>they've fixed a few things that allow bad programming
They've fixed some organizational and syntactic annoyances, but bad programming is something caused by bad programmers. A language can't save you from yourself.
Sun promised Java would do this, back in the day, and a million shitty Java programmers went forth to prove them wrong.
>Oh woe! Not having to worry about pointers and having built in string types. >I love C. It's terse and really useful for optimising performance but it's really not a good teaching language.
C is an excellent teaching language. It has a relatively simple syntax, and doesn't hide anything under the covers. In a similar way assembly is also an excellent teaching language.
It teaches the user about memory addressing and memory management, which are important topics no matter what language you use. It also teaches the user how to do the elementary logic and understanding of flow control that constitute the early stages of learning how to program. It does all this without forcing the learner to memorize unnecessary syntax.
Conversely, while C is an excellent teaching language and a poor language for real world use, C++ is an excellent language for real world use, and a poor teaching language.
I expect there will be some inane comment about how C++ sucks from someone who tried it once and thought it was too hard to learn how to use. My response is simply, "don't be such a baby." Real programmers use C++.
>(2) Programs manipulate numbers. Mathematic formulae manipulate numbers. It's an entirely reasonable conclusion that he has reached that a program is merely a formula.
Dude, saying stuff like that makes me wince.
First of all, mathematics does not "manipulate numbers". That's arithmetic. Mathematics is much more general. Ultimately mathematics is just symbol manipulation. Also, a mathematical formula *is* a set of symbols, so you can do math about math.
Second of all, programs don't "manipulate numbers". A calculator manipulates numbers. A program manipulates symbols, which may happen to represent numbers, or anything else for that matter. A program also *is* a set of symbols, so you can write programs that manipulate programs.
Third and finally, Dijkstra didn't have to conclude *anything* about programs between formulas, because that's always been known. Where do you think programs came from anyway?
A computer is an automated mathematician. That's always been the idea, literally since the 17th century (Liebniz). That computer science curriculum has been so dumbed down that programmers who graduate from universities don't understand the basic idea that computer programming is just math, is why Dijkstra wrote the article.
Let me nail this down in case people still aren't getting this.
1. A programmer does some symbol manipulation and produces a formula, which is conventional terminology is called a computer program. 2. The computer then takes that formula, and continues manipulating the symbols until the result is achieved.
There's no real difference between what the computer and the programmer do, except that the computer is faster at it. There's no real difference between what a programmer and a mathematician do either. Programmers, computers, and mathematicians are all the same sorts of things, and the same techniques (proofs) are applicable to all of them.
Dijkstra is pissed off in the article that people write software "tests", which can never show the correctness of a program, when they should be writing proofs that *can* show the correctness of the program.
>Imagine that, a mathematician describing engineering as deriving a formula! >No comfortable analogies here...
That's not an analogy. That's literally what computer science is. That you did not know that says a lot about why he wrote that article.
They didn't decide that merge sort was a correct sorting algorithm by coding it up and running it a million times. A mathematical proof was given. No actual running computer is necessary.
Furthermore, a computer program *is* a mathematical formula. It always has been. Dijkstra is pointing out that the curriculum has been so dumbed down that most programmers don't even know that.
In this article Dijkstra correctly criticizing the fact that most programmers don't know how to prove the correctness of algorithms. The same could be said about asymptotic complexity. Most programmers do not understand these concepts well enough to write programs that don't run forever on large input values. This is a real problem.
There are both analytical and empirical methods for dealing with computer programs. The analytical methods involves proofs of correctness and symbolic manipulation. The empirical methods involve software testing and debugging.
Dijkstra certainly goes overboard by suggesting that software testing is totally unnecessary because he's not interested in such intellectually uninteresting problems as reliably detecting typos in 10 million lines of source code for a problem. Dijkstra correctly points out that software testing suffers from the fallacy of induction, but ignores the fact that induction is an important tool even if it doesn't prove anything.
The truth is that most programmers are just code monkeys with no understanding of the *science* in computer science. That is what Dijkstra is railing against ultimately.
>And the audio stuff? In Windows, you use the Windows sound system for normal apps, and ASIO for low latency. In Linux, you use ALSA (or one of wrappers/libraries designed to make your life easier) or JACK for low-latency.
You're kidding me. You seriously think there's nothing wrong with Linux sound? I'm not even going to debate that point, I'm just going to let you sound like an idiot on your own.
>My laptop wouldn't have worked very well at all a year or two ago. On Intrepid, everything works out of the box
So, your 2 year old laptop model works fine with the *brand new* version of your distro, which you run at *home*. Obviously, that means that Linux works perfect for everyone, since no one will ever have to use a distro older than 6 months or a computer newer than 2 years old.
>(minus the camera, which requires firmware that you can't download anywhere). So, it's really not a problem that your operating system can't use your computer's hardware? Maybe it would be simpler for you if you just left your computer turned off.
I know slashdotter's like to save time when writing responses, which is usually why they don't read the article. With that in mind I've written up some template posts to this article. Just use shell variable substitution to customize your response.
Linux doesn't need to be fixed. $FEATURE is not a feature, lack of $FEATURE is a feature. Every other operating system, especially the ones with higher market share, need to be fixed by removing $FEATURE.
$FEATURE is contrary to the spirit of free software as laid out by Richard Stallman, and thus it would be immoral to implement $FEATURE. Anyway, if you want $FEATURE, feel free to download the source code and implement $FEATURE yourself.
People who use $FEATURE are dumb and lazy, they should use the command line and flat configuration files instead. Using an operating system without $FEATURE makes you smarter, and generally better than other people who use $FEATURE.
$OSSOFTWARE already implements feature. See it's listed among the features on the $OSSOFTWARE.org web page. All you have to do is go to $OSSOFTWARE-devel archives from three years ago that implements it, and patch the compatible version of the source tree from that time frame, and get the compatible versions of the library, and then edit these lines in these source files by hand so that it will work with the latest version of ubuntu. I mean, *I've* never done it and don't know for a fact it works, but It's there if you want it.
You can do $FEATURE in emacs. All you have to do is write a little emacs lisp.
$FEATURE already works for me.
$FEATURE is implemented in $DISTRO, why do you use $OTHERDISTRO? Just install $DISTRO.
$FEATURE is in the next version of $YOURDISTRO, just nuke your six month old install with the new $YOURDISTRO. Otherwise, use these upgrade instructions that 6 people have tested. Works for me.
$FEATURE only works with NVIDIA's proprietary graphics card drivers. Of course, $DISTRO doesn't ship with those drivers because that's against software freedom. Blame NVIDIA for not releasing their software as open source.
If you really need $FEATURE, why spend $MONETARYQUANTITY on $PROPRIETARYSOFTWARE when you could just spend the next three years fixing $OSSOFTWARE? Do you work for $MISSPELLINGOFMICROSOFT or something?
These carefully crafted argument formulas should help you convince everyone else on slashdot that Linux is already *fine* and that this year is *definitely* the year of the Linux desktop. And if not, it's because of something evil Bill Gates did.
Most academic issues are handled worse than computer science.
Most of the CS coverage addressed on wikipedia is the kind of stuff that working computer programmers would be interested. There are a few theory articles, but you can't expect much from them. Writing in CS theory or other areas in mathematics is difficult, and requires more than citations. It requires strong writing and editing skills, and strong understanding of the subject at hand. I wouldn't expect to get more than a rough overview of a field from its wikipedia entry.
>>>You see, I can't even begin to help you until you concede that if a tool gets the job done, it's a good tool.
>>I can hammer a nail in with my fist. But I wouldn't call my fist a good tool for hammering nails. It works, but it's not pleasant.
>Come on, man, that's a bit extreme. It's not like any of us are suggesting we should use Microsoft Visual Basic here...
MS basic was actually very successful at what it was designed for, doing very quick GUI development on windows.
The browser on the other hand is an enormous pain the ass for a lot of the tasks people use it for. Consider the word processor that google is trying unsuccessfully to write. If they put that together as a java applet, it would be trivial. However, since they went the ajax route, they have an application that is feature poor, and still manages to crash so often that it is unusable.
>>... schooled in the old temple and given a proper >>appreciation of a real language like C++?
>You're going to have to inform us "young'uns" of >what is and isn't a "real language." You see, I >can't even begin to help you until you concede >that if a tool gets the job done, it's a good >tool. It might not be the best tool but it's a >good tool. Stop making inflammatory statements.
The original poster was not insulting ruby, or whatever language you use for server side processing. He was saying that the browser itself is not a real platform, which it isn't. The browser is a joke because its capabilities have more or less stagnated at what internet explorer 6 can provide.
Browsers are a huge pain in the ass to develop real applications for and require all sorts of insane hacks to do things that are trivial if you just write your own C++/Java/Whatever applications to run on the server and client.
Probably someday the browser will evolve into a great platform for writing clients, but that's maybe 10 years out.
For the time being, there are still some ease of deployment reasons to code ajax applications, but in a lot of cases there are technologies like java applets, flash, and even C++ and python clients that can be written when more complicated interface and behavior are needed.
Would love to see more 2d games. I think it says something that the 2d art on the box of games often looks better than the 3d gameplay art.
For me the golden age of gaming ended when the playstation, with it's fairly crappy 3d art (remember cloud strife and his yellow triangle head?) replaced the SNES, which had pretty nice art considering the limited resolution and color palette.
Since then gaming has become a technological race, with not enough attention payed to gameplay and art, and too much payed to pixel shaders.
Yeah, I get it, we have really realistic looking water now. Whoopty friken doo. Realism aside, it still doesn't necessarily look as *good* as when it was hand drawn.
The book was definitely worth reading, but there were some definite weaknesses.
I felt that the book was more about the ideas than the people. Part of this stems from the fact that stephenson never describes the appearance of the characters in detail. This may have been necessary to not giving away elements of the plot (think of that twilight zone episode where everyone has pig faces) but it means that Stephenson doesn't get to bring out one of his strongest abilities, his strength as a visual storyteller. Part of what brings his other characters alive is his lively description of the, which is hampered if you can't even say what their face looks like.
Also, for some reason Stephenson started without a strong hook. I think part of that is the barrage of new terms, which makes the book difficult to read at first, and obscures the plot.
Aside from that, I felt like Stephenson didn't bring to bear one of his primary strengths. One of the things that hooked me in snow crash, the diamond age, cryptonomicon, and even the baroque cycle, was his excellent action writing. His ability to describe a firefight and really engage the reader on the level that a movie or a comic book might, with stories of heroism and derring can take what is at its core a heavily conceptual novel, and make it not only interesting, but entertaining to read.
Yet, the action scenes were a bit sparse in Anathem, and those that were there felt a bit weak. The scene where the Ringing Vale rescue Erasmus seemed like the primary action scene of the novel... and I didn't feel like it compared favorably with Stephenson's other action scenes. In parts the Ringing Vale came off as fairly generic shoalin kung fu masta movie martial artists, doing lots of unnecessary backflips and jumping around. Normally, Stephenson fight scenes feel more chaotic and real.
Even with those failings though, it's probably one of the better books I've read this year, and I don't regret reading it for a minute. The concepts, which the story stays focussed on for the most part, are where it is at. The extended discussion of physics and multiple universes was cool.
I was also interested in seeing Stephenson write a straight up old school hard sci-fi novel. Most of his books are equivocations of sci fi. Snow crash and Diamond Age were both cyber punk. Cryptonomicon was only *secretly* science fiction, as in, virtually no one who read it noticed the sci fi elements, and they could have been discarded easily. In the same vein, the baroque cycle was more historical fiction than anything else, with some Enoch Root mixed in.
Anathem on the other hand, is hard sci fi. Think Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Stanislaw Lem, and the awful novelist of the Foundation series.
I don't think Stephenson is really at his strongest in this genre. Maybe because a space adventure isn't even fun unless you are willing to stoop to putting some sexy alien babes in your book *cough* Niven *cough*.
I'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of functionality to get the portability of google docs... but I can't deal with how buggy it is.
I have never managed to get through a single session of usage of docs without it either crashing or coming up with error messages. Just loading the page with Chrome, google's own browser, gives me errors.
Seriously, it wouldn't take much above what they have technically to make inroads for people more interested in easy collaboration than having a featureful word processor, but no one's going to use a product that buggy.
>The question you ask is wrong... >since people are no longer answering questions >on usenet.
Some communities use usenet almost exclusively (the c++ community is basically built around comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.lang.std.c++). Furthermore, a lot of programming mailing lists are mirrored to usenet.
The problem the poster had was that google's search for usenet sucks, which I have to agree. In general, google groups has deteriorated since they started adding non-usenet groups to the service.
Stackoverflow is great, but it has nothing to do with usenet or newsgroups.
Usenet is a place for communities of people to have discussions. Basically, it is a unified distributed bulletin board system, with boards for discussions of all topics *ever*. It is also a convenient place to mirror mailing lists, so that they can be browsed in a unified manner without having to subscribe to a million different mailing lists, or go to lots of different websites.
See: gmane.org
Stackoverflow is a question answer service.... basically the same as yahoo answers except that it is focussed on answers to programming questions. Basically, it is a FAQ generation system.
If you think about it, most google apps have a few really cool and flashy features (which is why I like to use them), but then tend to have lots of UI bugs. Also, it's pretty much impossible to actually report bugs to google. At best you'll find some google group on the product that no engineer ever looks at.
Aside from the one mentioned google groops had lots of basic bugs. Until recently reading comp.lang.c++.moderated on google groups caused all sorts of problems because they weren't properly handling the escape of the ++ characters in the url (every time I clicked on a link I'd have to edit the url manually to get it to work). It took them years to find out about that and fix it. Although it was a daily annoyance to me, I had no way to get it into any kind of bug tracking system.
Even worse I've *never* been able to use google gears or google docs without major bugs and error messages, no matter what browser I used (including chrome).
Gmail, google reader, and basic search are probably the only google web apps I've seen that don't have lots of bugs. I actually have a higher opinion of their desktop apps.
Reader, which is awesome and you should check out btw, used to be very bug ridden, but it's massively improved over the last year and a half.
Search actually is kind of problematic in that the basic search works fine, but lots of the extensions are broken. Last time I tried subscribed links was broken. As in, it didn't work *at all* and there was no workaround.
I think honestly that while they obviously have high quality engineers, they just have sucky QA. I think that they focus too much on unit tests, and have forgotten that a lot of basic bugs can only be detected by someone hammering on the interface of the production system and logging bugs.
Also, I think they've basically destroyed their ability to have beta software, by making all of their software beta. Now, user have no way of distinguishing what is truly production ready software from stuff that clearly isn't, except by trying it and getting burned.
so very *conservatively* speaking, there are about 800 to 900 million office installs out there. And I'm basically throwing out a couple hundred million just on the assumption I've made *some* kind of error.
Now, my bet is that a good fraction of major open office users on windows have already upgraded their install, so that 3 million number is probably within an order of magnitude of the total install base. I'll give open office the benefit of the doubt and say that they have 10 times as many users as have already upgraded; however, I'll say right now that I doubt that number is that high.
So, heavily weighting the numbers in favor of open office, I still only come up with 30 million open office users to 800 million MS office installs.
So open office has, being very optimistic in open office's favor, 3 or 4% the number of MS office users?
Now the stupid slashdot summary says: "As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor."
Uh, whatever. I guess the software isn't "almost identical." Moron.
90% of the documents I get passed are in MS office format, and those documents can be "rendered" by open office, but then they will without exception look like shit.
That means that open office can't even *read* the documents I want to read. How does that make it a competitor for MS office? Why are people who don't know what the word "open source" means going to throw out software they already own to use software that doesn't do the job any better?
They aren't. They haven't. They won't.
I'm glad there *is* OO.org, because if I don't have a copy of office on hand, which is kinda rare, I can still layout a basic document.
However, I've got to say, it must be depressing to spend so much effort working on software that isn't going anywhere.
Seriously, what was that article even about? The title says "Microsoftâ(TM)s new âMâ(TM) programming language", but after reading the article I still have zero idea what the M programming language is for.
I mean... maybe if you're explaining a programming language a few code samples would be good so people know what the fuck you are talking about?
I think the mono project was started primarily because of interest in the C# language, as it compares favorably to java, fixing many of Java's flaws.
Sadly while the C# language may be in many ways stronger than Java, the platform is much weaker. Realistically, the reason Java was so successful was that there were high quality VM and classpath implementations on all platforms. Yet, Microsoft didn't seem to learn this lesson from Java, and instead relied on third parties, who can't possibly maintain parity with Microsoft.NET. Thus,.NET will always be a second class citizen on Linux, and always a poor choice compared to Java.
As much as I like C#, it's a foolish choice to write Linux apps in.NET in the same way that it is foolish to write them in win32. It will always be a second rate platform on Linux, so long as the people controlling the standard have no interest in doing the work to making the framework work across platforms.
>I think things would be a lot easier if there was a minimum support standard that all distros held to. ie, a standard desktop, a standard filesystem hierarchy, a standard package manager, etc. I don't mean that these are the ONLY desktop, package manager etc, just that on supported distros they are guaranteed to be there.
That's exactly what the LSB is (except for the standard desktop part).
The problem is that distro makers only give the LSB lip service, and do the bare minimum to get supported, because they fear if there was true distro independence, they would lose their market lock in. Despite all of their talk of openness, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and Suze do a lot to prevent interoperability. They are all more focussed on keeping their tiny piece of the Linux pie than on baking a bigger pie.
>Most people will never need to download software that isn't in the Ubuntu (or insert favorite distro here)
People who are using Linux to make money almost invariably use it in conjunction with proprietary software, like databases, custom apps, etc. Until recently, you needed to download Sun Java binaries for any serious Java development. Also, some of us are *writing* proprietary software for Linux.
But sure, if all you ever do with Linux is write a dinky php home page that you serve out of your mom's basement, then you don't need to use any proprietary software that isn't shipped with Linux.
"Yes, he should have asked permission before trying, but throwing the book at the guy and wrecking his life with criminal charges (which stick for a long time) seems a little excessive."
I suppose, but when he broke the law he opened himself up to prosecution. Don't play with fire if you're afraid of getting burnt.
"The university should spend money on hiring some admins with better computer skills and teaching skills rather than paying lawyers."
They could... or they could make an example out of someone who screwed with them.
Every time we get robbed, we could just increase our home security until we are living in a steel box, or we could, you know, send the robber to jail to make an example out of him.
The truth is, there is no such thing as a secure computer system, or a secure physical building for that matter. The reason most people don't get robbed on a regular basis isn't because there's no way to break into their house. The reason is that if you are caught breaking and entering, even if you don't steal anything, the consequences are severe (i.e. jail time, loss of your right to vote, etc).
It doesn't really matter that this guy in particular had no ill intent. If they don't enforce the law when someone breaks it, and make an example out of him, they might as well not have the law at all. That may sound cruel, but that's how society works. The basis of all law, and civilization as an extension of law, is fear.
Free will means different things to different philosophers and in different contexts. Generally, though, philosophers don't take the notion of free will seriously.
The article in particular points out that determinism and free will can't coexists, which is really only true if you are talking about about a Cartesian "radical" sense of free will, which actually isn't a very good notion of free will to begin with.
How, after all, if your will free if it occurs merely through chance? How can *you* be said to move your hand, if your hand wasn't determined to move by the atoms that make up your body, but merely through random happenstance?
Spinoza would say that something is free that is necessitated by it's own nature.
Modern philosophers have even more sophisticated approaches to the subject.
The article has an interesting scientific point, but it would only really be relevant to a discussion of free will if this were the 18th century.
>They are part of the kernel, not add-ons No, driver's are not part of your kernel, because if they were, then you would have to swap out your whole fucking kernel every time someone comes up with a new piece of hardware.
Oh, *you do* have to do that? And you think it is a *feature*?
Thank you anonymous coward for you contribution to this discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
>they've fixed a few things that allow bad programming
They've fixed some organizational and syntactic annoyances, but bad programming is something caused by bad programmers. A language can't save you from yourself.
Sun promised Java would do this, back in the day, and a million shitty Java programmers went forth to prove them wrong.
>Oh woe! Not having to worry about pointers and having built in string types.
>I love C. It's terse and really useful for optimising performance but it's really not a good teaching language.
C is an excellent teaching language. It has a relatively simple syntax, and doesn't hide anything under the covers. In a similar way assembly is also an excellent teaching language.
It teaches the user about memory addressing and memory management, which are important topics no matter what language you use. It also teaches the user how to do the elementary logic and understanding of flow control that constitute the early stages of learning how to program. It does all this without forcing the learner to memorize unnecessary syntax.
Conversely, while C is an excellent teaching language and a poor language for real world use, C++ is an excellent language for real world use, and a poor teaching language.
I expect there will be some inane comment about how C++ sucks from someone who tried it once and thought it was too hard to learn how to use. My response is simply, "don't be such a baby." Real programmers use C++.
>(2) Programs manipulate numbers. Mathematic formulae manipulate numbers. It's an entirely reasonable conclusion that he has reached that a program is merely a formula.
Dude, saying stuff like that makes me wince.
First of all, mathematics does not "manipulate numbers". That's arithmetic. Mathematics is much more general. Ultimately mathematics is just symbol manipulation. Also, a mathematical formula *is* a set of symbols, so you can do math about math.
Second of all, programs don't "manipulate numbers". A calculator manipulates numbers. A program manipulates symbols, which may happen to represent numbers, or anything else for that matter. A program also *is* a set of symbols, so you can write programs that manipulate programs.
Third and finally, Dijkstra didn't have to conclude *anything* about programs between formulas, because that's always been known. Where do you think programs came from anyway?
A computer is an automated mathematician. That's always been the idea, literally since the 17th century (Liebniz). That computer science curriculum has been so dumbed down that programmers who graduate from universities don't understand the basic idea that computer programming is just math, is why Dijkstra wrote the article.
Let me nail this down in case people still aren't getting this.
1. A programmer does some symbol manipulation and produces a formula, which is conventional terminology is called a computer program.
2. The computer then takes that formula, and continues manipulating the symbols until the result is achieved.
There's no real difference between what the computer and the programmer do, except that the computer is faster at it. There's no real difference between what a programmer and a mathematician do either. Programmers, computers, and mathematicians are all the same sorts of things, and the same techniques (proofs) are applicable to all of them.
Dijkstra is pissed off in the article that people write software "tests", which can never show the correctness of a program, when they should be writing proofs that *can* show the correctness of the program.
>Imagine that, a mathematician describing engineering as deriving a formula!
>No comfortable analogies here...
That's not an analogy. That's literally what computer science is. That you did not know that says a lot about why he wrote that article.
They didn't decide that merge sort was a correct sorting algorithm by coding it up and running it a million times. A mathematical proof was given. No actual running computer is necessary.
Furthermore, a computer program *is* a mathematical formula. It always has been. Dijkstra is pointing out that the curriculum has been so dumbed down that most programmers don't even know that.
In this article Dijkstra correctly criticizing the fact that most programmers don't know how to prove the correctness of algorithms. The same could be said about asymptotic complexity. Most programmers do not understand these concepts well enough to write programs that don't run forever on large input values. This is a real problem.
There are both analytical and empirical methods for dealing with computer programs. The analytical methods involves proofs of correctness and symbolic manipulation. The empirical methods involve software testing and debugging.
Dijkstra certainly goes overboard by suggesting that software testing is totally unnecessary because he's not interested in such intellectually uninteresting problems as reliably detecting typos in 10 million lines of source code for a problem. Dijkstra correctly points out that software testing suffers from the fallacy of induction, but ignores the fact that induction is an important tool even if it doesn't prove anything.
The truth is that most programmers are just code monkeys with no understanding of the *science* in computer science. That is what Dijkstra is railing against ultimately.
>And the audio stuff? In Windows, you use the Windows sound system for normal apps, and ASIO for low latency. In Linux, you use ALSA (or one of wrappers/libraries designed to make your life easier) or JACK for low-latency.
You're kidding me. You seriously think there's nothing wrong with Linux sound? I'm not even going to debate that point, I'm just going to let you sound like an idiot on your own.
>My laptop wouldn't have worked very well at all a year or two ago. On Intrepid, everything works out of the box
So, your 2 year old laptop model works fine with the *brand new* version of your distro, which you run at *home*. Obviously, that means that Linux works perfect for everyone, since no one will ever have to use a distro older than 6 months or a computer newer than 2 years old.
>(minus the camera, which requires firmware that you can't download anywhere).
So, it's really not a problem that your operating system can't use your computer's hardware? Maybe it would be simpler for you if you just left your computer turned off.
I know slashdotter's like to save time when writing responses, which is usually why they don't read the article. With that in mind I've written up some template posts to this article. Just use shell variable substitution to customize your response.
Linux doesn't need to be fixed. $FEATURE is not a feature, lack of $FEATURE is a feature. Every other operating system, especially the ones with higher market share, need to be fixed by removing $FEATURE.
$FEATURE is contrary to the spirit of free software as laid out by Richard Stallman, and thus it would be immoral to implement $FEATURE. Anyway, if you want $FEATURE, feel free to download the source code and implement $FEATURE yourself.
People who use $FEATURE are dumb and lazy, they should use the command line and flat configuration files instead. Using an operating system without $FEATURE makes you smarter, and generally better than other people who use $FEATURE.
$OSSOFTWARE already implements feature. See it's listed among the features on the $OSSOFTWARE.org web page. All you have to do is go to $OSSOFTWARE-devel archives from three years ago that implements it, and patch the compatible version of the source tree from that time frame, and get the compatible versions of the library, and then edit these lines in these source files by hand so that it will work with the latest version of ubuntu. I mean, *I've* never done it and don't know for a fact it works, but It's there if you want it.
You can do $FEATURE in emacs. All you have to do is write a little emacs lisp.
$FEATURE already works for me.
$FEATURE is implemented in $DISTRO, why do you use $OTHERDISTRO? Just install $DISTRO.
$FEATURE is in the next version of $YOURDISTRO, just nuke your six month old install with the new $YOURDISTRO. Otherwise, use these upgrade instructions that 6 people have tested. Works for me.
$FEATURE only works with NVIDIA's proprietary graphics card drivers. Of course, $DISTRO doesn't ship with those drivers because that's against software freedom. Blame NVIDIA for not releasing their software as open source.
If you really need $FEATURE, why spend $MONETARYQUANTITY on $PROPRIETARYSOFTWARE when you could just spend the next three years fixing $OSSOFTWARE? Do you work for $MISSPELLINGOFMICROSOFT or something?
These carefully crafted argument formulas should help you convince everyone else on slashdot that Linux is already *fine* and that this year is *definitely* the year of the Linux desktop. And if not, it's because of something evil Bill Gates did.
Most academic issues are handled worse than computer science.
Most of the CS coverage addressed on wikipedia is the kind of stuff that working computer programmers would be interested. There are a few theory articles, but you can't expect much from them. Writing in CS theory or other areas in mathematics is difficult, and requires more than citations. It requires strong writing and editing skills, and strong understanding of the subject at hand. I wouldn't expect to get more than a rough overview of a field from its wikipedia entry.
>>>You see, I can't even begin to help you until you concede that if a tool gets the job done, it's a good tool.
>>I can hammer a nail in with my fist. But I wouldn't call my fist a good tool for hammering nails. It works, but it's not pleasant.
>Come on, man, that's a bit extreme. It's not like any of us are suggesting we should use Microsoft Visual Basic here ...
MS basic was actually very successful at what it was designed for, doing very quick GUI development on windows.
The browser on the other hand is an enormous pain the ass for a lot of the tasks people use it for. Consider the word processor that google is trying unsuccessfully to write. If they put that together as a java applet, it would be trivial. However, since they went the ajax route, they have an application that is feature poor, and still manages to crash so often that it is unusable.
>>... schooled in the old temple and given a proper
>>appreciation of a real language like C++?
>You're going to have to inform us "young'uns" of
>what is and isn't a "real language." You see, I
>can't even begin to help you until you concede
>that if a tool gets the job done, it's a good
>tool. It might not be the best tool but it's a
>good tool. Stop making inflammatory statements.
The original poster was not insulting ruby, or whatever language you use for server side processing. He was saying that the browser itself is not a real platform, which it isn't. The browser is a joke because its capabilities have more or less stagnated at what internet explorer 6 can provide.
Browsers are a huge pain in the ass to develop real applications for and require all sorts of insane hacks to do things that are trivial if you just write your own C++/Java/Whatever applications to run on the server and client.
Probably someday the browser will evolve into a great platform for writing clients, but that's maybe 10 years out.
For the time being, there are still some ease of deployment reasons to code ajax applications, but in a lot of cases there are technologies like java applets, flash, and even C++ and python clients that can be written when more complicated interface and behavior are needed.
Would love to see more 2d games. I think it says something that the 2d art on the box of games often looks better than the 3d gameplay art.
For me the golden age of gaming ended when the playstation, with it's fairly crappy 3d art (remember cloud strife and his yellow triangle head?) replaced the SNES, which had pretty nice art considering the limited resolution and color palette.
Since then gaming has become a technological race, with not enough attention payed to gameplay and art, and too much payed to pixel shaders.
Yeah, I get it, we have really realistic looking water now. Whoopty friken doo. Realism aside, it still doesn't necessarily look as *good* as when it was hand drawn.
The book was definitely worth reading, but there were some definite weaknesses.
I felt that the book was more about the ideas than the people. Part of this stems from the fact that stephenson never describes the appearance of the characters in detail. This may have been necessary to not giving away elements of the plot (think of that twilight zone episode where everyone has pig faces) but it means that Stephenson doesn't get to bring out one of his strongest abilities, his strength as a visual storyteller. Part of what brings his other characters alive is his lively description of the, which is hampered if you can't even say what their face looks like.
Also, for some reason Stephenson started without a strong hook. I think part of that is the barrage of new terms, which makes the book difficult to read at first, and obscures the plot.
Aside from that, I felt like Stephenson didn't bring to bear one of his primary strengths. One of the things that hooked me in snow crash, the diamond age, cryptonomicon, and even the baroque cycle, was his excellent action writing. His ability to describe a firefight and really engage the reader on the level that a movie or a comic book might, with stories of heroism and derring can take what is at its core a heavily conceptual novel, and make it not only interesting, but entertaining to read.
Yet, the action scenes were a bit sparse in Anathem, and those that were there felt a bit weak. The scene where the Ringing Vale rescue Erasmus seemed like the primary action scene of the novel... and I didn't feel like it compared favorably with Stephenson's other action scenes. In parts the Ringing Vale came off as fairly generic shoalin kung fu masta movie martial artists, doing lots of unnecessary backflips and jumping around. Normally, Stephenson fight scenes feel more chaotic and real.
Even with those failings though, it's probably one of the better books I've read this year, and I don't regret reading it for a minute. The concepts, which the story stays focussed on for the most part, are where it is at. The extended discussion of physics and multiple universes was cool.
I was also interested in seeing Stephenson write a straight up old school hard sci-fi novel. Most of his books are equivocations of sci fi. Snow crash and Diamond Age were both cyber punk. Cryptonomicon was only *secretly* science fiction, as in, virtually no one who read it noticed the sci fi elements, and they could have been discarded easily. In the same vein, the baroque cycle was more historical fiction than anything else, with some Enoch Root mixed in.
Anathem on the other hand, is hard sci fi. Think Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Stanislaw Lem, and the awful novelist of the Foundation series.
I don't think Stephenson is really at his strongest in this genre. Maybe because a space adventure isn't even fun unless you are willing to stoop to putting some sexy alien babes in your
book *cough* Niven *cough*.
I'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of functionality to get the portability of google docs... but I can't deal with how buggy it is.
I have never managed to get through a single session of usage of docs without it either crashing or coming up with error messages. Just loading the page with Chrome, google's own browser, gives me errors.
Seriously, it wouldn't take much above what they have technically to make inroads for people more interested in easy collaboration than having a featureful word processor, but no one's going to use a product that buggy.
>The question you ask is wrong...
>since people are no longer answering questions
>on usenet.
Some communities use usenet almost exclusively (the c++ community is basically built around comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.lang.std.c++). Furthermore, a lot of programming mailing lists are mirrored to usenet.
The problem the poster had was that google's search for usenet sucks, which I have to agree. In general, google groups has deteriorated since they started adding non-usenet groups to the service.
>Answer:
>www.stackoverflow.com [stackoverflow.com]
Stackoverflow is great, but it has nothing to do with usenet or newsgroups.
Usenet is a place for communities of people to have discussions. Basically, it is a unified distributed bulletin board system, with boards for discussions of all topics *ever*. It is also a convenient place to mirror mailing lists, so that they can be browsed in a unified manner without having to subscribe to a million different mailing lists, or go to lots of different websites.
See: gmane.org
Stackoverflow is a question answer service.... basically the same as yahoo answers except that it is focussed on answers to programming questions. Basically, it is a FAQ generation system.
If you think about it, most google apps have a few really cool and flashy features (which is why I like to use them), but then tend to have lots of UI bugs. Also, it's pretty much impossible to actually report bugs to google. At best you'll find some google group on the product that no engineer ever looks at.
Aside from the one mentioned google groops had lots of basic bugs. Until recently reading comp.lang.c++.moderated on google groups caused all sorts of problems because they weren't properly handling the escape of the ++ characters in the url (every time I clicked on a link I'd have to edit the url manually to get it to work). It took them years to find out about that and fix it. Although it was a daily annoyance to me, I had no way to get it into any kind of bug tracking system.
Even worse I've *never* been able to use google gears or google docs without major bugs and error messages, no matter what browser I used (including chrome).
Gmail, google reader, and basic search are probably the only google web apps I've seen that don't have lots of bugs. I actually have a higher opinion of their desktop apps.
Reader, which is awesome and you should check out btw, used to be very bug ridden, but it's massively improved over the last year and a half.
Search actually is kind of problematic in that the basic search works fine, but lots of the extensions are broken. Last time I tried subscribed links was broken. As in, it didn't work *at all* and there was no workaround.
I think honestly that while they obviously have high quality engineers, they just have sucky QA. I think that they focus too much on unit tests, and have forgotten that a lot of basic bugs can only be detected by someone hammering on the interface of the production system and logging bugs.
Also, I think they've basically destroyed their ability to have beta software, by making all of their software beta. Now, user have no way of distinguishing what is truly production ready software from stuff that clearly isn't, except by trying it and getting burned.
Apparently open office was "downloaded" 3 million times.
Ok... let's take a look at those numbers. There are about 1 billion PC's in use today:
http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9119
About 90% of which are windows installed. Most windows machines come bundled with office, so almost that entire number has office on it. Additionally, office is the single most widely used application for OSX, which has about 7% market share:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/01/01/mac-os-x-market-share-sets-new-record-at-the-end-of-2007
so very *conservatively* speaking, there are about 800 to 900 million office installs out there. And I'm basically throwing out a couple hundred million just on the assumption I've made *some* kind of error.
Now, my bet is that a good fraction of major open office users on windows have already upgraded their install, so that 3 million number is probably within an order of magnitude of the total install base. I'll give open office the benefit of the doubt and say that they have 10 times as many users as have already upgraded; however, I'll say right now that I doubt that number is that high.
So, heavily weighting the numbers in favor of open office, I still only come up with 30 million open office users to 800 million MS office installs.
So open office has, being very optimistic in open office's favor, 3 or 4% the number of MS office users?
Now the stupid slashdot summary says:
"As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor."
Uh, whatever. I guess the software isn't "almost identical." Moron.
90% of the documents I get passed are in MS office format, and those documents can be "rendered" by open office, but then they will without exception look like shit.
That means that open office can't even *read* the documents I want to read. How does that make it a competitor for MS office? Why are people who don't know what the word "open source" means going to throw out software they already own to use software that doesn't do the job any better?
They aren't. They haven't. They won't.
I'm glad there *is* OO.org, because if I don't have a copy of office on hand, which is kinda rare, I can still layout a basic document.
However, I've got to say, it must be depressing to spend so much effort working on software that isn't going anywhere.
Seriously, what was that article even about? The title says "Microsoftâ(TM)s new âMâ(TM) programming language", but after reading the article I still have zero idea what the M programming language is for.
I mean... maybe if you're explaining a programming language a few code samples would be good so people know what the fuck you are talking about?
I think the mono project was started primarily because of interest in the C# language, as it compares favorably to java, fixing many of Java's flaws.
Sadly while the C# language may be in many ways stronger than Java, the platform is much weaker. Realistically, the reason Java was so successful was that there were high quality VM and classpath implementations on all platforms. Yet, Microsoft didn't seem to learn this lesson from Java, and instead relied on third parties, who can't possibly maintain parity with Microsoft .NET. Thus, .NET will always be a second class citizen on Linux, and always a poor choice compared to Java.
As much as I like C#, it's a foolish choice to write Linux apps in .NET in the same way that it is foolish to write them in win32. It will always be a second rate platform on Linux, so long as the people controlling the standard have no interest in doing the work to making the framework work across platforms.
>I think things would be a lot easier if there was a minimum support standard that all distros held to. ie, a standard desktop, a standard filesystem hierarchy, a standard package manager, etc. I don't mean that these are the ONLY desktop, package manager etc, just that on supported distros they are guaranteed to be there.
That's exactly what the LSB is (except for the standard desktop part).
The problem is that distro makers only give the LSB lip service, and do the bare minimum to get supported, because they fear if there was true distro independence, they would lose their market lock in. Despite all of their talk of openness, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and Suze do a lot to prevent interoperability. They are all more focussed on keeping their tiny piece of the Linux pie than on baking a bigger pie.
>Most people will never need to download software that isn't in the Ubuntu (or insert favorite distro here)
People who are using Linux to make money almost invariably use it in conjunction with proprietary software, like databases, custom apps, etc. Until recently, you needed to download Sun Java binaries for any serious Java development. Also, some of us are *writing* proprietary software for Linux.
But sure, if all you ever do with Linux is write a dinky php home page that you serve out of your mom's basement, then you don't need to use any proprietary software that isn't shipped with Linux.
"Yes, he should have asked permission before trying, but throwing the book at the guy and wrecking his life with criminal charges (which stick for a long time) seems a little excessive."
I suppose, but when he broke the law he opened himself up to prosecution. Don't play with fire if you're afraid of getting burnt.
"The university should spend money on hiring some admins with better computer skills and teaching skills rather than paying lawyers."
They could... or they could make an example out of someone who screwed with them.
Every time we get robbed, we could just increase our home security until we are living in a steel box, or we could, you know, send the robber to jail to make an example out of him.
The truth is, there is no such thing as a secure computer system, or a secure physical building for that matter. The reason most people don't get robbed on a regular basis isn't because there's no way to break into their house. The reason is that if you are caught breaking and entering, even if you don't steal anything, the consequences are severe (i.e. jail time, loss of your right to vote, etc).
It doesn't really matter that this guy in particular had no ill intent. If they don't enforce the law when someone breaks it, and make an example out of him, they might as well not have the law at all. That may sound cruel, but that's how society works. The basis of all law, and civilization as an extension of law, is fear.
Free will means different things to different philosophers and in different contexts. Generally, though, philosophers don't take the notion of free will seriously.
The article in particular points out that determinism and free will can't coexists, which is really only true if you are talking about about a Cartesian "radical" sense of free will, which actually isn't a very good notion of free will to begin with.
How, after all, if your will free if it occurs merely through chance? How can *you* be said to move your hand, if your hand wasn't determined to move by the atoms that make up your body, but merely through random happenstance?
Spinoza would say that something is free that is necessitated by it's own nature.
Modern philosophers have even more sophisticated approaches to the subject.
The article has an interesting scientific point, but it would only really be relevant to a discussion of free will if this were the 18th century.
>They are part of the kernel, not add-ons
No, driver's are not part of your kernel, because if they were, then you would have to swap out your whole fucking kernel every time someone comes up with a new piece of hardware.
Oh, *you do* have to do that? And you think it is a *feature*?
Thank you anonymous coward for you contribution to this discussion.
>we are talking about FLOSS and innovation
In the same sentence?
Now there's a first.
>Show potential Linux users a demo of that floating cube, and you will ship millions of Linux boxes.
Dude, I could do that on my mac years ago. Only on Linux, where hardware acceleration is so often broken, would anyone be impressed with that.
>I think we're going to see that Plasma/Plasmoids are the genius invention that will propel innovation
Yes, I'm glad there will be plenty of apple and vista cloning, resource sucking widgets on your desktop that I don't use because it is buggy as hell.
What were we talking about again?
Oh, right, the future of Linux.