My one and only complaint is the "Awesome Bar". Some people love it; other hate it. I hate it. It's not enough to make me stop using it, but I really wish I could get the old Address Bar back.
Give it some time. Your reaction is a common one, but not everyone who starts off hating it stays that way. I should know; I went from hating it, to accepting it, to finding it really quite useful on occasion.
Please don't be silly. It is entirely possible that this policy is reducing the numbers of enterprises that are adopting Firefox, but I know for a fact that at least one enterprise has accepted this, so your claim is trivially shown to be false and everything you say thereby becomes suspect.
Startup time for OpenOffice programs directly conflicts with the assertion that wins OSS converts, that OSS software will better utilize existing hardware.
Who makes this assertion? Only ignorance or stupidity could lead someone to claim that OSS is inherently faster simply by virtue of being open source.
The only vaguely similar claim I've ever heard is that certain specific OSS programs better utilize existing hardware than certain specific proprietary software; for example, a suitably minimalist Linux configuration will run much faster than Windows Vista, and I don't think you'll find anyone -- even a diehard Vista fan -- who could disagree with that. (Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be a like-for-like comparison; the point there is that Linux is more flexible, so you can trim it down for low-spec machines.)
Incidentally, I just ran some tests. Time to load Microsoft Excel 2000 on my computer: 20 seconds. Time to load OpenOffice.org Calc: 7 seconds. Hmmm, maybe the speed difference isn't so clear-cut after all.
So lets say I'm well off financially and we become a leftist socialist state. No one is going to take my money to give to those less fortunate then me? I can keep all my money, make as much as I want without fear of the government threatening my freedoms with guns and people carrying them?
Yes, that sounds about right.
For example, Sweden is generally considered a leftist socialist state, and yet somehow it managed to produce IKEA, whose owner is the 7th richest person in the world, and has not yet had all his money taken away from him. (True, he currently lives in Switzerland, but he's got a heck of a lot of property in Sweden that the socialists could easily seize, if that was what socialists actually do. Which it isn't.)
Okay, you will now argue that Sweden isn't really socialist. Which is true, in a sense; it isn't at the utter extreme end of the socialist spectrum. But that's kind of the point. Democracies tend not to go to that extreme. In practice, they never get beyond kinda-socialist-but-still-capitalist-really (like Sweden), or, in the other direction, mostly-capitalist-but-still-a-bit-socialist (like the USA). We merely use "socialist" to describe the former case because it's a convenient shorthand. And so we've now reached what we call the "real world", where socialism is a successful political movement, not an evil bogeyman hiding under your bed and waiting for you to go to sleep so it can steal your piggy-bank.
When the guys at nytimes.com and OED.com reverse the meaning of "hacker" back to its hobbyist definition, give me a call...
Who cares what the mainstream usage is? Slashdot is not a mainstream website. It is targeted at nerds, and it uses words with the meanings nerds give them. There is no ambiguity going on here. "Kernel hackers" is the correct terminology for Slashdot's target audience.
Perhaps you should report O'Reilly to the police, as clearly you must believe they are selling a whole range of books aimed at criminals.
I did not think there were many Linux hackers, as the opportunity to do widespread damage was so low due to the relative obscurity of the OS.
The OS that runs the majority of websites is "relatively obscure" and not a popular hacker target? Ri-i-i-ight.
Seriously, using "hacker" in this context is about six months shy of using "gay" to mean "merry." Like it or not, popular media and language usage has changed the word's meaning, and to insist otherwise is to insist upon being misunderstood.
"Gay" still does mean "merry". Feel free to tell a Scotsman that "the Gay Gordons" is only danced by homosexuals. I'll be sure to visit you in hospital to find out how he took the news.
Newsflash: some words have multiple meanings, and humans are actually quite good at distinguishing between them. Ambiguity is more likely to lead to comedy than to confusion.
Unfortunately that nice small regular syntax is only for the Lisp core. The actual language that you need to program in has all kinds of other syntactic features, starting with 'symbols and `(macro,@quoting) and going rapidly downhill from there.
On top of all this, Ioke allows regular expressions in code, like Perl.
This is a good idea; it makes the regular expressions themselves much easier to read, with less escaping than is required in languages that insist on putting them in strings. Regular expressions are already complicated enough without requiring you to write crazy stuff like "\\\\\\*" just to match a backslash followed by an asterisk.
It also makes it feasible for syntax-highlighting editors to treat all regular expressions specially, which means that things end up being more readable, not less, because you can see exactly which characters are literals and which are metacharacters at a glance.
Okay, you have answered the first part of lokedhs' post. Would you now please answer the second part? I will quote it again for your convenience:
PJ never said that Solaris was illegally open sourced. In fact, I believe she said that Sun already had that right, regardless of whether or not SCO had the right to sign the contract with them.
Because if that is correct, then the red-highlighted ruling is completely irrelevant to the question of whether OpenSolaris is legal.
OS X has a nice kernel and a decent BSD-derived userland, but the GUI is not universally appreciated -- some of us find it restrictive, dumbed-down, inefficient, and poorly integrated with X11. Heck, you have to install a third-party utility just to get the mouse acceleration to work properly!
You would quickly learn the hard way that many people are inclined to follow Selfism, a convenient religion that encourages its devotees to attack you and steal all your property. And with no state, who is going to bother to protect you from them? You surely aren't going to pretend that you, alone, with whatever guns you may possess, can hold off an armed gang indefinitely. Sooner or later you will have to sleep.
The only case on that page that appears to be remotely relevant is the EliteTorrents one. But in that case, the person who went to jail was the administrator of the P2P site. Can you show us any cases where someone has been jailed for merely using P2P?
Because it looks to me like the US doesn't jail people for visiting TPB, whatever you might like to think.
You can indeed -- it's quite simple, you just uncheck some options and then you can take advantage of OpenDNS' fast and reliable servers without helping them pay the bills.
One gotcha for home users is that the settings are tied to your IP address, so if you have a dynamic IP then you need to run an additional bit of software to let them know every time your address changes. Some people might not like that.
Unfortunately it's inaccurate. For example, it claims that "forward one page" is Alt+V in Emacs. But pressing Alt+V in Emacs just gives the message "A-v is undefined", unless of course you happen to be using a computer where the Alt key has been configured to send Meta.
(Yes, Windows and many Linux boxes are set up to do that by default. But that just means you'll end up cursing the first time you find yourself in front of a Solaris box, or a Linux box that's been configured in any of the dozens of other possible ways.)
You get asked who you want to see in a film every time you decide which film to see.
That is only true if the actors' names are the only thing you base your decision on.
For example, there's this new film out called "Quantum of Solace". What do you think is going to be more important in deciding how profitable that film is -- the fact that the lead actor is called Daniel Craig, or the fact that he's playing the role of James Bond? (Hint: the answer is "b".)
Australia might like to follow in the UK's footsteps, but hasn't got quite the momentum behind it and is always a bit of a comedy character.
Depends what you're looking for. The UK might be further ahead in surveillance, but Australia is miles ahead in censorship -- at least we can get 18-rated video games in the UK!
Slashdot Mirror
Give it some time. Your reaction is a common one, but not everyone who starts off hating it stays that way. I should know; I went from hating it, to accepting it, to finding it really quite useful on occasion.
Please don't be silly. It is entirely possible that this policy is reducing the numbers of enterprises that are adopting Firefox, but I know for a fact that at least one enterprise has accepted this, so your claim is trivially shown to be false and everything you say thereby becomes suspect.
Who makes this assertion? Only ignorance or stupidity could lead someone to claim that OSS is inherently faster simply by virtue of being open source.
The only vaguely similar claim I've ever heard is that certain specific OSS programs better utilize existing hardware than certain specific proprietary software; for example, a suitably minimalist Linux configuration will run much faster than Windows Vista, and I don't think you'll find anyone -- even a diehard Vista fan -- who could disagree with that. (Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be a like-for-like comparison; the point there is that Linux is more flexible, so you can trim it down for low-spec machines.)
Incidentally, I just ran some tests. Time to load Microsoft Excel 2000 on my computer: 20 seconds. Time to load OpenOffice.org Calc: 7 seconds. Hmmm, maybe the speed difference isn't so clear-cut after all.
Yes, that sounds about right.
For example, Sweden is generally considered a leftist socialist state, and yet somehow it managed to produce IKEA, whose owner is the 7th richest person in the world, and has not yet had all his money taken away from him. (True, he currently lives in Switzerland, but he's got a heck of a lot of property in Sweden that the socialists could easily seize, if that was what socialists actually do. Which it isn't.)
Okay, you will now argue that Sweden isn't really socialist. Which is true, in a sense; it isn't at the utter extreme end of the socialist spectrum. But that's kind of the point. Democracies tend not to go to that extreme. In practice, they never get beyond kinda-socialist-but-still-capitalist-really (like Sweden), or, in the other direction, mostly-capitalist-but-still-a-bit-socialist (like the USA). We merely use "socialist" to describe the former case because it's a convenient shorthand. And so we've now reached what we call the "real world", where socialism is a successful political movement, not an evil bogeyman hiding under your bed and waiting for you to go to sleep so it can steal your piggy-bank.
Right, that's why nobody in American elections ever runs campaign ads that focus on the other candidate.
Surely "useless crap cluttering up the screen" is practically the whole point of E? All those crazy chunky window decorations and stuff.
If you want minimalist, try *box, or ?wm, or even a suitably-configured Xfce.
So, to repeat your argument:
I think you might want to work a little on filling that gap.
And yet the number of people willing to pay well over $20 to watch a 90-minute movie is great enough to sustain an entire industry...
Who cares what the mainstream usage is? Slashdot is not a mainstream website. It is targeted at nerds, and it uses words with the meanings nerds give them. There is no ambiguity going on here. "Kernel hackers" is the correct terminology for Slashdot's target audience.
Perhaps you should report O'Reilly to the police, as clearly you must believe they are selling a whole range of books aimed at criminals.
The OS that runs the majority of websites is "relatively obscure" and not a popular hacker target? Ri-i-i-ight.
"Gay" still does mean "merry". Feel free to tell a Scotsman that "the Gay Gordons" is only danced by homosexuals. I'll be sure to visit you in hospital to find out how he took the news.
Newsflash: some words have multiple meanings, and humans are actually quite good at distinguishing between them. Ambiguity is more likely to lead to comedy than to confusion.
Unfortunately that nice small regular syntax is only for the Lisp core. The actual language that you need to program in has all kinds of other syntactic features, starting with 'symbols and `(macro ,@quoting) and going rapidly downhill from there.
This is a good idea; it makes the regular expressions themselves much easier to read, with less escaping than is required in languages that insist on putting them in strings. Regular expressions are already complicated enough without requiring you to write crazy stuff like "\\\\\\*" just to match a backslash followed by an asterisk.
It also makes it feasible for syntax-highlighting editors to treat all regular expressions specially, which means that things end up being more readable, not less, because you can see exactly which characters are literals and which are metacharacters at a glance.
No, no, you've got it backwards. Designing a successful language gives you a beard.
Poor Grace Hopper...
Yes, people often don't see the point of things they've never tried, or of features that are missing from their current favourite language.
Oh, please. There's a macro for this:
Okay, you have answered the first part of lokedhs' post. Would you now please answer the second part? I will quote it again for your convenience:
Because if that is correct, then the red-highlighted ruling is completely irrelevant to the question of whether OpenSolaris is legal.
OS X has a nice kernel and a decent BSD-derived userland, but the GUI is not universally appreciated -- some of us find it restrictive, dumbed-down, inefficient, and poorly integrated with X11. Heck, you have to install a third-party utility just to get the mouse acceleration to work properly!
Whyever not? They've paid for patent licenses, so it's perfectly legal, even in the USA.
Of course, we might be thinking of different distros.
You would quickly learn the hard way that many people are inclined to follow Selfism, a convenient religion that encourages its devotees to attack you and steal all your property. And with no state, who is going to bother to protect you from them? You surely aren't going to pretend that you, alone, with whatever guns you may possess, can hold off an armed gang indefinitely. Sooner or later you will have to sleep.
I don't remember any recent file sharing cases ending in jail time.
Wow... really? Let me refresh your memory.
The only case on that page that appears to be remotely relevant is the EliteTorrents one. But in that case, the person who went to jail was the administrator of the P2P site. Can you show us any cases where someone has been jailed for merely using P2P?
Because it looks to me like the US doesn't jail people for visiting TPB, whatever you might like to think.
You can indeed -- it's quite simple, you just uncheck some options and then you can take advantage of OpenDNS' fast and reliable servers without helping them pay the bills.
One gotcha for home users is that the settings are tied to your IP address, so if you have a dynamic IP then you need to run an additional bit of software to let them know every time your address changes. Some people might not like that.
Unfortunately it's inaccurate. For example, it claims that "forward one page" is Alt+V in Emacs. But pressing Alt+V in Emacs just gives the message "A-v is undefined", unless of course you happen to be using a computer where the Alt key has been configured to send Meta.
(Yes, Windows and many Linux boxes are set up to do that by default. But that just means you'll end up cursing the first time you find yourself in front of a Solaris box, or a Linux box that's been configured in any of the dozens of other possible ways.)
This feature is built into C-x e as well: `C-x e e e e e' is exactly the same as `C-x e C-x z z z z'. :)
That is only true if the actors' names are the only thing you base your decision on.
For example, there's this new film out called "Quantum of Solace". What do you think is going to be more important in deciding how profitable that film is -- the fact that the lead actor is called Daniel Craig, or the fact that he's playing the role of James Bond? (Hint: the answer is "b".)
Depends what you're looking for. The UK might be further ahead in surveillance, but Australia is miles ahead in censorship -- at least we can get 18-rated video games in the UK!