Most people in India can't read anything which can be written in ASCII. This is not true in Peru (Spanish) or AFAIK any of your other examples. Right now, software is generally bad at handling text which is not ASCII-ish (i.e. "Romaniform", so Greek and Russian are OK). The first Operating System to have good support for a non-romaniform language will be a big step in the history of computers, in my opinion. If it's going to be a Free operating system then it's even bigger news in this community. So I think the story is interesting, and relevant.
You can use the perl plugin for xmms to control it from the command line. Alternatively, you could get Freeamp, which is GPL and has a command-line interface (as well as a graphical one).
He specifically says he is a "deltic" and asks you to forgive the spelling. Some people just *can't* spell, it's no good complaining to them if there's nothing they can do about it. Or did you just not read the sig?
The manuals for J++ don't make it clear that J++ is not Java. (They are cleverly worded). As a result, people will test java programs with J++, expecting them to work on any Java JVM, and inadvertantly they get their codebase locked into using J++.
This doesn't seem to have been the relevant point in the court ruling, but it's the reason *I* think J++ "pollutes" Java.
There is more software available for dos than for any other OS (except windows 95). Many businesses rely on legacy apps which are only available for dos. 90% of desktop computers around today run on a dos kernel of some sort (this includes windows 95).
Note that freedos is not a dos emulator, but a free implementation of dos. dosemu is the dos emulator.
... it will work with most other versions of dos, including DRDOS 7.x, MSDOS 6.x and (i believe) Windows 95 DOS. Of course, these aren't free software. freedos is a bit different in design from msdos/drdos, for example it has a \bin directory which contains dos programs, and other unix-like directories. Also, you don't need dosemu to use freedos! It might seem obvious, but if you have an old 386 with msdos 3.3, and you want to be able to have partitions > 32 mb, then freedos could be a good bet. (For the price of msdos you could buy a new (second-hand) computer).
>[...] debian's method where you have no clue what's happening...
I've never found that to be a problem. Either you set your system to track "stable", in which case you get a major upgrade about once a year, or you set it to track "unstable" or "frozen", in which case everything updates very often but might be broken once in a while.
If they make the proposed changes to de-emphasise the importance of "releases", then it'll be more like FreeBSD's method.
But imagine if your hypothetical junkie served a prison sentence, then was released, but was not allowed to go into any shops. It's the same kind of thing. There are plenty of computers (e.g. wristwatch, or non-networked PC with no floppy drive, only a CDROM) from which Kevin could do no harm. This isn't about protecting the public, this is about making life unlivable for Kevin. If you think he should be punished more, then maybe he should have a longer prison sentence. But banning him from "using computers" stops him from getting on with his life in a harmless manner, which is what being "free" is all about.
Hard to know much about closed-source NT!
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Mr Dillon knows more about FreeBSD than anyone outside Microsoft can know about NT, because he has the source. If NT reacts to things in stupid ways, Mr Dillon *can't* show you the bit of source code where the mistake/oversight was programmed in. I think he was probably talking more about fundamental design flaws, rather than bugs in, say, TCP/IP, which anyone could make.
Kernel-mode GUI is single-user only.
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NT has a single-user, kernel mode GUI. Since nearly everything you can do in NT needs the GUI, that means only one person can use an NT machine at once. People writing apps today may assume only one person is using the computer at once. So any future multi-user version of Windows may have severe difficulties running today's apps.
Lower-case / capital letters for filenames
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NT is hopeless at handling filenames case-sensitively. You can create a file called HELLO.TXT and when looking at a directory^H^H^H^H folder listing, the filename will be printed in capitals. Now try creating a file called hello.txt, or Hello.TXT, or HeLlO.TxT. It won't let you. Even though it remembers that the original filename was in capitals, it thinks the new filename is the same.
This can be problematic if you want to copy files from a unix machine, e.g. mirroring a web page, where there may be two different files called CONTENT.html and content.html, because one of them will get overwritten.
Corel probably can't afford to completely rewrite their office suite, they're using Wine to avoid binning all their old code. And since wine is x86 specific, that means they can only deliver x86 apps. (A native x86 FreeBSD version, on the other hand, would probably be quite straightforward for them to produce. But FreeBSD can run linux binaries, so they probably won't bother)
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France was quite rich when I last checked. (India is not, and never has been, communist)
Most people in India can't read anything which can be written in ASCII. This is not true in Peru (Spanish) or AFAIK any of your other examples. Right now, software is generally bad at handling text which is not ASCII-ish (i.e. "Romaniform", so Greek and Russian are OK). The first Operating System to have good support for a non-romaniform language will be a big step in the history of computers, in my opinion. If it's going to be a Free operating system then it's even bigger news in this community. So I think the story is interesting, and relevant.
... but even if it's not, then picking somebody up about a single word is harsh.
... are you saying it's harder to translate stuff into Indian languages than out of German? Or that Linux has more English in it than German?
You can use the perl plugin for xmms to control it from the command line. Alternatively, you could get Freeamp, which is GPL and has a command-line interface (as well as a graphical one).
If you use freeamp, the syntax is:
freeamp -ui freeampcmd blah.mp3
> If you are black, female or jewish, look back to your ancestors
I think even males usually have some female ancestors.
It's quite a clever idea, makes the UI standard across all platforms. Of course, the drawback is that you lose your GTK themes.
He specifically says he is a "deltic" and asks you to forgive the spelling. Some people just *can't* spell, it's no good complaining to them if there's nothing they can do about it. Or did you just not read the sig?
... is a book which avoids using the letter "e" throughout. Dunno if it has "8" in it, but I imagine it does have adjectives.
I think the original poster was being sarcastic, and mocking the many people who really have been saying things like that.
The manuals for J++ don't make it clear that J++ is not Java. (They are cleverly worded). As a result, people will test java programs with J++, expecting them to work on any Java JVM, and inadvertantly they get their codebase locked into using J++.
This doesn't seem to have been the relevant point in the court ruling, but it's the reason *I* think J++ "pollutes" Java.
There is more software available for dos than for any other OS (except windows 95). Many businesses rely on legacy apps which are only available for dos. 90% of desktop computers around today run on a dos kernel of some sort (this includes windows 95).
Note that freedos is not a dos emulator, but a free implementation of dos. dosemu is the dos emulator.
... it will work with most other versions of dos, including DRDOS 7.x, MSDOS 6.x and (i believe) Windows 95 DOS. Of course, these aren't free software. freedos is a bit different in design from msdos/drdos, for example it has a \bin directory which contains dos programs, and other unix-like directories. Also, you don't need dosemu to use freedos! It might seem obvious, but if you have an old 386 with msdos 3.3, and you want to be able to have partitions > 32 mb, then freedos could be a good bet. (For the price of msdos you could buy a new (second-hand) computer).
>[...] debian's method where you have no clue what's happening ...
I've never found that to be a problem. Either you set your system to track "stable", in which case you get a major upgrade about once a year, or you set it to track "unstable" or "frozen", in which case everything updates very often but might be broken once in a while.
If they make the proposed changes to de-emphasise the importance of "releases", then it'll be more like FreeBSD's method.
... then search for "Score:3", or just use page down.
I think it's fairly clear that Kevin got a ridiculously harsh sentence, in a country where murderers sometimes get less.
If you walk around my house without nicking/damaging anything, then you should not be called a thief.
But imagine if your hypothetical junkie served a prison sentence, then was released, but was not allowed to go into any shops. It's the same kind of thing. There are plenty of computers (e.g. wristwatch, or non-networked PC with no floppy drive, only a CDROM) from which Kevin could do no harm. This isn't about protecting the public, this is about making life unlivable for Kevin. If you think he should be punished more, then maybe he should have a longer prison sentence. But banning him from "using computers" stops him from getting on with his life in a harmless manner, which is what being "free" is all about.
Mr Dillon knows more about FreeBSD than anyone outside Microsoft can know about NT, because he has the source. If NT reacts to things in stupid ways, Mr Dillon *can't* show you the bit of source code where the mistake/oversight was programmed in. I think he was probably talking more about fundamental design flaws, rather than bugs in, say, TCP/IP, which anyone could make.
NT has a single-user, kernel mode GUI. Since nearly everything you can do in NT needs the GUI, that means only one person can use an NT machine at once. People writing apps today may assume only one person is using the computer at once. So any future multi-user version of Windows may have severe difficulties running today's apps.
NT is hopeless at handling filenames case-sensitively. You can create a file called HELLO.TXT and when looking at a directory^H^H^H^H folder listing, the filename will be printed in capitals. Now try creating a file called hello.txt, or Hello.TXT, or HeLlO.TxT. It won't let you. Even though it remembers that the original filename was in capitals, it thinks the new filename is the same.
This can be problematic if you want to copy files from a unix machine, e.g. mirroring a web page, where there may be two different files called CONTENT.html and content.html, because one of them will get overwritten.
Corel probably can't afford to completely rewrite their office suite, they're using Wine to avoid binning all their old code. And since wine is x86 specific, that means they can only deliver x86 apps. (A native x86 FreeBSD version, on the other hand, would probably be quite straightforward for them to produce. But FreeBSD can run linux binaries, so they probably won't bother)
Ok, so it still loads slow, but that's probably debugging stuff which is to be expected in alpha stuff.
>... Jeb ... or whatever his name is ... looks like Tux run over with a steam roller
Heh, lol. Duke it is. Ever noticed that he also looks just like HP's "Doctor Deskjet"?
dive