How about Eclipse as an IDE? That should be better than emacs and textmate for most things.
Well, it has certainly finally taken the crown from emacs in the crucial "loading time" and "memory consumption" stakes! Congratulations, Eclipse team, on finally making all those pro-vi arguments about emacs being inefficient look silly.
Of course it is something where if ti matters at all is really questionable. You are talking like "Which card lets you get slightly higher FSAA settings with a game running at max quality in 5,760x1200?"
Precisely. Most people buy video cards to play games. The vast majority of games are graphically crippled by the obsolete technology in current consoles. There are basically no AAA PC exclusives any more -- even Crysis has shifted its attention to the console market. And apparently there's no plan to improve console technology until 2015 now?
No point upgrading for a while, I guess. By the time anything appears that can make proper use of these cards, their price will have fallen at least 90%. Thanks for the selfless subsidies, early adopters!
Hardware really doesn't matter if there's not software to utilize it.
There is software to utilize it. It's pretty good, really. I use it every day and it has not let me down yet, unlike the open-source Intel drivers which seem to break completely every alternate release.
You have apparently chosen not to touch NVidia's Linux driver on ideological grounds, as is your right; but that does not alter the fact that it exists.
Objective-C doesn't count -- it does not solve the problem for static types, it just falls back on dynamic typing. A better example is OCaml, which actually does solve the problem while remaining completely statically typed.
GPL alone has created a large problem. [...] unless we deal with that hypocricy Microsoft will always win. [...] GPL is bad.
And yet for some reason GPL-licensed Linux is everywhere, and FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD are niche products. Why is it that most companies that want to migrate from legacy UNIX servers are choosing to migrate to Linux rather than a BSD, if the GPL is such a terrifying thing and the BSD license is so much better?
Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that GPL-embracing companies such as Red Hat have invested so much money in improving Linux. And since Linux is GPL, everyone who has built a product by improving it has released those improvements. So Linux has improved rapidly, while by some miracle Red Hat has not yet been destroyed by the GPL's poisonous touch.
On the other hand, companies that have built products on BSD bases, such as Apple, have tended not to release all their improvements. Most of Apple's interesting, useful improvements have been kept private. Who has benefited from the BSD license? Apple. Only Apple. Certainly not the open source community, which has merely been thrown the bone of Darwin, a project that recently passed the significant milestone of 500 users worldwide.
But wait, you cry! What about CUPS? What about WebKit? Apple so does give things back!
Ooh, guess what? Those both use GNU licenses, not BSD! That's why Apple gives their improvements back -- because they have to. If they didn't have to, they most likely wouldn't. So thanks to the GNU copyleft approach we all, Linux and BSD alike, have a better printing system and better web browsers.
Now tell me you seriously think the GPL is harming open source and BSD would be the cure. Because I'm sorry to say that reality seems to disagree.
Comparator<SomeClass> someClassComparator =
new Comparator<SomeClass>() {
public int compare(SomeClass a, SomeClass b)
{
return a.foo().compareTo(b.foo());
}
};
instead of some perfectly unambiguous syntax that does not force you to say exactly the same thing three times, such as e.g.
var someClassComparator =
new Comparator<SomeClass>(| a, b | { return a.foo().compareTo(b.foo()); });
Wow. I mean, I appreciate Java and even use it for some things, but I am amazed that anyone who has used it for so long has not become increasingly irritated by its crazily verbose and deliberately redundant syntax.
I guess long-term Java programmers : verbosity:: fish : water. You survive just fine with it. You even feel pretty uncomfortable without it. But civilization is going to be built by the creatures who crawl out of that water, evolve a damn lung or two, and set about trying to find better ways to do things.
Nothing bothers me as much as the incorrect usage [...] of works like biweekly, bimonthly, etc
Really? You find that more offensive than genocide, pedophilia, and split infinitives put together?
Unfortunately, years back the dictionary added these incorrect and ambiguous usages so that now these words can "officially" mean either twice per, or every two.
I don't think you know how dictionaries work. There are many English dictionaries, none of which is "the" dictionary. The presence of a word or meaning in a dictionary does not make it "official", nor does its absence necessarily mean it isn't a "real" word. It just means that the word or meaning has or has not been spotted by the dictionary's compilers and deemed sufficiently widely used and well attested to be worth documenting.
Two conflicting definitions makes them useless.
Many words have two conflicting meanings. Somehow our language gets by just fine in a state where "hot" can mean "cool" and "bad" can mean "good".
And it would make the dictionaries less useful if they omitted one of the definitions. The purpose of a dictionary is not to define language but to describe it, to help you understand what other people mean. If a dictionary did not give both definitions, when someone tried to find out what a sentence containing the word "bimonthly" meant, half the time they would get a clear, unambiguous, and completely wrong answer. It's far more helpful for a dictionary to point out that the word is ambiguous than to pretend it isn't when it is!
For those of you who may be wondering, the proper way to say twice per X is with the prefix semi-
That's also probably a bad idea; semi can also be a vague prefix meaning "not quite". A lot of people, including myself, would naturally interpret "semimonthly" to mean "happens once a month, but not every month".
The best, most easily comprehensible, and only unambiguous way to say "twice per X" is to use more than one word: try "twice per X" or "twice a(n) X". Similarly, for "every two Xes", try "every two Xes" or "every other X".
Um, surely the whole point of QC is that it is not vulnerable to MitM, because you can't intercept the key exchange without changing it?
Please explain why I should believe a random Slashdotter on this, rather than the legions of physicists and mathematicians who have published peer-reviewed academic papers that disagree with you.
unlike the video game consoles, those media don't have a cryptographic lockout preventing those outside the "giant commercial industry" from even getting started.
Actually, games are easier to get started in. Good luck getting your music airtime or getting your movie into theaters! But with games, all you have to do is not target consoles. There's a thriving indie sector on the PC, which has precisely no barrier to entry whatsoever. And perhaps you spotted a recent post on this very site from some guy who's sold more copies of his game on iPhone and Android than most console titles ever sell?
Crytek et al mope about because of low sales of their "you need to be this rich to run our game" high-requirement, high-cost output.
Right. That's why they rushed out an expansion and then got right to work on the sequel. That's practically the definition of "moping about because of low sales" right there.
It's true that a new Call of Duty game can sell more copies on release day than Crysis ever did. In other news, Ford sells more cars than Ferrari. And yet somehow both Crytek and Ferrari still appear to be profitable.
See, with 1. RedHat doing their weird patches thing, and their restrictions when you use RedHat Network (Red Hat Stops Shipping Kernel Changes as Patches [slashdot.org]), and the huge lag times between RHEL updates plus 2. Ubuntu doing stuff [slashdot.org] that some people don't like, plus the whole Unity/Wayland thing,
the importance of a good, free, working and fresh distro is highlighted.
I absolutely agree 100%.
That's why I'm so glad Fedora exists. It's as usable as Ubuntu, avoids non-free software just like Debian, and is fresher than either.
No, the reason Linux does not have a large desktop market share is because it matured 10 years too late, after Microsoft had already established a stranglehold on the desktop market. The barrier to entry is massive. Fragmentation is a minor issue in comparison to the difficulty of challenging an established monopoly.
The only way Linux will ever succeed on the consumer desktop is if it (a) runs all Windows applications and games perfectly, and (b) never presents users with any uncertainty or minor difficulties. Because the truth is this: when a user has have a problem with Linux, they blame Linux. When they have the same problem with Windows, they blame themselves or their computer. That is the real reason why Linux has only made major inroads in markets such as smartphones, where there was no existing monopoly.
In all of the iOS devices I have ever had, I have not once had to replace a battery.
If you have had a sufficent number of iOS devices for this to be a statistically meaningful sample, then you can never have never used any single one of them for long enough to draw any conclusions about battery longevity.
They kind of work as well, but the interfaces are absolutely horrible, and there's too much magic going on behind the scenes for them to be convenient.
For example, before I gave up on PackageKit and removed it from all my systems, it had a wonderful habit of locking something every time yum stopped doing stuff. Install one package, then decide you want to install another? Sorry, you get to wait 10 minutes while PackageKit does God only knows what before it will release the lock and let you run yum again.
I still use Fedora, but I really miss aptitude. An efficient package selection interface with decent search! Instant dependency resolution as you select packages! Wonderful. And there is nothing like it anywhere in the RPM-based ecosystem. (No, apt-rpm does not help.)
I, for one, hope things never get that bad, because contrary to your huge assumption, there is no guarantee that another revolution would even happen, let alone be successful without massive loss of life and great suffering all round, and even if it did succeed there is no guarantee that the new regime would be more to the average Slashdotter's taste. (Consider Iran, where a broad coalition of liberals and conservatives rose up to overthrow the hated monarchy, only to watch in horror as the power vacuum was filled by an even more brutal theocracy.)
The fact that juries occasionally reach a decision that contradicts the law does not mean that the purpose of the jury is to decide on the law, any more than the fact that presidents occasionally start wars means that the purpose of the president is to start wars.
The purpose of the jury is to reach a simple decision: innocent or guilty. In other words, did the guy break the law or not? Not "is the law right" -- that responsibility belongs to the elected representatives of the people (in the USA, members of congress), not random individuals who do not have a democratic mandate to speak for anyone other than themselves.
Define "well run"? Christopher Tolkien has published some fifteen volumes of serious Tolkien scholarship, which is more books than J.R.R. himself published in his lifetime.
Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien left Christopher some very valuable things: primarily his notes. Christopher has done a perfectly reasonable thing, and made a perfectly reasonable living, by working them into books and selling them. Few people have any objection to that kind of thing; some fans may find they dislike the new books, but they cannot reasonably deny his right to publish them. That is a reasonable use of a literary inheritance. It has involved honest and creative work.
The problem arises when the Tolkien estate starts claiming to own things that are not traditionally passed on from generation to generation, such as the "right" to refuse to allow anyone else to write books about J.R.R. Tolkien.
Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.
Which is why Hamlet and King Lear, among other plays, are thought to be reworkings of older plays.
And, in the case of Hamlet, the earliest edition is widely believed to be an unauthorized copy -- basically the 17th-century equivalent of a camcorder. There is no record whatsoever of anyone ever being sued or punished for that.
Intel has not "partnered with Microsoft" in this sense. Intel sells general-purpose hardware, and a lot of it never touches any Microsoft software at all. Last time I checked, Intel chips also powered Apple's desktops and laptops. I don't think Nokia is going to be offering its customers a choice between Windows or iOS.
That isn't necessarily bad. It's easier for a random cybercriminal in China or Russia to root a server that stores a million passwords than it is for them to break into a million American homes.
Microsoft took reasonable care to ensure that its EULA would always be presented. There is nothing they could really do to prevent people patching it out, and you cannot patch it out without knowing it exists.
Sony has not taken any precautions at all to ensure people view the EULA before downloading PS3 firmware. There are many trivial things they could do to block direct download links; they have not done any of them. And you can easily follow such a link with no idea that any EULA exists.
Yes, that sucks. I read Slashdot on a netbook. I already have little enough vertical real estate, the last thing I want is a huge Slashdot toolbar eating up more.
Fortunately it took like 30 seconds with Firebug and Stylish to identify the offending container and change its position property from "fixed" to "absolute". So that's fixed.
Control characters can mess up the page. Blacklisting control characters is too hard, because it's not like Unicode comes with a character database that explicitly identifies them or anything. So Slashdot whitelists ASCII and a handful of other characters, and bad luck if you wanted to use anything they forgot.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it has certainly finally taken the crown from emacs in the crucial "loading time" and "memory consumption" stakes! Congratulations, Eclipse team, on finally making all those pro-vi arguments about emacs being inefficient look silly.
Precisely. Most people buy video cards to play games. The vast majority of games are graphically crippled by the obsolete technology in current consoles. There are basically no AAA PC exclusives any more -- even Crysis has shifted its attention to the console market. And apparently there's no plan to improve console technology until 2015 now?
No point upgrading for a while, I guess. By the time anything appears that can make proper use of these cards, their price will have fallen at least 90%. Thanks for the selfless subsidies, early adopters!
There is software to utilize it. It's pretty good, really. I use it every day and it has not let me down yet, unlike the open-source Intel drivers which seem to break completely every alternate release.
You have apparently chosen not to touch NVidia's Linux driver on ideological grounds, as is your right; but that does not alter the fact that it exists.
Objective-C doesn't count -- it does not solve the problem for static types, it just falls back on dynamic typing. A better example is OCaml, which actually does solve the problem while remaining completely statically typed.
And yet for some reason GPL-licensed Linux is everywhere, and FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD are niche products. Why is it that most companies that want to migrate from legacy UNIX servers are choosing to migrate to Linux rather than a BSD, if the GPL is such a terrifying thing and the BSD license is so much better?
Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that GPL-embracing companies such as Red Hat have invested so much money in improving Linux. And since Linux is GPL, everyone who has built a product by improving it has released those improvements. So Linux has improved rapidly, while by some miracle Red Hat has not yet been destroyed by the GPL's poisonous touch.
On the other hand, companies that have built products on BSD bases, such as Apple, have tended not to release all their improvements. Most of Apple's interesting, useful improvements have been kept private. Who has benefited from the BSD license? Apple. Only Apple. Certainly not the open source community, which has merely been thrown the bone of Darwin, a project that recently passed the significant milestone of 500 users worldwide.
But wait, you cry! What about CUPS? What about WebKit? Apple so does give things back!
Ooh, guess what? Those both use GNU licenses, not BSD! That's why Apple gives their improvements back -- because they have to. If they didn't have to, they most likely wouldn't. So thanks to the GNU copyleft approach we all, Linux and BSD alike, have a better printing system and better web browsers.
Now tell me you seriously think the GPL is harming open source and BSD would be the cure. Because I'm sorry to say that reality seems to disagree.
Really? You really like writing
instead of some perfectly unambiguous syntax that does not force you to say exactly the same thing three times, such as e.g.
Wow. I mean, I appreciate Java and even use it for some things, but I am amazed that anyone who has used it for so long has not become increasingly irritated by its crazily verbose and deliberately redundant syntax.
I guess long-term Java programmers : verbosity :: fish : water. You survive just fine with it. You even feel pretty uncomfortable without it. But civilization is going to be built by the creatures who crawl out of that water, evolve a damn lung or two, and set about trying to find better ways to do things.
Really? You find that more offensive than genocide, pedophilia, and split infinitives put together?
I don't think you know how dictionaries work. There are many English dictionaries, none of which is "the" dictionary. The presence of a word or meaning in a dictionary does not make it "official", nor does its absence necessarily mean it isn't a "real" word. It just means that the word or meaning has or has not been spotted by the dictionary's compilers and deemed sufficiently widely used and well attested to be worth documenting.
Many words have two conflicting meanings. Somehow our language gets by just fine in a state where "hot" can mean "cool" and "bad" can mean "good".
And it would make the dictionaries less useful if they omitted one of the definitions. The purpose of a dictionary is not to define language but to describe it, to help you understand what other people mean. If a dictionary did not give both definitions, when someone tried to find out what a sentence containing the word "bimonthly" meant, half the time they would get a clear, unambiguous, and completely wrong answer. It's far more helpful for a dictionary to point out that the word is ambiguous than to pretend it isn't when it is!
That's also probably a bad idea; semi can also be a vague prefix meaning "not quite". A lot of people, including myself, would naturally interpret "semimonthly" to mean "happens once a month, but not every month".
The best, most easily comprehensible, and only unambiguous way to say "twice per X" is to use more than one word: try "twice per X" or "twice a(n) X". Similarly, for "every two Xes", try "every two Xes" or "every other X".
Um, surely the whole point of QC is that it is not vulnerable to MitM, because you can't intercept the key exchange without changing it?
Please explain why I should believe a random Slashdotter on this, rather than the legions of physicists and mathematicians who have published peer-reviewed academic papers that disagree with you.
Actually, games are easier to get started in. Good luck getting your music airtime or getting your movie into theaters! But with games, all you have to do is not target consoles. There's a thriving indie sector on the PC, which has precisely no barrier to entry whatsoever. And perhaps you spotted a recent post on this very site from some guy who's sold more copies of his game on iPhone and Android than most console titles ever sell?
Right. That's why they rushed out an expansion and then got right to work on the sequel. That's practically the definition of "moping about because of low sales" right there.
It's true that a new Call of Duty game can sell more copies on release day than Crysis ever did. In other news, Ford sells more cars than Ferrari. And yet somehow both Crytek and Ferrari still appear to be profitable.
I absolutely agree 100%.
That's why I'm so glad Fedora exists. It's as usable as Ubuntu, avoids non-free software just like Debian, and is fresher than either.
No, the reason Linux does not have a large desktop market share is because it matured 10 years too late, after Microsoft had already established a stranglehold on the desktop market. The barrier to entry is massive. Fragmentation is a minor issue in comparison to the difficulty of challenging an established monopoly.
The only way Linux will ever succeed on the consumer desktop is if it (a) runs all Windows applications and games perfectly, and (b) never presents users with any uncertainty or minor difficulties. Because the truth is this: when a user has have a problem with Linux, they blame Linux. When they have the same problem with Windows, they blame themselves or their computer. That is the real reason why Linux has only made major inroads in markets such as smartphones, where there was no existing monopoly.
If you have had a sufficent number of iOS devices for this to be a statistically meaningful sample, then you can never have never used any single one of them for long enough to draw any conclusions about battery longevity.
I, too, find that Kool-Aid tastes really good inside the reality distortion field.
They kind of work as well, but the interfaces are absolutely horrible, and there's too much magic going on behind the scenes for them to be convenient.
For example, before I gave up on PackageKit and removed it from all my systems, it had a wonderful habit of locking something every time yum stopped doing stuff. Install one package, then decide you want to install another? Sorry, you get to wait 10 minutes while PackageKit does God only knows what before it will release the lock and let you run yum again.
I still use Fedora, but I really miss aptitude. An efficient package selection interface with decent search! Instant dependency resolution as you select packages! Wonderful. And there is nothing like it anywhere in the RPM-based ecosystem. (No, apt-rpm does not help.)
I, for one, hope things never get that bad, because contrary to your huge assumption, there is no guarantee that another revolution would even happen, let alone be successful without massive loss of life and great suffering all round, and even if it did succeed there is no guarantee that the new regime would be more to the average Slashdotter's taste. (Consider Iran, where a broad coalition of liberals and conservatives rose up to overthrow the hated monarchy, only to watch in horror as the power vacuum was filled by an even more brutal theocracy.)
The fact that juries occasionally reach a decision that contradicts the law does not mean that the purpose of the jury is to decide on the law, any more than the fact that presidents occasionally start wars means that the purpose of the president is to start wars.
The purpose of the jury is to reach a simple decision: innocent or guilty. In other words, did the guy break the law or not? Not "is the law right" -- that responsibility belongs to the elected representatives of the people (in the USA, members of congress), not random individuals who do not have a democratic mandate to speak for anyone other than themselves.
Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien left Christopher some very valuable things: primarily his notes. Christopher has done a perfectly reasonable thing, and made a perfectly reasonable living, by working them into books and selling them. Few people have any objection to that kind of thing; some fans may find they dislike the new books, but they cannot reasonably deny his right to publish them. That is a reasonable use of a literary inheritance. It has involved honest and creative work.
The problem arises when the Tolkien estate starts claiming to own things that are not traditionally passed on from generation to generation, such as the "right" to refuse to allow anyone else to write books about J.R.R. Tolkien.
And, in the case of Hamlet, the earliest edition is widely believed to be an unauthorized copy -- basically the 17th-century equivalent of a camcorder. There is no record whatsoever of anyone ever being sued or punished for that.
Intel has not "partnered with Microsoft" in this sense. Intel sells general-purpose hardware, and a lot of it never touches any Microsoft software at all. Last time I checked, Intel chips also powered Apple's desktops and laptops. I don't think Nokia is going to be offering its customers a choice between Windows or iOS.
That isn't necessarily bad. It's easier for a random cybercriminal in China or Russia to root a server that stores a million passwords than it is for them to break into a million American homes.
Microsoft took reasonable care to ensure that its EULA would always be presented. There is nothing they could really do to prevent people patching it out, and you cannot patch it out without knowing it exists.
Sony has not taken any precautions at all to ensure people view the EULA before downloading PS3 firmware. There are many trivial things they could do to block direct download links; they have not done any of them. And you can easily follow such a link with no idea that any EULA exists.
See any difference there?
Yes, that sucks. I read Slashdot on a netbook. I already have little enough vertical real estate, the last thing I want is a huge Slashdot toolbar eating up more.
Fortunately it took like 30 seconds with Firebug and Stylish to identify the offending container and change its position property from "fixed" to "absolute". So that's fixed.
Control characters can mess up the page. Blacklisting control characters is too hard, because it's not like Unicode comes with a character database that explicitly identifies them or anything. So Slashdot whitelists ASCII and a handful of other characters, and bad luck if you wanted to use anything they forgot.
True, but the fact that they explicitly say they are going to make backwards-incompatible changes does.