Effort dispersed, spent on competing projects is ultimately wasted. But it is so hard to join efforts because compromises and agreements are needed. In a business that would not be a problem.
Firstly, effort dispersed is not wasted. The atmosphere in different teams leads to different implemented ideas, and inspiration/motivation for the other team.
But more importantly, your analogy is completely flawed. You can't compare the whole of open source software to one company. It is sometimes hard to get different OSS projects to co-operate with each other, just like it would be impossible to get all the companies of the world to co-operate. After all, why is there not just one widget maker in the world? Wouldn't it be more productive if all the widget companies pooled their expertise and made one superwidget?
This has been tried and tested by (non-Apple) research labs, with people who are used to repeated movements. No matter how fast you think you are at 'precision' mouse movements, you will be faster aiming at the edge of the screen.
Sources please. Without a reference your claim is worse than useless. What was their testing methodology, what screen sizes were used, multiple monitors, what window sizes for apps? There are many variables that can be played with to get the result you want. If you had ever done any user testing you would know that you almost never get a hard and fast result that can be generalized to all users.
My biggest problem with the window on top is that even if it is faster to access, does that actually help me? If I'm experienced enough to be very fast with the mouse, I really don't use the menu very often at all. All the common actions are either in the toolbar or have a keyboard shortcut. The menu is the least used part of a program for me. So why would I care that it takes 1/2 second less time to access something that I access only once an hour? However I do use the close and minimize buttons a lot, and in OS X these are tiny and hard to click. In KDE I have it set up so they are at the top right and top left corner in a maximized window. This lets me toss the mouse there without even thinking about it to close/minimize an application. Much more useful to me than fast access to a menu which I almost never need.
Brilliant! Now all we need is a catchy slogan for this magical new language.. Something that really shows that you don't have to test it on every platform, and that it will look the same on all of them.. How about, "Write once, run anywhere!"?
Additionally, I wonder how much cash is being burnt to keep Ubuntu cracking along. Perhaps it is not sustainable? Debian is, I would say. It has proven itself.
Good point. Shuttleworth is not doing Ubuntu so he can bleed money for all eternity, he wants to make money at some point. So far that hasn't happened (pretty sure), and if it continues not to happen for a few more years, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he moved on to another project. This isn't a criticism of Shuttleworth, I would probably move on a lot sooner if the business wasn't working. And then where is Ubuntu? Does it have enough volunteer developers to continue releasing new versions, let alone ones that are polished enough for people to really get excited about?
The great thing about Debian is that it is not dependant on the whims of some random company. That's one of the reasons why I run it on my desktop. The other reason is that Debian messes around with packages a whole lot less. What you get is basically what the upstream software looks like. No hacks to quickly fix something or change the defaults. Those hacks sometimes work, but when they break you're lost, cause the upstream project won't want to support your bastard version of their software.
What're you talking about? The kernel affects _everything_. If I upgraded the kernel and then things started going wonky it would be the first thing I suspected. That's about the most obvious candidate for when something breaks. It seems like you consider a upgrading the kernel between major versions a minor patch. I don't know where you're getting your information, but the kernel is central to the system. Even minor updates need major testing since it could affect anything on the system.
Aside from that, I agree with you. SPs are not any harder to test for than individual patches, easier in some cases.
Who gains by putting this link on the/. front page?
Several people actually. If you submit an article that gets accepted, you get a link to your page. So you gain by having that link there because it drives some traffic to your site. Slashdot gains because there is now an incentive for people to submit good stories that will get accepted, and I gain amusement by watching people like you freak about nothing.
So if her recordings were so masterful, and they were identical to other recordings, then why didn't the critics recognize the similarity for so long?
This confirms my belief that music critics are mostly full of shit. If those recordings were so good, then the artists she copied from were obviously superb. However, one was apparently a very obscure Japanese pianist, so his brilliance wasn't recognized, and since no-one noticed the copy for so long, the others can't have been very prominent either.
Sorry, I wasn't quite clear. By wireless settings I meant things like saving a network to connect to later, not settings for the card. Networkmanager in Linux does not require root privileges to do that.
You're right, but how many viruses have you seen that delete your documents folder? Viruses and trojans are not there to delete your data, they're there to put the control of your machine into someone else's hands so it can be used for spamming, hosting illegal files, or mounting a DDOS attack on a different target. To do this, they need to modify system files, so while I don't directly care about the system files, I do care about the integrity of my computer.
People bitch when it's so easy to get this stuff on a windows machine, Microsoft finally does something about it and people decide to bitch about that.
No, people aren't bitching about them doing something, they're bitching about them doing something WRONG. Linux and Mac's have a similar approach to this problem, but their solution (sudo) is not annoying, so it actually works. All Microsoft had to do was copy that solution to improve security, instead they came up with their own and made it obtrusive in the process.
I have yet to experience these supposed headaches with Vista yet, the only time that shield pops up is when I run a program that is potentially harmful to my computer
Although I also have not seen these prompts when copying text, I have seen them in plenty of places aside from installing programs. Places that make absolutely no sense, such as storing wireless settings. There is no reason that action should require admin privileges and thus a prompt.
How many story's were posted about programs looking like they came from an official place only to release a trojan? sure you get a program from download.com and figure it's safe but after installing a program it suddenly fucks up your PC, with Vista it will actually ask if you trust it let you know where it came from the works.
And how would that help? You download a program from somewhere, and double click to install it. Whether it is a trojan or not, Windows is going to ask you for permission. Since you downloaded it, you obviously think it is not a trojan, so you would press Ok on the permissions dialog. Turns out it is a trojan, and your system is compromised. A permission dialog does nothing to protect you here.
Bingo. Of course some people will say that installing applications on Linux also requires that you enter your password. This is true, and unavoidable if you want the added security, but there is one very important difference: the package manager.
If I set up a new Linux install, I go into the package manager, select the 20-30 applications I use regularly, enter my password, and everything gets installed. If I want to set up a Vista install, I have to launch 20-30 installers, and each one asks me for permission to run, and I have to run them one by one, because some will refuse to install if another installation is in progress.
So yes, no matter what the OS, you want the computer to ask for permission when installing software. The problem with Vista is that the package management is so primitive that you can only install one thing at a time (at least for the average joe) and you get pestered for permission every time.
Of course, this is not all Microsoft's fault, it is more a product of the software culture on Windows, where everyone rolls their own installer EXE, instead of creating a standard package that can then be installed with a separate program.
Alright there Jennifer Scott. I assumed you were male. Mea culpa.
But seriously, I can't imagine how what I wrote could be taken as insulting. I was merely pointing out a flaw in your argument (a point which you would rather sidestep than defend apparently). Perhaps a thicker skin is in order.
Right... The grandparent poster compares the price of a "decent gaming PC" to a Mac Mini, and when the fallacy of that argument is pointed out to him you think its an ad hominem attack. Nice defense there. I'm crushed that you won't read the rest of my comment.
Clue for next time. My statement would be an ad hominem attack if it had been something like: are you even reading what you're writing, you brain damaged monkey. As it was written, it was not an attack of any kind.
I thought about recommending a Mac Mini to my parents when their old computer died but reconsidered because of the price. Unfortunately, your price comparison is quite bogus. You're saying you can get the Mini for $579 (discounted) and say that a decent gaming PC is more expensive. Are you even reading what you're writing? A mini is not useful for much more than the basics. It is not anywhere close to a "decent gaming PC" so comparing it to that is silly. My parents don't do anything but email, surf the web, and do the occasional spreadsheet. To accomplish this, they could spend a minimum $679 CAN on a Mac mini or $400 CAN on a PC. Yeah the mac is more stylish, but it is also foreign and almost $300 more. Sorry, not worth it. The equation changes when you're looking at laptops, where the Macs are competitive, but the PC still rules the low-end market.
The bulbs you got didn't have a warranty? I'm not completely informed about the different brands, but here in BC, Canada, the most common brand of CFLs is Noma, which all have a 1-8 year warranty on them. If it breaks for whatever reason, bring it back, no questions asked.
You, like I did up until I saw this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_G uys_in_the_Room, think that the brownouts in california were caused by not enough capacity. In actual fact, they were caused by Enron shutting down plants or exporting energy out of the state because they could make more money that way.
I don't get why RPN is so popular amongst the supposed geek crowd. It's backwards from all the work you do on paper (or do you also write your equations down in RPN?). It makes it much more difficult to translate to english as well. Instead of the calculator conforming to the way you work, you have to conform to how the calculator works. Seems completely backwards to me.
By the way, I prefer TIs (Ti89 is like portable matlab), command line is cool for some tasks, C++ is nicer than Java, don't care for vi or emacs, and have an engineering degree.
Unfortunately for your argument, there is nothing stopping you from writing software for the Greenphone using GTK. The only problem is that they haven't done the work to make it easy, so it might be a very significant effort to get started.
Fair enough for the most part. (Don't use the ugly parts of boost if you don't want, and please give a concrete example of where collections need to expose a pointer).
But what is really missing from your rant is an alternative. It would be the most beautiful rant in the world if it ended with "And it doesn't have to be this way, CSuperDuperDoublePlus does everything C++ does without the problems!". Except it didn't, which means that C++ is still the language to use for a lot of tasks. Anything CPU intensive for example. There are still plenty of applications where performance really matters. Aside from the usual (image processing, video editing, etc) even any moderately complex program requires better performance than what Java/C#/Python can provide in some codepaths. So if you know of a language that's completely safe and at the same time as efficient as C/C++, you really should have mentioned it.
You say he gets a lot of flak, but I don't really see it. Most of the (not modded into oblivion) comments I see praise him as being a shrewd businessman. Microsoft gets a lot of flak, but that is completely different. He's not even in charge there anymore.
Actually that's not true. They are only written in Qt on Linux. Opera actually made their own widget set on Windows (so much for consistency) and Skype uses Delphi on Windows. As someone else mentioned, skype uses Cocoa on OS X. No idea about what Opera does there.
Slashdot Mirror
But it comes with a free frogurt!
Effort dispersed, spent on competing projects is ultimately wasted. But it is so hard to join efforts because compromises and agreements are needed. In a business that would not be a problem.
Firstly, effort dispersed is not wasted. The atmosphere in different teams leads to different implemented ideas, and inspiration/motivation for the other team.
But more importantly, your analogy is completely flawed. You can't compare the whole of open source software to one company. It is sometimes hard to get different OSS projects to co-operate with each other, just like it would be impossible to get all the companies of the world to co-operate. After all, why is there not just one widget maker in the world? Wouldn't it be more productive if all the widget companies pooled their expertise and made one superwidget?
This has been tried and tested by (non-Apple) research labs, with people who are used to repeated movements. No matter how fast you think you are at 'precision' mouse movements, you will be faster aiming at the edge of the screen.
Sources please. Without a reference your claim is worse than useless. What was their testing methodology, what screen sizes were used, multiple monitors, what window sizes for apps? There are many variables that can be played with to get the result you want. If you had ever done any user testing you would know that you almost never get a hard and fast result that can be generalized to all users.
My biggest problem with the window on top is that even if it is faster to access, does that actually help me? If I'm experienced enough to be very fast with the mouse, I really don't use the menu very often at all. All the common actions are either in the toolbar or have a keyboard shortcut. The menu is the least used part of a program for me. So why would I care that it takes 1/2 second less time to access something that I access only once an hour? However I do use the close and minimize buttons a lot, and in OS X these are tiny and hard to click. In KDE I have it set up so they are at the top right and top left corner in a maximized window. This lets me toss the mouse there without even thinking about it to close/minimize an application. Much more useful to me than fast access to a menu which I almost never need.
Brilliant! Now all we need is a catchy slogan for this magical new language.. Something that really shows that you don't have to test it on every platform, and that it will look the same on all of them.. How about, "Write once, run anywhere!"?
Yeah, this will take the world by storm.
Additionally, I wonder how much cash is being burnt to keep Ubuntu cracking along. Perhaps it is not sustainable? Debian is, I would say. It has proven itself.
Good point. Shuttleworth is not doing Ubuntu so he can bleed money for all eternity, he wants to make money at some point. So far that hasn't happened (pretty sure), and if it continues not to happen for a few more years, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he moved on to another project. This isn't a criticism of Shuttleworth, I would probably move on a lot sooner if the business wasn't working. And then where is Ubuntu? Does it have enough volunteer developers to continue releasing new versions, let alone ones that are polished enough for people to really get excited about?
The great thing about Debian is that it is not dependant on the whims of some random company. That's one of the reasons why I run it on my desktop. The other reason is that Debian messes around with packages a whole lot less. What you get is basically what the upstream software looks like. No hacks to quickly fix something or change the defaults. Those hacks sometimes work, but when they break you're lost, cause the upstream project won't want to support your bastard version of their software.
What're you talking about? The kernel affects _everything_. If I upgraded the kernel and then things started going wonky it would be the first thing I suspected. That's about the most obvious candidate for when something breaks.
It seems like you consider a upgrading the kernel between major versions a minor patch. I don't know where you're getting your information, but the kernel is central to the system. Even minor updates need major testing since it could affect anything on the system.
Aside from that, I agree with you. SPs are not any harder to test for than individual patches, easier in some cases.
Who gains by putting this link on the /. front page?
Several people actually. If you submit an article that gets accepted, you get a link to your page. So you gain by having that link there because it drives some traffic to your site. Slashdot gains because there is now an incentive for people to submit good stories that will get accepted, and I gain amusement by watching people like you freak about nothing.
So if her recordings were so masterful, and they were identical to other recordings, then why didn't the critics recognize the similarity for so long?
This confirms my belief that music critics are mostly full of shit. If those recordings were so good, then the artists she copied from were obviously superb. However, one was apparently a very obscure Japanese pianist, so his brilliance wasn't recognized, and since no-one noticed the copy for so long, the others can't have been very prominent either.
Sorry, I wasn't quite clear. By wireless settings I meant things like saving a network to connect to later, not settings for the card. Networkmanager in Linux does not require root privileges to do that.
You're right, but how many viruses have you seen that delete your documents folder? Viruses and trojans are not there to delete your data, they're there to put the control of your machine into someone else's hands so it can be used for spamming, hosting illegal files, or mounting a DDOS attack on a different target. To do this, they need to modify system files, so while I don't directly care about the system files, I do care about the integrity of my computer.
People bitch when it's so easy to get this stuff on a windows machine, Microsoft finally does something about it and people decide to bitch about that.
No, people aren't bitching about them doing something, they're bitching about them doing something WRONG. Linux and Mac's have a similar approach to this problem, but their solution (sudo) is not annoying, so it actually works. All Microsoft had to do was copy that solution to improve security, instead they came up with their own and made it obtrusive in the process.
I have yet to experience these supposed headaches with Vista yet, the only time that shield pops up is when I run a program that is potentially harmful to my computer
Although I also have not seen these prompts when copying text, I have seen them in plenty of places aside from installing programs. Places that make absolutely no sense, such as storing wireless settings. There is no reason that action should require admin privileges and thus a prompt.
How many story's were posted about programs looking like they came from an official place only to release a trojan? sure you get a program from download.com and figure it's safe but after installing a program it suddenly fucks up your PC, with Vista it will actually ask if you trust it let you know where it came from the works.
And how would that help? You download a program from somewhere, and double click to install it. Whether it is a trojan or not, Windows is going to ask you for permission. Since you downloaded it, you obviously think it is not a trojan, so you would press Ok on the permissions dialog. Turns out it is a trojan, and your system is compromised. A permission dialog does nothing to protect you here.
Bingo. Of course some people will say that installing applications on Linux also requires that you enter your password. This is true, and unavoidable if you want the added security, but there is one very important difference: the package manager.
If I set up a new Linux install, I go into the package manager, select the 20-30 applications I use regularly, enter my password, and everything gets installed. If I want to set up a Vista install, I have to launch 20-30 installers, and each one asks me for permission to run, and I have to run them one by one, because some will refuse to install if another installation is in progress.
So yes, no matter what the OS, you want the computer to ask for permission when installing software. The problem with Vista is that the package management is so primitive that you can only install one thing at a time (at least for the average joe) and you get pestered for permission every time.
Of course, this is not all Microsoft's fault, it is more a product of the software culture on Windows, where everyone rolls their own installer EXE, instead of creating a standard package that can then be installed with a separate program.
Alright there Jennifer Scott. I assumed you were male. Mea culpa.
But seriously, I can't imagine how what I wrote could be taken as insulting. I was merely pointing out a flaw in your argument (a point which you would rather sidestep than defend apparently). Perhaps a thicker skin is in order.
Right... The grandparent poster compares the price of a "decent gaming PC" to a Mac Mini, and when the fallacy of that argument is pointed out to him you think its an ad hominem attack. Nice defense there. I'm crushed that you won't read the rest of my comment.
Clue for next time. My statement would be an ad hominem attack if it had been something like: are you even reading what you're writing, you brain damaged monkey.
As it was written, it was not an attack of any kind.
I thought about recommending a Mac Mini to my parents when their old computer died but reconsidered because of the price.
Unfortunately, your price comparison is quite bogus. You're saying you can get the Mini for $579 (discounted) and say that a decent gaming PC is more expensive. Are you even reading what you're writing? A mini is not useful for much more than the basics. It is not anywhere close to a "decent gaming PC" so comparing it to that is silly.
My parents don't do anything but email, surf the web, and do the occasional spreadsheet. To accomplish this, they could spend a minimum $679 CAN on a Mac mini or $400 CAN on a PC. Yeah the mac is more stylish, but it is also foreign and almost $300 more. Sorry, not worth it. The equation changes when you're looking at laptops, where the Macs are competitive, but the PC still rules the low-end market.
The bulbs you got didn't have a warranty? I'm not completely informed about the different brands, but here in BC, Canada, the most common brand of CFLs is Noma, which all have a 1-8 year warranty on them. If it breaks for whatever reason, bring it back, no questions asked.
You, like I did up until I saw this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_G uys_in_the_Room, think that the brownouts in california were caused by not enough capacity. In actual fact, they were caused by Enron shutting down plants or exporting energy out of the state because they could make more money that way.
t y_crisis
Read more about it here, especially the section entitled Supply and Demand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electrici
Matlab does do symbolic equations, with the right toolbox. You're right though, I actually meant Maple.
I don't get why RPN is so popular amongst the supposed geek crowd. It's backwards from all the work you do on paper (or do you also write your equations down in RPN?). It makes it much more difficult to translate to english as well. Instead of the calculator conforming to the way you work, you have to conform to how the calculator works. Seems completely backwards to me.
By the way, I prefer TIs (Ti89 is like portable matlab), command line is cool for some tasks, C++ is nicer than Java, don't care for vi or emacs, and have an engineering degree.
Unfortunately for your argument, there is nothing stopping you from writing software for the Greenphone using GTK. The only problem is that they haven't done the work to make it easy, so it might be a very significant effort to get started.
Find me a modded up (4 or 5) post that bashes Bill Gates then.
Fair enough for the most part. (Don't use the ugly parts of boost if you don't want, and please give a concrete example of where collections need to expose a pointer).
But what is really missing from your rant is an alternative. It would be the most beautiful rant in the world if it ended with "And it doesn't have to be this way, CSuperDuperDoublePlus does everything C++ does without the problems!". Except it didn't, which means that C++ is still the language to use for a lot of tasks. Anything CPU intensive for example. There are still plenty of applications where performance really matters. Aside from the usual (image processing, video editing, etc) even any moderately complex program requires better performance than what Java/C#/Python can provide in some codepaths. So if you know of a language that's completely safe and at the same time as efficient as C/C++, you really should have mentioned it.
You say he gets a lot of flak, but I don't really see it. Most of the (not modded into oblivion) comments I see praise him as being a shrewd businessman. Microsoft gets a lot of flak, but that is completely different. He's not even in charge there anymore.
As for relative modesty and relative generosity, Warren Buffet still has him beat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffet
Kolab http://kolab.org/ is another option
Actually that's not true. They are only written in Qt on Linux. Opera actually made their own widget set on Windows (so much for consistency) and Skype uses Delphi on Windows. As someone else mentioned, skype uses Cocoa on OS X. No idea about what Opera does there.