>...to purchase commercial equivalents of all the Linux apps I use would be extremely expensive. Compilers (think Visual Studio), editors (think Visual SlickEdit), mail clients (think Eudora), system monitors (think all manner of shareware apps), sound editors (think Cakewalk), image editors (think Photoshop), web servers (think IIS), code checkers (think Gimpel Lint), graphing programs (think Visio), math/statistics packages (think MATLAB), and all the rest, there is a *lot* of money involved....except that nearly all of the free equivalents of the above are available under Windows, either natively or using Cygwin. GCC, Vi/Emacs/whatever, Pine/Mutt/KMail/Mozilla Mail, Gimp, Apache, yadda yadda yadda......hey, guess what, the only commercial software I use on a daily basis is the Windows kernel itself!
> I can fix bugs that piss me off.
See above. There's plenty of open-source stuff to use under Windows. The ability to patch the kernel yourself is the only advantage Linux provides there, and kernel hackers are a tiny percentage of coders, who themselves are a tiny percentage of computer users as a whole.
> It's easier to write a reliable Linux driver than a reliable Windows driver.
And it's easier to _find_ a reliable Windows driver for $HARDWARE than to find a Linux one of any sort. I certainly don't write my drivers.
>...flexibility in file system layout and control...
Oh, do you mean how in Linux you get to choose whether to put something in/bin,/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin,/usr/X11R6/bin,/opt/$whatever/bin, ~/bin, etc., instead of being forced to put it in Program Files? I don't understand why my single-user desktop machine should need to use a file system layout that might concievably have made sense on a mainframe thirty years ago.
Damn, got a bit close to trolling with that last one, sorry. I think the rest is sound, though. Your main argument is "I can't use *nix software under Windows", and that simply isn't true.
> First, security. I don't like my browser or mail client doing things I'm not explicitly aware of. I cannot use Windows with a clear conscience because of IE's and Outlook's persistent security failures. Add in IIS for Windows incarnations with IIS installed an running.
I run Windows. My browser and mail client don't do things I'm not explicitly aware of, because I don't use IE or Outlook. Or IIS, come to that.
> There are a growing number of open source software projects that meet or even exceed their commercial competitors capabilities. OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Apache to name a few.
Hey, guess what? I use OpenOffice and Mozilla on Windows! I'd use Apache, too, if I needed a web server.
> Linux and the canon of open source software built upon it make so much more sense financially, socially, and from an engineering standpoint.
One word: Cygwin. It gives me pretty much all the open source software available on Linux, and all on top of the relative ease of use that comes from using Windows in a Windows environment.
> What's the quote? "Those who do not understand Unix are condemmed to reinvent it, poorly."
True in a sense, but more generally, those who do not understand Unix are condemned to use Windows or MacOS, because they can't get $UNIX_STYLE_OS to work properly.
Any new option which makes it in the slightest bit easier to get a Unix system to work better is worth introducing. So you know what "moving S90kdm to S21kdm" means? I'm very happy for you, but I don't, and I don't want to have to care about that sort of thing. If this new system can speed up my boot process without requiring me to study advanced system administration, then I'm all for it.
KDE and Gnome both boast about their i18n efforts, and indeed it's possible to get their applications displaying Japanese menus without any hassle at all. The problems are little things like Japanese input and poor support for Japanese fonts (for starters, the common TTC format isn't supported at all AFAICS). Even installing a distro in Japanese mode, I've never seen these things working out of the box. In the cases of Red Hat and Mandrake, I've never seen them working at all.
Not to mention that Linux Japanese support is generally based on EUC-JP, which is as creaky and old as Shift_JIS, and less well supported.
So, yes, I do think there might be some influence there.:)
> I mean really how often do you have to reboot your linux box?
Daily. Like most students, my computer and my bed are in the same room. And despite a fair amount of money spent on quiet cooling, I still haven't got the noise down to a level I can comfortably sleep over.
Plus, as you say, dual-booters (hey! guess who?) care about boot times. My Linux boots don't really take that much longer than my Win2k boots, but I'd sure appreciate a Linux boot system that I understand how to edit.
> While I agree that speeding up boot time is a "good thing" for me just isn't an issue.
Lucky you. In that case I advise you not to bother contributing to this project or anything like it. In fact, you could save everyone's time by not even replying to articles on it.
I find it works pretty well. To open the file I want, I:
* type Ctrl+O * start typing the path to the file I want * finish typing very quickly thanks to the auto-complete feature * press "enter" to open the file.
Just because it's possible to use a UI element inefficiently, doesn't mean it's inefficient. A car's not much use if you don't start the engine, now, is it?
> it's a strange strategy they didn't participate in the refinement of pango, which is used in many other apps, in place of creating indix.
Probably for the same reason that the Gnome programmers haven't migrated to KDE now that Qt is available under the GPL. Diversity never hurt anyone.
Or it might be because Pango is LGPL'd, which means there are still restrictions to its use in proprietary software. IndiX is BSD-licensed (?).
Besides, since IndiX is Free, the Pango developers will be able to draw on its code to improve Pango's Indic script handling, so in the long run everyone benefits.
Depends where you live. In the UK, for example, roads are most certainly not public property; the street is a public right of way, but you do not have the right to stand still in it; that's a criminal offence known as 'obstructing the Queen's highway'.
Public Domain, as a legal term applied to software, means "not copyrighted". GPLed software is copyrighted, and therefore is not in the public domain.
> even with access to the source of the compiler, you can still be trojaned.
Okay. So we develop, from scratch, a compiler capable of recompiling MS Visual Studio from source. For safety, we'd better write our compiler by hand in machine code, so we're not depending on _any_ "first compiler" which might be trojaned.
> But X doesn't force you to use any particular version. With MS Windows, try running today that little MS W3.0 app... good luck.
Funny - I'm running several 16-bit Windows applications under Win2k right now, and all the Windows 3.0 widgets seem to work perfectly well. In other words, you're talking out of your arse.
> This is not very different from certain South American and African countries that demanded and received the formulae to certain drugs and then turned around and started making their own.
OMG!!! They're trying to produce cheap medicines which the world's poorest people might have a hope of being able to afford! That hurts American profit margins! QUICK, INVADE!
> I don't know how they manage to get non-GPLed portions NOT being derivative works of GPLed portions, but they implictly claim to manage that.
The easy way is to get the permission of whoever GPLed it. The hard way is to demonstrate that your code actually derives from a non-GPLed version even where a GPLed version also exists. The SCO way is to claim you own it all anyway. Take your pick.:D
But I can't think of any programming languages in common use which do not have foreign function interfaces sufficient to link to any toolkit efficiently, regardless of its implementation language. GTK+, Tk, and wxWindows all have bindings for most programming languages. So the idea that "each toolkit is for a different language" is pretty much dead in the water. There's no reason why we shouldn't have stuck with one, although I agree that in this post-proliferation age it's going to be quite hard to get rid of any. (If Y actually succeeded, I'd place bets we'd see most of these toolkits ported to it within a month.)
> as far as code goes, EMACS is right there with GCC...
I disagree. Practically everyone developing on Linux, and on a good few other systems as well, uses GCC; Emacs on the other hand competes with thousands of other Free editors, and isn't even installed by default in many environments.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice quote from your link...
"EMACS is a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it."
How the world has changed since 1984...
> ...ridiculous karma-whoring conspiracy theories...
You do realise you're replying to an AC, right?
> Other good reasons to use Linux...
...to purchase commercial equivalents of all the Linux apps I use would be extremely expensive. Compilers (think Visual Studio), editors (think Visual SlickEdit), mail clients (think Eudora), system monitors (think all manner of shareware apps), sound editors (think Cakewalk), image editors (think Photoshop), web servers (think IIS), code checkers (think Gimpel Lint), graphing programs (think Visio), math/statistics packages (think MATLAB), and all the rest, there is a *lot* of money involved. ...except that nearly all of the free equivalents of the above are available under Windows, either natively or using Cygwin. GCC, Vi/Emacs/whatever, Pine/Mutt/KMail/Mozilla Mail, Gimp, Apache, yadda yadda yadda... ...hey, guess what, the only commercial software I use on a daily basis is the Windows kernel itself!
...flexibility in file system layout and control...
/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/X11R6/bin, /opt/$whatever/bin, ~/bin, etc., instead of being forced to put it in Program Files? I don't understand why my single-user desktop machine should need to use a file system layout that might concievably have made sense on a mainframe thirty years ago.
>
> I can fix bugs that piss me off.
See above. There's plenty of open-source stuff to use under Windows. The ability to patch the kernel yourself is the only advantage Linux provides there, and kernel hackers are a tiny percentage of coders, who themselves are a tiny percentage of computer users as a whole.
> It's easier to write a reliable Linux driver than a reliable Windows driver.
And it's easier to _find_ a reliable Windows driver for $HARDWARE than to find a Linux one of any sort. I certainly don't write my drivers.
>
Oh, do you mean how in Linux you get to choose whether to put something in
Damn, got a bit close to trolling with that last one, sorry. I think the rest is sound, though. Your main argument is "I can't use *nix software under Windows", and that simply isn't true.
> First, security. I don't like my browser or mail client doing things I'm not explicitly aware of. I cannot use Windows with a clear conscience because of IE's and Outlook's persistent security failures. Add in IIS for Windows incarnations with IIS installed an running.
I run Windows. My browser and mail client don't do things I'm not explicitly aware of, because I don't use IE or Outlook. Or IIS, come to that.
> There are a growing number of open source software projects that meet or even exceed their commercial competitors capabilities. OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Apache to name a few.
Hey, guess what? I use OpenOffice and Mozilla on Windows! I'd use Apache, too, if I needed a web server.
> Linux and the canon of open source software built upon it make so much more sense financially, socially, and from an engineering standpoint.
One word: Cygwin. It gives me pretty much all the open source software available on Linux, and all on top of the relative ease of use that comes from using Windows in a Windows environment.
> Is Linux kernel 2.6.0 stable yet?
Of course it is, that's why it's called 2.6.0 and not 2.5.xx.
Well, it's stable by Microsoft standards, anyway.
You're sure that's London you mean and not Toronto, eh?
> It will be interesting to look back on these types of discussions 20 years from now.
You think it'll be legal to read this kind of discussion in 20 years?
> What's the quote? "Those who do not understand Unix are condemmed to reinvent it, poorly."
True in a sense, but more generally, those who do not understand Unix are condemned to use Windows or MacOS, because they can't get $UNIX_STYLE_OS to work properly.
Any new option which makes it in the slightest bit easier to get a Unix system to work better is worth introducing. So you know what "moving S90kdm to S21kdm" means? I'm very happy for you, but I don't, and I don't want to have to care about that sort of thing. If this new system can speed up my boot process without requiring me to study advanced system administration, then I'm all for it.
Japanese support on Linux is... er... possible.
:)
KDE and Gnome both boast about their i18n efforts, and indeed it's possible to get their applications displaying Japanese menus without any hassle at all. The problems are little things like Japanese input and poor support for Japanese fonts (for starters, the common TTC format isn't supported at all AFAICS). Even installing a distro in Japanese mode, I've never seen these things working out of the box. In the cases of Red Hat and Mandrake, I've never seen them working at all.
Not to mention that Linux Japanese support is generally based on EUC-JP, which is as creaky and old as Shift_JIS, and less well supported.
So, yes, I do think there might be some influence there.
> I mean really how often do you have to reboot your linux box?
Daily. Like most students, my computer and my bed are in the same room. And despite a fair amount of money spent on quiet cooling, I still haven't got the noise down to a level I can comfortably sleep over.
Plus, as you say, dual-booters (hey! guess who?) care about boot times. My Linux boots don't really take that much longer than my Win2k boots, but I'd sure appreciate a Linux boot system that I understand how to edit.
> While I agree that speeding up boot time is a "good thing" for me just isn't an issue.
Lucky you. In that case I advise you not to bother contributing to this project or anything like it. In fact, you could save everyone's time by not even replying to articles on it.
Given that Bochs is already past 2.0, merely waiting till 1.0 for a release probably wouldn't solve much.
> Yes, China has ratified it.
Looks like the Vatican hasn't, though. Protestants beware!
I find it works pretty well. To open the file I want, I:
* type Ctrl+O
* start typing the path to the file I want
* finish typing very quickly thanks to the auto-complete feature
* press "enter" to open the file.
Just because it's possible to use a UI element inefficiently, doesn't mean it's inefficient. A car's not much use if you don't start the engine, now, is it?
> it's a strange strategy they didn't participate in the refinement of pango, which is used in many other apps, in place of creating indix.
Probably for the same reason that the Gnome programmers haven't migrated to KDE now that Qt is available under the GPL. Diversity never hurt anyone.
Or it might be because Pango is LGPL'd, which means there are still restrictions to its use in proprietary software. IndiX is BSD-licensed (?).
Besides, since IndiX is Free, the Pango developers will be able to draw on its code to improve Pango's Indic script handling, so in the long run everyone benefits.
> Parks and roads are in pub[l]ic domain.
Depends where you live. In the UK, for example, roads are most certainly not public property; the street is a public right of way, but you do not have the right to stand still in it; that's a criminal offence known as 'obstructing the Queen's highway'.
Public Domain, as a legal term applied to software, means "not copyrighted". GPLed software is copyrighted, and therefore is not in the public domain.
> even with access to the source of the compiler, you can still be trojaned.
Okay. So we develop, from scratch, a compiler capable of recompiling MS Visual Studio from source. For safety, we'd better write our compiler by hand in machine code, so we're not depending on _any_ "first compiler" which might be trojaned.
Now all we need is a secure hardware platform...
The keyboard I'm using right now _does_ label it "control". But it has empty arrows instead of "shift" labels.
> But X doesn't force you to use any particular version. With MS Windows, try running today that little MS W3.0 app... good luck.
Funny - I'm running several 16-bit Windows applications under Win2k right now, and all the Windows 3.0 widgets seem to work perfectly well. In other words, you're talking out of your arse.
> This is not very different from certain South American and African countries that demanded and received the formulae to certain drugs and then turned around and started making their own.
OMG!!! They're trying to produce cheap medicines which the world's poorest people might have a hope of being able to afford! That hurts American profit margins! QUICK, INVADE!
What's INTERCAL++ supposed to mean?
A unary increment program in INTERCAL can be found here. I don't see no lousy ++.
> I don't know how they manage to get non-GPLed portions NOT being derivative works of GPLed portions, but they implictly claim to manage that.
:D
The easy way is to get the permission of whoever GPLed it. The hard way is to demonstrate that your code actually derives from a non-GPLed version even where a GPLed version also exists. The SCO way is to claim you own it all anyway. Take your pick.
But I can't think of any programming languages in common use which do not have foreign function interfaces sufficient to link to any toolkit efficiently, regardless of its implementation language. GTK+, Tk, and wxWindows all have bindings for most programming languages. So the idea that "each toolkit is for a different language" is pretty much dead in the water. There's no reason why we shouldn't have stuck with one, although I agree that in this post-proliferation age it's going to be quite hard to get rid of any. (If Y actually succeeded, I'd place bets we'd see most of these toolkits ported to it within a month.)
I'm glad I don't have mod points. I can't decide whether it would be funnier to mod you up or down.
> Throughout it's history Finland has been treated despicably by Russia.
Don't forget the parts when it was being treated despicably by Sweden and/or Denmark...
> as far as code goes, EMACS is right there with GCC...
I disagree. Practically everyone developing on Linux, and on a good few other systems as well, uses GCC; Emacs on the other hand competes with thousands of other Free editors, and isn't even installed by default in many environments.