Whenever people say this, I pick up my five test java applications. Three are programs I like and use, the other two are picked more-or-less randomly from freshmeat.
None of them work under such stacks. Not one.
Would you care to reveal what they are? It's quite difficult to track down a bug when you have to start by reading someone's mind.
He meant GNU/Linux, most of which will be automatically available under GPL3 once it is published.
Just about everything but Linux, indeed. So what he actually meant was just GNU, and not Linux at all.
When people start saying "Linux" when they really mean "everything that is usually used with Linux except for Linux itself", I start to wonder if maybe RMS has a point.
[Retained Mode] was stupid to begin with, yet Microsoft kept pushing it version after version. I know it was still there at least as high as DirectX 5.0.
Look, you're welcome to hate Microsoft if you choose, but your memory is rather inaccurate.
Get this: Retained mode was not meant for games. Microsoft never "pushed" it for games. Immediate mode was always there for games to use. Games were always supposed to use immediate mode.
It's been a while since I read the documentation for ancient DirectX versions, but IIRC it actually said, right there, quite explicitly, in the documentation, that retained mode was not meant for high-performance graphics and that games should use immediate mode.
The idea of retained mode was that it provided a much simpler interface. It was intended for use by multimedia applications that did not require the power and flexiblity of immediate mode, but just wanted to throw a few 3D meshes on screen and move them about a bit, without all the hassle of coding all the data structures and transformations by hand. It didn't catch on, and it eventually died, but it wasn't stupid by any means, and something very similar will be making a comeback in Windows Vista.
At least, I say it wasn't stupid. Maybe it was stupid. I don't see how providing a simplified API for simple applications, and a complex API for complex applications, is "stupid", but then I use Microsoft software out of choice, so clearly I don't hate Microsoft badly enough yet for me to be able to judge their decisions objectively.
"We're all well educated athiests [sic]", says the submitter.
Apparently not quite so well-educated as he thinks. I'm guessing Cambridge, judging by his inability even to spell the name of the philosophy to which he subscribes. Or is he claiming to take that philosophy further than most? I've met some people who were pretty athy, so if he's athier than them, perhaps he really is the athiest!
So, where are the important benchmarks that show things actually running 2-3 times faster? RTFA: they performed a wide variety of tests here, and the largest performance increase they measured was 1.84x, which is not "2-3x" by any means. And that was for system startup, hardly an "important" benchmark, given that most people I know with Macs use the suspend feature instead of switching the thing right off every night. And the average speed increase on "important" benchmarks, which I take to mean "things people actually wish were faster", was 1.2-1.5x. That's a good figure. If Steve Jobs had said "it's 50% faster", people would still have been impressed. But that's not what he said.
Look, if you go to the Apple Store right now, what you'll see is a banner that says "The 2x faster iMac". Not "The iMac that's 2x faster on artificial benchmarks, but actually only 1.2-1.5x faster in real life because most tasks are IO-bound". Apple are selling this thing as 2x faster, period - and it isn't. Call it lying, or call it marketing, as you wish, but it still doesn't reflect well on Apple.
Why not just quit worrying? Statistically speaking, the two people most likely to sexually abuse your children are you and your spouse, in roughly that order. Then other family members. Then other people whom they know well, such as friends' families, teachers, sports coaches, religious leaders, and so forth. Total strangers barely figure as a risk; registered sex offenders probably come even lower, because they know damn well they'll be the first suspect if anything happens.
Besides, if all that guy has done is download child porn, then there's no particular reason to assume he's a predatory paedophile, any more than the fact that I've watched The Godfather means I'm likely to be affiliated with the Mafia.
That's not so bad. Really truly dire filtering software produces results that are indistinguishable from random blocks.
One day I swear I will work out why I was threatened with disciplinary action for attempting to access websites with "obscene/pornographic content" like, uh, Google Language Tools.
Here in the Democratic People's Monarchy of Englandistan, no bank ATMs charge any fees at all, regardless of whether you're a customer of that bank or not.
This happy situation is unlikely to last, of course.
Re:Perl 6 is evolving the language into awesome!
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
This is why I like ML's choice of ^ for string concatenation. Since there's no general consensus among other programming languages whether it should represent exponentiation, bitwise XOR, or pointer dereferencing, it's not a terrible problem to be suddenly faced with yet another possible meaning.
Parrot . . . does not have a patent sword hanging over it like mono does.
This claim always puzzles me. If Microsoft may have patents that relate to the implementation of virtual machines designed to host a variety of languages, why do people assume that those patents are bound to be so narrow in scope that they will only affect Mono? And why do people assume that Microsoft is the only company that might ever consider taking out patents in such an area?
Have the Parrot developers conducted exhaustive patent searches at every stage of development? Because if not, then Parrot does have a patent sword hanging over it. A sword made of pure FUD, just like the one invented by the anti-Mono campaigners.
Well done, you know the difference between racism and prejudice.
Now see if you can work out the difference between racism and what the poster you're replying to actually wrote, which is "like racism". Go on, have a guess. Even if you take a random stab at it, you've got a 50-50 chance of spotting the key word that you apparently failed to notice when you decided to try to make yourself look smart by "correcting" a perfectly correct post.
And why are you artificially excluding turntables from your definition of "instrument"? If nothing else, then scratching is a perfectly valid form of percussion.
I sure do, and that's why proper documentation is important.
Suppose I have a generic function that takes a container and returns another container. The tests tell me that the container it returns is the same size, has the same type, and has the property that its contents are sorted in ascending order according to a generic comparison operator.
Is that all I want to know? Fuck no. I want to know what the complexity of the sort algorithm is - how its time and memory consumption change based on the input, for example. Tests can't show me that, but the documentation can tell me. If it's a straightforward implementation of a standard algorithm, just two or three words of documentation might be enough to tell me.
So that documentation could get out of date, in theory? Well, yes, it could. And if it did, then I'd expect the developer who neglected his duties to be fired - just as I'd expect the same for a developer who implemented an important class without ensuring that all its functionality was covered by the tests.
Code and comments. Tests and documentation. Belt and braces. End result: fewer bugs. Developers who argue that comments are useless because they can get out of date aren't "agile", they're just lazy.
Similarly I think they don't have a word for "nature"
Apart from shizen, which has pretty much exactly the same semantic range as the English word.
Meanwhile, English doesn't have a word for people who irrationally believe that a language that doesn't have a single, specific word for a concept is unable to express that concept, and that people speaking such a language are incapable of understanding the concept. And yet it seems to be able to express the concept quite admirably. Funny, that.
Not only is Darwin Open Source but it is Free Software as defined by the FSF.
And how many people run just Darwin, as opposed to the complete OS X? People use OS X for the closed-source Mac interface, not the open-source BSD underpinnings; if you want open-source BSD, you use a real BSD and get open-source everything.
To put it another way: Windows 3.1 was just as closed-source as Windows XP is, even though 3.1 could easily be run on an open-source version of DOS.
Re:Next week we'll compare the PS one to the Xbox
on
Comparing Xbox Launches
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I just played through Half Life 2 on the original XBox, and it was pretty darn near photorealistic. The game looked fantastic. Many other games on the XBox look great, including Halo 2 and the original Halo. They're already at the point where they look like real life; how much better can graphics really get?
Answer: a lot better. You think they look like real life now, but two or three years down the line, you'll think today's games look like crap.
How do I know this? Simple: I've been there. Look, I can remember looking at Doom and thinking, this is it, there is no way Quake could possibly be more realistic. And then Quake came out, and it looked like a jerky version of real life itself. Back then.
Look at Half-Life 2 with a critical eye. Compare it to movies or TV, if you find it too difficult to compare a 2D screen with 3D reality itself. Blockiness, jaggy edges, unrealistic motion, flat lighting... it's nowhere near reality. It's nothing like. But your brain is very, very good at error-correction... for as long as it's the best you've seen.
To put this in perspective, I recently tried out a WWII game on the XBox 360 in a Gamestop store, and really, I couldn't see any big difference between that and Half Life II's graphics.
You're comparing a mature XBox title with a first-generation 360 title - one that was written by people who didn't know how to get the best out of the new system.
I think basically you don't understand what "next generation" means. It's not a quantised thing: you don't step up a generation and everything looks so much better and stays looking the same for the next five years. A generation is a period of growth, during which things continue to improve. And next-generation hardware is about enabling the improvement to continue, not about causing that improvement in and of itself. In other words, XBox games look as good as they ever will, but 360 games have a lot of scope for improvement.
Look around and note the up and coming providers for suborbital flight - there isn't but one serious contender outside of the US. The heavyweights are all in the US.
Look around and note where all current, operating, here-and-now space tourism is taking place - there isn't one serious contender outside of Russia. The heavyweights are all in Russia. Hmm.
As for suborbital flight - well, look at the article. See if you can spot the sole contender who's well-enough known to be mentioned in the Slashdot summary. "Sir Richard Branson". Even if you've never heard of the guy, that little "Sir" should be a clue to you that there is no chance in hell that we are talking about a US citizen here, because that "Sir" is a British title, and US citizens are not exactly encouraged to accept titles from foreign powers.
So, tell me. Do you seriously think that Richard Branson, a British citizen, would have any emotional attachment to launching from U.S. soil, when the European Space Agency would no doubt be overjoyed to allow him the use of their facilities? Because I don't. I really don't see the US Air Force reserving the right to shoot down foreign passenger spaceships, the way they reserve the right to shoot down foreign satellites, because even America can't go killing the rich and get away with it. So I reckon the market, not the FAA, is going to decide where commercial space flights launch from; Branson et al. will use US soil, US equipment, US expertise, and US regulations if and only if that's the best deal. (Which it might well be, of course.)
And naturally there's a strong likelihood that US muscle will convince other nations to adopt the rules the US wants anyway. Being the world's biggest superpower tends to leave you getting your way even when things aren't going on in your jurisdiction...
Yes, we Windows users have to mangle our text into a hideous travesty of human language all by ourselves, without recourse to "translation" software.
Maybe Microsoft will consider adding this functionality to Windows if it's ever actually capable of translating into any languages apart from gobbledygook and double-dutch. As it is now, it's just a gimmick. Thanks, but I'd prefer the developers of my operating system to be concentrating on useful features, not gimmicks.
No other PC GUI system came up with such a poor design. (Yeah, X-Windows was a mess too. But it was a controlled mess intended for *cough* "Professionals".) BeOS, Amiga, RiscOS, Mac, etc. all had way better solutions to the problem. The most important goal for Windows was to run a multi-user environment on top of a single-user Operating System that would perhaps be best be described as an "embedded OS". It worked at the time, but it wasn't a very effective way to handle things long-term.
And every single one of the "other PC GUI systems" you cite is a single-user OS with few, if any, multi-user capabilities. Since not one of them even attempted to solve the same problem as Windows - to whit, how to mix configuration and metadata with multi-user environments - I fail to see how you can consider them comparable.
When the crunch finally came and everyone realised that everything had to support multi-user operation, what happened? Unix was already there. Windows had a kludge in place that worked well enough, for enough people, enough of the time, for it to survive. And the rest? What became of the other wonderful GUI systems you mention? They failed to adapt, and died!
BeOS and the Amiga sank quickly, and are now remembered only by a handful of fanatics who are still trying to come to terms with the collapse of their religion. RiscOS would have been long dead already if it hadn't had a niche in education; though apparently it's still around somewhere, lurching sadly along like the walking dead in their haunted catacombs. And the Mac was sick unto death, nearly taking Apple with it - who survived only by, uh, binning basically their entire codebase and adopting a Unix-based system? Oops.
Funny how the "worst" design was the only desktop OS that was actually adaptable enough to survive. I guess you subscribe to some kind of anti-Darwinist "survival of the unfittest" theory of evolution?
America is referred to as the Land of the Free for a reason-our freedoms are what makes us a great nation. Not our military, not our economic strength, not our President, good or bad, not our Congressional system, not our massive land area. Our freedoms, as enshrined in the US Constitution.
Know what? North Korea has a constitution too.
A constitution is just a bit of paper with words on it. Nothing more, nothing less. It's what the government does that counts. And if your government passes laws like the DMCA and the PATRIOT act, you aren't living in a free country any more...
In that case I'd recommend something like python combined with some gui toolkit such as wxpython or pygtk.
Not pygtk. You'd better avoid GTK+ like the plague if there is any possibility that you might ever want your code to run on OS X, because there is no maintained native OS X version of GTK+. (There are X11 versions that run in OS X, but few Mac users will use an X11 app if there is any alternative whatsoever.) And that's not even mentioning how sucky the Win32 port of GTK+ is.
Basically, consider GTK+ only if the only platforms you really care about are Linux/Unix/BSD-type OSes that use X11 as their primary windowing system. If you want a portable UI that will actually run well on OS X or Windows, use Qt or wxWidgets.
For goodness sake, they don't even have a Constitution!
And since when has a constitution ever been anything more than a piece of paper with words on it?
Did the fact that the US has a constitution prevent millions of African Americans being held as slaves? Not for the first 80 years of its existence. There were 12 amendments on other matters before the government finally got round to adding a ban on slavery to their text.
Did the fact that the US has a constitution then guarantee the newly freed African Americans the same rights as Americans of other ethnicities? No, segregation persisted for another century after that.
Did the fact that the US has a constitution prevent other abuses of rights and liberties, such as the prohibition of alcohol or the internment of Japanese Americans (most of whom were full US citizens)? Nope.
Does it today prevent abuses like mentally disabled people being executed for crimes they don't even understand, or people being executed for crimes they committed as a child? No. Does it enable you to exercise your rights of free speech and free assembly by holding a banner critical of the president somewhere where he might see it? No. Does it even prevent obviously ludicrous violations of people's rights like the "three strikes" laws? Why, no, the Supreme Court has actually found that it is constitutional to jail someone for 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pizza!
Man, that's some constitution you guys have. I wish my country had something like that. No, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever people say this, I pick up my five test java applications. Three are programs I like and use, the other two are picked more-or-less randomly from freshmeat.
None of them work under such stacks. Not one.
Would you care to reveal what they are? It's quite difficult to track down a bug when you have to start by reading someone's mind.
He meant GNU/Linux, most of which will be automatically available under GPL3 once it is published.
Just about everything but Linux, indeed. So what he actually meant was just GNU, and not Linux at all.
When people start saying "Linux" when they really mean "everything that is usually used with Linux except for Linux itself", I start to wonder if maybe RMS has a point.
[Retained Mode] was stupid to begin with, yet Microsoft kept pushing it version after version. I know it was still there at least as high as DirectX 5.0.
Look, you're welcome to hate Microsoft if you choose, but your memory is rather inaccurate.
Get this: Retained mode was not meant for games. Microsoft never "pushed" it for games. Immediate mode was always there for games to use. Games were always supposed to use immediate mode.
It's been a while since I read the documentation for ancient DirectX versions, but IIRC it actually said, right there, quite explicitly, in the documentation, that retained mode was not meant for high-performance graphics and that games should use immediate mode.
The idea of retained mode was that it provided a much simpler interface. It was intended for use by multimedia applications that did not require the power and flexiblity of immediate mode, but just wanted to throw a few 3D meshes on screen and move them about a bit, without all the hassle of coding all the data structures and transformations by hand. It didn't catch on, and it eventually died, but it wasn't stupid by any means, and something very similar will be making a comeback in Windows Vista.
At least, I say it wasn't stupid. Maybe it was stupid. I don't see how providing a simplified API for simple applications, and a complex API for complex applications, is "stupid", but then I use Microsoft software out of choice, so clearly I don't hate Microsoft badly enough yet for me to be able to judge their decisions objectively.
"We're all well educated athiests [sic]", says the submitter.
Apparently not quite so well-educated as he thinks. I'm guessing Cambridge, judging by his inability even to spell the name of the philosophy to which he subscribes. Or is he claiming to take that philosophy further than most? I've met some people who were pretty athy, so if he's athier than them, perhaps he really is the athiest!
oh, guess i better take the music I'VE made (which is free and legally distributable) out of there too
Yeah, right. I'VE music is no more free and legally distributable than any other copyrighted commercial recordings are.
Er... wait a minute...
So, where are the important benchmarks that show things actually running 2-3 times faster? RTFA: they performed a wide variety of tests here, and the largest performance increase they measured was 1.84x, which is not "2-3x" by any means. And that was for system startup, hardly an "important" benchmark, given that most people I know with Macs use the suspend feature instead of switching the thing right off every night. And the average speed increase on "important" benchmarks, which I take to mean "things people actually wish were faster", was 1.2-1.5x. That's a good figure. If Steve Jobs had said "it's 50% faster", people would still have been impressed. But that's not what he said.
Look, if you go to the Apple Store right now, what you'll see is a banner that says "The 2x faster iMac". Not "The iMac that's 2x faster on artificial benchmarks, but actually only 1.2-1.5x faster in real life because most tasks are IO-bound". Apple are selling this thing as 2x faster, period - and it isn't. Call it lying, or call it marketing, as you wish, but it still doesn't reflect well on Apple.
Why not just quit worrying? Statistically speaking, the two people most likely to sexually abuse your children are you and your spouse, in roughly that order. Then other family members. Then other people whom they know well, such as friends' families, teachers, sports coaches, religious leaders, and so forth. Total strangers barely figure as a risk; registered sex offenders probably come even lower, because they know damn well they'll be the first suspect if anything happens.
Besides, if all that guy has done is download child porn, then there's no particular reason to assume he's a predatory paedophile, any more than the fact that I've watched The Godfather means I'm likely to be affiliated with the Mafia.
That's not so bad. Really truly dire filtering software produces results that are indistinguishable from random blocks.
One day I swear I will work out why I was threatened with disciplinary action for attempting to access websites with "obscene/pornographic content" like, uh, Google Language Tools.
Last I checked Marriage wasn't a right in the US, it is a privaledge granted by society
Try article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Men and women of full age [...] have the right to marry..."
(Note the carefully vague wording, which stops short of defining whether this can include homosexual relationships or not.)
Here in the Democratic People's Monarchy of Englandistan, no bank ATMs charge any fees at all, regardless of whether you're a customer of that bank or not.
This happy situation is unlikely to last, of course.
This is why I like ML's choice of ^ for string concatenation. Since there's no general consensus among other programming languages whether it should represent exponentiation, bitwise XOR, or pointer dereferencing, it's not a terrible problem to be suddenly faced with yet another possible meaning.
Parrot . . . does not have a patent sword hanging over it like mono does.
This claim always puzzles me. If Microsoft may have patents that relate to the implementation of virtual machines designed to host a variety of languages, why do people assume that those patents are bound to be so narrow in scope that they will only affect Mono? And why do people assume that Microsoft is the only company that might ever consider taking out patents in such an area?
Have the Parrot developers conducted exhaustive patent searches at every stage of development? Because if not, then Parrot does have a patent sword hanging over it. A sword made of pure FUD, just like the one invented by the anti-Mono campaigners.
Well done, you know the difference between racism and prejudice.
Now see if you can work out the difference between racism and what the poster you're replying to actually wrote, which is "like racism". Go on, have a guess. Even if you take a random stab at it, you've got a 50-50 chance of spotting the key word that you apparently failed to notice when you decided to try to make yourself look smart by "correcting" a perfectly correct post.
And why are you artificially excluding turntables from your definition of "instrument"? If nothing else, then scratching is a perfectly valid form of percussion.
Do you want your code to me modular and reusable?
I sure do, and that's why proper documentation is important.
Suppose I have a generic function that takes a container and returns another container. The tests tell me that the container it returns is the same size, has the same type, and has the property that its contents are sorted in ascending order according to a generic comparison operator.
Is that all I want to know? Fuck no. I want to know what the complexity of the sort algorithm is - how its time and memory consumption change based on the input, for example. Tests can't show me that, but the documentation can tell me. If it's a straightforward implementation of a standard algorithm, just two or three words of documentation might be enough to tell me.
So that documentation could get out of date, in theory? Well, yes, it could. And if it did, then I'd expect the developer who neglected his duties to be fired - just as I'd expect the same for a developer who implemented an important class without ensuring that all its functionality was covered by the tests.
Code and comments. Tests and documentation. Belt and braces. End result: fewer bugs. Developers who argue that comments are useless because they can get out of date aren't "agile", they're just lazy.
Similarly I think they don't have a word for "nature"
Apart from shizen, which has pretty much exactly the same semantic range as the English word.
Meanwhile, English doesn't have a word for people who irrationally believe that a language that doesn't have a single, specific word for a concept is unable to express that concept, and that people speaking such a language are incapable of understanding the concept. And yet it seems to be able to express the concept quite admirably. Funny, that.
Not only is Darwin Open Source but it is Free Software as defined by the FSF.
And how many people run just Darwin, as opposed to the complete OS X? People use OS X for the closed-source Mac interface, not the open-source BSD underpinnings; if you want open-source BSD, you use a real BSD and get open-source everything.
To put it another way: Windows 3.1 was just as closed-source as Windows XP is, even though 3.1 could easily be run on an open-source version of DOS.
I just played through Half Life 2 on the original XBox, and it was pretty darn near photorealistic. The game looked fantastic. Many other games on the XBox look great, including Halo 2 and the original Halo. They're already at the point where they look like real life; how much better can graphics really get?
Answer: a lot better. You think they look like real life now, but two or three years down the line, you'll think today's games look like crap.
How do I know this? Simple: I've been there. Look, I can remember looking at Doom and thinking, this is it, there is no way Quake could possibly be more realistic. And then Quake came out, and it looked like a jerky version of real life itself. Back then.
Look at Half-Life 2 with a critical eye. Compare it to movies or TV, if you find it too difficult to compare a 2D screen with 3D reality itself. Blockiness, jaggy edges, unrealistic motion, flat lighting... it's nowhere near reality. It's nothing like. But your brain is very, very good at error-correction... for as long as it's the best you've seen.
To put this in perspective, I recently tried out a WWII game on the XBox 360 in a Gamestop store, and really, I couldn't see any big difference between that and Half Life II's graphics.
You're comparing a mature XBox title with a first-generation 360 title - one that was written by people who didn't know how to get the best out of the new system.
I think basically you don't understand what "next generation" means. It's not a quantised thing: you don't step up a generation and everything looks so much better and stays looking the same for the next five years. A generation is a period of growth, during which things continue to improve. And next-generation hardware is about enabling the improvement to continue, not about causing that improvement in and of itself. In other words, XBox games look as good as they ever will, but 360 games have a lot of scope for improvement.
Look around and note the up and coming providers for suborbital flight - there isn't but one serious contender outside of the US. The heavyweights are all in the US.
Look around and note where all current, operating, here-and-now space tourism is taking place - there isn't one serious contender outside of Russia. The heavyweights are all in Russia. Hmm.
As for suborbital flight - well, look at the article. See if you can spot the sole contender who's well-enough known to be mentioned in the Slashdot summary. "Sir Richard Branson". Even if you've never heard of the guy, that little "Sir" should be a clue to you that there is no chance in hell that we are talking about a US citizen here, because that "Sir" is a British title, and US citizens are not exactly encouraged to accept titles from foreign powers.
So, tell me. Do you seriously think that Richard Branson, a British citizen, would have any emotional attachment to launching from U.S. soil, when the European Space Agency would no doubt be overjoyed to allow him the use of their facilities? Because I don't. I really don't see the US Air Force reserving the right to shoot down foreign passenger spaceships, the way they reserve the right to shoot down foreign satellites, because even America can't go killing the rich and get away with it. So I reckon the market, not the FAA, is going to decide where commercial space flights launch from; Branson et al. will use US soil, US equipment, US expertise, and US regulations if and only if that's the best deal. (Which it might well be, of course.)
And naturally there's a strong likelihood that US muscle will convince other nations to adopt the rules the US wants anyway. Being the world's biggest superpower tends to leave you getting your way even when things aren't going on in your jurisdiction...
Yes, we Windows users have to mangle our text into a hideous travesty of human language all by ourselves, without recourse to "translation" software.
Maybe Microsoft will consider adding this functionality to Windows if it's ever actually capable of translating into any languages apart from gobbledygook and double-dutch. As it is now, it's just a gimmick. Thanks, but I'd prefer the developers of my operating system to be concentrating on useful features, not gimmicks.
No other PC GUI system came up with such a poor design. (Yeah, X-Windows was a mess too. But it was a controlled mess intended for *cough* "Professionals".) BeOS, Amiga, RiscOS, Mac, etc. all had way better solutions to the problem. The most important goal for Windows was to run a multi-user environment on top of a single-user Operating System that would perhaps be best be described as an "embedded OS". It worked at the time, but it wasn't a very effective way to handle things long-term.
And every single one of the "other PC GUI systems" you cite is a single-user OS with few, if any, multi-user capabilities. Since not one of them even attempted to solve the same problem as Windows - to whit, how to mix configuration and metadata with multi-user environments - I fail to see how you can consider them comparable.
When the crunch finally came and everyone realised that everything had to support multi-user operation, what happened? Unix was already there. Windows had a kludge in place that worked well enough, for enough people, enough of the time, for it to survive. And the rest? What became of the other wonderful GUI systems you mention? They failed to adapt, and died!
BeOS and the Amiga sank quickly, and are now remembered only by a handful of fanatics who are still trying to come to terms with the collapse of their religion. RiscOS would have been long dead already if it hadn't had a niche in education; though apparently it's still around somewhere, lurching sadly along like the walking dead in their haunted catacombs. And the Mac was sick unto death, nearly taking Apple with it - who survived only by, uh, binning basically their entire codebase and adopting a Unix-based system? Oops.
Funny how the "worst" design was the only desktop OS that was actually adaptable enough to survive. I guess you subscribe to some kind of anti-Darwinist "survival of the unfittest" theory of evolution?
America is referred to as the Land of the Free for a reason-our freedoms are what makes us a great nation. Not our military, not our economic strength, not our President, good or bad, not our Congressional system, not our massive land area. Our freedoms, as enshrined in the US Constitution.
Know what? North Korea has a constitution too.
A constitution is just a bit of paper with words on it. Nothing more, nothing less. It's what the government does that counts. And if your government passes laws like the DMCA and the PATRIOT act, you aren't living in a free country any more...
In that case I'd recommend something like python combined with some gui toolkit such as wxpython or pygtk.
Not pygtk. You'd better avoid GTK+ like the plague if there is any possibility that you might ever want your code to run on OS X, because there is no maintained native OS X version of GTK+. (There are X11 versions that run in OS X, but few Mac users will use an X11 app if there is any alternative whatsoever.) And that's not even mentioning how sucky the Win32 port of GTK+ is.
Basically, consider GTK+ only if the only platforms you really care about are Linux/Unix/BSD-type OSes that use X11 as their primary windowing system. If you want a portable UI that will actually run well on OS X or Windows, use Qt or wxWidgets.
The ISPs are going to submit it to Congress as the "Keep the Children Safe from Porn and Stop Content Theives."
No, it'll be the "Freedom from Unsuitable Content for Kids and Theft of Home Entertainment by United States Enemies and Rogue States".
(Because we all know that North Korea is pirating movies to try to destroy the American economy, see.)
For goodness sake, they don't even have a Constitution!
And since when has a constitution ever been anything more than a piece of paper with words on it?
Did the fact that the US has a constitution prevent millions of African Americans being held as slaves? Not for the first 80 years of its existence. There were 12 amendments on other matters before the government finally got round to adding a ban on slavery to their text.
Did the fact that the US has a constitution then guarantee the newly freed African Americans the same rights as Americans of other ethnicities? No, segregation persisted for another century after that.
Did the fact that the US has a constitution prevent other abuses of rights and liberties, such as the prohibition of alcohol or the internment of Japanese Americans (most of whom were full US citizens)? Nope.
Does it today prevent abuses like mentally disabled people being executed for crimes they don't even understand, or people being executed for crimes they committed as a child? No. Does it enable you to exercise your rights of free speech and free assembly by holding a banner critical of the president somewhere where he might see it? No. Does it even prevent obviously ludicrous violations of people's rights like the "three strikes" laws? Why, no, the Supreme Court has actually found that it is constitutional to jail someone for 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pizza!
Man, that's some constitution you guys have. I wish my country had something like that. No, really.