Closed software' is a fact of life for most users. This attempt at 'expanding' the functionality isn't very impressive, though, and won't have very many real world uses. What if you resize your monitor, do your 'customizations' all go to hell?
Not to mention the legal issues. Or trying to keep up with changes intentionally made to break your efforts (just ask the WINE, SAMBA or iPod-Linux compatibility devs about this).
The first time I saw this article in ACM links I thought "neat, but what a waste of effort; I should send them a note letting them know that open source welcomes this sort of innovation with open arms".
I fail to see why so many people using gnome hate anything that uses QT/kde libraries with such a passion. By doing so you are seriously limiting yourself and overlooking some nice software.
While I agree in general, there is a practical side to these objections: having many apps open that use different shared libraries starts eating up RAM, and both the GNOME and KDE shared libraries are no featherweights. Sure, it's not a problem on machines with 4GB (or more), but I recently had to pull out a backup machine with only 1GB of RAM, and it was painful to load up GNOME and KDE apps at the same time. Course, I was running a batch image process and DVD ripping in the background, which brings me to one other point . . .
Amarok, k3b, k9copy (only decent dvd ripper I've found on linux suitable for recommending to others),
I have to put in a word for thoggen; I hadn't even heard about it until I did a search for "DVD rip Linux", but it's one of the best programs I have ever used. Whereas most other DVD ripper/transcoders will drown you in a sea of options, thoggen is simple and straightforward. Add to that the fact that most other DVD rippers "try to keep it simple" by not supporting cropping or scaling while thoggen does both of those out of the box and makes it easy, and thoggen comes out the clear winner. The only "downside" is that it only rips to OGG formats, but for those of us who chose to buy hardware we have control over, that's a Good Thing.
The recent trend over the last few years for everyone to default to gnome and nobody having used any qt stuff seems strange to me, I always have both sets of libraries installed and use the best tool for the job.
Good software can and has made a name for itself independent of toolkit; I use LyX regularly, and I've not heard of anything open source that has the featureset of Rosegarden. But they both run better on my machine with 4GB of RAM. Posts like yours help to let people know about KDE/Qt apps that may work better for people than the GNOME defaults. Personally, I will be sticking with Rhythmbox, though; the last time I tried Amarok, it wouldn't play my.MODs,.XMs,.S3Ms,.ITs, or.MIDs.
That was absolutely one of the most cringeworthy aspects of the movie, and they could have fixed it with a single scene.
Data: "But it's strange - despite their formidable technology, their computer and communications networks are extremely straightforward - no encryption at all. We've spent years reverse-engineering the command codes for their systems. We've had a lot of success - for all the good it has done us."
Goldblum: "What - an advanced race like this, and the idea of passwords and encryption didn't occur to them?"
Pullman: "No - they're telepaths. They can't lie or hide anything from each other - and we're the only other advanced civilization they're ever encountered. No other race they've destroyed had computers."
Goldblum: "Give me everything you have on their computer systems and command codes. I have an idea..."
Sure, it would have still been a stretch, but a lot easier to swallow.
You, my good man are a genius. YOU should be writing (at least parts of) movie scripts. A thirty second scene (if that!) that could have saved millions of geeks years of agony; brilliant!
rather than use the statistical manipulation suite "R" instead used Fortran,
This right there tells me I don't need to read the rest of your post to know you aren't any more familiar with scientific computing or statistics than Michael Mann is. Did it ever occur to you that Mann probably learned FORTRAN near the beginning of his career and has been using it ever since because it's good enough? Or how about that a large majority of statistics and scientific code has been tested, tuned and optimized for decades in FORTRAN? Not to bash R, but it wasn't around back then. Shit, son, he's probably a better FORTRAN programmer than you are an "R" programmer; he's been doing it for decades. On top of that, Michael Mann is a climatologist who has been studying this stuff for decades. His code may not be written in "the one true statistics language", but I can tell you from direct experience that FORTRAN is still running a lot of DoD systems TODAY. And given the choice of who to believe about climatology (a climatologist who can't write readable code, or a first rate hacker who has dabbled in climatology), I'll take the climatologist. Even if you discount Mann, there are plenty of other well researched, well studied experts in this field whose data match up with Mann's.
All that aside, do you have any evidence to support your position? Where's your study, your analysis? You have one link in your whole post, to someone else's book, and judging from the title, I'm a bit skeptical of you or the authors lack of bias.
If you think no one here has looked at the emails, and soundly refuted all the conspiracy theories about them, you obviously haven't been paying attention. BTW, love your homepage; had it long?
Any linux purist (i.e. someone who has no dual boot) who likes computer (as opposed to console) games should try this, yes all ten of you. If not for any other reason then to encourage more developers to do this.
Answer me just one question first: is this a true port or did they "port" it using WINE? All due respect to developers who even acknowledge Linux (then again, in this day and age, how can you *not* acknowledge Linux?), and to the WINE developers, but I'm not willing to run some half-assed, DirectX laden, emulated "port" of a game. If I were, I'd still be playing Windows games. As it is, the game industry has never really given Linux the time of day, so I stopped paying attention to them. Don't get me wrong, I still run Jagged Alliance 2 on my N900, and plenty of emulated games that I bought before Linux existed, not to mention the myriad of open source and indie studio games that actually run on Linux and not WINE.
Years ago, I used to play games a lot; used to have a number of consoles, a decent PC gaming rig to run Windows and DOS games. But that was years ago, and as time has gone by, and I've found the only thing I need Windows for is games, I've found better things to do with my time. Like write my own software, or go hiking or climbing, or play my saxophone. I'd *love* to support developers who support Linux, but it costs money, and if they're not really supporting Linux, I'm definitely not going to give them money that I could better spend elsewhere.
I bought *multiple* copies of Savage, one for me and one for each of my friends because S2 had the three major platform clients on one CD. I bought them all through a Linux gaming shop (http://tuxgames.com), and told my friends "here, you can run it on Windows *and* Linux!". Then S2 made the sequel for Windows and "ported" it using WINE, and that was around the same time I stopped playing games seriously.
That's essentially true, but I don't think movies are simply about story telling -- movies are more about story immersion.
If there is no story, or the story seems like something you have heard twicebefore, or it seriously breaks your suspension of disbelief (too many movies to link to), then it doesn't matter how good the effects are, the immersion will be broken.
TFA explains it: main() isn't the true start of the program, _start is. That resides in ctrl.o, which fires off a bunch of setup stuff before calling __libc_start_main, which in turn kicks off main(), and off your program goes.
If a programmer doesn't know this, they aren't competent to be programming, much less programming in spaces that may be critical (such as embedded). Don't use wizard code you don't understand. And it's "crt1.o", BTW.
Let me follow this up by saying that I don't want to discourage anyone from/learning/ how to program, especially the GP, as he or she seems interested enough in it to search out things like this. What I mean by "they aren't competent to be programming" is that until someone is familiar enough with the language and underlying hardware and software, they shouldn't try to pass off their programs as the most reliable or efficient things around. Things like the The Pragmatic Programmer are especially cogent to becoming a better programmer, even if you only take away this one lesson: understand the abstractions you use. The layers of computing have been built and tested for decades, and most of the time they make sense and make your life easier (that's what they are *for*). But make sure you at least use them properly, and the surest way to make sure you use them properly is to *understand* them, eg, know that GCC will attach a whole bunch of stuff to your program (because almost all programs use it) that you might not need.
TFA explains it: main() isn't the true start of the program, _start is. That resides in ctrl.o, which fires off a bunch of setup stuff before calling __libc_start_main, which in turn kicks off main(), and off your program goes.
If a programmer doesn't know this, they aren't competent to be programming, much less programming in spaces that may be critical (such as embedded). Don't use wizard code you don't understand. And it's "crt1.o", BTW.
It's funny that this always come up in conversations about bloat, because not everyone has to program for embedded code, because not everyone is programming embedded devices. It's almost like you guys are a subsubculture of programmer, to the point where many of you guys come off with the general attitude of being superior, when in fact, neither approach is superior, just different based on the situation.
Not to mention that I have yet to meet the programmer, embedded or otherwise, that can beat the compiler when it comes to optimizing, for space or for speed. Even for my bread and butter, embedded systems, I have yet to have to touch assembler or microcode. Everything is in C and C++. Granted, most of my "embedded" systems are more comparable to desktop powerhouses of 5-10 years ago. But even when a friend and I were making software for an HC11 (where we had to make our own pseudo-filesystem that had to find the sweet spot between reducing writes to flash memory and trying to protect privacy), we wrote everything in C. We just wrote it *smartly* and used good algorithms. The result: entirely readable *and* efficient code. The simple fact of the matter is that unless someone is *hyper* competent and *extremely* familiar with the underlying architecture, they will most likely not beat the compiler for optimizing. If they claim that the higher level language adds too much bloat (such as C of all things!), then they are probably just not qualified to design algorithms or program in the higher level language.
Yes, Windows has its faults, but at least when I go to install something or buy something like a UPS or a printer, I can install the driver/program and just expect it to work.
Oh, you mean how like when I buy a UPS and I plug it in it just works? Oh wait, that's right, that's not Windows, it's Linux. No CD or driver download required. 99% of hardware is that way. The other 1% is shit that the manufacturer has not written a device driver or submitted the specs for a driver to be written for Linux, and that's not a Linux problem. As for software, that's not a Linux problem either; when there is already a perfectly acceptable standard software package format in the form of.DEBs available, and it's open, and it's free to use, then it's not the distro maintainers' fault when idiot developers don't use it. You think that Microsoft created the Nullsoft or Inno installer? Oh, but wait, you might try to claim.MSI's. Well, not everyone uses those, yet I don't hear you bitching out Microsoft for "not settling on some kind of standard". Linux has it's faults, but your post is hammering on shit that's either already fixed or can't be fixed by the Linux devs and distro makers.
Big, sweeping solutions like "legalize marijuana" seem like panaceas, but in fact the government is a vast, complex entity, like the company you work for scaled up by a factor of 1,000. Ending the war on drugs is certainly a good idea, but if you really want to fix government, it helps to know something about government, and not just
I don't think that anyone is arguing that legalizing marijuana would be a panacea. Much like those who say organized religion should be abolished don't think it will solve all the worlds' ills. Both are good ideas, and the main reason people want to see them done is that they are quick and easy ways to eliminate big problems. It's sort of like profiling code, where making a small change to one piece of code might cut the overall run time in half. Sure, it won't *eliminate* the run time completely, but it's such an easy thing to do, that will help so much, why not do it? The only reason it isn't being done is some political bullshit. To continue the analogy, it's as if you found the slow piece of code, found a fix, but then your manager said "oh no, we can't do that, it might upset our users." even when the user survey obviously says they all think your code runs like a dog.
You'd better believe in what you're doing, because there isn't always a thank-you.
On behalf of all computer users, I would like to say thank you. They may not think that I speak for them, but I believe that everything you have done (and continue to do) helps make the world a better place.
And oh BTW, I'm still using Electric Fence on a daily basis. Thanks!
This type of anecdotal philosophy is useless. It is the equivalent of asking a 100 year old man what the secret to his long life was. The answer is never, "Well, I just happened to be a couple of sigma away from the mean in the normal distribution of human longevity". It is always like "get up early every morning, smoke a cigar every night, drink a pint of whiskey every day, etc."
Exactly. For every Jimmy Wales, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, how many *hundreds* or *thousands* of people are there who worked just as hard, if not harder, who have failed? It's pretty much random chance to start a successful business (1 in 10 last I heard). Working hard and trying repeatedly is just a *pre-requisite* to being *dealt* a hand. If you've got enough money to pay the bills while you fail nine times, then sure, yeah, you can try for number ten and have a good chance of succeeding. People with no money, or people who have bad health and no health insurance don't have that option.
Another thing to remember is: "don't be afraid to think big" (or fail big, perhaps). Apple, McDonalds, Google, Dell and others have grown from small enterprises into big corporations. Some of that is luck, being at the right place at the right time and all that, but not all of it. And there are many similar small successes that have failed to cross over into the big time, or failed to even try.
I think the big thing here is "it's the customers, stupid", or more generically, it doesn't matter how hard someone works, how good an idea is or anything else; the only thing that matters is, will the market pay for it? Of course, if you never try, you'll never know. The fact that market success is mostly a game of random chance is not something the rugged-individual, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap types like to hear, but it's true. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and all those others aren't successful because they work any harder or have better ideas. They're successful because they kept trying, and had ways to keep paying the bills while they were trying. This is another thing most "American dream" types fail to get: it's damn near impossible to bootstrap your business when you are working two jobs just to pay the bills, or you don't have the money/health insurance to pay for a new liver.
You're missing the point; the GP was comparing Google's actions to the MO of Microsoft. Many people in this thread seem to be blowing things way out of proportion and trying to make Google look worse than Microsoft and Apple look like the victim. Apple and Google are about equally evil, with Apple perhaps being more on the evil side because of it's lockin, random banning of apps, closed dev environment, and (meager) support of DRM. But neither of them are anywhere near as bad as Microsoft. Anyone who's been in the computing industry for a long enough time can tell you that (unless they have an agenda). Personally, I'm not fond of Apple; the only reason they are not in Microsoft's position is that Microsoft kept all the power (and abused it) to itself. If it hadn't of been for Microsoft, *everyone* would be bitching about Apple; they're really not all that different.
As for Google, I don't trust them either; that's why I don't use their email or their phone. Still, given the choice between working for/with Google or Apple, I'd go with Google in a heartbeat. I doubt Apple would pay me to write Linux software:)
Really, at what point was there a need to pull sale?
At the point Google realized it was cutting out the ads on Google mail? At the point that they decided it would take too many resources to support or continue development? Also note, we have no idea whether the *author* pulled it of his own free will, or Google forced him to. Considering he was successful enough with this app, if he had wanted to keep working on it, he would have. And everything points to Google integrating this apps' features into their Gmail service; end users lose nothing. iPhone/Gmail users will still have these features. Who loses here? Apple? Can't see how, and even if they do, who cares?
You'll need to explain why playing hardball with Apple counts, in some way, as "evil".
Hell, fucking with Apple counts as one of the most *good* things anyone can do, in my book. And honestly, I don't think Google was really doing this to do any harm to Apple; I think all the fanboys are just having a persecution complex overreaction.
I know Google has done extremely well diversifying themselves and has their fingers in anything, but no one treats them like monopolizers that Microsoft became.
Get back to us when Google "has talks to buy" a small company, then turns around and implements that small companies' flagship product without any deal, bundles it with their OS (that they force on vendors) so tightly it takes a crowbar to remove it, and makes their OS incompatible with that small companies' products. Multiple times. And that's just one of many examples off the top of my head.
Maybe because there's a big difference between "killing" and "giving a huge bag of money and a job and the potential to integrate the app into the google codebase", regardless of how the Register/Slashdot try and spin the story title?
I know, it's like people don't RTFA around here, but also skip vital parts of the summary. And I quote: "[the app developer] will be returning to Google as a Product Manager on the Gmail team". Anybody else catch that? Apparently, he used to work for Google! And now he's going back. Of course, if someone was really a mac fanboi, they could claim that this guy was a plant, and Google is just yanking him back to to fuck with Apple. Personally, I don't mind anyone fucking with Apple; anyone who can get Jobs' panties in enough of a twist to get him to say "do no evil is bullshit" has got my vote. Still, I don't trust Google either (I'm buying an N900 over any Android based phone), but better that the 800lb gorillas slug at each other rather than us (the little guys).
This is the only mobile Linux distro that takes openness and interop with desktop Linux seriously, so I'll still support it, but I really liked the fact that Maemo was Debian-based
Being a big fan of Debian (see my sig), I have to agree. Some claim that Maemo/Meego "is not a desktop OS, compatibility isn't important", but I'd just like to point out that Debian is the *only* distro I can run as a server *and* desktop OS, on multiple architectures, and not have it give me headaches. Why can't we extend the Debian model to smartphones/palmtops? Even Ubuntu, while derived from Debian, has enough differences to irritate me (the binary drivers in particular are nice until they crash the kernel). Just as a quick example of what Debian has that I would like on the N900: most of my friends have iPhones. I can easily develop software using the GNUstep packages for Debian and have the same software just work on the iPhone. Unfortunately, Maemo (another Debian derivative) doesn't even have the Objective-C *compiler*, which is shocking when you realize that Debian covers something like eleven architectures, and ARM (what's in the N900) is one of them. Furthermore, the packages (including dev tools) *work on all architectures*. I can compile ObjC on my NSLU2, but will I even be able to run those on the N900?
I haven't used RPM based distros in a while (I happily switched away around the turn of the century), but I'm hoping that it really won't make much of a difference.
Broken window fallacy. If AGW is not correct but we focus on "green tech" then we will have spent society's resources inefficiently. We will have build carbon-capture facilities that are entirely useless. We will have researched efficiency technologies of less utility than we thought. We will have built homes/businesses/cars that are more expensive than they needed to be because we improperly calculated the cost of future energy input. We will have made our major industries less competitive by pointlessly reducing their carbon output.
Broken window fallacy my ass. Okay, here's some things to chew on:
Health care costs for treating emphysema, cancer, etc because of burning of fossil fuels.
Increasing efficiency is *almost* always a net gain (ie, by not saving money on power bills you take away money that could have been put towards other things). There may well be a time where we could pile as much effort as possible into making things more efficient with very little return, but it doesn't look like we are anywhere near that point.
Challenges have almost always lead to the human race becoming stronger for them; the Greatest Generation didn't get that way by whining that fighting the Nazis would make us less competitive with the rest of the world.
The only thing that will happen by industries being forced to reduce their carbon output is that the weak (ie, inflexible, un-adaptable) ones will fail. Good riddance.
I agree that the way that we are trying to go about reducing carbon pollution is very wrong and very probably will have no noticeable effect (except to make the rich richer and the poor poorer). That doesn't change the fact that the climate is changing, and whether you believe it's caused by humanity or not, reducing pollution and increasing efficiency are very hard to argue against.
On that, I can agree with you, but for geopolitical, not environmental reasons. That said, no reason not to form a coalition, eh?
Fuck yeah! I'm glad I can find others who think this is a good idea. Now the only problem is convincing my neighbors that it would be okay to have a nuke plant built in our community. Too many damn NIMBYs; I always have to ask, would they rather have a coal or a nuke plant built near their house? Because there's no getting around the fact that we are going to need that energy, and it has to be generated somehow . . .
Star Wars freely stole from^W^W paid homage to everybody. C-3PO is the Maria robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Tattooine is, as you note, Arrakis (they even had what could pass for a sandworm skeleton when the two droids are wandering the desert before being captured by Jawas), Corscant as Trantor. Heck, even the Jedi bear a passing resemblence -- in mission, if not detail -- to Christopher Anvil's Interstellar Patrol (which used advanced tech rather than The Force, and were generally more competent than the Jedi). And that borrowed from Doc Smith's Lensman series. (Indeed, there are similarities between the Lens and The Force. Maybe midichlorians are a kind of micro-Lens.)
In theory, this is true. In practice, it is not. If I dare to call myself a "free-thinking, religious individual" then 95% of atheists will roll their eyes and offer up some ridiculous strawman, as if on command.
Then I will say, "these people do not speak for me; I do NOT consider them to be rational freethinkers." Do you have the have the same integrity to speak against those who identify themselves as religious and spew forth hate?
For starters, by definition, an atheist must grant that that their belief "that there is no God" is not based on scientific principle.
Strawman: "atheism" = "a" (without) + "theism" (belief in a deity). Atheism is not a belief; it is a lack of belief; they are NOT the same. There is no faith in atheism, by definition.
The morally dead will choose atheism. The baby-killing, wife-cheating, porn-addicted, sociopathic, sexual-experimenting person will choose atheism as an attempt to escape their guilt.
Fuck. IHBT. Too bad that research shows exactly the opposite of what you claim (that is, those most likely to engage in sick sadistic, baby-killing, wife-cheating, sociopathic tendencies are the religious).
To start, use a good programming editor/environment (Xcode, Vslick, Visual Studio, etc.) that gives you the ability to easily go to definition or references to variables, functions, structs and such.
I have to put in a word for Emacs, which Works For Me, and Works Very Well, ThankYouVeryMuch. Never did like XCode, Vslick, VisualStudio, Eclipse or any of those others. Of course, if the poster isn't using Emacs already, that's just another learning curve they will have to climb, I admit. What it boils down to: does your favorite editor support looking up definitions of names in code? If not, switch to one that does, preferably one that is similar to your favorite editor. If you are using Emacs and hitting up against the limits of etags, take a look at CEDET, in case you haven't already.
Run some sort of profiler or flowchart type program on it to get a high level view of the code and how it fits together.
Huh. Much as I harp on using profiler's, I would argue that they aren't very helpful at this stage in the game. Granted, most of the code I get to maintain is a mess that won't help by being profiled. However, any tool you can get that helps pick apart the code automatically is a Good Thing; I second this.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the legal issues. Or trying to keep up with changes intentionally made to break your efforts (just ask the WINE, SAMBA or iPod-Linux compatibility devs about this).
The first time I saw this article in ACM links I thought "neat, but what a waste of effort; I should send them a note letting them know that open source welcomes this sort of innovation with open arms".
While I agree in general, there is a practical side to these objections: having many apps open that use different shared libraries starts eating up RAM, and both the GNOME and KDE shared libraries are no featherweights. Sure, it's not a problem on machines with 4GB (or more), but I recently had to pull out a backup machine with only 1GB of RAM, and it was painful to load up GNOME and KDE apps at the same time. Course, I was running a batch image process and DVD ripping in the background, which brings me to one other point . . .
I have to put in a word for thoggen; I hadn't even heard about it until I did a search for "DVD rip Linux", but it's one of the best programs I have ever used. Whereas most other DVD ripper/transcoders will drown you in a sea of options, thoggen is simple and straightforward. Add to that the fact that most other DVD rippers "try to keep it simple" by not supporting cropping or scaling while thoggen does both of those out of the box and makes it easy, and thoggen comes out the clear winner. The only "downside" is that it only rips to OGG formats, but for those of us who chose to buy hardware we have control over, that's a Good Thing.
Good software can and has made a name for itself independent of toolkit; I use LyX regularly, and I've not heard of anything open source that has the featureset of Rosegarden. But they both run better on my machine with 4GB of RAM. Posts like yours help to let people know about KDE/Qt apps that may work better for people than the GNOME defaults. Personally, I will be sticking with Rhythmbox, though; the last time I tried Amarok, it wouldn't play my .MODs, .XMs, .S3Ms, .ITs, or .MIDs.
You, my good man are a genius. YOU should be writing (at least parts of) movie scripts. A thirty second scene (if that!) that could have saved millions of geeks years of agony; brilliant!
This right there tells me I don't need to read the rest of your post to know you aren't any more familiar with scientific computing or statistics than Michael Mann is. Did it ever occur to you that Mann probably learned FORTRAN near the beginning of his career and has been using it ever since because it's good enough? Or how about that a large majority of statistics and scientific code has been tested, tuned and optimized for decades in FORTRAN? Not to bash R, but it wasn't around back then. Shit, son, he's probably a better FORTRAN programmer than you are an "R" programmer; he's been doing it for decades. On top of that, Michael Mann is a climatologist who has been studying this stuff for decades. His code may not be written in "the one true statistics language", but I can tell you from direct experience that FORTRAN is still running a lot of DoD systems TODAY. And given the choice of who to believe about climatology (a climatologist who can't write readable code, or a first rate hacker who has dabbled in climatology), I'll take the climatologist. Even if you discount Mann, there are plenty of other well researched, well studied experts in this field whose data match up with Mann's.
All that aside, do you have any evidence to support your position? Where's your study, your analysis? You have one link in your whole post, to someone else's book, and judging from the title, I'm a bit skeptical of you or the authors lack of bias.
If you think no one here has looked at the emails, and soundly refuted all the conspiracy theories about them, you obviously haven't been paying attention. BTW, love your homepage; had it long?
Answer me just one question first: is this a true port or did they "port" it using WINE? All due respect to developers who even acknowledge Linux (then again, in this day and age, how can you *not* acknowledge Linux?), and to the WINE developers, but I'm not willing to run some half-assed, DirectX laden, emulated "port" of a game. If I were, I'd still be playing Windows games. As it is, the game industry has never really given Linux the time of day, so I stopped paying attention to them. Don't get me wrong, I still run Jagged Alliance 2 on my N900, and plenty of emulated games that I bought before Linux existed, not to mention the myriad of open source and indie studio games that actually run on Linux and not WINE.
Years ago, I used to play games a lot; used to have a number of consoles, a decent PC gaming rig to run Windows and DOS games. But that was years ago, and as time has gone by, and I've found the only thing I need Windows for is games, I've found better things to do with my time. Like write my own software, or go hiking or climbing, or play my saxophone. I'd *love* to support developers who support Linux, but it costs money, and if they're not really supporting Linux, I'm definitely not going to give them money that I could better spend elsewhere.
I bought *multiple* copies of Savage, one for me and one for each of my friends because S2 had the three major platform clients on one CD. I bought them all through a Linux gaming shop (http://tuxgames.com), and told my friends "here, you can run it on Windows *and* Linux!". Then S2 made the sequel for Windows and "ported" it using WINE, and that was around the same time I stopped playing games seriously.
If there is no story, or the story seems like something you have heard twice before, or it seriously breaks your suspension of disbelief (too many movies to link to), then it doesn't matter how good the effects are, the immersion will be broken.
Let me follow this up by saying that I don't want to discourage anyone from /learning/ how to program, especially the GP, as he or she seems interested enough in it to search out things like this. What I mean by "they aren't competent to be programming" is that until someone is familiar enough with the language and underlying hardware and software, they shouldn't try to pass off their programs as the most reliable or efficient things around. Things like the The Pragmatic Programmer are especially cogent to becoming a better programmer, even if you only take away this one lesson: understand the abstractions you use. The layers of computing have been built and tested for decades, and most of the time they make sense and make your life easier (that's what they are *for*). But make sure you at least use them properly, and the surest way to make sure you use them properly is to *understand* them, eg, know that GCC will attach a whole bunch of stuff to your program (because almost all programs use it) that you might not need.
If a programmer doesn't know this, they aren't competent to be programming, much less programming in spaces that may be critical (such as embedded). Don't use wizard code you don't understand. And it's "crt1.o", BTW.
Not to mention that I have yet to meet the programmer, embedded or otherwise, that can beat the compiler when it comes to optimizing, for space or for speed. Even for my bread and butter, embedded systems, I have yet to have to touch assembler or microcode. Everything is in C and C++. Granted, most of my "embedded" systems are more comparable to desktop powerhouses of 5-10 years ago. But even when a friend and I were making software for an HC11 (where we had to make our own pseudo-filesystem that had to find the sweet spot between reducing writes to flash memory and trying to protect privacy), we wrote everything in C. We just wrote it *smartly* and used good algorithms. The result: entirely readable *and* efficient code. The simple fact of the matter is that unless someone is *hyper* competent and *extremely* familiar with the underlying architecture, they will most likely not beat the compiler for optimizing. If they claim that the higher level language adds too much bloat (such as C of all things!), then they are probably just not qualified to design algorithms or program in the higher level language.
Oh, you mean how like when I buy a UPS and I plug it in it just works? Oh wait, that's right, that's not Windows, it's Linux. No CD or driver download required. 99% of hardware is that way. The other 1% is shit that the manufacturer has not written a device driver or submitted the specs for a driver to be written for Linux, and that's not a Linux problem. As for software, that's not a Linux problem either; when there is already a perfectly acceptable standard software package format in the form of .DEBs available, and it's open, and it's free to use, then it's not the distro maintainers' fault when idiot developers don't use it. You think that Microsoft created the Nullsoft or Inno installer? Oh, but wait, you might try to claim .MSI's. Well, not everyone uses those, yet I don't hear you bitching out Microsoft for "not settling on some kind of standard". Linux has it's faults, but your post is hammering on shit that's either already fixed or can't be fixed by the Linux devs and distro makers.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that legalizing marijuana would be a panacea. Much like those who say organized religion should be abolished don't think it will solve all the worlds' ills. Both are good ideas, and the main reason people want to see them done is that they are quick and easy ways to eliminate big problems. It's sort of like profiling code, where making a small change to one piece of code might cut the overall run time in half. Sure, it won't *eliminate* the run time completely, but it's such an easy thing to do, that will help so much, why not do it? The only reason it isn't being done is some political bullshit. To continue the analogy, it's as if you found the slow piece of code, found a fix, but then your manager said "oh no, we can't do that, it might upset our users." even when the user survey obviously says they all think your code runs like a dog.
It is sad that "dark" is considered "mature".
On behalf of all computer users, I would like to say thank you. They may not think that I speak for them, but I believe that everything you have done (and continue to do) helps make the world a better place.
And oh BTW, I'm still using Electric Fence on a daily basis. Thanks!
Exactly. For every Jimmy Wales, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, how many *hundreds* or *thousands* of people are there who worked just as hard, if not harder, who have failed? It's pretty much random chance to start a successful business (1 in 10 last I heard). Working hard and trying repeatedly is just a *pre-requisite* to being *dealt* a hand. If you've got enough money to pay the bills while you fail nine times, then sure, yeah, you can try for number ten and have a good chance of succeeding. People with no money, or people who have bad health and no health insurance don't have that option.
I think the big thing here is "it's the customers, stupid", or more generically, it doesn't matter how hard someone works, how good an idea is or anything else; the only thing that matters is, will the market pay for it? Of course, if you never try, you'll never know. The fact that market success is mostly a game of random chance is not something the rugged-individual, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap types like to hear, but it's true. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and all those others aren't successful because they work any harder or have better ideas. They're successful because they kept trying, and had ways to keep paying the bills while they were trying. This is another thing most "American dream" types fail to get: it's damn near impossible to bootstrap your business when you are working two jobs just to pay the bills, or you don't have the money/health insurance to pay for a new liver.
You're missing the point; the GP was comparing Google's actions to the MO of Microsoft. Many people in this thread seem to be blowing things way out of proportion and trying to make Google look worse than Microsoft and Apple look like the victim. Apple and Google are about equally evil, with Apple perhaps being more on the evil side because of it's lockin, random banning of apps, closed dev environment, and (meager) support of DRM. But neither of them are anywhere near as bad as Microsoft. Anyone who's been in the computing industry for a long enough time can tell you that (unless they have an agenda). Personally, I'm not fond of Apple; the only reason they are not in Microsoft's position is that Microsoft kept all the power (and abused it) to itself. If it hadn't of been for Microsoft, *everyone* would be bitching about Apple; they're really not all that different.
As for Google, I don't trust them either; that's why I don't use their email or their phone. Still, given the choice between working for/with Google or Apple, I'd go with Google in a heartbeat. I doubt Apple would pay me to write Linux software :)
At the point Google realized it was cutting out the ads on Google mail? At the point that they decided it would take too many resources to support or continue development? Also note, we have no idea whether the *author* pulled it of his own free will, or Google forced him to. Considering he was successful enough with this app, if he had wanted to keep working on it, he would have. And everything points to Google integrating this apps' features into their Gmail service; end users lose nothing. iPhone/Gmail users will still have these features. Who loses here? Apple? Can't see how, and even if they do, who cares?
Hell, fucking with Apple counts as one of the most *good* things anyone can do, in my book. And honestly, I don't think Google was really doing this to do any harm to Apple; I think all the fanboys are just having a persecution complex overreaction.
Get back to us when Google "has talks to buy" a small company, then turns around and implements that small companies' flagship product without any deal, bundles it with their OS (that they force on vendors) so tightly it takes a crowbar to remove it, and makes their OS incompatible with that small companies' products. Multiple times. And that's just one of many examples off the top of my head.
You know, I think you're right: that would be about the time the Microsoft and Apple fanboys started showing up in large droves.
I know, it's like people don't RTFA around here, but also skip vital parts of the summary. And I quote: "[the app developer] will be returning to Google as a Product Manager on the Gmail team". Anybody else catch that? Apparently, he used to work for Google! And now he's going back. Of course, if someone was really a mac fanboi, they could claim that this guy was a plant, and Google is just yanking him back to to fuck with Apple. Personally, I don't mind anyone fucking with Apple; anyone who can get Jobs' panties in enough of a twist to get him to say "do no evil is bullshit" has got my vote. Still, I don't trust Google either (I'm buying an N900 over any Android based phone), but better that the 800lb gorillas slug at each other rather than us (the little guys).
Being a big fan of Debian (see my sig), I have to agree. Some claim that Maemo/Meego "is not a desktop OS, compatibility isn't important", but I'd just like to point out that Debian is the *only* distro I can run as a server *and* desktop OS, on multiple architectures, and not have it give me headaches. Why can't we extend the Debian model to smartphones/palmtops? Even Ubuntu, while derived from Debian, has enough differences to irritate me (the binary drivers in particular are nice until they crash the kernel). Just as a quick example of what Debian has that I would like on the N900: most of my friends have iPhones. I can easily develop software using the GNUstep packages for Debian and have the same software just work on the iPhone. Unfortunately, Maemo (another Debian derivative) doesn't even have the Objective-C *compiler*, which is shocking when you realize that Debian covers something like eleven architectures, and ARM (what's in the N900) is one of them. Furthermore, the packages (including dev tools) *work on all architectures*. I can compile ObjC on my NSLU2, but will I even be able to run those on the N900?
I haven't used RPM based distros in a while (I happily switched away around the turn of the century), but I'm hoping that it really won't make much of a difference.
Broken window fallacy my ass. Okay, here's some things to chew on:
I agree that the way that we are trying to go about reducing carbon pollution is very wrong and very probably will have no noticeable effect (except to make the rich richer and the poor poorer). That doesn't change the fact that the climate is changing, and whether you believe it's caused by humanity or not, reducing pollution and increasing efficiency are very hard to argue against.
Fuck yeah! I'm glad I can find others who think this is a good idea. Now the only problem is convincing my neighbors that it would be okay to have a nuke plant built in our community. Too many damn NIMBYs; I always have to ask, would they rather have a coal or a nuke plant built near their house? Because there's no getting around the fact that we are going to need that energy, and it has to be generated somehow . . .
You forgot "Hidden Fortress" and Joseph Campbell.
Then I will say, "these people do not speak for me; I do NOT consider them to be rational freethinkers." Do you have the have the same integrity to speak against those who identify themselves as religious and spew forth hate?
Strawman: "atheism" = "a" (without) + "theism" (belief in a deity). Atheism is not a belief; it is a lack of belief; they are NOT the same. There is no faith in atheism, by definition.
Fuck. IHBT. Too bad that research shows exactly the opposite of what you claim (that is, those most likely to engage in sick sadistic, baby-killing, wife-cheating, sociopathic tendencies are the religious).
I have to put in a word for Emacs, which Works For Me, and Works Very Well, ThankYouVeryMuch. Never did like XCode, Vslick, VisualStudio, Eclipse or any of those others. Of course, if the poster isn't using Emacs already, that's just another learning curve they will have to climb, I admit. What it boils down to: does your favorite editor support looking up definitions of names in code? If not, switch to one that does, preferably one that is similar to your favorite editor. If you are using Emacs and hitting up against the limits of etags, take a look at CEDET, in case you haven't already.
Huh. Much as I harp on using profiler's, I would argue that they aren't very helpful at this stage in the game. Granted, most of the code I get to maintain is a mess that won't help by being profiled. However, any tool you can get that helps pick apart the code automatically is a Good Thing; I second this.