Hey, I live in the US and I can tell you that for many people here $1000 sounds like a hell of a lot of money compared to $300 or $500 for something that will do most of the same work.
Only certain versions of Firefox are that bad. I've had this copy of FF 3 beta 2 open for half an hour and it's still under 40 MB. I've even had other tabs open and closed them, and the extra memory went back to the OS. But yes, the 2.0.0.x line, especially from.8 to.10, hoard memory like squirrels storing nuts for winter.
There was a rumor when Fallout 1 came out that it was inspired largely by Shadowrun's back story and rules set. It could as easily have been Rifts, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, or any other post-apocalyptic game, if it was indeed directly inspired by any of them. Obviously they went a different direction from Rifts or Shadowrun with it not having the big return of magic and all the cybertech even if there was an initial connection.
If you remember every line from 19 seasons, then I really pity the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Buffy, and Star Trek geeks around you who have to put up with that.;-)
Besides, I don't get Fox where I live, and my wife only has three or four seasons on DVD so far, you insensitive clod!
Cars sold with combination XM, FM, and AM radios work fine with those three radio technologies. However, while AM and FM are free, the XM satellite radio costs extra! And radios designed with those features have all the necessary parts to also receive HD Radio, but the manufacturers cited "little demand from customers" as a reason not to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs to do the decoding.
Can we really start demanding in court that our favorite niche format be supported in the market regardless of return on the seller's investment? Cool. Where do I get my firewire-enabled Betamax deck with Colecovision game cartridge slot and RCA Selectravision cartridge slot? After all, it's all audiovisual entertaiment, and by God I want it just that way!
The main target for Open Source, of course, is edge cases. Far more people run across one or another edge case with Windows or OS X than you might at first think, though. One of Open Source's biggest strengths is that people can work around their edge cases ro have someone do the work around it for them.
If you're willing to stick to the most bog-standard hardware, Linux can support it nearly as well if not as well as OS X. The Linux on Mac people for example typically only worry about supporting Apple-approved hardware and little if anything else.
As for the applications being all developed by the same people, that's simply not true. Lots of people do contribute across many projects. The kernel team, libc team, and text tools teams are all different, though. KDE and GNOME have completely different sets o programmers. Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Exim, Postfix, X.org, OpenOffice, FireFox, and more focus on their applications and not on the OS software. Some audio applications are bundled up with their desktop environments, but several are independent.
Slag, for example, is a simple and useful (but not very pretty) drum machine program that uses JACK as output. JACK in turn uses OSS, ALSA, coreaudio, or portaudio. TuxGuitar is a tablature editor and player which supports ALSA, OSS, GCJ, and coreaudio. FST supports VST plugins on Linux. Rosegarden is a synth/MIDI sequencer, composing, and editing suite which supports LADSPA, DSSI softsynths, and some VST/VSTi plugins. It uses some KDE libs but can be run under other desktop/window manager environments, and uses ALSA (MIDI) and JACK (synth) for output. FFADO handles many Firewire audio devices. Audacity is a good wvaeform-level soundclip editor. Ardour is cross-platform and has had commercial support.
The main problems are not that one team works on everything or that it's not a suitable platform. The main problem is that if you want to use something that uses EsounD with something that uses ALSA, you have lots of workaround hassles. OSS, ALSA, NMM, and lots of other sound servers have tried to correct deficiencies along the way. Now it seems that PulseAudio will be taking over for EsounD possibly also for aRts, NMM, and ALSA. If there was one or even two sound systems from which to choose, most audio software would be targeted to work together. So yes, in this respect OS X has a nice leg up by limiting the audio servers available. If PulseAudio (which also works on Windows) takes a single prime spot on Linux and is well maintained, it's just up to the application developers to keep up. All it takes from there is time.
The fuck I missed the point. Translation is not the right word. Sure, I only took one semester of Russian, but we did learn the alphabet, thankyouverymuch.
Russians who learn English don't use Latin characters for their resemblance to Cyrillic letters any more than Americans learning Russian use Cyrillic letters based on the Latin letters they look like. They are both phonetically spelled languages, and learning the different letters is part of learning the languages.
The confusion isn't in using the wrong letters in the other language. The confusion is in not being aware at any given moment which language's encoding is in use for the domain. The problem of the characters being similar in appearance between the two languages is a transliteration problem, as many people have said in this thread. Transliteration and translation are two very different things.
You both have points, but why the hell do you need to access his toaster or would he need to access yours? NAT gives him the flexibility to decide which outside connections get forwarded without a separate set of firewall rules for the internal and external networks. Despite the totally internetworked ideal some people have, people will still use NAT with IPv6. It won't be for lack of addresses, but for (ab)using the lack of routing in place of a proper addition of firewall rules.
There are other nice things about NAT, too. You can achieve many tricks with NAT, ARP tricks, and tunnels for failover redundancy, transparent proxies, and load balancing. Having multiple machines appear on one IP can make things convenient depending on your goals and methods.
IPv6 gets rid of one big reason for NAT, but it's still going to have uses.
Which, really, is no different from allowing Cyrillic in the second-level domain. Having one site in the same ccTLD as the one it spoofs is no more secure than spoofing across ccTLDs.
If there's no difference in the words we use, then we should stick to just one word. I propose "Oof".;-)
Seriously, though, I think you've struck on the right issue here. It's not a problem caused by the current system. It's a problem encountered when expanding the current system to include other character sets. For the people designing the DNS had considered this change way back when they designed the initial system and assigned the ccTLDs, it would have been nice but would've required an extreme case of forethought.
These are the types of snags extending a system beyond its original design will encounter. As for the proper ccTLD, perhaps.ru should be replaced entirely with.rf in the standard and current domain holders grandfathered into the new system. It seems like a good fix for this specific problem.
Indeed. I nearly bought a dual 486dx2-66 (or a Pentium 60) instead of my dx4-100. The Intel line has had at least rudimentary support for multiprocessor installations since the 386. The boards used to do much of the work that the CPUs do now, though. Not a lot of people cared about dual processors in the PC world yet (other platforms had a head start). The boards were therefore pretty rare and pretty expensive.
The fact that NT 4, SCO, or a very immature (at the time) Linux would be my only OS choices on the dual pretty much solidified my choice of the single dx4. It gave the best bang for my buck for a Windows 95 box so I could play the games for that which NT 4 wouldn't. If Microsoft had a dual-processor capable OS with full DirectX support in 1995, I'd have had one of those dual 486s.
To be fair, some PC and server manufacturers put the CPU on a riser card in the 486 and Pentium days, but it wouldn't have come from Intel that way. I have a Dell 486dx33 with the processor and cache SRAM on a riser, for example.
You can't really translate between 'r' and rho. It's a character set issue. It's a straight equivalency of sounds. Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet and the English alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. It could be confused with Paraguay because of the character encoding, but it's not really the same letters.
If the goal is "my audio workstation set up just the way I want it" and Apple's software doesn't feel quite right, you might be surprised how many people will take the time to learn to set up their own stuff. People who point out the costs of commercial software in terms of money are often dismissed with the "pros don't care if it costs money" line. Well, I'm pretty sure pros have been known to invest time into projects when they couldn't find a way to fix things with money.
Commercial software has the visible cost of cash. It also has the hidden cost (which doesn't stay hidden long when you're trying to do something new with it) of usually being pretty inflexible. Another hidden cost is vendor failure. Apple won't be gone tomorrow, but what about the little third-party shop that made your audio filter plugins? How do you get support for those after they're gone?
Open software tends to have a visible cost of time. What are its hidden costs? Sometimes there's incompatibility, but outside of specific Apple/MS-developed or Apple/MS-sanctioned software you have that on Mac and Windows too. Mac is better about it than either Windows or Linux, sure. So are NetBSD, Solaris, Irix, and AIX when you're using the small body of software meant for each one of them. Where else besides Windows do you have as big of a software selection, though? The modern Unix systems, including Linux, the BSDs, and most commercial Unixes, get along for the most part pretty well at the source level. Some of them get along on the same platform at the library level. A few can even run each other's binaries. That means that there's a huge body of software written for Linux or that can be pretty easily ported to Linux. Compatibility issues are going to result, sure.
Try running you favorite web browser or even text editor from OS 6 or OS 7 on OS X. The most basic of tools for Linux can usually be used on future versions on the same hardware. With Mac you're talking about three platforms with two entirely different operating system families. Now if I want faster performance for my PPC-only OS 9 and OS X binaries, I have to find a way to get OS X on an IBM Power machine or a Momentum box. Meanwhile, there's no MacOS for anything handheld, but there are certainly handhelds out there using chips derived from the Motorola 68000-series. Linux runs on many of them. That means I can conceivably take a Linux program from an Amiga or M68k Mac and at least hope to run it on another M68k-derived device. I can take my Yellow Dog, Mandriva PPC, or Ubuntu PPC stuff and put it on a Power system. Where's Apple?
You'd probably want to use it if you work for Microsoft. You might want to use it if you're personally a Microsoft certified type and they make the new certifications include it in some way. If they tied their partnered business designations to using Silverlight and not Flash on your sites. You might like the price if you haven't already invested in Flash-related stuff. They'll probably stuff it into academic versions and developer care packages of all sorts, too.
Otherwise, I can't think of any reasons. The best killer of Silverlight would be for Adobe to dump Flash on the market for three or four months, but that'd be illegal. While Microsoft has no problems market dumping, I'm not sure Adobe would even consider that with their developer tools.
One place Adobe could really help itself, BTW, is in quality of documentation. There is a lot of it out there, but most of the free and cheap stuff frankly stinks. That's a problem they inherited from Macromedia, and I'm sure they're working on it becuase the PDF file format documentation is clear as a bell. That's one place Microsoft might get some momentum if they can beat Adobe to the good cheap documentation punch.
All you need is a text editor and a text-oriented tool for Flash to get a Flash site going.
There are lots of tools for Flash-compatible SWF files out there besides Flash. Flex is one. HaXe is another. Laszlo Systems has a proprietary product and an open version called Open Laszlo, which IIRC is built on Java. There are probably more I'm forgetting.
HaXe is its own language from the guy who designed the Neko VM. It run on the Neko runtime, and it targets Neko, Javascript browser DOM with its own Ajax libraries, or Flash. I haven't done anything huge with it, but it was pretty quick to pick up for a couple of small projects.
There are also graphical Flash authoring tools besides Flash and Dreamweaver. They range from Swish Max which is meant to be a full Flash replacement for most people down to specialized things like animated banner creators and photo gallery creators. There's also a lot of royalty-free and even some Open Source components you can download and reuse.
Flash isn't as open as JavaScript and HTML, and it is dominated by one company. It's not exactly useful only to people who buy Flash, though.
Amen. The first thing I did when I got to the replies for this question, before reading anything, was to search for "Robin Williams" in my browser's search box to make sure someone had mentioned her books. There's one typography specifically. There's one about general design principles.
Here's a list of her earlier books in the "Non-Designer's" series and more. She also has a list of useful resources for designers which includes her stuff and other stuff at one of her sites.
As a conservative and home sovereignty proponent, I want to thank you for pointing this out to those who've taken the movements too far. We should keep our power to determine things at home, but determining at home to abide by a treaty isn't giving up sovereignty at all. Those you are describing are tainting the name of both conservatives and those in favor of home rule.
Remind me never to let your summarize anything for me, since you're dismissing the idea that you could do so.
"I've almost never seen a discussion of DSLs that doesn't point to the use of Lisp macros as a key example of their implementation."
Using Lisp macros to implement a DSL and the macros themselves comprising the DSL are two very different things. Having macros that do the work of a feature of a DSL is interpretation of the DSL, sure. Having macros that each translate a feature of the DSL into machine language or add it to an AST would be a good deal of an implementation of a compiler for the DSL. Having macros with names that make sense for what they're doing is not, in itself, any definition of a DSL that I've seen before this thread.
"Ruby is a better Perl than Perl" means exactly nothing. That's exactly the statement I was tugging apart. For the statement to have any meaning, "a better Perl" must be defined. What makes it better? What makes it Perlish? Why would someone wanting Perl want Ruby more? Don't attack my statement as being meaningless and say the statement upon which it plays is meaningful when it clearly is no more meaningful.
The author who claims to come to Ruby with plenty of Perl experience didn't stick with Perl long enough, apparently. He could argue that he learned Ruby much faster than Perl and that Perl therefore was harder for him and people who think like him to learn. That would be a valid comparison. He doesn't say that, and we don't really know how much time he spent with Perl or with Ruby from the article. I can tell you it's generally considered that Perl's learning curve is very long. People who can teach introductory courses in the language could still be learning a great deal from the true masters. Some consider such a long learning curve a bad thing, and in some situations it's true. Others consider that a tool you can use now and continue to use better as time goes on is a good tool.
I actually mean deprecate, as the article and the summary said. "To deprecate" in programming circles generally means to mark something as "The old way" to do something or "the less preferred way".
Deprecation of a programming language feature, for example, usually starts with suggestions of a better way to do something. Then, a warning goes out to say that the feature might be changed or removed in later versions of the language. Then, the docs for the language might start saying not to use the particular feature and suggesting an alternative. Programmers are warned definitively that the feature will not be portable to newer versions. Then, sometimes a version of the language tools come out that perform the function properly but which warn about its deprecation at compile time or even runtime if warnings are enabled. Finally, a version comes out in which the language tools stop supporting the feature and perhaps there's still a warning at compile time. The documentation will probably list the feature just enough to say "this is deprecated, please use feature X instead".
Since Microsoft's marking features as "deprecated", it simply means they're recommending people don't use those features in a standards-compliant file. It doesn't mean the default behavior of their software won't use those features in addition to the core standard for "enhanced functionality". I can easily imagine a situation in which Microsoft has an option buried in their application somewhere to produce a vanilla standards-compliant file, but that it's not enabled by default and most non-technical users of Word and Excel will still be sending around files with tags from the deprecated set. It's better, if MS is going to use them, that they're documented and marked deprecated than not documented at all. That way other applications can work around them more easily. That other applications have to work around them at all is the problem. If it's a standard, MS's own software should follow the heart of the standard and the deprecated portions should instead be culled.
If you're using Word on it, you've replaced the software that was preloaded and meant for use on such a system. If you're using Word 2000 or newer on it, you're just being silly.
It was loaded from the store with a fast-booting, low-resource OS and window manager for use with efficient applications (despite the fact that they also put OpenOffice on it). If you're undoing that,you deserve what you get.
Personally, if I really wanted responsiveness I'd get rid of Enlightenment as even though it's lighter-weight than the newest Gnome or KDE with Compiz it was known just a few years ago as a resource hog. I'd probably replace the whole OS with something like Xubuntu or Mandriva 2006 with IceWM with the security updates. I'd use Gnumeric, vim, Abiword, and mutt. I might use Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, or Nautilus for a browser (contrary to what some believe, you can use Gnome or KDE apps without their window manager as long as you have the right libs installed) with links or lynx as a backup for when I really want speed.
Just to give you some idea of how serious I am about this setup being useful, I have two boxes at this desk. One's the Athlon XP 2400+ with 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon 9000 Pro with XP Pro SP2 on it, using Firefox 3b2 to enter this post. The other is an Athlon 1000 with 512 MB of RAM running Mandriva 2006.0 with KDE 3.5 which I use just as much. It has the GIMP, XSane, Inkscape, Skencil, KsCD, KAudioCreator, Slag, KGhostview, Konqueror, Firefox 2, and Opera 9 on it. In the background it's running backups, running Apache and MySQL at low loads, and I use several Konsole sessions at once for editing stuff with vim. Boot time is about 20 seconds, and time into X from that command line (if I'm going to need X at all that day) is about another 30. GIMP starts in about 25-35 seconds depending on other disk activity (it takes a while to load the fonts).
Yeah, this machine with a 1.5 GHz C7 isn't a game killer. It's about as fast as an Athlon 1000. Which is about as fast as I need a machine to be to be useful as a second desktop. I have a 600 MHz Linux box at home that does NAT and firewall work for my home network, has some quick code tidbits run on it once in a while, and gets sued for browsing or downloading when my XP machine is tied up with something else. I used to run Mandrake 7, RedHat 7, and Caldera 2 on machines from dx4-100 to Pentium II @ 450. In fact, a console-only Pentium II 450 ran firewall, NAT, SMTP, web, MySQL, and a telnettable Citadel-style BBS for me for years on Mandrake 8, 9 and 10.
So bitch if you want about things being slow with your bloated idea of "adequate" software. Millions of people were doing just fine when we measured things in megahertz and megabytes, thankyouverymuch. Just because you don't want to buy a machine that is cheaper than some video cards because you can't find a use for it doesn't mean someone else is as spoiled and whiny over speed as you.
As long as we're pissing, I used to use Lynx on a direct dumbterm dialup (no PPP or even SLIP) to a Vax machine at a public library from DOS using Telemate for my terminal emulator and modem control.
I had no storage on the library system. The connection was all 8-bit clean though, so I'd use Lynx to open a telnet session to my shell at Concentric Research. I'd run FTP, WAIS, Archie, or Lynx again from there to download to the shell account, then fire up Zmodem from the shell to get files to my PC.
My friends and I were doing this in 1992-1994 before there was commercial net access in our local calling area. A $10 a month shell account was much cheaper than long distance charges for downloads at 2400 or 9000 bps.
I spent $135 for my first fax modem, 2400 bps with 9600 send and 4800 receive fax. Then I went to 28.8k, then 56k (which was supposed to be limited to 53k but was usually more in the 41kto 48k range). My last analog modem was a 56k hardware modem with a real RS232C-compatible link to the PC. It cost all of $55 and was much nicer than waiting an hour per megabyte with the 2400 bps.
Now I'm on 6 Mbps down and 384 kbps up and people bitch about how slow that is. I used to work in the ISP field and had a testing machine with a burner hooked up to a burstable DS3. The truth is, unless there's a particular file I need in a hurry and the other end has enough bandwidth and server power to actually keep up with demand (which is pretty rare for large popular files) then I don't really miss it.
BitTorrent comes in handy sometimes, but I'm usually downloading stuff that's just popular enough to stress the small number of mirrors it's on but not so popular that I find many seeds. I usually end up uploading two or three times what I download, and with such an unbalanced asymmetric plan it's kind of more pain than pleasure. And no, I've never made an illegal download over BitTorrent and certainly never seeded anything illegal over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I live in the US and I can tell you that for many people here $1000 sounds like a hell of a lot of money compared to $300 or $500 for something that will do most of the same work.
Only certain versions of Firefox are that bad. I've had this copy of FF 3 beta 2 open for half an hour and it's still under 40 MB. I've even had other tabs open and closed them, and the extra memory went back to the OS. But yes, the 2.0.0.x line, especially from .8 to .10, hoard memory like squirrels storing nuts for winter.
There was a rumor when Fallout 1 came out that it was inspired largely by Shadowrun's back story and rules set. It could as easily have been Rifts, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, or any other post-apocalyptic game, if it was indeed directly inspired by any of them. Obviously they went a different direction from Rifts or Shadowrun with it not having the big return of magic and all the cybertech even if there was an initial connection.
If you remember every line from 19 seasons, then I really pity the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Buffy, and Star Trek geeks around you who have to put up with that. ;-)
Besides, I don't get Fox where I live, and my wife only has three or four seasons on DVD so far, you insensitive clod!
Cars sold with combination XM, FM, and AM radios work fine with those three radio technologies. However, while AM and FM are free, the XM satellite radio costs extra! And radios designed with those features have all the necessary parts to also receive HD Radio, but the manufacturers cited "little demand from customers" as a reason not to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs to do the decoding.
Can we really start demanding in court that our favorite niche format be supported in the market regardless of return on the seller's investment? Cool. Where do I get my firewire-enabled Betamax deck with Colecovision game cartridge slot and RCA Selectravision cartridge slot? After all, it's all audiovisual entertaiment, and by God I want it just that way!
The main target for Open Source, of course, is edge cases. Far more people run across one or another edge case with Windows or OS X than you might at first think, though. One of Open Source's biggest strengths is that people can work around their edge cases ro have someone do the work around it for them.
If you're willing to stick to the most bog-standard hardware, Linux can support it nearly as well if not as well as OS X. The Linux on Mac people for example typically only worry about supporting Apple-approved hardware and little if anything else.
As for the applications being all developed by the same people, that's simply not true. Lots of people do contribute across many projects. The kernel team, libc team, and text tools teams are all different, though. KDE and GNOME have completely different sets o programmers. Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Exim, Postfix, X.org, OpenOffice, FireFox, and more focus on their applications and not on the OS software. Some audio applications are bundled up with their desktop environments, but several are independent.
Slag, for example, is a simple and useful (but not very pretty) drum machine program that uses JACK as output. JACK in turn uses OSS, ALSA, coreaudio, or portaudio. TuxGuitar is a tablature editor and player which supports ALSA, OSS, GCJ, and coreaudio. FST supports VST plugins on Linux. Rosegarden is a synth/MIDI sequencer, composing, and editing suite which supports LADSPA, DSSI softsynths, and some VST/VSTi plugins. It uses some KDE libs but can be run under other desktop/window manager environments, and uses ALSA (MIDI) and JACK (synth) for output. FFADO handles many Firewire audio devices. Audacity is a good wvaeform-level soundclip editor. Ardour is cross-platform and has had commercial support.
The main problems are not that one team works on everything or that it's not a suitable platform. The main problem is that if you want to use something that uses EsounD with something that uses ALSA, you have lots of workaround hassles. OSS, ALSA, NMM, and lots of other sound servers have tried to correct deficiencies along the way. Now it seems that PulseAudio will be taking over for EsounD possibly also for aRts, NMM, and ALSA. If there was one or even two sound systems from which to choose, most audio software would be targeted to work together. So yes, in this respect OS X has a nice leg up by limiting the audio servers available. If PulseAudio (which also works on Windows) takes a single prime spot on Linux and is well maintained, it's just up to the application developers to keep up. All it takes from there is time.
The fuck I missed the point. Translation is not the right word. Sure, I only took one semester of Russian, but we did learn the alphabet, thankyouverymuch.
Russians who learn English don't use Latin characters for their resemblance to Cyrillic letters any more than Americans learning Russian use Cyrillic letters based on the Latin letters they look like. They are both phonetically spelled languages, and learning the different letters is part of learning the languages.
The confusion isn't in using the wrong letters in the other language. The confusion is in not being aware at any given moment which language's encoding is in use for the domain. The problem of the characters being similar in appearance between the two languages is a transliteration problem, as many people have said in this thread. Transliteration and translation are two very different things.
You both have points, but why the hell do you need to access his toaster or would he need to access yours? NAT gives him the flexibility to decide which outside connections get forwarded without a separate set of firewall rules for the internal and external networks. Despite the totally internetworked ideal some people have, people will still use NAT with IPv6. It won't be for lack of addresses, but for (ab)using the lack of routing in place of a proper addition of firewall rules.
There are other nice things about NAT, too. You can achieve many tricks with NAT, ARP tricks, and tunnels for failover redundancy, transparent proxies, and load balancing. Having multiple machines appear on one IP can make things convenient depending on your goals and methods.
IPv6 gets rid of one big reason for NAT, but it's still going to have uses.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible."
In Soviet Russia, grammar misuses you to brag about its use of you!
Which, really, is no different from allowing Cyrillic in the second-level domain. Having one site in the same ccTLD as the one it spoofs is no more secure than spoofing across ccTLDs.
If there's no difference in the words we use, then we should stick to just one word. I propose "Oof". ;-)
.ru should be replaced entirely with .rf in the standard and current domain holders grandfathered into the new system. It seems like a good fix for this specific problem.
Seriously, though, I think you've struck on the right issue here. It's not a problem caused by the current system. It's a problem encountered when expanding the current system to include other character sets. For the people designing the DNS had considered this change way back when they designed the initial system and assigned the ccTLDs, it would have been nice but would've required an extreme case of forethought.
These are the types of snags extending a system beyond its original design will encounter. As for the proper ccTLD, perhaps
Actually, it was 1994 that I got that system. So it was mostly DOS games at the time. But there was press out about "Windows 4"...
Indeed. I nearly bought a dual 486dx2-66 (or a Pentium 60) instead of my dx4-100. The Intel line has had at least rudimentary support for multiprocessor installations since the 386. The boards used to do much of the work that the CPUs do now, though. Not a lot of people cared about dual processors in the PC world yet (other platforms had a head start). The boards were therefore pretty rare and pretty expensive.
The fact that NT 4, SCO, or a very immature (at the time) Linux would be my only OS choices on the dual pretty much solidified my choice of the single dx4. It gave the best bang for my buck for a Windows 95 box so I could play the games for that which NT 4 wouldn't. If Microsoft had a dual-processor capable OS with full DirectX support in 1995, I'd have had one of those dual 486s.
To be fair, some PC and server manufacturers put the CPU on a riser card in the 486 and Pentium days, but it wouldn't have come from Intel that way. I have a Dell 486dx33 with the processor and cache SRAM on a riser, for example.
You can't really translate between 'r' and rho. It's a character set issue. It's a straight equivalency of sounds. Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet and the English alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. It could be confused with Paraguay because of the character encoding, but it's not really the same letters.
If the goal is "my audio workstation set up just the way I want it" and Apple's software doesn't feel quite right, you might be surprised how many people will take the time to learn to set up their own stuff. People who point out the costs of commercial software in terms of money are often dismissed with the "pros don't care if it costs money" line. Well, I'm pretty sure pros have been known to invest time into projects when they couldn't find a way to fix things with money.
Commercial software has the visible cost of cash. It also has the hidden cost (which doesn't stay hidden long when you're trying to do something new with it) of usually being pretty inflexible. Another hidden cost is vendor failure. Apple won't be gone tomorrow, but what about the little third-party shop that made your audio filter plugins? How do you get support for those after they're gone?
Open software tends to have a visible cost of time. What are its hidden costs? Sometimes there's incompatibility, but outside of specific Apple/MS-developed or Apple/MS-sanctioned software you have that on Mac and Windows too. Mac is better about it than either Windows or Linux, sure. So are NetBSD, Solaris, Irix, and AIX when you're using the small body of software meant for each one of them. Where else besides Windows do you have as big of a software selection, though? The modern Unix systems, including Linux, the BSDs, and most commercial Unixes, get along for the most part pretty well at the source level. Some of them get along on the same platform at the library level. A few can even run each other's binaries. That means that there's a huge body of software written for Linux or that can be pretty easily ported to Linux. Compatibility issues are going to result, sure.
Try running you favorite web browser or even text editor from OS 6 or OS 7 on OS X. The most basic of tools for Linux can usually be used on future versions on the same hardware. With Mac you're talking about three platforms with two entirely different operating system families. Now if I want faster performance for my PPC-only OS 9 and OS X binaries, I have to find a way to get OS X on an IBM Power machine or a Momentum box. Meanwhile, there's no MacOS for anything handheld, but there are certainly handhelds out there using chips derived from the Motorola 68000-series. Linux runs on many of them. That means I can conceivably take a Linux program from an Amiga or M68k Mac and at least hope to run it on another M68k-derived device. I can take my Yellow Dog, Mandriva PPC, or Ubuntu PPC stuff and put it on a Power system. Where's Apple?
You'd probably want to use it if you work for Microsoft. You might want to use it if you're personally a Microsoft certified type and they make the new certifications include it in some way. If they tied their partnered business designations to using Silverlight and not Flash on your sites. You might like the price if you haven't already invested in Flash-related stuff. They'll probably stuff it into academic versions and developer care packages of all sorts, too.
Otherwise, I can't think of any reasons. The best killer of Silverlight would be for Adobe to dump Flash on the market for three or four months, but that'd be illegal. While Microsoft has no problems market dumping, I'm not sure Adobe would even consider that with their developer tools.
One place Adobe could really help itself, BTW, is in quality of documentation. There is a lot of it out there, but most of the free and cheap stuff frankly stinks. That's a problem they inherited from Macromedia, and I'm sure they're working on it becuase the PDF file format documentation is clear as a bell. That's one place Microsoft might get some momentum if they can beat Adobe to the good cheap documentation punch.
All you need is a text editor and a text-oriented tool for Flash to get a Flash site going.
There are lots of tools for Flash-compatible SWF files out there besides Flash. Flex is one. HaXe is another. Laszlo Systems has a proprietary product and an open version called Open Laszlo, which IIRC is built on Java. There are probably more I'm forgetting.
HaXe is its own language from the guy who designed the Neko VM. It run on the Neko runtime, and it targets Neko, Javascript browser DOM with its own Ajax libraries, or Flash. I haven't done anything huge with it, but it was pretty quick to pick up for a couple of small projects.
There are also graphical Flash authoring tools besides Flash and Dreamweaver. They range from Swish Max which is meant to be a full Flash replacement for most people down to specialized things like animated banner creators and photo gallery creators. There's also a lot of royalty-free and even some Open Source components you can download and reuse.
Flash isn't as open as JavaScript and HTML, and it is dominated by one company. It's not exactly useful only to people who buy Flash, though.
Close. Mono is .Net while Moonlight is Silverlight and runs on top of Mono.
Amen. The first thing I did when I got to the replies for this question, before reading anything, was to search for "Robin Williams" in my browser's search box to make sure someone had mentioned her books. There's one typography specifically. There's one about general design principles.
Here's a list of her earlier books in the "Non-Designer's" series and more. She also has a list of useful resources for designers which includes her stuff and other stuff at one of her sites.
As a conservative and home sovereignty proponent, I want to thank you for pointing this out to those who've taken the movements too far. We should keep our power to determine things at home, but determining at home to abide by a treaty isn't giving up sovereignty at all. Those you are describing are tainting the name of both conservatives and those in favor of home rule.
Remind me never to let your summarize anything for me, since you're dismissing the idea that you could do so.
"I've almost never seen a discussion of DSLs that doesn't point to the use of Lisp macros as a key example of their implementation."
Using Lisp macros to implement a DSL and the macros themselves comprising the DSL are two very different things. Having macros that do the work of a feature of a DSL is interpretation of the DSL, sure. Having macros that each translate a feature of the DSL into machine language or add it to an AST would be a good deal of an implementation of a compiler for the DSL. Having macros with names that make sense for what they're doing is not, in itself, any definition of a DSL that I've seen before this thread.
"Ruby is a better Perl than Perl" means exactly nothing. That's exactly the statement I was tugging apart. For the statement to have any meaning, "a better Perl" must be defined. What makes it better? What makes it Perlish? Why would someone wanting Perl want Ruby more? Don't attack my statement as being meaningless and say the statement upon which it plays is meaningful when it clearly is no more meaningful.
The author who claims to come to Ruby with plenty of Perl experience didn't stick with Perl long enough, apparently. He could argue that he learned Ruby much faster than Perl and that Perl therefore was harder for him and people who think like him to learn. That would be a valid comparison. He doesn't say that, and we don't really know how much time he spent with Perl or with Ruby from the article. I can tell you it's generally considered that Perl's learning curve is very long. People who can teach introductory courses in the language could still be learning a great deal from the true masters. Some consider such a long learning curve a bad thing, and in some situations it's true. Others consider that a tool you can use now and continue to use better as time goes on is a good tool.
I actually mean deprecate, as the article and the summary said. "To deprecate" in programming circles generally means to mark something as "The old way" to do something or "the less preferred way".
Deprecation of a programming language feature, for example, usually starts with suggestions of a better way to do something. Then, a warning goes out to say that the feature might be changed or removed in later versions of the language. Then, the docs for the language might start saying not to use the particular feature and suggesting an alternative. Programmers are warned definitively that the feature will not be portable to newer versions. Then, sometimes a version of the language tools come out that perform the function properly but which warn about its deprecation at compile time or even runtime if warnings are enabled. Finally, a version comes out in which the language tools stop supporting the feature and perhaps there's still a warning at compile time. The documentation will probably list the feature just enough to say "this is deprecated, please use feature X instead".
Since Microsoft's marking features as "deprecated", it simply means they're recommending people don't use those features in a standards-compliant file. It doesn't mean the default behavior of their software won't use those features in addition to the core standard for "enhanced functionality". I can easily imagine a situation in which Microsoft has an option buried in their application somewhere to produce a vanilla standards-compliant file, but that it's not enabled by default and most non-technical users of Word and Excel will still be sending around files with tags from the deprecated set. It's better, if MS is going to use them, that they're documented and marked deprecated than not documented at all. That way other applications can work around them more easily. That other applications have to work around them at all is the problem. If it's a standard, MS's own software should follow the heart of the standard and the deprecated portions should instead be culled.
If you're using Word on it, you've replaced the software that was preloaded and meant for use on such a system. If you're using Word 2000 or newer on it, you're just being silly.
It was loaded from the store with a fast-booting, low-resource OS and window manager for use with efficient applications (despite the fact that they also put OpenOffice on it). If you're undoing that,you deserve what you get.
Personally, if I really wanted responsiveness I'd get rid of Enlightenment as even though it's lighter-weight than the newest Gnome or KDE with Compiz it was known just a few years ago as a resource hog. I'd probably replace the whole OS with something like Xubuntu or Mandriva 2006 with IceWM with the security updates. I'd use Gnumeric, vim, Abiword, and mutt. I might use Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, or Nautilus for a browser (contrary to what some believe, you can use Gnome or KDE apps without their window manager as long as you have the right libs installed) with links or lynx as a backup for when I really want speed.
Just to give you some idea of how serious I am about this setup being useful, I have two boxes at this desk. One's the Athlon XP 2400+ with 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon 9000 Pro with XP Pro SP2 on it, using Firefox 3b2 to enter this post. The other is an Athlon 1000 with 512 MB of RAM running Mandriva 2006.0 with KDE 3.5 which I use just as much. It has the GIMP, XSane, Inkscape, Skencil, KsCD, KAudioCreator, Slag, KGhostview, Konqueror, Firefox 2, and Opera 9 on it. In the background it's running backups, running Apache and MySQL at low loads, and I use several Konsole sessions at once for editing stuff with vim. Boot time is about 20 seconds, and time into X from that command line (if I'm going to need X at all that day) is about another 30. GIMP starts in about 25-35 seconds depending on other disk activity (it takes a while to load the fonts).
Yeah, this machine with a 1.5 GHz C7 isn't a game killer. It's about as fast as an Athlon 1000. Which is about as fast as I need a machine to be to be useful as a second desktop. I have a 600 MHz Linux box at home that does NAT and firewall work for my home network, has some quick code tidbits run on it once in a while, and gets sued for browsing or downloading when my XP machine is tied up with something else. I used to run Mandrake 7, RedHat 7, and Caldera 2 on machines from dx4-100 to Pentium II @ 450. In fact, a console-only Pentium II 450 ran firewall, NAT, SMTP, web, MySQL, and a telnettable Citadel-style BBS for me for years on Mandrake 8, 9 and 10.
So bitch if you want about things being slow with your bloated idea of "adequate" software. Millions of people were doing just fine when we measured things in megahertz and megabytes, thankyouverymuch. Just because you don't want to buy a machine that is cheaper than some video cards because you can't find a use for it doesn't mean someone else is as spoiled and whiny over speed as you.
As long as we're pissing, I used to use Lynx on a direct dumbterm dialup (no PPP or even SLIP) to a Vax machine at a public library from DOS using Telemate for my terminal emulator and modem control.
I had no storage on the library system. The connection was all 8-bit clean though, so I'd use Lynx to open a telnet session to my shell at Concentric Research. I'd run FTP, WAIS, Archie, or Lynx again from there to download to the shell account, then fire up Zmodem from the shell to get files to my PC.
My friends and I were doing this in 1992-1994 before there was commercial net access in our local calling area. A $10 a month shell account was much cheaper than long distance charges for downloads at 2400 or 9000 bps.
I spent $135 for my first fax modem, 2400 bps with 9600 send and 4800 receive fax. Then I went to 28.8k, then 56k (which was supposed to be limited to 53k but was usually more in the 41kto 48k range). My last analog modem was a 56k hardware modem with a real RS232C-compatible link to the PC. It cost all of $55 and was much nicer than waiting an hour per megabyte with the 2400 bps.
Now I'm on 6 Mbps down and 384 kbps up and people bitch about how slow that is. I used to work in the ISP field and had a testing machine with a burner hooked up to a burstable DS3. The truth is, unless there's a particular file I need in a hurry and the other end has enough bandwidth and server power to actually keep up with demand (which is pretty rare for large popular files) then I don't really miss it.
BitTorrent comes in handy sometimes, but I'm usually downloading stuff that's just popular enough to stress the small number of mirrors it's on but not so popular that I find many seeds. I usually end up uploading two or three times what I download, and with such an unbalanced asymmetric plan it's kind of more pain than pleasure. And no, I've never made an illegal download over BitTorrent and certainly never seeded anything illegal over it.