free software is merely open, not free as in free beer. Why do people still confuse this in 2004?
There is nothing to worry about. If these people run into enough money to buy a real PC, and if they want such a thing, they can acquire it. Therefore, even with some magical "lock-in," there is no money to be made.
You people make me sick with all this anti-MS lock-in propaganda. I haven't used an MS product since 1996. You never had a gun to your head forcing to use their crap. Why must people dramatize it to that level? Seriously, grow up kids. Even if there was a government mandate requiring all to use MS products, it would be the very least of my worries today.
Notice that when I said "creating new things", I didn't specify only technological works. The fact that you've assumed this shows that you have some sort of agenda to push.
Yes, this is a thread about math and science. As any American already knows, these are only good for technology (that's sarcasm for those who fail to read between the lines).
As for realtors, it sounds like I may have touched a nerve. I'm sorry, but almost all the realtors I've met are complete morons who are nearly incapable of keeping themselves afloat financially. I only used the lock thing as an analogy; maybe I should have said something like "I'm surprised most realtors have enough sense to drive a vehicle to the house they're selling." There's a test to be passed to get a driver's license too, but look how poor most drivers are.
You're good at that irrelevant generalization thing.
Not all realtors are morons; my last realtor that I bought my house through was excellent. He not only knew all the business stuff, but also came over after I moved in and helped fix a few minor issues in my attic that the inspector had noted.
Make up your damn mind already. You're throwing generalizations around without a point.
WTF? You're talking about the USA, right? The country where kids' math skills are on par with those of Afghanistan, and a majority of the population thinks the earth is 6000 years old? The one where all the engineering jobs are being sent to India?
That "WTF" is getting annoying. Learn to type out what you wish to say. Of course I'm talking about the USA. What other country is so obsessed with technology that they have "smart weapons" and claim they can win "smart wars" with those weapons? The USA.
The US is not a uber-technological country. You're thinking of Japan or maybe Germany. The US is two things: a land where people are extremely greedy and lazy, and will screw over anyone for a buck, and a land where religious zealots run amok.
Again with the generalizations. Are you American? Are you on Slashdot, home of all gadget and technology-related discussion? I really can't believe you fail to see this.
You really need to get out some.
Call me a "troll" and you could wiggle out of a real discussion just as well. Or a zealot, or some other nonsense.
"creating new things" is certainly no worthy goal for society. only slightly more admirable than "screwing people out of their money."
and you are dead wrong about realty. there is an enormous amount of information that has to be learned, as well as a standard test that must be passed (USA). why would they even be touching the locks on a house that they are just selling? it's not their job to do such silly things. that's akin to a programmer knowing how to replace the CRT tube in their monitor.
there is more to life than technology. I feel the US is so completely entrenched in technology for technology's sake that we are doomed. Life itself has become a commodity in service of new technology. Ask anyone today if they would sacrifice a (anonymous) human life for some grand new technology. The answer will be a definite "yes."
nonsense. Why can't Gordon just leave? As much walking as he does, you'd think that facility is larger than Rhode Island. How convenient that there are no doors to the outside. Been there, done that. It's called "Doom". Play it some time.
You've obviously never played a game with a real story. Again, half-life is not a story. It's a scripted Doom. There are no true characters. You have the anonymous Gordon, identical Barneys, and some completely off-the-wall guy at the end that is never once explained. You just have a hard-on for him and want to follow him for no reason. You can remove just about any "scene" from the game and then entire thing will still make as little sense as it does WITH the scene. Try it. Remove one of the many annoying McGuyver "i must turn the power generator back on" scenes. Or the ninja fighting. Or any of a hundred other "scenes" that have nothing to do with storytelling.
Let me get this right.. Gordon can launch a space rocket, bring down a military transport plane, bring down a military chopper, take out an entire army, but can't avoid it all by walking back the way he came before all this shit started?! And then your suspension of disbelief is crushed by game intermissions? Wow. What you really mean is your adrenaline kicks in during the action and then intermission occurs when you're still going strong like a porn star on his first take. Nothing to do with the story.
I suggest you step away from the computer if your sense of belief is that easily manipulated.
The first half-life didn't have a story. Where do people get this nonsense from? It had about as much story as the first Doom or Wolf3d. Random identical "characters" talking does not a story make. Barney #243 gets eaten by a grue! Can't you just feel the tension? Oh the drama!
I don't have TIME to learn a completely different interface.
Sounds like a personal problem. I really don't care about the need to compete with Photoshop, and I don't think too many of the GIMP developers do either. It is their personal time they are using.
MDI is a problem because X11 doesn't have such support. You might see MDI in something like KDE, etc. but it is emulated. In other words, the window manager has no control over it. KDE gets away with it because it is integrated with Qt and what not, GIMP and GTK+ predate KDE and GNOME by a *long* shot. Think twm and fvwm window managers. This is the period of time that GIMP was created. Emulated MDI is even worse than true, Windows-style, MDI. Let's not forget what MDI was designed (badly) to do: remove clutter. Guess what? Grab WindowMaker, create a new workspace and place GIMP in it. Tenfold better than any MDI system. A single keypress can hide all the GIMP windows by moving to a different workspace.
You do realize that asking for the MDI "option" basically entails redesigning the *entire* program, don't you?
That sort of arrogance is totally offputting, not to mention that it demonstrates a complete and utter lack of understanding about the economic constraints
And you're demanding that people who are working on GIMP in their *own* time learn about economic constraints and to "fix" their "broken" program? Get back to me when you understand what arrogance is, buddy.
I use sodipodi. It's actual a decent and quite capable tool. Tigert uses (or has) GIMP, but when he started it was much much less capable than it is today. Think about that.
Larry Ewing, the designer of the Linux pengiun, used GIMP 0.54, which is about where Sodipodi is compared to something like Adobe Illustrator today.
Sodipodi complements GIMP *greatly*. It's a joy to use both together, since GIMP vector tools aren't that useful for actual drawing purposes and can be tedious.
Idealism is striving for an ideal. It is that simple, really. At some point you will realize that "good enough" is all you will ever achieve and that idealism is best left to your favorite deity. Any other "feeling" or "common sense" (which it's not) you have indicates that you're not an idealist or perfectionist to begin with. You only care if something is "good enough."
There is no room in business for either idealism or perfectionism. Both lead to arrogance and dictatorship-like organizations.
Of course, you seem to be bending or inferring a different notion, that is completely different from any known and accepted definition of either word all to put in your own two cents. Or perhaps you are really an idealist who is strugging with the notion that there actually is no ideal to be had at the end of the day and that everything you believe in is turning into a false hope; a mirage.
In any case, idealism and perfectionism are not the same as having standards. The latter I can empathize with; the former, there is no use for.
Continue with that attitude. I guarantee you won't enjoy life one bit more.
I tire of your emotional hand-waving. I'm only going to say one more thing: you are the change you want to see in the world. You need to learn that you control your position in life. Not some arrogant boss who hates his job just as much as you seem to hate yours.
Education is worthless itself. You have to put it to use. Maybe you're bitter that you have some fancy doctorate degree or something and it's not helping you obtain a steady career. There is no "social agreement" and you are incredibly ignorant of the way this society works. There are no hand-outs.
The thing that makes the US a great place to live is the one thing you are complaining about: freedom. Not everyone is going to please everyone else.
Advertising is crucial. Selling products is crucial. Welcome to capitalism.
I think you should learn a little about this free market we have going. Not everyone who holds an MBA or enjoys business is out to get you. They only get ahead of you because you're too ignorant to realize how they do it and YOU LET THEM. Or you're so brainwashed into thinking business is a "necessary evil" that you wish to take no part in your own future. The only involvment you want to have with a business is when you pick up your paycheck.
You think it's bad that EA hires fresh-faced grads eager to become slaves? I don't. If people are willing to become slaves then they deserve all that comes their way. Again, there is no "right" granted to you that guarantees your satisfaction (stable high-paying job) in life.
The Declaration of Independence says "the pursuit of Happiness" for a reason. I would never want my life planned from birth as many of you seem to want. Go to school, go to college, and get a stable high-paying job. Where is the pursuit in that? That arrangement has never been a guarantee; nor should it.
There are no guarantees in life, and especially not in a specific job market in a specific country (probably doing a specific job in a specific niche area too). The lack of a job or getting laid-off is a wake-up call.
Want to be a slave to economic and management forces? Work for someone. Want independence? Become an entrepreneur. It really is that simple.
The only problem I see is certain people needing a crutch in life and crying when things turn sour. You should be thankful you had a steady hand-holding position for so long. Many people are not that fortunate.
The cost of a computer and software is miniscule when doing things at a professional level. If the software available already for Linux/Windows isn't good enough, then you're probably a professional and can afford to get the right tool for the right job.
People used to purchase expensive SGI machines for rendering. Film/video editors purchase expensive Avid machines, and lately they have been purchasing *cheap* Macs with Final Cut Pro. $3000-4000 Mac vs. a $10,000+ Avid? Whatever will get the job done.
It's a shame that Linux and even Windows have poor support in certain areas, but it's completely the fault of the API layer. Anyone serious about developing professional-level applications using GNOME API with ALSA/Jack is insane.
I'm not here to convince you, son. I'm anti-ignorance, and you seem to be full of it. The easiest way to discredit someone is to call them a troll, a liar, etc. It's a well-known tactic of people who are too pathetic to admit they don't have a clue and lost the argument. My work here is done.
DoS *IS* a security problem. And that is not the only security problem that occurs with pointer bugs which are not related to character arrays. The "inept" part in your username is appropriate. Come back when you have mastered C and know more about security than the garbage you've heard around trashdot. It is quite apparent you are simply regurgitating what you have read or heard somewhere. Not only is "overwrite that pointer" technically incorrect, it does not say a thing about the security problem that occurs when one "overwrites that pointer".
"A type of string" Come the fuck on! You don't even KNOW the problem. It's called a "pointer", and it allows one to point to arbitrary places in memory, and they most certainly are not limited to usage with character arrays (strings). Maybe you should actually learn the language before trying to defend it's *flaws*. Hint: the pointer problem is not just a buffer overflow problem, nearly *every* memory issue, *every* bug, is someone fucking up with a pointer. Each time a program crashes, it was likely the fault of a stray pointer.
Jesus H. Christ. Slashdot has dropped a few notches since I last visited.
Your Implied Conclusion
They say assumptions make an ass out of you and me, but I'm definately not sharing the blame for your stupidity.
I think you missed the point. Or, rather, you missed what I was replying to. Theo was talking about "low-level programmer errors." Buffer overflows, nothing more. That issue *is* a programming language one, specifically a C/C++ one.
Remember the URL path hacks
Unix had this same issue, in the form of a CGI that would allow a user to grab/etc/passwd effortlessly. Therefore, Unix is not much different from other systems in terms of security.
Almost all the security problems that happen in software, like probably 95 percent of them, are low-level programmer errors
Quite meaningless figure, and not exactly low-level. They just happen to be part of the (implicit) C/C++ design. Lisp, Java, Haskell, ML, etc. do not have these problems. Blame the old Unix/C system design, but don't blame countless programmers who do, infact, know better but often just fsck things up by no fault of their own. Theo is awfully quick at placing the blame on programmers when it's a Unix security problem, but can easily turn around and place the blame on MS for *their* programmer errors. Why not just fess up? C/C++ are insecure. Systems designed with those are insecure. Both Unix and MS share equal blame in propagating this horribly flawed system.
Microsoft's security problems have to do with its Web client which probably has 300 to 500 vulnerabilities in it
Riiiight. I'm no MS supporter for you fanboys with mod points out there, but this is speculative bullshit.
The *only* difference between MS and Unix in terms of security is that with every little security issue, MS is under the spotlight instantly. Theo was still wearing diapers when most of the major Unix security issues were dealt with, and Slashdot did not exist.
Just because OSS brings you good things such as free software (both cost and openness) does not mean it is better in *all* cases. The arguments for OSS often sound like some 3rd grader arguing why his comic book hero is better than another's.
I still stand by this because....
What is relevant is the quality and security matters for a given amount of time and effort expended. OSS seems to come out a clear winner
This is a completely meaningless statement. Does my mention of sendmail, bind, and here.. I'll give you another: *HURD* say nothing about the shitty quality OSS is capable of? I'd say considerable effort and time has been spent on all of those. THERE IS NO CORRELATION. Get over it, you're just another fanboy with his blinders on.
Even when the manpages are quite old, it's not like they keep changing stuff just to be changing stuff.
Ha! I've never seen such a silly, nonargument posed as an argument before. People change stuff precisely *because* they want it changed.
Sendmail and bind were (and still are to many people) important. No correlation to quality there. Free software that is more important to me is just barely (if even!) maintained. I could care less about Apache, Python, Perl, etc.
Just because OSS brings you good things such as free software (both cost and openness) does not mean it is better in *all* cases. The arguments for OSS often sound like some 3rd grader arguing why his comic book hero is better than another's.
Many programmers just plain *suck*, yet they crank out the free software just as well as Linus Torvalds. One could even make the argument around this that proprietary tends to work *better* because there is a filter. Not everyone who can crank out things in Java can get a job (though we all know that's not entirely true, but more than a few organizations have some sort of respectable quality control).
Emphasis on *usually*. And if you weren't aware, almost all manpages are entirely out of date. *Years* out of date, even. Could you even imagine trying to maintain the bash man page? That's an entire job itself.
There is horrid source code out there, with no commenting or documentation. Most people point to Linux or Apache or some such for examples of where OSS succeeds, yet avoid looking at all the countless other OSS that has far fewer eyeballs looking over the source code.
It just does not work generalizing OSS as better than proprietary when it comes to quality or security matters.
Slashdot Mirror
free software is merely open, not free as in free beer. Why do people still confuse this in 2004?
There is nothing to worry about. If these people run into enough money to buy a real PC, and if they want such a thing, they can acquire it. Therefore, even with some magical "lock-in," there is no money to be made.
You people make me sick with all this anti-MS lock-in propaganda. I haven't used an MS product since 1996. You never had a gun to your head forcing to use their crap. Why must people dramatize it to that level? Seriously, grow up kids. Even if there was a government mandate requiring all to use MS products, it would be the very least of my worries today.
"creating new things" is certainly no worthy goal for society. only slightly more admirable than "screwing people out of their money."
and you are dead wrong about realty. there is an enormous amount of information that has to be learned, as well as a standard test that must be passed (USA). why would they even be touching the locks on a house that they are just selling? it's not their job to do such silly things. that's akin to a programmer knowing how to replace the CRT tube in their monitor.
there is more to life than technology. I feel the US is so completely entrenched in technology for technology's sake that we are doomed. Life itself has become a commodity in service of new technology. Ask anyone today if they would sacrifice a (anonymous) human life for some grand new technology. The answer will be a definite "yes."
really. and it's about time this stupid meme died. it's all too easy to toss it about for dramatic effect when attention whoring.
nonsense. Why can't Gordon just leave? As much walking as he does, you'd think that facility is larger than Rhode Island. How convenient that there are no doors to the outside. Been there, done that. It's called "Doom". Play it some time.
You've obviously never played a game with a real story. Again, half-life is not a story. It's a scripted Doom. There are no true characters. You have the anonymous Gordon, identical Barneys, and some completely off-the-wall guy at the end that is never once explained. You just have a hard-on for him and want to follow him for no reason. You can remove just about any "scene" from the game and then entire thing will still make as little sense as it does WITH the scene. Try it. Remove one of the many annoying McGuyver "i must turn the power generator back on" scenes. Or the ninja fighting. Or any of a hundred other "scenes" that have nothing to do with storytelling.
Let me get this right.. Gordon can launch a space rocket, bring down a military transport plane, bring down a military chopper, take out an entire army, but can't avoid it all by walking back the way he came before all this shit started?! And then your suspension of disbelief is crushed by game intermissions? Wow. What you really mean is your adrenaline kicks in during the action and then intermission occurs when you're still going strong like a porn star on his first take. Nothing to do with the story.
I suggest you step away from the computer if your sense of belief is that easily manipulated.
The first half-life didn't have a story. Where do people get this nonsense from? It had about as much story as the first Doom or Wolf3d. Random identical "characters" talking does not a story make. Barney #243 gets eaten by a grue! Can't you just feel the tension? Oh the drama!
MDI is a problem because X11 doesn't have such support. You might see MDI in something like KDE, etc. but it is emulated. In other words, the window manager has no control over it. KDE gets away with it because it is integrated with Qt and what not, GIMP and GTK+ predate KDE and GNOME by a *long* shot. Think twm and fvwm window managers. This is the period of time that GIMP was created. Emulated MDI is even worse than true, Windows-style, MDI. Let's not forget what MDI was designed (badly) to do: remove clutter. Guess what? Grab WindowMaker, create a new workspace and place GIMP in it. Tenfold better than any MDI system. A single keypress can hide all the GIMP windows by moving to a different workspace.
You do realize that asking for the MDI "option" basically entails redesigning the *entire* program, don't you?
And you're demanding that people who are working on GIMP in their *own* time learn about economic constraints and to "fix" their "broken" program? Get back to me when you understand what arrogance is, buddy.
I use sodipodi. It's actual a decent and quite capable tool. Tigert uses (or has) GIMP, but when he started it was much much less capable than it is today. Think about that.
Larry Ewing, the designer of the Linux pengiun, used GIMP 0.54, which is about where Sodipodi is compared to something like Adobe Illustrator today.
GIMP 0.54 and pengiun
Sodipodi complements GIMP *greatly*. It's a joy to use both together, since GIMP vector tools aren't that useful for actual drawing purposes and can be tedious.
Idealism is striving for an ideal. It is that simple, really. At some point you will realize that "good enough" is all you will ever achieve and that idealism is best left to your favorite deity. Any other "feeling" or "common sense" (which it's not) you have indicates that you're not an idealist or perfectionist to begin with. You only care if something is "good enough."
There is no room in business for either idealism or perfectionism. Both lead to arrogance and dictatorship-like organizations.
Of course, you seem to be bending or inferring a different notion, that is completely different from any known and accepted definition of either word all to put in your own two cents. Or perhaps you are really an idealist who is strugging with the notion that there actually is no ideal to be had at the end of the day and that everything you believe in is turning into a false hope; a mirage.
In any case, idealism and perfectionism are not the same as having standards. The latter I can empathize with; the former, there is no use for.
Continue with that attitude. I guarantee you won't enjoy life one bit more.
I tire of your emotional hand-waving. I'm only going to say one more thing: you are the change you want to see in the world. You need to learn that you control your position in life. Not some arrogant boss who hates his job just as much as you seem to hate yours.
Education is worthless itself. You have to put it to use. Maybe you're bitter that you have some fancy doctorate degree or something and it's not helping you obtain a steady career. There is no "social agreement" and you are incredibly ignorant of the way this society works. There are no hand-outs.
The thing that makes the US a great place to live is the one thing you are complaining about: freedom. Not everyone is going to please everyone else.
Advertising is crucial. Selling products is crucial. Welcome to capitalism.
I think you should learn a little about this free market we have going. Not everyone who holds an MBA or enjoys business is out to get you. They only get ahead of you because you're too ignorant to realize how they do it and YOU LET THEM. Or you're so brainwashed into thinking business is a "necessary evil" that you wish to take no part in your own future. The only involvment you want to have with a business is when you pick up your paycheck.
You think it's bad that EA hires fresh-faced grads eager to become slaves? I don't. If people are willing to become slaves then they deserve all that comes their way. Again, there is no "right" granted to you that guarantees your satisfaction (stable high-paying job) in life.
The Declaration of Independence says "the pursuit of Happiness" for a reason. I would never want my life planned from birth as many of you seem to want. Go to school, go to college, and get a stable high-paying job. Where is the pursuit in that? That arrangement has never been a guarantee; nor should it.
petty.
Perfectionism and idealism does more harm than good. You're only hurting yourself with that attitude.
There are no guarantees in life, and especially not in a specific job market in a specific country (probably doing a specific job in a specific niche area too). The lack of a job or getting laid-off is a wake-up call.
Want to be a slave to economic and management forces? Work for someone. Want independence? Become an entrepreneur. It really is that simple.
The only problem I see is certain people needing a crutch in life and crying when things turn sour. You should be thankful you had a steady hand-holding position for so long. Many people are not that fortunate.
The cost of a computer and software is miniscule when doing things at a professional level. If the software available already for Linux/Windows isn't good enough, then you're probably a professional and can afford to get the right tool for the right job.
People used to purchase expensive SGI machines for rendering. Film/video editors purchase expensive Avid machines, and lately they have been purchasing *cheap* Macs with Final Cut Pro. $3000-4000 Mac vs. a $10,000+ Avid? Whatever will get the job done.
It's a shame that Linux and even Windows have poor support in certain areas, but it's completely the fault of the API layer. Anyone serious about developing professional-level applications using GNOME API with ALSA/Jack is insane.
I never mentioned the word "liberal" you stupid piece of shit troll. I expect a reply in another 4 days. Gotta save face..
I'm not here to convince you, son. I'm anti-ignorance, and you seem to be full of it. The easiest way to discredit someone is to call them a troll, a liar, etc. It's a well-known tactic of people who are too pathetic to admit they don't have a clue and lost the argument. My work here is done.
DoS *IS* a security problem. And that is not the only security problem that occurs with pointer bugs which are not related to character arrays. The "inept" part in your username is appropriate. Come back when you have mastered C and know more about security than the garbage you've heard around trashdot. It is quite apparent you are simply regurgitating what you have read or heard somewhere. Not only is "overwrite that pointer" technically incorrect, it does not say a thing about the security problem that occurs when one "overwrites that pointer".
"A type of string" Come the fuck on! You don't even KNOW the problem. It's called a "pointer", and it allows one to point to arbitrary places in memory, and they most certainly are not limited to usage with character arrays (strings). Maybe you should actually learn the language before trying to defend it's *flaws*. Hint: the pointer problem is not just a buffer overflow problem, nearly *every* memory issue, *every* bug, is someone fucking up with a pointer. Each time a program crashes, it was likely the fault of a stray pointer. Jesus H. Christ. Slashdot has dropped a few notches since I last visited. They say assumptions make an ass out of you and me, but I'm definately not sharing the blame for your stupidity.
The *only* difference between MS and Unix in terms of security is that with every little security issue, MS is under the spotlight instantly. Theo was still wearing diapers when most of the major Unix security issues were dealt with, and Slashdot did not exist.
Who's the appointed judge of importance?
Sendmail and bind were (and still are to many people) important. No correlation to quality there. Free software that is more important to me is just barely (if even!) maintained. I could care less about Apache, Python, Perl, etc.
Just because OSS brings you good things such as free software (both cost and openness) does not mean it is better in *all* cases. The arguments for OSS often sound like some 3rd grader arguing why his comic book hero is better than another's.
Many programmers just plain *suck*, yet they crank out the free software just as well as Linus Torvalds. One could even make the argument around this that proprietary tends to work *better* because there is a filter. Not everyone who can crank out things in Java can get a job (though we all know that's not entirely true, but more than a few organizations have some sort of respectable quality control).
Emphasis on *usually*. And if you weren't aware, almost all manpages are entirely out of date. *Years* out of date, even. Could you even imagine trying to maintain the bash man page? That's an entire job itself.
There is horrid source code out there, with no commenting or documentation. Most people point to Linux or Apache or some such for examples of where OSS succeeds, yet avoid looking at all the countless other OSS that has far fewer eyeballs looking over the source code.
It just does not work generalizing OSS as better than proprietary when it comes to quality or security matters.