Those, however, are basically dead languages in the Software Industry.
The whole point is that if the software industry (including open source software) wants to advance, it needs to embrace better tools.
Perhaps Java would be a good choice. Wait, I am wrong, it shares too much syntactically with C/C++ to be much of an improvement.
Java shares very little with C/C++, other than a superficial syntactic similarity. Java is a safe language with reflection and dynamic typing. Java would be an excellent choice for open source projects. It's far from state of the art, but it is decades ahead of C/C++.
It shows how C++ can be written in a style
such that it looks very much like Perl or Python. It can be as high-level as you need it to be.
Which only goes to show that people don't understand. You cannot write C++ code in a Perl/Python/Java style because C++ lacks the runtime safety and support for reflection.
In fact, a big part of the problems of systems like Gnome and KDE is that they are reinventing dynamic typing and reflection. The end product is a baroque, inefficient mess that is much more complicated to learn and maintain than if you used a language with those facilities built in.
A big part of the problem is that systems like Gnome are written on such a primitive foundation (C/C++) that any architectural change is extremely hard to make. People can't just develop two or three different ways of doing something and use them as drop-in replacements for one another, they have to make commitments way ahead of time and with little information. It's no wonder that that turns into a battle of wills and visions. Software tools and languages haven't progressed to the point where that kind of pluggability is easy, but by using higher-level tools than C or C++, we can do a lot better.
I think another, related problem we are seeing is that the open source developer community represents a wide range of skills (just like most commercial programmer communities). So, if you use advanced tools and methodologies, you get a tiny developer community. If you use primitive tools and technologies (like the tools and technologies Gnome and KDE are based on), you get lots of developers, but you run into maintenance and architectural problems down the road.
I don't have a good solution. I think things will only improve as the general level of education advances beyond what it is now.
if you are a student looking for an organizer, get a low-end palm. they work and they are cheap. if you want to get something cutting edge that is usable and extensible, the agenda vr3 is a nice choice (it is linux based and easy to program, although its apps are not as nice yet as the palm apps).
neither the yopy nor the ipaq are a good choice at this point in my opinion: you pay a premium for something that ends up being less functional than a palm for organizing, and something that isn't high resolution enough for comfortable note taking or reading.
until the ipaq actually comes out in a linux version, i would not buy it anyway: microsoft and gartner count every unit shipped as a windowsce machine, although many of the units actually run linux. if compaq can't be bothered to come out with an official linux-based unit, they just aren't commited enough (and you may fry your ipaq trying to install linux on it yourself as well).
Sorry, but this, as well as many other, analyses of open source are completely missing the point. There is little value in source code itself. Value is in the developer community and the user community, shared expertise and knowledge. (That, incidentally, is also the value of Windows.) A company that doesn't contribute to an open source project is mainly hurting themselves: they have to maintain their own patches, people won't know how to use their extensions, and users will look at their releases as non-standard. The GPL is a big hammer that drives that point home to clueless companies that behave irrationally. That makes a lot of sense in a market where people don't behave economically rationally (like the software market). But in the long run, free, shared, common development is simply the most rational behavior for companies for many software products.
Now, there is some software that people will want to keep proprietary. But, for the most part, that kind of software won't become free before market conditions make it sensible for people to contribute to it freely, GPL or not.
If free software required altruism or the stick of the GPL to work, it would have disappeared long ago. Altruism may help it a long a little, and the GPL may have some benefit, but the force behind free software is simple economics.
You've got to be kidding. In order to talk to someone, I have to memorize a 10 digit number? I have to dial those using accurate motions in a rotary phone or on a tiny touchpad with a layout different from any other keyboard?
Telephones are only "usable" because we are used to them. The same hold for Windows and MacOS. And the same holds increasingly for Gnome and KDE.
Most real-world interfaces are messy and complex because of physical constraints. What they have going for them compared to computer UIs is that they are fairly stable and standardized over long time frames. What they also have going for them is that companies aren't as successful lying to their customers about usability as Apple and Microsoft are. Learning to use a word processor is hard, as hard as driving a car. At least it usually doesnt kill people.
but I do know that I dont want to give up my right to control how I view and comment on other peoples web pages for some short term fix to the Microsoft monopoly problem. Microsoft will find other ways of solidifying their position anyway, but these kinds of restrictions will stay around. In fact, most likely, Microsoft will find ways of using them against open source ("you must view this with IE because your open source browser doesnt show the squiggly lines for Microsoft FrontPage authored sites, hence violating our copyright by taking away our rightful control over our content").
X11 has adapted to the people who use it: programmers, developers, researchers, academics. That's because those people can fix it if it doesnt do what they like.
In that, it seems a lot better to me than Windows or MacOS, which seem to have adapted mostly to what sells boxes (a good showroom floor and out of box experience); by the time people have bought them, it doesnt matter anymore. Trouble is, what is particularly usable after a few weeks or months isn't wwhat sells boxes.
So, you have a situation where Windows and MacOS dont really have high usability for anyone, while Linux at least is an effective tool for experienced users. If anybody ever figures out an incentive for someone to develop something that has the long term usability of non-experts at heart, well, maybe then we can make progress. But that's more an economic/motivational problem than a technical one.
If this Microsoft feature is ruled in violation of copyright law, it's another step down the slippery slope where you have no control anymore over how you view content
Let's be consistent here: these kinds of rulings are bad when they apply to advertising filters, they are bad when they apply to your and my ability to build applications that let us comment on other people's web sites, and they are bad when they apply to Microsoft's web browser.
That is not to say that I approve of Microsoft's actions. But the problem with this feature in IE is not the feature itself, it's Microsoft's monopoly position and their control over the feature.
I have my doubts that unifying the character sets is a good thing at all. Languages based on the Chinese character set have very different requirements and properties from alphabetic writing systems. Alphabetic writing systems have a number of complexities that don't really exist in Chinese (collation, ligatures, hyphenation, diacritics, etc.), while the CJK languages have enormous character sets that require many more bits to be reserved than alphabetic languages need. The Japanese writing system is so oddball and complex that it really doesn't fit in anywhere.
Why should programmers for any one market have to deal with the complexities of the other writing systems? It seems to me that the only companies that really win here are those with global reach, who get to churn out localized versions of their software with minimal effort. But is that kind of generic adaptation really that high quality? Wouldn't software developed from scratch locally be better?
What causes Napster problems is the fact that it is a business; for personal use, you can still
record, time-shift, space-shift, and do other things. Much as some institutions would like to make you believe, "fair use" is still the law of the land.
Besides, a video capture card is cheaper than a TiVo and easier to program, too. Why would a determined pirate bother with hacking a TiVo?
I've always thought that the "price" to pay for open-source software was time and patience.
Sure, open source software takes time to learn and maintain, but so does proprietary software. If you have even modest expertise in house, many issues that are major for proprietary software can be resolved in a short time.
If you really want to outsource support to someone skilled, you have to pay a premium, whether you use open source, free software or closed source, proprietary software. Your chances of getting someone skilled at a reasonable price are actually probably better with open source.
Why is that bad? Katz, you're knee-jerking again. They coming up with new projects and products.
No, they are not. Just about every one of their announced products is something pioneered by some other company. Microsoft has a legal right to do that, but we have a right to point out the facts.
It doesn't make sense to equate Microsoft and Linux.
Microsoft is a corporation, almost a person legally. Microsoft can do wrong. Arguably, they have. Linux is trademark on a kernel and collection of open source software. It can't do anything: it isn't a person, it isn't a legal entity. "Linux" can't attack your wallet.
Now, how about the employees of Microsoft and the developers of Linux, can we compare them? Sure. And the difference is profound. Microsoft, the company, needs to survive by maximizing profit: they have no alternative, and their employees act accordingly. Technical quality and satisfying users is only a means to that end, and given that they don't have any competition, is often secondary to considerations of market position and strength. The Linux world is entirely different: no company can dominate the market with Linux, and Linux survives whether anybody makes a profit with it or not.
Another thing you might compare is technical quality. Indeed, both Windows and Linux have serious flaws. But with Linux, users are empowered to fix them, and with Linux, people don't pay an arm and a leg for basically the same software every couple of years.
Let's wait and see how well these products actually do. There is a good chance most of them will be flops. There is no point about staring at Microsoft like a deer caught in the headlights.
Microsoft is also getting serious about the handheld devices market;
Underlying your commend is the belief that if only Microsoft gets serious about something, they can get it. That's wrong. Microsoft has been serious about the handheld devices market for years, they have just produced one flop after another. Their handheld devices have been so bad so far that even Microsoft's marketing machinery couldn't paper over the problems. If they catch up with Palm it's because Palm has been dropping the ball.
I'm more than happy to pay for this service, and TiVo is more than happy to provide it. Why do you feel compelled to be so vengeful against TiVo?
I'm sorry, but what exactly is "vengeful" about my message? Predicting the demise of a company because the market they are in doesn't have a high barrier to entry may be uncomfortable for the company involved, but otherwise, it's simply factual. To me, TiVo doesn't seem any different from a lot of other recent startups in that regard. If you disagree on my conclusions, maybe you can explain why.
BTW, I don't own a TiVo. I had digital TV recording available to me years before TiVo came out, but I hardly ever watch TV anyway.
Well, it wasn't hard to see the writing on the wall: margins on the hardware must be small and the technology is pretty trivial (all the hard parts are embodied in the components they use: video compression, software, high capacity hard disks, components available to everybody else at similar prices).
The only way they could justify any decent stock valuation is with a profitable "subscription model". Sooner or later, more consumers are going to figure out that they just don't need the company.
I think you can expect a flood cheap, hardware-only TiVo-like devices in a year or two from Asian manufacturers, in addition to a lot of PC-based recording. There will probably be free, simple, non-proprietary web-based lookups of program information and broadcasters and cable stations will increasingly make that information available in a standard format. That will be followed by a lot of huffing by TiVo about how their "innovation" isn't properly rewarded and some nuisance patent suits by them that they probably shouldn't win. In the long run, TiVo will likely just disappear. If the investors are lucky, some generous or desparate consumer electronics giant will pick them up.
What would happen if his whole web site was in a location where the method is not patented? It seems to me that it would be up to each downloader to decide whether they could legally use the software.
Of course, a bigger question is: if software is speech (unfortunately, the courts don't seem to have agreed to that yet), this would be a serious form of prior restraint. Even in countries where something is patented, it's the act of using the patented invention without a license is prohibited by patent law; writing about a patented invention should be encouraged.
(Yet another big question is whether the IPIX patents should be valid in the first place; there is a lot of prior art. But I'll leave that for another time.)
As far as I'm concerned, both IE and NS/MOZ are awful. At some point, they became a battleground for vast corporate interests, not programs to display and browser hyperlinked content in a way that is convenient for their users.
Works are unfinished for all sorts of reasons: bad plot, death, whatever. Some unfinished works are excellent, and some aren't. Why not release it and let the readers judge? What's the harm?
"Degeneration" implies that it used to be worse. It wasn't. Frivolous lawsuits, lobbyists, influence peddling, and all that are nothing new. The same thing used to happen in Rome, Bagdad, Jerusalem, or Peking. You used to lose liberty, limb, or life if you lost. Now you usually just lose your shirt.
How the hell can a commercial entity "copyright" coordinates?
How the hell can a commercial entity own people? But they used to. In the US even. It's worth doing something about such absurdities, but it's also useful not to be naive about history.
Actually, I do know it. I also know other people who spent years learning it, including native speakers. And I've had enough opportunities to watch native users of those writing systems struggle with them. And my conclusion is: alphabetic writing systems are simply a better idea. That has nothing to do with whether other aspects of English are complex or baroque (which they are).
There is nothing western about alphabetic writing systems: they trace their roots to the Middle East and are used as much in Asia as in Europe and the US.
But reality is that the CJKs aren't going to change. Hell would freeze over before those cultures would undertake such a step even if it were practical. They are stuck with an unwieldy writing system. In fact, they probably like the barriers that creates to foreign competition; that alone makes Unicode a losing proposition. And the only reason US companies bother is because they want to export there; non-CJK users otherwise have little interest in paying extra for the complexities and cultural sensitivies of CJK countries.
User-centered design is paramount on the Macintosh. Focus on what users want and need and how they work with their tools if you want to gain any share.
It's a profitable myth created by Apple marketing that Macintosh is any better in this regard than any other commercial platform: software vendors on any platform, of course, try to cater to the needs of their paying customers.
Not only does GIMP have Photoshop for competition on the Macintosh, it will also be competing with tools like TIFFany3 from Caffeine Software.
You're confused about free software. It doesn't "compete" with commercial software. It's out there for you to use and improve if you so like. If you prefer to spend hundreds of dollars on some well-marketed product in the hope that it saves you time, that's your God-given right as an American. But don't expect people to develop that sort of stuff for you for free. I, for one, wouldn't want free software to try to cater to mainstream tastes: to me, the end result would be inferior.
stop whining about the UI
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Photographers used to fiddle with messy chemicals, delicate mechanical controls, and materials that would become unusable if it got too hot or too bright or if you touched them in the wrong place. Compared to that, both the Gimp and Photoshop are a breeze.
Photoshop is doubtlessly more "polished". Whether it is more usable or efficient is a different question, however, and opinions may differ, but that makes little practical difference anyway.
Professionals will continue to use Photoshop, not necessarily because it's necessarily better, but because it's the standard. Students and other collectors will continue to bootleg Photoshop, and people with too much money will buy it, because it's the expensive "professional" choice. Many other people, who need powerful, extensible image manipulation software without spending a fortune, will use the Gimp.
What do you get for the extra money?
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If you need color calibration or CMYK, or if you use Photoshop for layout or web page design (a twisted idea advocated by some web "experts"), the $700 extra for Photoshop may be worth it to you.
I find it doesn't give me anything useful for the extra money. In fact, I think the recent releases of Photoshop have been overburdened with useless features, and I prefer the Gimp now overall.
EMI is offering music for download and burning, something they haven't done before. If they do it with annoying "copy protection", it won't catch on. If they do something reasonable, it will. It doesn't really affect anything we are doing now, and it won't displace the current CD format for many years. So, I don't really see a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point is that if the software industry (including open source software) wants to advance, it needs to embrace better tools.
Perhaps Java would be a good choice. Wait, I am wrong, it shares too much syntactically with C/C++ to be much of an improvement.
Java shares very little with C/C++, other than a superficial syntactic similarity. Java is a safe language with reflection and dynamic typing. Java would be an excellent choice for open source projects. It's far from state of the art, but it is decades ahead of C/C++.
It shows how C++ can be written in a style such that it looks very much like Perl or Python. It can be as high-level as you need it to be.
Which only goes to show that people don't understand. You cannot write C++ code in a Perl/Python/Java style because C++ lacks the runtime safety and support for reflection.
In fact, a big part of the problems of systems like Gnome and KDE is that they are reinventing dynamic typing and reflection. The end product is a baroque, inefficient mess that is much more complicated to learn and maintain than if you used a language with those facilities built in.
I think another, related problem we are seeing is that the open source developer community represents a wide range of skills (just like most commercial programmer communities). So, if you use advanced tools and methodologies, you get a tiny developer community. If you use primitive tools and technologies (like the tools and technologies Gnome and KDE are based on), you get lots of developers, but you run into maintenance and architectural problems down the road.
I don't have a good solution. I think things will only improve as the general level of education advances beyond what it is now.
neither the yopy nor the ipaq are a good choice at this point in my opinion: you pay a premium for something that ends up being less functional than a palm for organizing, and something that isn't high resolution enough for comfortable note taking or reading.
until the ipaq actually comes out in a linux version, i would not buy it anyway: microsoft and gartner count every unit shipped as a windowsce machine, although many of the units actually run linux. if compaq can't be bothered to come out with an official linux-based unit, they just aren't commited enough (and you may fry your ipaq trying to install linux on it yourself as well).
Now, there is some software that people will want to keep proprietary. But, for the most part, that kind of software won't become free before market conditions make it sensible for people to contribute to it freely, GPL or not.
If free software required altruism or the stick of the GPL to work, it would have disappeared long ago. Altruism may help it a long a little, and the GPL may have some benefit, but the force behind free software is simple economics.
Telephones are only "usable" because we are used to them. The same hold for Windows and MacOS. And the same holds increasingly for Gnome and KDE.
Most real-world interfaces are messy and complex because of physical constraints. What they have going for them compared to computer UIs is that they are fairly stable and standardized over long time frames. What they also have going for them is that companies aren't as successful lying to their customers about usability as Apple and Microsoft are. Learning to use a word processor is hard, as hard as driving a car. At least it usually doesnt kill people.
but I do know that I dont want to give up my right to control how I view and comment on other peoples web pages for some short term fix to the Microsoft monopoly problem. Microsoft will find other ways of solidifying their position anyway, but these kinds of restrictions will stay around. In fact, most likely, Microsoft will find ways of using them against open source ("you must view this with IE because your open source browser doesnt show the squiggly lines for Microsoft FrontPage authored sites, hence violating our copyright by taking away our rightful control over our content").
In that, it seems a lot better to me than Windows or MacOS, which seem to have adapted mostly to what sells boxes (a good showroom floor and out of box experience); by the time people have bought them, it doesnt matter anymore. Trouble is, what is particularly usable after a few weeks or months isn't wwhat sells boxes.
So, you have a situation where Windows and MacOS dont really have high usability for anyone, while Linux at least is an effective tool for experienced users. If anybody ever figures out an incentive for someone to develop something that has the long term usability of non-experts at heart, well, maybe then we can make progress. But that's more an economic/motivational problem than a technical one.
Let's be consistent here: these kinds of rulings are bad when they apply to advertising filters, they are bad when they apply to your and my ability to build applications that let us comment on other people's web sites, and they are bad when they apply to Microsoft's web browser.
That is not to say that I approve of Microsoft's actions. But the problem with this feature in IE is not the feature itself, it's Microsoft's monopoly position and their control over the feature.
Why should programmers for any one market have to deal with the complexities of the other writing systems? It seems to me that the only companies that really win here are those with global reach, who get to churn out localized versions of their software with minimal effort. But is that kind of generic adaptation really that high quality? Wouldn't software developed from scratch locally be better?
Besides, a video capture card is cheaper than a TiVo and easier to program, too. Why would a determined pirate bother with hacking a TiVo?
Sure, open source software takes time to learn and maintain, but so does proprietary software. If you have even modest expertise in house, many issues that are major for proprietary software can be resolved in a short time.
If you really want to outsource support to someone skilled, you have to pay a premium, whether you use open source, free software or closed source, proprietary software. Your chances of getting someone skilled at a reasonable price are actually probably better with open source.
No, they are not. Just about every one of their announced products is something pioneered by some other company. Microsoft has a legal right to do that, but we have a right to point out the facts.
Microsoft is a corporation, almost a person legally. Microsoft can do wrong. Arguably, they have. Linux is trademark on a kernel and collection of open source software. It can't do anything: it isn't a person, it isn't a legal entity. "Linux" can't attack your wallet.
Now, how about the employees of Microsoft and the developers of Linux, can we compare them? Sure. And the difference is profound. Microsoft, the company, needs to survive by maximizing profit: they have no alternative, and their employees act accordingly. Technical quality and satisfying users is only a means to that end, and given that they don't have any competition, is often secondary to considerations of market position and strength. The Linux world is entirely different: no company can dominate the market with Linux, and Linux survives whether anybody makes a profit with it or not.
Another thing you might compare is technical quality. Indeed, both Windows and Linux have serious flaws. But with Linux, users are empowered to fix them, and with Linux, people don't pay an arm and a leg for basically the same software every couple of years.
Microsoft is also getting serious about the handheld devices market;
Underlying your commend is the belief that if only Microsoft gets serious about something, they can get it. That's wrong. Microsoft has been serious about the handheld devices market for years, they have just produced one flop after another. Their handheld devices have been so bad so far that even Microsoft's marketing machinery couldn't paper over the problems. If they catch up with Palm it's because Palm has been dropping the ball.
I'm sorry, but what exactly is "vengeful" about my message? Predicting the demise of a company because the market they are in doesn't have a high barrier to entry may be uncomfortable for the company involved, but otherwise, it's simply factual. To me, TiVo doesn't seem any different from a lot of other recent startups in that regard. If you disagree on my conclusions, maybe you can explain why.
BTW, I don't own a TiVo. I had digital TV recording available to me years before TiVo came out, but I hardly ever watch TV anyway.
The only way they could justify any decent stock valuation is with a profitable "subscription model". Sooner or later, more consumers are going to figure out that they just don't need the company.
I think you can expect a flood cheap, hardware-only TiVo-like devices in a year or two from Asian manufacturers, in addition to a lot of PC-based recording. There will probably be free, simple, non-proprietary web-based lookups of program information and broadcasters and cable stations will increasingly make that information available in a standard format. That will be followed by a lot of huffing by TiVo about how their "innovation" isn't properly rewarded and some nuisance patent suits by them that they probably shouldn't win. In the long run, TiVo will likely just disappear. If the investors are lucky, some generous or desparate consumer electronics giant will pick them up.
Of course, a bigger question is: if software is speech (unfortunately, the courts don't seem to have agreed to that yet), this would be a serious form of prior restraint. Even in countries where something is patented, it's the act of using the patented invention without a license is prohibited by patent law; writing about a patented invention should be encouraged.
(Yet another big question is whether the IPIX patents should be valid in the first place; there is a lot of prior art. But I'll leave that for another time.)
As far as I'm concerned, both IE and NS/MOZ are awful. At some point, they became a battleground for vast corporate interests, not programs to display and browser hyperlinked content in a way that is convenient for their users.
Works are unfinished for all sorts of reasons: bad plot, death, whatever. Some unfinished works are excellent, and some aren't. Why not release it and let the readers judge? What's the harm?
How the hell can a commercial entity "copyright" coordinates?
How the hell can a commercial entity own people? But they used to. In the US even. It's worth doing something about such absurdities, but it's also useful not to be naive about history.
There is nothing western about alphabetic writing systems: they trace their roots to the Middle East and are used as much in Asia as in Europe and the US.
But reality is that the CJKs aren't going to change. Hell would freeze over before those cultures would undertake such a step even if it were practical. They are stuck with an unwieldy writing system. In fact, they probably like the barriers that creates to foreign competition; that alone makes Unicode a losing proposition. And the only reason US companies bother is because they want to export there; non-CJK users otherwise have little interest in paying extra for the complexities and cultural sensitivies of CJK countries.
It's a profitable myth created by Apple marketing that Macintosh is any better in this regard than any other commercial platform: software vendors on any platform, of course, try to cater to the needs of their paying customers.
Not only does GIMP have Photoshop for competition on the Macintosh, it will also be competing with tools like TIFFany3 from Caffeine Software.
You're confused about free software. It doesn't "compete" with commercial software. It's out there for you to use and improve if you so like. If you prefer to spend hundreds of dollars on some well-marketed product in the hope that it saves you time, that's your God-given right as an American. But don't expect people to develop that sort of stuff for you for free. I, for one, wouldn't want free software to try to cater to mainstream tastes: to me, the end result would be inferior.
Photoshop is doubtlessly more "polished". Whether it is more usable or efficient is a different question, however, and opinions may differ, but that makes little practical difference anyway.
Professionals will continue to use Photoshop, not necessarily because it's necessarily better, but because it's the standard. Students and other collectors will continue to bootleg Photoshop, and people with too much money will buy it, because it's the expensive "professional" choice. Many other people, who need powerful, extensible image manipulation software without spending a fortune, will use the Gimp.
I find it doesn't give me anything useful for the extra money. In fact, I think the recent releases of Photoshop have been overburdened with useless features, and I prefer the Gimp now overall.
EMI is offering music for download and burning, something they haven't done before. If they do it with annoying "copy protection", it won't catch on. If they do something reasonable, it will. It doesn't really affect anything we are doing now, and it won't displace the current CD format for many years. So, I don't really see a problem.