"Cleave" is another example. It either means "to split apart" or "to stick to like glue."
There's a big difference though. Guido is allowed - nay, encouraged - to spend half of his work time at Google improving Python, an language from which anyone can benefit thanks to its license. Microsoft on the other hand have a long track record of buying up threats. Off the top of my head I remember a company called Coopers and Peters who had developed an Office clone in Java in 1997, a pretty incredible piece of work. Microsoft bought them and that was the last we heard of that.
Maybe it's just me being cynical.
But the track record of Firefox vs IE disagrees with Joel. Paradoxically I think his stance is still generally right but this is a special case: in the long run Netscape's code benefited from being opened up and IE's was deliberately allowed to languish.
"Just a bit of harmless brain alteration, that's all..."
In your one experiance you beat the experiance of someone who's been in computers for quite a bit of his life ... erm, yeah
Not one experience - many, many experiences covering the SA telecoms markets for a variety of publications, some of them as editor. Besides, what has experience got to do with it? This issue - that ISPs can carry IP traffic without having to do it through a Telkom server - goes back more than a decade, probably before your correspondent was even graced with pubic hair. My current connection does not go through TelkomInternet and neither did the Sentech VSAT one I had before go through TelkomInternet. Hence his complaint that 45 million people can't post to Slashdot is demonstrably false.
try doing anything from the University of Pretoria Campus, the same thing happens to them, they get forced through the same cache that Gldm is being forced through, and they have a 5MB Pipe
And yet I, and thousands of others like me who don't use Telkom as our ISP, are not. What does that tell you?
Also i've seen them transparently using cache.saix.net and dsl-cache.saix.net to monitor your usage on ADSL, yes, this happens but no-one knows about it, heck the fewer people who know the more telcom can get away with it!
It's Telkom with a 'k'. It would help your credibility (and his) if you could spell and put full stops and capital letters in more or less the right places.
Sure.
198.54.202.114 resolves to rba-cache3-vif1.saix.net
So let's see if that IP appears in any of the hops between my PC and Slashdot:
It doesn't. So the conclusion I must draw is that somehow I can reach (and post to) Slashdot from within South Africa without passing through Telkom's caching server (leaving aside the fairly compelling evidence to me that I'm sitting in my home office posting to Slashdot). So clearly not everyone in South Africa is subject to the ban on TelkomInternet's cache and thus your claims about the Internet landscape in this country must be false.
I'm not particularly interested in people's opinions about Open Source - they're perfectly entitled to them and of course all of our perceptions (mine included) are shaped by our own personal experience. But your piece is so riddled with factual errors that any valid criticisms you do have (and you do have quite a few) get lost in the noise. Michael needs a good kick for publishing it :)
I will write a proper critique of it this weekend.
He's wrong - take it from the former editor of Communications Week South Africa :) If you want to see how clueless he is in general, you can read his laughable article on FLOSS here.
TelkomInternet powered by ADSL
This is the key phrase. I have an ADSL connection but I don't use Telkom as an ISP - I use a Tier 2 who has an upstream Tier 1 provider with their own link to the US. The Tier 1 must buy his half circuit from Telkom but it's just bandwidth - it doesn't get IP services from them and it certainly doesn't go through Telkom's cache. In fact, there's an additional carrier with its own license that doesn't have to use Telkom at all.
Maybe TelkomInternet's cache is banned but that's hardly Slashdot's problem and it certainly doesn't affect me. *hits Submit button*
Nonsense. I'm from Johannesburg with an ADSL connection through DataPro and I've never been banned from posting on Slashdot and neither does the Internet landscape in this country look remotely like what you claim. Before I got ADSL I had a satellite connection from Sentech and before that it was an ISDN connection direct from Telkom. A traceroute to Slashdot shows Datapro->IS->Alternet in New York and then on to Santa Clara via savvis. No giant abusive caching server anywhere in sight.
Everyone in #lisp was polite.
Hey Jester!
:] Good to see you're still active and say hello to the other guys for me.
I'm sure I still have a recording somewhere of you, me and Dipstick clearing out E1M4
Mod parent up. As succinct a description of good tech journalism as I've read, although I'm an IDG-syndicated columnist and have been for the last ten years so I'm just biased as well :)
From the interview:
Honestly, the stealth gameplay chemistry of Thief 1 didn't truly come together till very close to ship, possibly as close as a few weeks. Although we all had our suspicions, it wasn't until then that it was clear which types of content would be a good match for the game systems
This is an incredible statement. Thief 1 to me has always been an example of a game design done right from the very beginning. For the designer to say that the "stealth gameplay chemistry" only came together right at the end of the process boggles my mind. If so, it was very fortuitous: Thief 1 remains for me an all-time classic, possibly one of the best first-person perspective games ever made.