You can never have too much hard drive space. It never fails that, as soon as somebody makes a leap in hard drive capacity, something comes along to fill it, even if it's just more bloat from $FAVORITE_OFFICE_SUITE. That something could be HDTV. TiVo gets 30 hours by recording analog TV at low ("VHS") quality. How much 780p or 1080i do you think the same size hard drive could handle, even at low quality? And after seeing part of an NHL game in HD*, I wouldn't want low quality.
Data is Bandwidth is Time is Money. If my lossless-compressed media files never leave the box the hard drive is in, it's no problem. Performance is only bound by throughput on the system bus. But I don't see much value in having a massive BorgBox for each and every display/speaker set in my house. I'd much rather have a mofo-huge BorgServer in the basement/closet, serving any number of thin BorgBoxen set-top devices, all connected by cheap, plentiful Cat 5. Until something faster and cheaper comes along, or I start pulling down Sultan of Brunei money, I'll err on the side of efficiency.
Do you need your entire music collection to be CD/SACD/DVD Audio quality? Really, are you losing any subtleties by ripping Dokken at 128 Kbps?:-) Whenever I get around to it, I'll re-rip Dvorak's 9th Symphony at 320Kbps, but I don't need that much bitrate for hair bands.
You're right that the VCR isn't obsolete. Not yet, at least. I don't think people will go for DVD burners until they can get rid of that intellectual-property-lawyer smell.
*: One of Best Buy's old demo recordings included a Buffalo Sabres game. I don't recall the format, but I think it was 780p. On a ~61" screen, you could read the names on the players' backs clearly, and the puck was far easier to follow than on analog TV, even without any lame FoxTrax comet trails.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Since when exactly has the GPL allowed its use in commercial products? LGPL, maybe, but it's being deprecated as we speak...
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. See, there's more than one version of Qt.
One is called "Qt Free Edition", and it is dual-licensed under the GPL and a home-brew, Open Source compatible license dubbed QPL. It allows developers to use Qt in Open Source and Free projects, like KDE or, well, just about anything on Freshmeat starting with "K".:-) This was done to resolve licensing conflicts with KDE. The catch is that this version is only compatible with X11. There is no Free version for Windows. (Trolltech will begrudgingly support Free Edition on proprietary Unix variants, but when it comes to Microsoft, they'd rather "stick it to The Man", as if he cares.)
The other versions are called "Professional" and "Enterprise". They carry a per-developer royalty-free commercial license.
In short, once you go beyond Qt Free Edition on Linux or BSD, the licensing becomes a nightmare.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them.
This seems to be the prevailing attitude among those "at" Linux and elsewhere: users are smart, so smart that they can figure out what ever we throw at them.
See how extremist everyone can get when Microsoft and Linux get mentioned in the same room? Doug makes a perfectly valid point about the usability and out-of-box experience of the typical Linux distro, and the knee-jerk reaction is to act like he's banging his shoe on the table, shouting "We will bury you."*
I'll take the typical developers' cop-out and say that it's a training issue. Too much of what people need to get the job done, and not enough of the overall metaphor. Here's a desktop, here's the icons, here's the menu, here's a folder tree. It doesn't matter if you use GNOME, KDE, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Win95, Win2K, WinXP, or WinPDQ. User interface design has only been moving in drips and drabs over the past five years or so. The biggest culture shock involves the mouse button count.:-)
I agree with Doug that too many choices, too soon, will confuse the average user. I also agree with Bob Young that, for the experienced user, choice is good. Either way, as long as there's competition, there won't be a monoculture.
Please, the world isn't that stupid.
I don't mean to be so nihilistic, but the world isn't as smart as you think. At the very least, it's far too impatient to frell around with downloading ALSA packages for their laptop's sound system, when Windows 2000 "just works."
"User-friendly" and "powerful" are not mutually exclusive. They just take more work.
*: ObAYB: All your desktop are belong to us.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
I know, from years of experience, that Slashdot has always wobbled on either side of the line between news source and bully pulpit. But this is going way too far.
Could we please save the acid-dripping rhetoric for a "Read More..." block, instead of the headline? If a issue is worth debating, it will stand on its own merit. We don't need the flamebait.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
*: ZD, instead of publishing a retraction, performed an Orwellian edit to the column, changing "XML" to the unqualified statement "key web technologies". They also removed all but one TalkBack post pointing out the error, although, to be fair, most of it was hair-trigger flameage.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
You're dead right about the ergonomics. I was seriously considering a C1 myself, until I tried typing on it. Ugh. Killer for a touch-typist. Slowed me down considerably. Might as well have been writing Graffiti on my Palm. Hence my anticipation of TabletPC. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's OEMs didn't offer a hinged keyboard/trackpad "slice" that allowed the tablet to convert to notebook use.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
This isn't Yet Another Internet Appliance. TabletPC comes as advertised: a full-fledged PC, running Windows XP, not Linux/BeIA/Java with a dumbed-down, captive UI. It will make strong use of "ink" as an input device, but underneath, it's a notebook. The keyboard and mouse are just dockable devices. Wireless networking will come in some combination of wireless Ethernet and Bluetooth, depending of the OEMs' designs.
I absolutely love the idea. It bridges the gap between PDAs and notebooks far better than sub-notebooks like Toshiba Libretto or Sony Vaio C1.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
After making a second pass over what I wrote, I realized that I wasn't as clear as I should have been.
I was a bit too liberal in my use of the word "Free". I side strongly with Open Source, myself. Something about GPL's "viral" licensing bothers me. Too close to bedtime to express it, right now. Catch me when I've been sufficiently caffeinated.
And, unfortunately, the license wars aren't going away anytime soon. Corporate interests (i.e. Apple , Sun) are still churning the waters.
I just can't get religious about computers anymore. I had that beaten out of me in my OS/2 days. ('nuff said.) I read RMS' texts, like the "Why not LGPL" link you provided, and I think to myself, "He is seeking ideological purity." Well, him and everybody else in this world.... Stallman insists that it's "Free vs. proprietary", and I just can't buy that. I try very hard not to fall into the trap of "single-bit" thinking that is so common to us geeks. Life is never that simple.
Too me, it all comes down to choice. Say I'm about to release VBFooLib to the public. I could sell binaries for $250, and charge $1500 for the source, implying that you "commie pinko scum" need not apply. Or, I could release it under LGPL, with all of the community benefits that implies. The message is simple: "I share with you, in the hopes that you will share with me." But I don't feel right mandating that. I'd rather spread the meme. In the long run, that's more powerful than the license.
And getting back to the toolkits, it's simple. QT for Windows is only avaliable as a proprietary library. For me, that trumps all other points of contention. GTK is Open. Not Free in the RMS Purity Test sense of the word, but far more suitable than QT.
BTW, GTK has far more bindings than just C. QT is locked hard into C++.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
QT is Free by the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
TrollTech says that they want to support the development of Free software on Free operating systems. This is why there is no GPL/QPL version of QT for Windows. Yet TrollTech appears to be willing to "tolerate" development of Free software on proprietary unix variants, like Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX, as long as they use X.
I can hear some muttering in the peanut gallery: "Why not port the Free X version of QT to Windows?" Simple. It's poisoned. First of all, QT for Windows already exists. TrollTech chooses not to license it for Free/Open Source software for Windows.
Second, TrollTech suggests that anyone wanting to use QT/Free on Windows should use an X server for Windows. See also: redundant; waste of resources.
Finally, TrollTech distributes the source as a pristine base, plus patches. Distributing a port to another base API as patches would be horribly inefficient, not to mention error-prone. Besides, TrollTech would have the power to deny any or all of those changes. And I have no doubt that they would.
Bottom line: TrollTech is acting out of spite, and picking sides. They're on some holy crusade to rid the world of the Redmond Menace, and they don't care how many innocent developers and users of Free software for Windows get caught under the tank treads.
Meanwhile, the GTK team is actively encouraging the development of Win32 and BeOS ports. In their eyes, no operating systems are more equal than others.
And that is why they will win.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
I lost all respect for InfoWorld when they reviewed the last version of OS/2 Warp Server with Buzzword-Compliant Subtitle (whatever). Since they were still bitter over the Product of the Year ballot-stuffing incident, they gave the review to a contributing editor from Windows NT magazine (no conflict of interest there), who proceded to flame the IBM product, based solely on his dislike of multi-colored tabs in the settings windows. No benchmarks, no feature comparisons, just a summary dismissal because the UI wasn't identical to NT4.
I seem to recall that it was only a few weeks later that Nick Petreley left his editorial position at InfoWorld, although he remained as a columnist, and latched onto LinuxWorld.com. Smart guy, that Nick. Any chance Andover can get him to displace Jon Katz around here?
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Don't get me wrong. I loved the visual style, and it was my first introduction to Angelina Jolie, before I found out how biographical Girl, Interrupted really was.:-)
But I found two big flaws the film.
I could guess all the plot "twists", which were really more like 15-degree bends. Is that the contempt of familiarity you spoke of, or am I just sick of the banal "stickin' it to The Man" structure?
Fisher Stevens and Matthew Lillard. I kept wishing that the scenery they were chewing was toxic.
The Matrix is still, for my money, the greatest hacker movie ever made. Why settle for databases when you can hack a Massively Multi-user Online Virtual Reality?
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
According to Steve Ballmer's bio, his degrees are in mathematics and economics. Gates and Allen were/are the geeks. Ballmer's a suit. This would explain his mangling of "hardware abstraction layer".
He probably thinks Hackers was a better movie than Antitrust, too. (Which is true, but in the same unfortunate way Howard the Duck was better than Battlefield Earth.)
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
The project will be 3 years old, come April. Happy fucking anniversary -- there is almost nothing to show for it. The development tools, blah, blah, blah are great, but where's the browser?
You mean the browser I'm using to post this reply? It's an open source project. It's been available to the public from the start. The just-before-Milestone-8 build I'm using is feature rich and relatively solid, as long as the sites I visit don't try any extravagant tricks with popup windows. (And if you think that's a problem, think back to NS4.x, when Geocities ad banners, using the layer tag Netscape recommended, would eventually leave the browser unresponsive, requiring the user to manually kill the process before they could resume browsing. Next to that, the occasional ill-behaved popup is nothing.)
Several standards compliant browsers have been built during this project's existence.
Several? I can only think of one: Opera. The others are either branches of Mozilla (NS6, Galeon), or are only standards-compliant when there isn't a pissing contest over the standard (NS4.x, MSIE).
Most people prefer to use an alternate email client. Hardly anyone gives a flying rat's ass about XUL.
So what about those who benefit from the built-in email and XUL? Dropping email and news would be a regression from NS4.x, and in my experience, dropping popular and/or useful features for the sake of expedience is a Bad Thing. An I don't give a damn about Qt. (That's a whole 'nother rant.) But that doesn't seem to be stopping development of KDE, nor should it.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
You could as easily send a Perl script to any UNIX out there ask the users to save the attachment and then execute it. Same result. Granted Outlook didn't have enough warnings about executing scripts...
Exactly. The key difference is that your typical *nix user isn't naive enough to try AnnaKournikova.jpg.pl when they see it. It's like saying that the Toyota Camry is the car most frequently stolen in the US based on raw numbers. Of course it is. Camry is the best selling car in the US.
To say that crashing machines and daily reboots are such a horrible problem, caused by Microsoft, is just a plain lie - or maybe you just haven't used anything Microsoft has made in the past couple of years.
Sounds like you haven't had the same experience I have. For me, Win98/ME has been a house of cards. Biggest piece of ess-aitch-eye-tee since MS-DOS 4.0. Since upgrading my PCs to Win2000 (one with only 32MB RAM), I have had exactly one BSOD, caused by an ill-advised attempt to use leaked NVIDIA drivers. 2000 is solid as a rock.
...remember that there are people who have had similar experiences with other OS's.
Ever since I got a new CD burner, BeOS 5 won't boot. Just before Tracker starts, the system freezes hard enough to require a power bounce. Of course, power management doesn't work in any OS, now, so it's probably Burner vs. BIOS, not the operating system. But at least Win2K and Linux can boot. YMMV.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Yes you can. No captain at all. The entire ship is run by a committee... or it could be an anarchy... or a group mind... Hmm, this might even get me to watch the series for an episode or two.
Ah, yes. Once again, a Microsoft executive has made me look like a fool-by-association.
The idea that Open Source stifles innovation is patently absurd. Does Jim actually want us to believe that "innovation" can only come from well-funded corporate R&D think tanks? That individuals, or like-minded groups, are incapable of a good idea? Who do you think started those think tanks?
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Honestly, how often do you think to yourself in the middle of a cutscene:
"So the virus and the cure were both made by the same corporation. But what does Vice President Clark have to do with -- aaaaaggggghhhhh! Look at the dot crawl on the edge of that catwalk!"
Not everything moves at the lightning speed of a deathmatch.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Complainers are always louder, so of course, [C|ZD]Net picked that up.
The bottom line is that Microsoft had to make a tough choice: Build VB7 on VB6's codebase, and leave it behind from.NET, or bite the bullet and make the great, sweeping changes necessary to maintain parity with the state of the art.
Microsoft realizes that there will be a not-insignificant cost to migrate from VB6 to VB.NET. They're working on a migration tool, although it's barely functional in Beta 1. While the changes are significant, they are consistent, and for the most part, convertable automatically.
With management that pointy-haired, you're probably better off bailing out now, just in case they do something that leaves you, or your reputation, vulnerable.
How's the job market in your area? If it's good, and your friends are as good as you say they are, chances are they'll easily land on their feet, probably in a better environment, position, and/or pay scale.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
I'll be damned if I can find it now, but I saw a picture of the Nissan Fusion concept that had a Windows 95 login screen on the in-dash display. I seriously doubt it was for real; whoever did the paste-up in Photoshop got the edges of the dialog totally askew to the edges of the screen. But damn, don't scare me like that, Nissan! I've been soooo looking forward to the new Z. Windows 2000, I could live with, but not 95!
I hate to admit it, but the Super 8 is the first Chrysler concept in a long time that I thought was anything less than awesome. In a way, it was inevitable. Chrysler design has been living on the edge for years. The Super 8 finally pushed them over. At least Chrysler will have the good sense to not put something that ugly into production.
If you're looking for something easier on the eyes, try the aforementioned Z, or the Chrysler Crossfire.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
FTC approval is not the final step. The FCC still has to approve the merger. They traditionally wait for the FTC and/or DOJ to make their ruling(s) first.
The FCC still has issues with content/distribution and AOL's fscked-up stance on Instant Messaging. Plus, the FCC's mandate also dictates that they must act "in the public interest". Not that they've done that in the past, but....
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
IIRC, the Aliens TC for Doom met the same fate. A shame, too. I managed to grab it before it was Foxed, and pummeling the alien Queen with a power loader was much fun.
There's also the issue of existing games based on the franchise in question. There was a DBZ fighting game on Ye Olde Nintendo. And there could possibly be others that were only released in Japan. Aliens TC may have been Foxed because of Alien vs. Predator, which was originally an Atari Jaguar title. (The only good Jaguar title, IIRC.) The PC version was a remake of the Jaguar game by the same studio. In either case, the license holder can claim that they're not just protecting their own intellectual property, but also existing licensees' rights to that IP.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
... it's that simple. vi vs. emacs. GUI vs. CLI. Mac vs. PC. Perl vs. Python. Microsoft vs. OS/2. Microsoft vs. Linux. Oh, hell, Microsoft vs. *.:-)
Unfortunately, it's human nature to lower a discussion to mudslinging. Done frequently enough, one starts casting aspersions on those who hold the opposite viewpoint. Compound that problem with the relative anonymity of [BBS, newsgroups, Slashdot], and it's easy for decorum to be neglected. As a result, people type things they would never say to someone's face. Earlier this week, I got into a donnybrook with an Eiffel programmer who, as far as I can tell, probably never considered the fact that some Slashdot readers use Visual Basic.
I have a page from a Dilbert calendar that sums things up quite nicely.
Dumb Guy on Bench: I teach my kids that these things are right and these things are wrong. Period. End of story.
Dogbert: Wouldn't that teach them to believe anything they're told without applying any critical thinking?
DGoB: I don't think about that.
Dogbert: Duh.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
You've already beaten yourself numb with that bible you carry, so a clue stick will probably be ineffective, but here goes anyway.
WHACK! This is not a holy war.
WHACK! This is not good v. evil.
WHACK! This is not a zero-sum solution.
You prefer the purity and design-by-contract discipline of Eiffel. Fine. I prefer the flexibility of Visual Basic, combined with the wisdom of experience. We agree to disagree.
However, I strictly follow a reader-response theory of language critcism -- I judge languages by the sorts of programmers who are most attracted to them.
I judge languages by suitability to task myself. Probably explains why I've used so many different languages over the years. No dogma, just the right tool for the right job. By your criteria, I must have the most severe case of Multiple Personality Disorder on record.
Why is it that Microsoft shills always resort to ad hominem attacks to respond to allegations about the types of programmers that Microsoft's inferior wares attract?
Probably because any show of support or sympathy for Microsoft on Slashdot is met with a conditioned response of "Burn the heretic!" I reiterate: This is not a holy war. I've been reading it for years. You were just unlucky enough to catch me on a bad day with enough free time to respond.
BTW, to pull this whole thing back on topic, I agree with you that a.NET-ized Eiffel would be pretty worthless if it meant that Eiffel's unique features would be dropped for the sake of compatibility. So I don't think you have to worry about any "Microsoft shills" doing who-knows-what to your codebase.
(I can feel my Karma points burning away even as I type, but I've been waiting to get this off my chest for years.)
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Slashdot Mirror
- You can never have too much hard drive space. It never fails that, as soon as somebody makes a leap in hard drive capacity, something comes along to fill it, even if it's just more bloat from $FAVORITE_OFFICE_SUITE. That something could be HDTV. TiVo gets 30 hours by recording analog TV at low ("VHS") quality. How much 780p or 1080i do you think the same size hard drive could handle, even at low quality? And after seeing part of an NHL game in HD*, I wouldn't want low quality.
- Data is Bandwidth is Time is Money. If my lossless-compressed media files never leave the box the hard drive is in, it's no problem. Performance is only bound by throughput on the system bus. But I don't see much value in having a massive BorgBox for each and every display/speaker set in my house. I'd much rather have a mofo-huge BorgServer in the basement/closet, serving any number of thin BorgBoxen set-top devices, all connected by cheap, plentiful Cat 5. Until something faster and cheaper comes along, or I start pulling down Sultan of Brunei money, I'll err on the side of efficiency.
- Do you need your entire music collection to be CD/SACD/DVD Audio quality? Really, are you losing any subtleties by ripping Dokken at 128 Kbps?
:-) Whenever I get around to it, I'll re-rip Dvorak's 9th Symphony at 320Kbps, but I don't need that much bitrate for hair bands.
You're right that the VCR isn't obsolete. Not yet, at least. I don't think people will go for DVD burners until they can get rid of that intellectual-property-lawyer smell.*: One of Best Buy's old demo recordings included a Buffalo Sabres game. I don't recall the format, but I think it was 780p. On a ~61" screen, you could read the names on the players' backs clearly, and the puck was far easier to follow than on analog TV, even without any lame FoxTrax comet trails.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
One is called "Qt Free Edition", and it is dual-licensed under the GPL and a home-brew, Open Source compatible license dubbed QPL. It allows developers to use Qt in Open Source and Free projects, like KDE or, well, just about anything on Freshmeat starting with "K".
The other versions are called "Professional" and "Enterprise". They carry a per-developer royalty-free commercial license.
In short, once you go beyond Qt Free Edition on Linux or BSD, the licensing becomes a nightmare.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
See how extremist everyone can get when Microsoft and Linux get mentioned in the same room? Doug makes a perfectly valid point about the usability and out-of-box experience of the typical Linux distro, and the knee-jerk reaction is to act like he's banging his shoe on the table, shouting "We will bury you."*
I'll take the typical developers' cop-out and say that it's a training issue. Too much of what people need to get the job done, and not enough of the overall metaphor. Here's a desktop, here's the icons, here's the menu, here's a folder tree. It doesn't matter if you use GNOME, KDE, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Win95, Win2K, WinXP, or WinPDQ. User interface design has only been moving in drips and drabs over the past five years or so. The biggest culture shock involves the mouse button count.
I agree with Doug that too many choices, too soon, will confuse the average user. I also agree with Bob Young that, for the experienced user, choice is good. Either way, as long as there's competition, there won't be a monoculture.
I don't mean to be so nihilistic, but the world isn't as smart as you think. At the very least, it's far too impatient to frell around with downloading ALSA packages for their laptop's sound system, when Windows 2000 "just works."
"User-friendly" and "powerful" are not mutually exclusive. They just take more work.
*: ObAYB: All your desktop are belong to us.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
So, Michael, tell us how you really feel.
I know, from years of experience, that Slashdot has always wobbled on either side of the line between news source and bully pulpit. But this is going way too far.
Could we please save the acid-dripping rhetoric for a "Read More..." block, instead of the headline? If a issue is worth debating, it will stand on its own merit. We don't need the flamebait.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
- imaginary beings
- uninterested in journalistic integrity
- doomed to repeat history (see also "Mozilla doesn't support XML", revisionist history*)
- all of the above
*: ZD, instead of publishing a retraction, performed an Orwellian edit to the column, changing "XML" to the unqualified statement "key web technologies". They also removed all but one TalkBack post pointing out the error, although, to be fair, most of it was hair-trigger flameage.We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
I can just imagine using this during a hay fever spell:
Me: Ahhh, ahhhhh, ahhhhhhhh-CHHHHHOOOOOOOO!
Neighbor: Gesundheit.
Guy down hall: Aw, frell! What happened to the server?!
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
You're dead right about the ergonomics. I was seriously considering a C1 myself, until I tried typing on it. Ugh. Killer for a touch-typist. Slowed me down considerably. Might as well have been writing Graffiti on my Palm. Hence my anticipation of TabletPC. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's OEMs didn't offer a hinged keyboard/trackpad "slice" that allowed the tablet to convert to notebook use.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
This isn't Yet Another Internet Appliance. TabletPC comes as advertised: a full-fledged PC, running Windows XP, not Linux/BeIA/Java with a dumbed-down, captive UI. It will make strong use of "ink" as an input device, but underneath, it's a notebook. The keyboard and mouse are just dockable devices. Wireless networking will come in some combination of wireless Ethernet and Bluetooth, depending of the OEMs' designs.
I absolutely love the idea. It bridges the gap between PDAs and notebooks far better than sub-notebooks like Toshiba Libretto or Sony Vaio C1.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
After making a second pass over what I wrote, I realized that I wasn't as clear as I should have been.
I was a bit too liberal in my use of the word "Free". I side strongly with Open Source, myself. Something about GPL's "viral" licensing bothers me. Too close to bedtime to express it, right now. Catch me when I've been sufficiently caffeinated.
And, unfortunately, the license wars aren't going away anytime soon. Corporate interests (i.e. Apple , Sun) are still churning the waters.
I just can't get religious about computers anymore. I had that beaten out of me in my OS/2 days. ('nuff said.) I read RMS' texts, like the "Why not LGPL" link you provided, and I think to myself, "He is seeking ideological purity." Well, him and everybody else in this world.... Stallman insists that it's "Free vs. proprietary", and I just can't buy that. I try very hard not to fall into the trap of "single-bit" thinking that is so common to us geeks. Life is never that simple.
Too me, it all comes down to choice. Say I'm about to release VBFooLib to the public. I could sell binaries for $250, and charge $1500 for the source, implying that you "commie pinko scum" need not apply. Or, I could release it under LGPL, with all of the community benefits that implies. The message is simple: "I share with you, in the hopes that you will share with me." But I don't feel right mandating that. I'd rather spread the meme. In the long run, that's more powerful than the license.
And getting back to the toolkits, it's simple. QT for Windows is only avaliable as a proprietary library. For me, that trumps all other points of contention. GTK is Open. Not Free in the RMS Purity Test sense of the word, but far more suitable than QT.
BTW, GTK has far more bindings than just C. QT is locked hard into C++.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
- TrollTech says that they want to support the development of Free software on Free operating systems. This is why there is no GPL/QPL version of QT for Windows. Yet TrollTech appears to be willing to "tolerate" development of Free software on proprietary unix variants, like Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX, as long as they use X.
- I can hear some muttering in the peanut gallery: "Why not port the Free X version of QT to Windows?" Simple. It's poisoned. First of all, QT for Windows already exists. TrollTech chooses not to license it for Free/Open Source software for Windows.
Bottom line: TrollTech is acting out of spite, and picking sides. They're on some holy crusade to rid the world of the Redmond Menace, and they don't care how many innocent developers and users of Free software for Windows get caught under the tank treads.Second, TrollTech suggests that anyone wanting to use QT/Free on Windows should use an X server for Windows. See also: redundant; waste of resources.
Finally, TrollTech distributes the source as a pristine base, plus patches. Distributing a port to another base API as patches would be horribly inefficient, not to mention error-prone. Besides, TrollTech would have the power to deny any or all of those changes. And I have no doubt that they would.
Meanwhile, the GTK team is actively encouraging the development of Win32 and BeOS ports. In their eyes, no operating systems are more equal than others.
And that is why they will win.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
I lost all respect for InfoWorld when they reviewed the last version of OS/2 Warp Server with Buzzword-Compliant Subtitle (whatever). Since they were still bitter over the Product of the Year ballot-stuffing incident, they gave the review to a contributing editor from Windows NT magazine (no conflict of interest there), who proceded to flame the IBM product, based solely on his dislike of multi-colored tabs in the settings windows. No benchmarks, no feature comparisons, just a summary dismissal because the UI wasn't identical to NT4.
I seem to recall that it was only a few weeks later that Nick Petreley left his editorial position at InfoWorld, although he remained as a columnist, and latched onto LinuxWorld.com. Smart guy, that Nick. Any chance Andover can get him to displace Jon Katz around here?
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
But I found two big flaws the film.
- I could guess all the plot "twists", which were really more like 15-degree bends. Is that the contempt of familiarity you spoke of, or am I just sick of the banal "stickin' it to The Man" structure?
- Fisher Stevens and Matthew Lillard. I kept wishing that the scenery they were chewing was toxic.
The Matrix is still, for my money, the greatest hacker movie ever made. Why settle for databases when you can hack a Massively Multi-user Online Virtual Reality?We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
According to Steve Ballmer's bio, his degrees are in mathematics and economics. Gates and Allen were/are the geeks. Ballmer's a suit. This would explain his mangling of "hardware abstraction layer".
He probably thinks Hackers was a better movie than Antitrust, too. (Which is true, but in the same unfortunate way Howard the Duck was better than Battlefield Earth.)
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Ah, yes. Once again, a Microsoft executive has made me look like a fool-by-association.
The idea that Open Source stifles innovation is patently absurd. Does Jim actually want us to believe that "innovation" can only come from well-funded corporate R&D think tanks? That individuals, or like-minded groups, are incapable of a good idea? Who do you think started those think tanks?
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Honestly, how often do you think to yourself in the middle of a cutscene:
"So the virus and the cure were both made by the same corporation. But what does Vice President Clark have to do with -- aaaaaggggghhhhh! Look at the dot crawl on the edge of that catwalk!"
Not everything moves at the lightning speed of a deathmatch.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
Complainers are always louder, so of course, [C|ZD]Net picked that up.
.NET, or bite the bullet and make the great, sweeping changes necessary to maintain parity with the state of the art.
.NET's naysayers, including VB.Not.
The bottom line is that Microsoft had to make a tough choice: Build VB7 on VB6's codebase, and leave it behind from
Microsoft realizes that there will be a not-insignificant cost to migrate from VB6 to VB.NET. They're working on a migration tool, although it's barely functional in Beta 1. While the changes are significant, they are consistent, and for the most part, convertable automatically.
For reference, here's some links:
Microsoft's technical article on 6-to-.NET migration.
A DevX commentary that addresses some of
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
With management that pointy-haired, you're probably better off bailing out now, just in case they do something that leaves you, or your reputation, vulnerable.
How's the job market in your area? If it's good, and your friends are as good as you say they are, chances are they'll easily land on their feet, probably in a better environment, position, and/or pay scale.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
I'll be damned if I can find it now, but I saw a picture of the Nissan Fusion concept that had a Windows 95 login screen on the in-dash display. I seriously doubt it was for real; whoever did the paste-up in Photoshop got the edges of the dialog totally askew to the edges of the screen. But damn, don't scare me like that, Nissan! I've been soooo looking forward to the new Z. Windows 2000, I could live with, but not 95!
I hate to admit it, but the Super 8 is the first Chrysler concept in a long time that I thought was anything less than awesome. In a way, it was inevitable. Chrysler design has been living on the edge for years. The Super 8 finally pushed them over. At least Chrysler will have the good sense to not put something that ugly into production.
If you're looking for something easier on the eyes, try the aforementioned Z, or the Chrysler Crossfire.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
FTC approval is not the final step. The FCC still has to approve the merger. They traditionally wait for the FTC and/or DOJ to make their ruling(s) first.
The FCC still has issues with content/distribution and AOL's fscked-up stance on Instant Messaging. Plus, the FCC's mandate also dictates that they must act "in the public interest". Not that they've done that in the past, but....
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
IIRC, the Aliens TC for Doom met the same fate. A shame, too. I managed to grab it before it was Foxed, and pummeling the alien Queen with a power loader was much fun.
There's also the issue of existing games based on the franchise in question. There was a DBZ fighting game on Ye Olde Nintendo. And there could possibly be others that were only released in Japan. Aliens TC may have been Foxed because of Alien vs. Predator, which was originally an Atari Jaguar title. (The only good Jaguar title, IIRC.) The PC version was a remake of the Jaguar game by the same studio. In either case, the license holder can claim that they're not just protecting their own intellectual property, but also existing licensees' rights to that IP.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
... it's that simple. vi vs. emacs. GUI vs. CLI. Mac vs. PC. Perl vs. Python. Microsoft vs. OS/2. Microsoft vs. Linux. Oh, hell, Microsoft vs. *. :-)
Unfortunately, it's human nature to lower a discussion to mudslinging. Done frequently enough, one starts casting aspersions on those who hold the opposite viewpoint. Compound that problem with the relative anonymity of [BBS, newsgroups, Slashdot], and it's easy for decorum to be neglected. As a result, people type things they would never say to someone's face. Earlier this week, I got into a donnybrook with an Eiffel programmer who, as far as I can tell, probably never considered the fact that some Slashdot readers use Visual Basic.
I have a page from a Dilbert calendar that sums things up quite nicely.
Dumb Guy on Bench: I teach my kids that these things are right and these things are wrong. Period. End of story.
Dogbert: Wouldn't that teach them to believe anything they're told without applying any critical thinking?
DGoB: I don't think about that.
Dogbert: Duh.
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
WHACK! This is not a holy war.
WHACK! This is not good v. evil.
WHACK! This is not a zero-sum solution.
You prefer the purity and design-by-contract discipline of Eiffel. Fine. I prefer the flexibility of Visual Basic, combined with the wisdom of experience. We agree to disagree. I judge languages by suitability to task myself. Probably explains why I've used so many different languages over the years. No dogma, just the right tool for the right job. By your criteria, I must have the most severe case of Multiple Personality Disorder on record. Probably because any show of support or sympathy for Microsoft on Slashdot is met with a conditioned response of "Burn the heretic!" I reiterate: This is not a holy war. I've been reading it for years. You were just unlucky enough to catch me on a bad day with enough free time to respond.
BTW, to pull this whole thing back on topic, I agree with you that a
(I can feel my Karma points burning away even as I type, but I've been waiting to get this off my chest for years.)
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead