"In the future we may even get around to laser scanning real objects. Hire a cheap sculpter, contract with a laser scanning company and BAM!, cheap graphics."
In the future? Wasn't precisely this done years ago with Primal Rage?
"The problem I have with the post is that it does NOT have to be a zero-sum game. If someone wants to make a distro of linux that provides limited choices, what's stopping them? Why does every distro have to be limited in choices. That mentality makes no sense."
Why? Because, among the many things Windows users do not understand, the concept of "distros" ranks fairly highly. Customers want "Linux", because that's the product they've heard so much about. They don't want to have to spend a week researching different kinds of Linux any more than they want to research different desktops.
The article also makes it quite clear that the object is not complete uniformity or "dumbing down". Just, well, rational defaults. If every distro _defaulted_ to the "standard" desktop, but they all had "advanced" options allowing people who are interested in such things to explore the complete range of current and future choices, would that not satisfy everyone?
"Do Java apps look like Windows apps when they run on the Windows platform? No. Does a GTK app look like a Windows app when running on the Windows platform? No."
Do the majority of Windows users run Java or GTK applications? No. Is one of the reasons that Java and GTK applications "look weird"? In my experience, yes - given a choice, most users will take an inferior program that has the familiar look and feel over a superior, but alien, option.
Probably by using the "code" mode, which appears to bypass the lameness filter altogether. I think that was the only way they could get it to let people post Visual Basic.
"You cannot express an unsigned 32 bit int in ocaml."
module UInt32 = struct type t = Int64.t let zero = 0_L let one = 1_L let minus_one = 0xffffffff_L let neg (n : t) = Int64.sub 0x100000000_L n let add (n : t) (m : t) = Int64.logand (Int64.add n m) 0xffffffff_L let sub (n : t) (m : t) = Int64.logand (Int64.sub n m) 0xffffffff_L (* Etc. *) end
Okay, maybe that comes into the category of "somewhat onerous"...
C# is not a real language because C# does not exist. It is a myth put about by people such as yourself who wish to tempt programmers from the True Path of GNU. There is no such language as VB.NET, either. If you claim to use them you are obviously lying.
Unfortunately there's nothing to stop the executives from immediately forming another company with the same staff, products, and business practices. See the recurrent timeshare scandals - rotten businesses are hydras.
I just love the way that Americans happily refer to a liquid as "gas". It's almost as good as US periodic tables, with "sulfur" right next to "phosphorus"...
Well, "tar" is obvious - it sticks files together as though they'd been dipped in the stuff. "Emacs", meanwhile, is an acronym - "Everyone Must Adopt Complicated 'Shortcut'-keys".
> And what happens when you want to get to the desktop?
Try right-clicking on the taskbar and selecting "minimize all". Then you can return to your previous state by repeating and selecting "undo minimize all".
Incidentally, you say that in Linux you never use desktop icons. Why do it differently in Windows? There's no more need for them, if you organise your start menu properly. (I recommend making sure everything at each level begins with a unique letter; then you can just hit Ctrl-Esc, or the windows key if you have one, and type a brief command, to load any application.)
You're aware, I take it, that not all DVDs are produced in Hollywood by MPAA members? I suggest you look into indie or foreign films, you might find yourself buying again.
Unfortunately they're required by law to be greedy in the interests of shareholders. If you want the benefits of capitalism, you have to be prepared to put up with its problems...
I believe you mean "Finnegans Wake". No apostrophe.
I'm not sure it's possible to translate it, either. Translation kind of implies that the source text is in a recognisable human language. But I've heard of a Japanese version that's supposedly quite good.
The language used by Delphi is called Delphi; it was renamed from Object Pascal some time ago when Borland found out about Apple's inferiorlanguage of that name. As a language it's actually not as bad as its Pascal ancestry would suggest; it has classes, multiple inheritance, typecasts, function and method overloading, and most of the other features of C++ that C++ programmers like to bash Pascal for not having. It has numerous mature libraries. Oh, and some elements (notably strings and dynamic arrays) are garbage-collected.
It compiles in milliseconds, with dependencies handled automatically. No makefiles, no five-minute build cycles a la GCC. C++Builder combines most of these features with C++, if the Pascal bit really offends you.
The two major problems are that it ISN'T cross-platform - Win32 and x86/Linux aren't good enough - and it's unfree in all senses.
For GUI prototyping, and in-house database applications, I know nothing to match it.
Most languages have some kind of foreign function interface, so they can link to C/C++ libraries. Most languages have good mailing lists where, in some cases, even the designers of the language hang out to answer any questions you have and (if you're lucky) to take on board your suggestions for _improving_ the language.
And nearly all of them are more maintainable than C++ (which, as the saying goes, combines the power of Java with the readability of Brainfuck).
A few years back I thought that about hard disks. An IDE hard disk cost £100, period, unless you wanted to pay a huge premium for a slightly bigger one, and that stayed the same while they grew from 500 Mb to 20 Gb. Now a hard disk costs £50.
Expect the same to happen with graphics cards. Not only will the current high-end cards get cheaper - their successors will probably be slightly cheaper in real terms than the current range are now. The cost of production _will_ most likely fall faster than the technology improves, particularly once diminishing returns start setting in.
Actually, the fact that my Linux system crashes on a weekly basis, while my Windows box only does so every other month, rather implies that a sufficiently incompetent user can make _any_ operating system unstable.:D
> Only with truly hi-resolution displays, do interactive 3-D OS environments make sense.
That's begging quite a few questions. Like whether interactive 3D OS environments will ever make sense. Do you know anyone with a conceptually 3D working environment? I sure don't. 2D across the desk - taking drawers and piles as overlapping 2D objects - and then 2D up the bookshelf.
Slashdot Mirror
"In the future we may even get around to laser scanning real objects. Hire a cheap sculpter, contract with a laser scanning company and BAM!, cheap graphics."
In the future? Wasn't precisely this done years ago with Primal Rage?
"The problem I have with the post is that it does NOT have to be a zero-sum game. If someone wants to make a distro of linux that provides limited choices, what's stopping them? Why does every distro have to be limited in choices. That mentality makes no sense."
Why? Because, among the many things Windows users do not understand, the concept of "distros" ranks fairly highly. Customers want "Linux", because that's the product they've heard so much about. They don't want to have to spend a week researching different kinds of Linux any more than they want to research different desktops.
The article also makes it quite clear that the object is not complete uniformity or "dumbing down". Just, well, rational defaults. If every distro _defaulted_ to the "standard" desktop, but they all had "advanced" options allowing people who are interested in such things to explore the complete range of current and future choices, would that not satisfy everyone?
"Do Java apps look like Windows apps when they run on the Windows platform? No. Does a GTK app look like a Windows app when running on the Windows platform? No."
Do the majority of Windows users run Java or GTK applications? No. Is one of the reasons that Java and GTK applications "look weird"? In my experience, yes - given a choice, most users will take an inferior program that has the familiar look and feel over a superior, but alien, option.
Er, it _did_ compile. I see no -Werror flag.
Probably by using the "code" mode, which appears to bypass the lameness filter altogether. I think that was the only way they could get it to let people post Visual Basic.
"You cannot express an unsigned 32 bit int in ocaml."
module UInt32 =
struct
type t = Int64.t
let zero = 0_L
let one = 1_L
let minus_one = 0xffffffff_L
let neg (n : t) = Int64.sub 0x100000000_L n
let add (n : t) (m : t) = Int64.logand (Int64.add n m) 0xffffffff_L
let sub (n : t) (m : t) = Int64.logand (Int64.sub n m) 0xffffffff_L
(* Etc. *)
end
Okay, maybe that comes into the category of "somewhat onerous"...
C# is not a real language because C# does not exist. It is a myth put about by people such as yourself who wish to tempt programmers from the True Path of GNU. There is no such language as VB.NET, either. If you claim to use them you are obviously lying.
Next you'll be trying to tell us that Idaho exists, which is another dangerous lie.
Er, surely Windows *is* (historically) a GUI on top of a command line base?
As for Applescript, I've only glanced at it, but what I saw looked hideously like a dialect of COBOL. (Yes, I'm prejudiced.)
Because it's addictive (high sugar and salt content).
And there's a letter 'w' in Greek, too - digamma (looks a bit like F). It just fell out of use, except as a number, several thousand years ago.
Unfortunately there's nothing to stop the executives from immediately forming another company with the same staff, products, and business practices. See the recurrent timeshare scandals - rotten businesses are hydras.
I just love the way that Americans happily refer to a liquid as "gas". It's almost as good as US periodic tables, with "sulfur" right next to "phosphorus"...
Well, "tar" is obvious - it sticks files together as though they'd been dipped in the stuff. "Emacs", meanwhile, is an acronym - "Everyone Must Adopt Complicated 'Shortcut'-keys".
> And what happens when you want to get to the desktop?
Try right-clicking on the taskbar and selecting "minimize all". Then you can return to your previous state by repeating and selecting "undo minimize all".
Incidentally, you say that in Linux you never use desktop icons. Why do it differently in Windows? There's no more need for them, if you organise your start menu properly. (I recommend making sure everything at each level begins with a unique letter; then you can just hit Ctrl-Esc, or the windows key if you have one, and type a brief command, to load any application.)
You're aware, I take it, that not all DVDs are produced in Hollywood by MPAA members? I suggest you look into indie or foreign films, you might find yourself buying again.
Unfortunately they're required by law to be greedy in the interests of shareholders. If you want the benefits of capitalism, you have to be prepared to put up with its problems...
I believe you mean "Finnegans Wake". No apostrophe.
I'm not sure it's possible to translate it, either. Translation kind of implies that the source text is in a recognisable human language. But I've heard of a Japanese version that's supposedly quite good.
The language used by Delphi is called Delphi; it was renamed from Object Pascal some time ago when Borland found out about Apple's inferiorlanguage of that name. As a language it's actually not as bad as its Pascal ancestry would suggest; it has classes, multiple inheritance, typecasts, function and method overloading, and most of the other features of C++ that C++ programmers like to bash Pascal for not having. It has numerous mature libraries. Oh, and some elements (notably strings and dynamic arrays) are garbage-collected.
It compiles in milliseconds, with dependencies handled automatically. No makefiles, no five-minute build cycles a la GCC. C++Builder combines most of these features with C++, if the Pascal bit really offends you.
The two major problems are that it ISN'T cross-platform - Win32 and x86/Linux aren't good enough - and it's unfree in all senses.
For GUI prototyping, and in-house database applications, I know nothing to match it.
In British English, make those
...and guess what...
() brackets
[] square brackets
{} curly brackets.
Most languages have some kind of foreign function interface, so they can link to C/C++ libraries. Most languages have good mailing lists where, in some cases, even the designers of the language hang out to answer any questions you have and (if you're lucky) to take on board your suggestions for _improving_ the language.
And nearly all of them are more maintainable than C++ (which, as the saying goes, combines the power of Java with the readability of Brainfuck).
Java? Ruby? Perl? Ada? O'Caml?
A few years back I thought that about hard disks. An IDE hard disk cost £100, period, unless you wanted to pay a huge premium for a slightly bigger one, and that stayed the same while they grew from 500 Mb to 20 Gb. Now a hard disk costs £50.
Expect the same to happen with graphics cards. Not only will the current high-end cards get cheaper - their successors will probably be slightly cheaper in real terms than the current range are now. The cost of production _will_ most likely fall faster than the technology improves, particularly once diminishing returns start setting in.
The "start button" is almost an exact copy of the Apple menu. But let's not go into how Windows rips off Macs _again_, okay?
As for Samba, I think we're okay. I'm pretty sure reverse-engineering is protected for interoperability purposes even under DMCA.
I fail to see how several buggy executables would be preferable to one buggy executable...
Actually, the fact that my Linux system crashes on a weekly basis, while my Windows box only does so every other month, rather implies that a sufficiently incompetent user can make _any_ operating system unstable. :D
> Only with truly hi-resolution displays, do interactive 3-D OS environments make sense.
That's begging quite a few questions. Like whether interactive 3D OS environments will ever make sense. Do you know anyone with a conceptually 3D working environment? I sure don't. 2D across the desk - taking drawers and piles as overlapping 2D objects - and then 2D up the bookshelf.