Maybe they should donate sperm as the pace of development is WAY TO SLOW. Linux is not going to the desktop mainstream. Deal with it.
This is a troll, but I'll bite. You're just like a friend of mine who does IT knows nothing but Microsoft Windows as a platform. He just has this bullish tactic of telling everyone "Linux is never going mainstream, deal with it. The money is in Windows." It's not about making money, it's about making things better.
Open source development is very fast. Apache, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Linux, and many others are moving at a break neck pace. They produce software and fixes for software much faster than Microsoft. As for being on the desktop, well, it will. It's only a matter of time.
Lots of people said Linux and open source in general would never make it "mainstream" and look, the popularity is growing all the time. Heck, my mother and sister (as well as myself of course) run Linux. What's funny is the platform runs some Windows applications faster and more reliably than Windows does (thanks to Codeweavers and the Wine project). On top of that, we've even got retail stores selling Linux to desktop consumers preinstalled, ala Walmart's Lindows PCs.
So, you're wrong, mark my words and just wait and see. I will not "deal with it".
That letter is awesome. It's great to have a real, honest, genuine human-being to rally behind.
This is the greatest things about open-source: the people. People who are willing to donate so much time and effort to the benefit of everyone on earth as opposed to people who want to screw over the world so they can make themselves rich.
We're much better off than those cheering on phony, cut-throat business men who run and jump around a stage like monkies to the tune of Gloria Estefan.
Sometimes it is genuinely difficult to tell when you're being baked. Except of course when that DRM protected music you're listening to seems to last 6 times as long.
Things are so much more interesting out of context...
Yes, but we are certain he's had heterosexual sex at least 2 (or is it 3?) times. That's far better that most/.ers (I was about to say 2 or 3 times better, but anything times 0 is 0).
If we, say, wrote in safer programming languages, used tools like Immunix's StackGuard, ProPolice, or OpenBSD 3.3, chroot and UML, we could reduce the damage a malicious hacker might do without damaging our civil liberities.
You're saying that developers should take responsibility for what they write to ensure it's secure? You're kidding, right? I mean, who the hell wants to be responsible in this day and age?
This kind of thing will never happen because businesses (plenty of them out there that would rahter sue than write solid code) are too lazy. I've been told "secure code doesn't make business sense -- it costs money".
Question: when a company/whatever gets hacked, who handles the prosecution? Do you just turn it over to the FBI and they go and nail the little bastard? If that's the case, what this story discusses will never happen.
had complete knowledge that they were facilitating a crime(ie, copyright violation, intellectual theft, etc.)
Napster's intended business was to encourage the exchange of free, independent media. They did this very well -- there was lots of legally free content on Napster. There were plenty of users who weren't satisfied with this, and thus traded copyrighted music. It's not Napster's fault, the users are to blame.
doing nothing to stop said crime
Actually, they did. Think of the Metalica situation.
ENCOURAGING said crime by promoting their business as(surprise!) a music-swapping service.
Yes, they were a music swapping service. Read my first point. It's not illegal to encourage the use of your services. Napster wanted to be a community of free music, but the users made it something else....had all been told as much by their lawyers and charged ahead regardless
Last I checked, there was no law that stated it was a felony to disobey the advice of one's legal council.
but the fact remains that people were violating the law using Napster
You can continuously repeat over and over that something is a fact, but you have yet to back this up.
Napster knew/did nothing/encouraged it, and their investors supported them and henceforth were accessories.
Many colleges know students use their bandwidth for music/movie/software piracy. They also say that the network is for free access to information. So many colleges know, do nothing, and even encourage infringement. Should all colleges be shut down? You can find pirated music/movies/software on Google, are they guilty too? The Internet is a medium for transfering files... should it be shut down because some of those files are copyrighted?
I suppose you're in favor of the fivilous lawsuit against the Prinston student who's getting sued for 98 billion dollars for running an indexing service. If that doesn't make it clear to you that the RIAA isn't just a bunch greedy, sue-crazy nitwits, I don't know what will.
I find it fascinating that most young people(plenty of whom are over the voting age) get furious when someone challenges their (non-existant, except for Fair Use)"right" to rip off music/movies, but don't blink an eyelid when things like the Patriot Act are passed, a FAR more serious violation of ACTUAL rights. I want to scream into their ears "who gives a SHIT about your music? Look at what they're doing to our FREEDOM!"
Oh believe me, I blinked my eyes many times. I've donated to the EFF and the ACLU on a very tight budget. What have you done?
Besides, whether it's fair use or liberty in a more basic sense, it's all important and we have to fight for all of it equally. Liberty gives us things like fair use. If we have liberty and don't apply it to anything, it's somewhat inert.
I find it interesting that you would take this angle too. You're shouting "freedom!" and "liberty!" yet you're in favor of a corporation using its power to bully smaller businesses. On top of that, said corporation (more like a cartel) uses its power to lobby against the rights and freedoms of the general public.
Mussolini called fascism "corporate rule". Keep that in mind.
If you want to be all "RIAA/MPAA sucks!", fine- but don't mix up centuries-old legitimate law. If you fund a business you know is a front for a drug operation, are you gonna be "speechless" when the DEA comes and arrests you? Actually, being speechless in such a case might be an excellent idea, particularly given your understanding of legal matters;-)
You're assuming Napster was doing something illegal, which they weren't. No violation of the law was made further than any other system that indexes files and provides their locations.
I hear you. I recently quit smoking largely because I'm sick of having to worry about legal issues all the time. I enjoy smoking, but that does not outweight the risks.
I guess before long, the risks of engaging in perfectly harmless activities like information security will outweigh their value. Then I'll probably quit technology too for the same reason.
"Suspect was apprehended for cipher posession and we believe he intended to use the cipher. I recommend the maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.
"Next up, we have a rapist. Hmm.. doesn't look too bad. Give him a slap on the wrist."
We have a government and a people that are terrified of insecurity to the point of burning civil liberties left and right. Law after law after law is passed that intends to increase security (but really only increases paranoia).
While all of this is going on, that very same government passes legislation that has the side-effect of making the research of *real* security illegal. This not only effectively stops the advancement of security, it degrades existing security as well.
This makes no fucking sense.
It's so hypocritical, it's almost religious. What a remarkable Americna innovation. We are the image of our leader.
...generating huge cryptographically strong random numbers. I wish more companies would add hardware like this because a good source of entropy is becoming increasingly important in the world. Weak random numbers can reduce the strength of most crypto systems and we need all the privacy we can get in the US today.
I understand supporting media types, but we know this is bad for open source. You have a licensed product, for which there is no control of the source or algorithms. Use in Linux based devices will serve to help make Microsoft's proprietary formats more ubiquitous. Eventually, when MS see that enough people are using their format, they will simply revoke the licenses they granted and/or sue whoever they did business with. This isn't fantasy -- it's historic. No open product should use anything from Microsoft. They are not to be trusted, ask any of the hundreds of businesses burned by them.
OKay, this is coming from the guy who wrote the original post.
Moderators are fucking retards.
To all the morons who moderated the parent up, you suck.
I wrote this post only as a little expression of my opinion. I never thought it was particularly "insightful" or "informative". To call it that is seriously overrating it. To give it a point is one thing, but all the way up to 5 (and then brought up again after a neg)!? That's insane! Get some lives, people!
I wish you people would have used those points raising good points above the cacophony.
Microsoft did not give out copies of Windows XP to people who bought computers with Windows 98.
Not that I am in favor of proprietary software, but this is no way compares to the upgrade path for OS X.
Windows9x and NT are two completely different operating systems. I can see Microsoft marketing them as two different products and hence, owning one does not mean you get the other. However, paying to upgrade Windows95 to Windows98 is an absolutely asinine thing to do. That upgrade is essentially a set of system updates an a free web browser. In fact, one could upgrade Windows95 to Windows98 for free -- download the latest Internet Explorer and let it do shell integration. You got the kernel enhancements, a more threaded Explorer, and all that.
Going from Mac OS X 10.n to 10.n + 1 should cost nothing for someone who already owns 10.n. It is an incremental upgrade. Yes, 10.2 includes some very hot technologies (Quartz Extreme, for instance), but it is really only a marginal upgrade over the previous version. It is something the user should have received with previous versions, nothing radically new or improved.
Minor version upgrades have traditionally been something the user should have gotten with the previous release. They make a product you already own more complete. Charging for them is robery. Major releases, on the contrary, are typical radical advances in the software, such that it is largely dissimilar from previous major releases. MacOS 9 versus MacOS X is an example of this -- that's a worthwhile purchase.
Yikes... export is not even supported in gcc 3.2.3. And 50$USD for a compiler is not so hot when you want to write open source software.
Is this such a particularly difficult or nasty feature that it's so over-looked in even the most modern compilers? Or is it just disliked for some form or convention reasons?
This is a common question that's probably been explained in a thousand different ways on comp.lang.c++ (you did try to find the answer there, didn't you?). You will be able to find a clear, concise answer to your question there (groups.google.com), but here's my rather torrid attempt...
I thought it might be a common question, but how exactly does one search for this? What is this called? Google: "some weird C++ template trick" probably would return approximately 3,000,000 links and/or news group postings.
This succeeds if I put that line in Foo.cpp. That's actually not so bad of a solution, putting similar lines in Foo.cpp for every data type I might want to use this for. And of course, it'll fail to link if I mistakenly try to use Foo with a datatype I wasn't anticipating it would use (catch bugs early). It's not perfect, but at least I can keep my conventions fairly clean.
This question is being asked in a sort of "offtopic" way. Sort of a "while we're on the subject" kind of thing. I haven't yet looked at this book yet, but based on some of your comments, I really ought to. Thanks for the replies nonetheless.:-)
You can get round this by putting the entire template definition in the header file, which may lead to massive code bloat if your linker doesn't combine all the multiple definitions.
That is essentially #include "Foo.cpp", which is insanely ugly. Come to think of it, it's been so long since I last tried to use that I cannot remember exactly what I was trying to do with it -- except that it would have made things a lot easier.:-)
As far as I can recall (without getting into specifics), I had a limited number of classes that while they were similar in nature, did not necessarily lend themselves to inheritance from a super class. Overloaded operators were present to make them act appropriately in an encapsulation (that would be class Foo).
A more basic example would be a graph implementation. The first time I wanted to do this was for course work. I tried creating a generic node object that could take any types for the key and data, and this is how I approached it (should be fine especially since the node class would have no need to manupulate the data).
Professor said that this approach created ambiguities, but with a concrete instantiation, I thought the compiler/linker would be able to work it out. Oh well.
I like how Java has an "Object" superclass to everything. That's solves this issue. As for C++, I guess it's not so bad to have an "Object" class in your project.
/* Foo.h */ template<class T> class Foo {
public:
T foo;
Foo(T);
T getFoo(); };
/* Foo.cpp */ #include "Foo.h"
template<class T> Foo<T>::Foo(T t) {
foo = t; }
template<class T> T Foo<T>::getFoo() {
return foo; }
/* main.cpp */ #include "Foo.h"
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
Foo<int> foo = Foo<int>(123);
int i = foo.getFoo();
return 0; }
$ g++ -c Foo.cpp main.cpp $ g++ -o test main.o Foo.o main.o(.text+0x1a): In function `main': : undefined reference to `Foo<int>::Foo[in-charge](int)' main.o(.text+0x29 ): In function `main': : undefined reference to `Foo<int>::getFoo()' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
I have never understood why this fails. I have had a number of cases where it'd be useful to do something like this, and have already resorted to hard-coding types. Can anyone enlighten me? Is this not yet standardized? Will this every be standardized? I understand that this *may* cause ambiguities, but that would not necessarily be a problem you do not properly overload classes (make sure they have all the operators you use in Foo), but it should be fine for base types (the instantiation should be clearly defined as to what type is used). Or perhaps I do not understand correct use of templates.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should donate sperm as the pace of development is WAY TO SLOW. Linux is not going to the desktop mainstream. Deal with it.
This is a troll, but I'll bite. You're just like a friend of mine who does IT knows nothing but Microsoft Windows as a platform. He just has this bullish tactic of telling everyone "Linux is never going mainstream, deal with it. The money is in Windows." It's not about making money, it's about making things better.
Open source development is very fast. Apache, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Linux, and many others are moving at a break neck pace. They produce software and fixes for software much faster than Microsoft. As for being on the desktop, well, it will. It's only a matter of time.
Lots of people said Linux and open source in general would never make it "mainstream" and look, the popularity is growing all the time. Heck, my mother and sister (as well as myself of course) run Linux. What's funny is the platform runs some Windows applications faster and more reliably than Windows does (thanks to Codeweavers and the Wine project). On top of that, we've even got retail stores selling Linux to desktop consumers preinstalled, ala Walmart's Lindows PCs.
So, you're wrong, mark my words and just wait and see. I will not "deal with it".
That letter is awesome. It's great to have a real, honest, genuine human-being to rally behind.
This is the greatest things about open-source: the people. People who are willing to donate so much time and effort to the benefit of everyone on earth as opposed to people who want to screw over the world so they can make themselves rich.
We're much better off than those cheering on phony, cut-throat business men who run and jump around a stage like monkies to the tune of Gloria Estefan.
[...] people don't realize they're being baked.
Sometimes it is genuinely difficult to tell when you're being baked. Except of course when that DRM protected music you're listening to seems to last 6 times as long.
Yes, it's a dupe.
Things are so much more interesting out of context...
/.ers (I was about to say 2 or 3 times better, but anything times 0 is 0).
Yes, but we are certain he's had heterosexual sex at least 2 (or is it 3?) times. That's far better that most
If we, say, wrote in safer programming languages, used tools like Immunix's StackGuard, ProPolice, or OpenBSD 3.3, chroot and UML, we could reduce the damage a malicious hacker might do without damaging our civil liberities.
You're saying that developers should take responsibility for what they write to ensure it's secure? You're kidding, right? I mean, who the hell wants to be responsible in this day and age?
This kind of thing will never happen because businesses (plenty of them out there that would rahter sue than write solid code) are too lazy. I've been told "secure code doesn't make business sense -- it costs money".
Question: when a company/whatever gets hacked, who handles the prosecution? Do you just turn it over to the FBI and they go and nail the little bastard? If that's the case, what this story discusses will never happen.
had complete knowledge that they were facilitating a crime(ie, copyright violation, intellectual theft, etc.)
...had all been told as much by their lawyers and charged ahead regardless
Napster's intended business was to encourage the exchange of free, independent media. They did this very well -- there was lots of legally free content on Napster. There were plenty of users who weren't satisfied with this, and thus traded copyrighted music. It's not Napster's fault, the users are to blame.
doing nothing to stop said crime
Actually, they did. Think of the Metalica situation.
ENCOURAGING said crime by promoting their business as(surprise!) a music-swapping service.
Yes, they were a music swapping service. Read my first point. It's not illegal to encourage the use of your services. Napster wanted to be a community of free music, but the users made it something else.
Last I checked, there was no law that stated it was a felony to disobey the advice of one's legal council.
but the fact remains that people were violating the law using Napster
You can continuously repeat over and over that something is a fact, but you have yet to back this up.
Napster knew/did nothing/encouraged it, and their investors supported them and henceforth were accessories.
Many colleges know students use their bandwidth for music/movie/software piracy. They also say that the network is for free access to information. So many colleges know, do nothing, and even encourage infringement. Should all colleges be shut down? You can find pirated music/movies/software on Google, are they guilty too? The Internet is a medium for transfering files... should it be shut down because some of those files are copyrighted?
I suppose you're in favor of the fivilous lawsuit against the Prinston student who's getting sued for 98 billion dollars for running an indexing service. If that doesn't make it clear to you that the RIAA isn't just a bunch greedy, sue-crazy nitwits, I don't know what will.
I find it fascinating that most young people(plenty of whom are over the voting age) get furious when someone challenges their (non-existant, except for Fair Use)"right" to rip off music/movies, but don't blink an eyelid when things like the Patriot Act are passed, a FAR more serious violation of ACTUAL rights. I want to scream into their ears "who gives a SHIT about your music? Look at what they're doing to our FREEDOM!"
Oh believe me, I blinked my eyes many times. I've donated to the EFF and the ACLU on a very tight budget. What have you done?
Besides, whether it's fair use or liberty in a more basic sense, it's all important and we have to fight for all of it equally. Liberty gives us things like fair use. If we have liberty and don't apply it to anything, it's somewhat inert.
I find it interesting that you would take this angle too. You're shouting "freedom!" and "liberty!" yet you're in favor of a corporation using its power to bully smaller businesses. On top of that, said corporation (more like a cartel) uses its power to lobby against the rights and freedoms of the general public.
Mussolini called fascism "corporate rule". Keep that in mind.
If you want to be all "RIAA/MPAA sucks!", fine- but don't mix up centuries-old legitimate law. If you fund a business you know is a front for a drug operation, are you gonna be "speechless" when the DEA comes and arrests you? Actually, being speechless in such a case might be an excellent idea, particularly given your understanding of legal matters ;-)
You're assuming Napster was doing something illegal, which they weren't. No violation of the law was made further than any other system that indexes files and provides their locations.
You can have WineX hon. :-)
Still no stable NWN client. On top of that, WineX 3 is horribly broken. On my system (at least) GTA3 no longer works and WC3 performs worse.
No major advances and a few steps back as far as I am concerned.
I hear you. I recently quit smoking largely because I'm sick of having to worry about legal issues all the time. I enjoy smoking, but that does not outweight the risks.
I guess before long, the risks of engaging in perfectly harmless activities like information security will outweigh their value. Then I'll probably quit technology too for the same reason.
"Suspect was apprehended for cipher posession and we believe he intended to use the cipher. I recommend the maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.
"Next up, we have a rapist. Hmm.. doesn't look too bad. Give him a slap on the wrist."
We have a government and a people that are terrified of insecurity to the point of burning civil liberties left and right. Law after law after law is passed that intends to increase security (but really only increases paranoia).
While all of this is going on, that very same government passes legislation that has the side-effect of making the research of *real* security illegal. This not only effectively stops the advancement of security, it degrades existing security as well.
This makes no fucking sense.
It's so hypocritical, it's almost religious. What a remarkable Americna innovation. We are the image of our leader.
I disagree that some small killer app must come along to make this happen.
I disagree with your disagreement. Microsoft products made us rethink how disk space was used. Now look at how much of it we have!
Killer application for storage: an operating system that's larger than any of the apps you run on it!
Everything in this post is correct. I fail to see reasons for negative moderation.
Men's perception of woman: it's all about bigger boob tubes.
...generating huge cryptographically strong random numbers. I wish more companies would add hardware like this because a good source of entropy is becoming increasingly important in the world. Weak random numbers can reduce the strength of most crypto systems and we need all the privacy we can get in the US today.
I understand supporting media types, but we know this is bad for open source. You have a licensed product, for which there is no control of the source or algorithms. Use in Linux based devices will serve to help make Microsoft's proprietary formats more ubiquitous. Eventually, when MS see that enough people are using their format, they will simply revoke the licenses they granted and/or sue whoever they did business with. This isn't fantasy -- it's historic. No open product should use anything from Microsoft. They are not to be trusted, ask any of the hundreds of businesses burned by them.
OKay, this is coming from the guy who wrote the original post.
Moderators are fucking retards.
To all the morons who moderated the parent up, you suck.
I wrote this post only as a little expression of my opinion. I never thought it was particularly "insightful" or "informative". To call it that is seriously overrating it. To give it a point is one thing, but all the way up to 5 (and then brought up again after a neg)!? That's insane! Get some lives, people!
I wish you people would have used those points raising good points above the cacophony.
Microsoft did not give out copies of Windows XP to people who bought computers with Windows 98.
Not that I am in favor of proprietary software, but this is no way compares to the upgrade path for OS X.
Windows9x and NT are two completely different operating systems. I can see Microsoft marketing them as two different products and hence, owning one does not mean you get the other. However, paying to upgrade Windows95 to Windows98 is an absolutely asinine thing to do. That upgrade is essentially a set of system updates an a free web browser. In fact, one could upgrade Windows95 to Windows98 for free -- download the latest Internet Explorer and let it do shell integration. You got the kernel enhancements, a more threaded Explorer, and all that.
Going from Mac OS X 10.n to 10.n + 1 should cost nothing for someone who already owns 10.n. It is an incremental upgrade. Yes, 10.2 includes some very hot technologies (Quartz Extreme, for instance), but it is really only a marginal upgrade over the previous version. It is something the user should have received with previous versions, nothing radically new or improved.
Minor version upgrades have traditionally been something the user should have gotten with the previous release. They make a product you already own more complete. Charging for them is robery. Major releases, on the contrary, are typical radical advances in the software, such that it is largely dissimilar from previous major releases. MacOS 9 versus MacOS X is an example of this -- that's a worthwhile purchase.
Yikes... export is not even supported in gcc 3.2.3. And 50$USD for a compiler is not so hot when you want to write open source software.
Is this such a particularly difficult or nasty feature that it's so over-looked in even the most modern compilers? Or is it just disliked for some form or convention reasons?
This is a common question that's probably been explained in a thousand different ways on comp.lang.c++ (you did try to find the answer there, didn't you?). You will be able to find a clear, concise answer to your question there (groups.google.com), but here's my rather torrid attempt...
I thought it might be a common question, but how exactly does one search for this? What is this called? Google: "some weird C++ template trick" probably would return approximately 3,000,000 links and/or news group postings.
This succeeds if I put that line in Foo.cpp. That's actually not so bad of a solution, putting similar lines in Foo.cpp for every data type I might want to use this for. And of course, it'll fail to link if I mistakenly try to use Foo with a datatype I wasn't anticipating it would use (catch bugs early). It's not perfect, but at least I can keep my conventions fairly clean.
Thanks for the tip!
This question is being asked in a sort of "offtopic" way. Sort of a "while we're on the subject" kind of thing. I haven't yet looked at this book yet, but based on some of your comments, I really ought to. Thanks for the replies nonetheless. :-)
*nod*
:-)
You can get round this by putting the entire template definition in the header file, which may lead to massive code bloat if your linker doesn't combine all the multiple definitions.
That is essentially #include "Foo.cpp", which is insanely ugly. Come to think of it, it's been so long since I last tried to use that I cannot remember exactly what I was trying to do with it -- except that it would have made things a lot easier.
As far as I can recall (without getting into specifics), I had a limited number of classes that while they were similar in nature, did not necessarily lend themselves to inheritance from a super class. Overloaded operators were present to make them act appropriately in an encapsulation (that would be class Foo).
A more basic example would be a graph implementation. The first time I wanted to do this was for course work. I tried creating a generic node object that could take any types for the key and data, and this is how I approached it (should be fine especially since the node class would have no need to manupulate the data).
Professor said that this approach created ambiguities, but with a concrete instantiation, I thought the compiler/linker would be able to work it out. Oh well.
I like how Java has an "Object" superclass to everything. That's solves this issue. As for C++, I guess it's not so bad to have an "Object" class in your project.