Delphi owes about as much to Wirth as C++ owes to Ritchie.
That is to say, while it's possible to write Wirth-style Pascal in Delphi, most of the code in an idiomatic Delphi program bears no more than a superficial resemblance to it.
Saying that these sites are legal or illegal is like opening a legal knife shop.
Er... no, it isn't.
You can take any knife and commit a crime with it, and likewise you can take any knife and use it in a perfectly legal manner. However, you can't make downloading FreeBSD into copyright infringement whatever you do, and you can't stop downloading a cam of a Hollywood movie being copyright infringement whatever you do.
Therefore, a single knife can be used both legally and illegally, but downloading from a single torrent can only be legal or illegal. Therefore, your analogy does not work.
The sites running [illegal torrents] aren't illegal...
Regardless of whether hosting links to illegal torrents, or running trackers for illegal torrents, is legal or not (given that the people who run these sites inevitably settle when sued, the implication is that THEY don't believe it's legal!), the concept of a "legal torrent site" - being one which hosts only torrents which it is legal for anyone to join - is a useful one.
You never pay a late fee. You simply own the movie. They say no late fees. They mean no late fees. It doesn't say anything about other fees.
I've decided to start a new political party. We pledge that if we get power, we will ABOLISH TAXES. You heard me right - we will operate a ZERO TAX POLICY. You will never have to pay tax again for as long as we are in power.
I take it I can count on your vote?
(We may, from time to time, at our discretion, charge Residence Fees of up to 100% of your annual income. We believe that the advantage of living in a TAX-FREE society will more than make up for you simply being forced to give all your money to the government.)
Used to be, your ISP would provide a news server the same way that it provides a mail server, web server, etc.
Don't they still? Mine sure does, with everything above 512kbps; I always thought it was a standard feature...
They don't carry the binaries groups, but P2P made those obsolete anyway.
Basically, it's nobody's fault but yours if you're getting a crappy deal. Don't whine about free services closing, just take your custom to someone who bundles the service you want with something you're going to be paying for anyway - i.e. find a decent ISP!
Ahh... seems really pointless to go to all the effort of porting something if a better version of it is going to be out soon.
To some extent, certainly, but it's not entirely redundant, as QT 4 will not be 100% backwards compatible. In other words, many QT 3 applications will not necessarily compile with QT 4, and their authors will not necessarily want to update them immediately - or at all.
So there may in theory be some situations in which having access to a Win32 version of QT 3 will enable people to compile QT-based applications on Win32 without having to port them to QT 4 themselves.
OK, smartass, show me just ONE example of buffer overrun in Perl. Just ONE. Put it up or shut up!
Okay, smartarse, show me just ONE SENTENCE in his post where he made any comment that implys that Perl is given to buffer overflows.
No, tell you what, I'll save you the trouble:
Of course your comment about "poorly written perl" could be more general. As an IT professional, it puts me in a constant state of amazement when I hear about yet another buffer overrun.
Since you appear to be unable to parse this perfectly straightforward English correctly, I'll explain: "Your comment could be more general" means "bad code is written in other languages as well as Perl". The reference to buffer overruns is an example of a form of bad code that is common in these more general cases.
Linking against a GPL library (e.g. cygwin) requires the result to be GPL'd.
Bad example:
In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs whose sources are distributed under a license that complies with the Open Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll without libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll itself causing the resulting program to be covered by the GNU GPL.
This means that you can port an Open Source(tm) application to cygwin, and distribute that executable as if it didn't include a copy of libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll linked into it.
There's a third side to the debate: I have no objection to people patenting their ideas, even software. Invent a clever new encryption algorithm, find a new compression technique, design an amazing new data structure that's O(1) for all operations or something? I say you should be allowed to patent it and make a bit of money.
Except that patent should only last two or three years at most.
Copyright is the same. I'd even be willing to give up many of my fair use rights - if I knew that all new works would enter the public domain within ten to twenty years.
Firstly, it's still very easy to get hold of timed scripts. There are whole websites devoted to them. Google is your friend.
Secondly, in legal terms there is no real difference between distributing the script as text and distributing a subtitled video file: both involve distributing an unauthorised translation of a copyright work (the script), and therefore both are equally illegal and infringe equally on the studios' IP.
couldn't people then just write a non-GPL ms-XML plugin for a GPL package, which is downloaded seperate in order to circumvent incompatibility with the GPL?
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of open source developers who have never touched GNU Make. Open source on windows, OMG it does exist!!!! Step out of your Linux bubble.
What would a blind person care if the money was all green or not?
Most people who care about accessibility like to take the partially-sighted into account as well as the completely blind. And using banknotes becomes much easier for the partially-sighted when the notes are distinguishable by size and colour as well as by finding and reading a number.
It already does that to an extent. If you type in a faulty URL, it goes through Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky".
That only happens some of the time. In many cases it displays an error page even if you type in a valid Google search query: for example, try "foo site:google.com", and you'll get a message saying "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded". (You have to type "keyword:foo site:google.com" to get the expected behaviour.)
Wouldn't it be great if there was a unified global language? Now I know some people would be quite upset at the horrible "loss" of cultural diversity implied by a single global language. But we can be just as diverse in many other ways that don't cause us to be unable to communicate with each other on a basic level. And IMHO, being able to communicate is much more important than some academic's ideal of "cultural identity".
Okay... how about the complete loss of the ability to read any of the world's literature without special training? It's bad enough at the moment, when most people can read only the literature in their native language. If the current languages were no longer spoken natively by anyone, the vast majority of people would no longer know any great literature except through the lossy process of translation. We're not talking about losing cultural diversity. We're talking about losing culture itself!
Not to mention that there is nothing academic about the link between cultural identity and language. Bloody wars have been fought over it. The recognition of a minority's language is often one of their deepest desires, and the suppression of a minority language is a common tool of oppression - see Welsh and Gaelic in English-occupied Wales and Ireland, Catalan and Basque in Spain, Chinese and Korean under the Japanese occupations, Kurdish in Turkey... the list goes on. If linguistic diversity is something that only academics care about, why do ordinary people all over the world get so upset about it?
Finally, what's so great about a world language, anyway? I don't suffer at all in my daily life from the inability to chat with Chinese or Spaniards; I did feel the need to be able to communicate with the French and the Japanese, so I did them the simple courtesy of learning their languages. Those who need to communicate in more languages than they can learn are generally politicians or businessmen who can afford interpreters.
However, you can rest assured that the GNOME development team thought long and hard before they decided *not* to include [different backgrounds for different workspaces]. It takes a lot of guts to say, "no, this isn't really necessary."
No, it doesn't. "I don't need this, therefore you don't either" is an incredibly easy line to take. It takes no guts to say it. Nor does it take guts - only time - to put in the effort, research the issue, and find out what your end users (both novices and experts) have to say.
What does take guts is to back down and admit that you were wrong, if your research does not agree with your expectations. And what I see in the GNOME development team - and their detractors - is not guts but religion. The GNOME team worship simplicity. The question they ask of any proposed feature is not "will this be beneficial to our end users", but "does this fit in with our design aesthetic".
I'm not criticising that. Simplicity is a valid goal, and it's one that KDE has not chosen, so it reduces the duplication of effort that so many people used to whine about.
However, it seems somehow implausible that the GNOME team considered this particular feature long and hard; given that it seems like a logical extension of the spatial metaphor, it seems to me that its absence can only suggest that they barely considered it if at all. Can you point to the relevant messages on the appropriate mailing list? I'd be interested to see what research they actually did, and what were their other arguments against making different workspaces visually distinct.
Why would you expect to write a program for one type of GUI, port it, but keep exactly the same interface, and expect the people on the second platform to think your program works very well? Programs on different operating systems should not look exactly the same. If you have a program for one OS that looks like it was written for a different OS, you can expect people to see that application as a half-attempt, and you can expect them not to regard the program very highly.
The success of iTunes for Windows suggests that this is not universally true. I know some people who avoid it because the interface is weird compared to what they're used to, but there are plenty of people who really don't seem to have any problem running something that looks like a Mac app on their PC.
you might realize that "could" and "couldn't" are in fact opposites, and that saying "could care less" when you mean "don't care" makes no sense whatsoever.
Nor do many everyday idioms.
Hey, I said "everyday", even though I don't actually use every idiom I know every day! Man, how dumb I must be to say something so patently nonsensical!
Back in the real world, "could care less" is now a valid alternative to "couldn't care less" in colloquial American English. Not to like this is perfectly reasonable, but to use the less "logical" form is not a sign of low intelligence, poor education, or even carelessness. It's just how the concept is expressed in many people's brands of English.
When you're counting something, for example days, you need to put a suffix on the number like '1st, 2nd, 3rd'. Suffixes by itself wouldn't be so bad, but the way it's determined is quite wierd. . . . In Japanese, you write it without suffixes, and even without plural forms, making it much easier to code incremental counts.
Sure, Japanese is so logical.
Let's consider the days of the month. "One" is "ichi", and "day" is "hi", so we put them together and get "tsuitachi". Then for the second, "two" is "ni", so we put that together with "hi" and naturally that produces "futsuka". Observe the transparency and regularity. Could Spock himself have come up with a more logical system?
And what about the teens themselves, anyway? Why don't you just write it as ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, like you do for twenties and beyond? That's how it's done for Japanese, and I find it much simpler.
Er, what did you think "fourteen" was, other than "four-ten"?
Sorry, but Japanese is no more logical than English. And numbers are one of the worst features of Japanese, not the best. (Did you forget about counters? You know, where you count books by the volume, pens by the book, and rabbits by the wing?)
The counterargument is usually something as simple-minded as "but proprietary software package X does Y, which I like, and there is no free alternative".
But I'm not sure that is the counterargument. For some reason proprietary software continues to exist, even where the free alternatives have long been recognised as completely viable, and are indeed generally recognised to be more powerful, more flexible, and just generally superior.
Like text editors, say.
Is emacs not obviously more powerful than any general-purpose closed-source editor? Is there anything that other editors can do that emacs can't do better? Not that I can think of. And yet a huge number of people, myself included, continue to buy programs like UltraEdit-32, TextPad, and so on. Why?
I mentioned emacs, so doubtless people will assume I'm about to bash the interface. And certainly interfaces are important - vi and emacs both get a lot of flamage for sticking with their non-standard interfaces, and we've all seen what happens every time GIMP is mentioned on Slashdot. But there are free editors out there that do use standard layouts and shortcut keys, both general-purpose editors such as jEdit and IDEs such as Eclipse. The time to learn to use one of those would probably be measurable in minutes rather than hours. And still I and many others pay for shareware text editors.
It's strange, really. Of the programs I use heavily on a day-to-day basis, only three are proprietary - the operating system, the text editor, and the graphics package. Yet in the first two cases, the free alternatives are clearly viable in all circumstances, and in the third GIMP really would almost certainly meet my needs. In other words, the areas where free software has not entered my life are among those where one might think it was strongest.
I think this may identify an interesting point: where free and proprietary software compete directly, people will not bother switching if they don't need to. If I ever need the freedoms free software promises, I know GNU/Linux, *BSD, vi, emacs, GIMP, etc. are all there. And if the freedoms are available to me any time I actually want them, doesn't that mean I'm essentially free already?
In the UK you can use other brands name in your advert for comparision purposes, but I believe it's quite a new law.
Not that new. Those "9 out of 10 people think Burger King tastes better than McDonalds" billboards were a good few years ago now. But I do remember being surprised that they were legal when they first appeared.
Slashdot Mirror
Nicklaus Wirth is now working for Microsoft???
Delphi owes about as much to Wirth as C++ owes to Ritchie.
That is to say, while it's possible to write Wirth-style Pascal in Delphi, most of the code in an idiomatic Delphi program bears no more than a superficial resemblance to it.
Saying that these sites are legal or illegal is like opening a legal knife shop.
Er... no, it isn't.
You can take any knife and commit a crime with it, and likewise you can take any knife and use it in a perfectly legal manner. However, you can't make downloading FreeBSD into copyright infringement whatever you do, and you can't stop downloading a cam of a Hollywood movie being copyright infringement whatever you do.
Therefore, a single knife can be used both legally and illegally, but downloading from a single torrent can only be legal or illegal. Therefore, your analogy does not work.
The sites running [illegal torrents] aren't illegal...
Regardless of whether hosting links to illegal torrents, or running trackers for illegal torrents, is legal or not (given that the people who run these sites inevitably settle when sued, the implication is that THEY don't believe it's legal!), the concept of a "legal torrent site" - being one which hosts only torrents which it is legal for anyone to join - is a useful one.
nobody gave a crap about that... it was that their little Timmy might have seen a boob.
Is anyone selling Baby Blindfolds for use when breastfeeding yet?
If not... I smell profit.
They say no late fees. They mean no late fees. It doesn't say anything about other fees.
Get the point?
Used to be, your ISP would provide a news server the same way that it provides a mail server, web server, etc.
Don't they still? Mine sure does, with everything above 512kbps; I always thought it was a standard feature...
They don't carry the binaries groups, but P2P made those obsolete anyway.
Basically, it's nobody's fault but yours if you're getting a crappy deal. Don't whine about free services closing, just take your custom to someone who bundles the service you want with something you're going to be paying for anyway - i.e. find a decent ISP!
Ahh, until their webmonkeys forget to put out the robots.txt file...
;)
I'm afraid they remembered: http://www.orbitz.com/robots.txt
Oops, I just violated the Orbitz TOS. How careless of me.
Ahh... seems really pointless to go to all the effort of porting something if a better version of it is going to be out soon.
To some extent, certainly, but it's not entirely redundant, as QT 4 will not be 100% backwards compatible. In other words, many QT 3 applications will not necessarily compile with QT 4, and their authors will not necessarily want to update them immediately - or at all.
So there may in theory be some situations in which having access to a Win32 version of QT 3 will enable people to compile QT-based applications on Win32 without having to port them to QT 4 themselves.
Okay, smartarse, show me just ONE SENTENCE in his post where he made any comment that implys that Perl is given to buffer overflows.
No, tell you what, I'll save you the trouble:
Since you appear to be unable to parse this perfectly straightforward English correctly, I'll explain: "Your comment could be more general" means "bad code is written in other languages as well as Perl". The reference to buffer overruns is an example of a form of bad code that is common in these more general cases.
What kind of excuse is that? Do you have to patch your brakes, or update your steering defintions on your car just to make it safe to use?
No - but you'd damn well better check the tyre pressures and the oil level before you set off on a long journey.
Please, no more car analogies. They rarely work.
TES3 was published by Bethesda in a solo effort.
Then what is this Ubisoft logo doing on the front of my Morrowind box?
Bad example:(source)
GNU Readline is the canonical example of a GPL'd library that makes no exceptions for other free software licenses.
There's a third side to the debate: I have no objection to people patenting their ideas, even software. Invent a clever new encryption algorithm, find a new compression technique, design an amazing new data structure that's O(1) for all operations or something? I say you should be allowed to patent it and make a bit of money.
Except that patent should only last two or three years at most.
Copyright is the same. I'd even be willing to give up many of my fair use rights - if I knew that all new works would enter the public domain within ten to twenty years.
Firstly, it's still very easy to get hold of timed scripts. There are whole websites devoted to them. Google is your friend.
Secondly, in legal terms there is no real difference between distributing the script as text and distributing a subtitled video file: both involve distributing an unauthorised translation of a copyright work (the script), and therefore both are equally illegal and infringe equally on the studios' IP.
couldn't people then just write a non-GPL ms-XML plugin for a GPL package, which is downloaded seperate in order to circumvent incompatibility with the GPL?
That depends, but probably not easily.
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of open source developers who have never touched GNU Make.
Open source on windows, OMG it does exist!!!!
Step out of your Linux bubble.
What's Linux-centric about GNU make?
I'm primarily a Windows user, and I used to use GNU make all the time. Until I realised I preferred omake.
What would a blind person care if the money was all green or not?
Most people who care about accessibility like to take the partially-sighted into account as well as the completely blind. And using banknotes becomes much easier for the partially-sighted when the notes are distinguishable by size and colour as well as by finding and reading a number.
It already does that to an extent. If you type in a faulty URL, it goes through Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky".
That only happens some of the time. In many cases it displays an error page even if you type in a valid Google search query: for example, try "foo site:google.com", and you'll get a message saying "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded". (You have to type "keyword:foo site:google.com" to get the expected behaviour.)
Wouldn't it be great if there was a unified global language?
Now I know some people would be quite upset at the horrible "loss" of cultural diversity implied by a single global language. But we can be just as diverse in many other ways that don't cause us to be unable to communicate with each other on a basic level. And IMHO, being able to communicate is much more important than some academic's ideal of "cultural identity".
Okay... how about the complete loss of the ability to read any of the world's literature without special training? It's bad enough at the moment, when most people can read only the literature in their native language. If the current languages were no longer spoken natively by anyone, the vast majority of people would no longer know any great literature except through the lossy process of translation. We're not talking about losing cultural diversity. We're talking about losing culture itself!
Not to mention that there is nothing academic about the link between cultural identity and language. Bloody wars have been fought over it. The recognition of a minority's language is often one of their deepest desires, and the suppression of a minority language is a common tool of oppression - see Welsh and Gaelic in English-occupied Wales and Ireland, Catalan and Basque in Spain, Chinese and Korean under the Japanese occupations, Kurdish in Turkey... the list goes on. If linguistic diversity is something that only academics care about, why do ordinary people all over the world get so upset about it?
Finally, what's so great about a world language, anyway? I don't suffer at all in my daily life from the inability to chat with Chinese or Spaniards; I did feel the need to be able to communicate with the French and the Japanese, so I did them the simple courtesy of learning their languages. Those who need to communicate in more languages than they can learn are generally politicians or businessmen who can afford interpreters.
However, you can rest assured that the GNOME development team thought long and hard before they decided *not* to include [different backgrounds for different workspaces]. It takes a lot of guts to say, "no, this isn't really necessary."
No, it doesn't. "I don't need this, therefore you don't either" is an incredibly easy line to take. It takes no guts to say it. Nor does it take guts - only time - to put in the effort, research the issue, and find out what your end users (both novices and experts) have to say.
What does take guts is to back down and admit that you were wrong, if your research does not agree with your expectations. And what I see in the GNOME development team - and their detractors - is not guts but religion. The GNOME team worship simplicity. The question they ask of any proposed feature is not "will this be beneficial to our end users", but "does this fit in with our design aesthetic".
I'm not criticising that. Simplicity is a valid goal, and it's one that KDE has not chosen, so it reduces the duplication of effort that so many people used to whine about.
However, it seems somehow implausible that the GNOME team considered this particular feature long and hard; given that it seems like a logical extension of the spatial metaphor, it seems to me that its absence can only suggest that they barely considered it if at all. Can you point to the relevant messages on the appropriate mailing list? I'd be interested to see what research they actually did, and what were their other arguments against making different workspaces visually distinct.
Why would you expect to write a program for one type of GUI, port it, but keep exactly the same interface, and expect the people on the second platform to think your program works very well? Programs on different operating systems should not look exactly the same. If you have a program for one OS that looks like it was written for a different OS, you can expect people to see that application as a half-attempt, and you can expect them not to regard the program very highly.
The success of iTunes for Windows suggests that this is not universally true. I know some people who avoid it because the interface is weird compared to what they're used to, but there are plenty of people who really don't seem to have any problem running something that looks like a Mac app on their PC.
you might realize that "could" and "couldn't" are in fact opposites, and that saying "could care less" when you mean "don't care" makes no sense whatsoever.
Nor do many everyday idioms.
Hey, I said "everyday", even though I don't actually use every idiom I know every day! Man, how dumb I must be to say something so patently nonsensical!
Back in the real world, "could care less" is now a valid alternative to "couldn't care less" in colloquial American English. Not to like this is perfectly reasonable, but to use the less "logical" form is not a sign of low intelligence, poor education, or even carelessness. It's just how the concept is expressed in many people's brands of English.
When you're counting something, for example days, you need to put a suffix on the number like '1st, 2nd, 3rd'. Suffixes by itself wouldn't be so bad, but the way it's determined is quite wierd. . . . In Japanese, you write it without suffixes, and even without plural forms, making it much easier to code incremental counts.
Sure, Japanese is so logical.
Let's consider the days of the month. "One" is "ichi", and "day" is "hi", so we put them together and get "tsuitachi". Then for the second, "two" is "ni", so we put that together with "hi" and naturally that produces "futsuka". Observe the transparency and regularity. Could Spock himself have come up with a more logical system?
And what about the teens themselves, anyway? Why don't you just write it as ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, like you do for twenties and beyond? That's how it's done for Japanese, and I find it much simpler.
Er, what did you think "fourteen" was, other than "four-ten"?
Sorry, but Japanese is no more logical than English. And numbers are one of the worst features of Japanese, not the best. (Did you forget about counters? You know, where you count books by the volume, pens by the book, and rabbits by the wing?)
The counterargument is usually something as simple-minded as "but proprietary software package X does Y, which I like, and there is no free alternative".
But I'm not sure that is the counterargument. For some reason proprietary software continues to exist, even where the free alternatives have long been recognised as completely viable, and are indeed generally recognised to be more powerful, more flexible, and just generally superior.
Like text editors, say.
Is emacs not obviously more powerful than any general-purpose closed-source editor? Is there anything that other editors can do that emacs can't do better? Not that I can think of. And yet a huge number of people, myself included, continue to buy programs like UltraEdit-32, TextPad, and so on. Why?
I mentioned emacs, so doubtless people will assume I'm about to bash the interface. And certainly interfaces are important - vi and emacs both get a lot of flamage for sticking with their non-standard interfaces, and we've all seen what happens every time GIMP is mentioned on Slashdot. But there are free editors out there that do use standard layouts and shortcut keys, both general-purpose editors such as jEdit and IDEs such as Eclipse. The time to learn to use one of those would probably be measurable in minutes rather than hours. And still I and many others pay for shareware text editors.
It's strange, really. Of the programs I use heavily on a day-to-day basis, only three are proprietary - the operating system, the text editor, and the graphics package. Yet in the first two cases, the free alternatives are clearly viable in all circumstances, and in the third GIMP really would almost certainly meet my needs. In other words, the areas where free software has not entered my life are among those where one might think it was strongest.
I think this may identify an interesting point: where free and proprietary software compete directly, people will not bother switching if they don't need to. If I ever need the freedoms free software promises, I know GNU/Linux, *BSD, vi, emacs, GIMP, etc. are all there. And if the freedoms are available to me any time I actually want them, doesn't that mean I'm essentially free already?
In the UK you can use other brands name in your advert for comparision purposes, but I believe it's quite a new law.
Not that new. Those "9 out of 10 people think Burger King tastes better than McDonalds" billboards were a good few years ago now. But I do remember being surprised that they were legal when they first appeared.
Yeah, cause a nuke hitting a major city would cost us tens of thousands of dollars.
Good point. And we'd better have fighters in the air around the White House this Christmas, too, in case Santa's joined al-Quaida.
And do we really trust the Tooth Fairy alone in our children's bedrooms? Please, won't somebody think of the children!
(Or maybe it's really not worth spending billions of dollars to counter imaginary threats.)