Edison ripped off many of his ideas from the people who worked for or with him, including AC from Tesla, who died penniless because he did not believe in restricting the application of his ideas.
You survive a collision and kill everybody in the other car. Congratulations. Oh yeah, watch out not to blow up when somebody runs into you from behind.
I know early versions of DOS played around with file extensions but if you are talking about batch files then I don't think that's on the same level. Installing interrupt vectors, relocating memory, altering pointers...all very complicated and confusing, at least to me. Perhaps it was because the original design of the x86 was so brain damaged to begin with.
I agree wholeheartedly. And I'd mod you up if I ever got moderation points when I fscking wanted them.
(rant) Taco: Can't we move to a moderation system where people accumulate moderation points and can use them WHENEVER they want. Just put a cap on it so people who go on vacation don't come back to 1000 moderation points or something. I NEVER get moderation points when I want them, and only get them when there is nothing really of interest to me, or just flames or hot grits. (/rant)
"Why must Open-Source necessarily equal free? Why does Open-Source necessarily equal best?"
Because that's what Open-Source advocates advocate. That's as opposed to Free Software which claims only to be Free, and only ethically best. I think the claim is valid that Open-Source is subtley distorting the spirit of Free-Software. It results in people asking questions like these. It's my impression anyway that Open-Source tries to sell itself as a panacea.
Check out this link I found from Kuro5hin.org to the Clean functional language: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/index.html Intro to Clean language: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/About_Clean/tutorial/t utorial.html I think their 2D platform games section shows that Clean can be used for practical applications, and that functional programming is not just a research toy. They also seem to have some nice IO library. Taken from the intro to Clean, thes functional implementation of common mathematical functions just seem SO elegant: Exponentiation: power:: Int Int -> Int power x 0 = 1 power x n = x * power x (n-1) Factorial: fac:: Int -> Int fac 0 = 1 fac n = n * fac (n-1) Maximum: maximum:: Int Int -> Int maximum n m | n=m = n From a quick scan of it, Clean looks VERY cool.
Or maybe they just thought that they can make megabucks on the action figures and merchandise. Never underestimate greed as the main motivating factor. I'm waiting for the collectible X-Men card game to come out (probably already has).
I'd hazard Apache as a good example. Apache is an EXCELLENT rock solid server, whose developers are working fast and hard to integrate and support new technologies. But there really isn't anything revolutionary about Apache (well, there doesn't really need to be anything innovative about it). OS is GREAT at building the best implementations of current technologies. But I think it is the "greedy" cathedral-goers that are the cause of a lot of "innovation" (read: creating-stuff-the-customer-would-like-for-money).
In my opinion there is room for both cathedrals and bazaars and they complement each other.
Usually shield laws are state laws I believe. Do we have a federal law on shielding? Do we have international law on shielding? I think that is how they are "different". As with everything internet, *which* laws do we use, and *where* do laws apply?
Did anyone catch the Future of Digital Music hearing on CSPAN on Saturday? It was excellent. I was just flipping through, and there on CSPAN was some kid, last name Kan, who was listed under Gnutella! I *had* to see what this was about. Actually it was a great hearing. I will be writing Senators Schumer, Leahy and Hatch thanking them for keeping an open mind. They were surprisingly clueful!! The funniest part was when Hatch demanded the RIAA shill to answer the question whether it was legal or not to copy a cd to tape for his wife. She fumbled and backtracked. There was also a joke about the Senate server going down because of people downloading Schumer's voting record. I think their cluefulness should be rewarded with at least a thank you letter of recognition. I will probably post that letter somewhere on Slashdot when I finish it.
I am constantly surprised at how willing people are to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on products that myself and a few others could probably build to suit in a week, and on conferences for information I've know for six months.
My respect for a company is inversely proportional to the number of buzzwords it uses in its presentations and glossyware.
You say they're hacks, I say they're a more intuitive way of implementing a facet of OO. Attributes or properties have OO grounding. An object has some data and some actions that can be performed upon it...but it also has some attributes that can be queried. Properties are a nice way to expose/publish those attributes without clunky getters and setters.
Sure, they are consistent with themselves. Do they use the same key combinations? Does drag and drop and cutting and pasting work the same? Does window manipulation work the same? I grant you that KDE and GNOME are both great steps. I just hope we don't have too many other great steps which splinter into an array of self-consistent but inconsistent-with-each-other window managers/GUIs.
"But that's irrelevant, because X is not a GUI, so badly designed GUIs are not really X's fault."
'My car won't go because it has badly designed blocks for wheels.' 'Well that's irrelevant because blocks are not wheels, so it is really not the blocks' fault.'
The point is that whatever X is, it has enabled and maintained inconsistency in the GUI. *Because* X doesn't have any GUI semantics itself, everything is open and everything can have its own idiosynchratic semantics.
I really wish something like Berlin would become a viable alternate. X just seems like so much of a hog for something that is so fundamental and so elegantly done in other systesm.
If you are posting on Slashdot you are probably of a calibre of tech savvy above the "normal" user.
I'm not saying that X is unlearnable or that it should conform to the lowest common denominator. But when people push Linux/XWindows as being not only on par with other desktop systems, but superior, they can't be startled when they realize there are actually users who have a preconception of a GUI and don't want to bend backwards trying to relearn everything.
Re:A lovely summary of all that's wrong with X
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 2
Fortunately that behavior is very amenable to the normal behavior of an average user. So it's not really much of a stretch to ask a normal user to do something normal in windows or the mac. However, in "serious" operating systems the behavior is optimized for serious people who know what they are doing and are not afraid to spend lots of time digging through manuals. That is obviously not the typical user.
Which they should! If we tax something, that is saying that you are reaping a reward from this country that you should pay back to it. Corporations reap TONS of rewards from this country. They should be taxed. And if they do evil things, they should be taxed even more, or dismantled.
And guess who owns the patents for these hybrid and more effecient fuels? You guessed it, the automobile and oil industries. And their sitting their rich fat asses on them. Now THAT is an abuse of the patent system.
"If someone were to build disposable cars, designed to last 3-4 years, using this ultra-efficient technology, you could throw away a good percentage of the gas-guzzlers."
We already have disposable cars. Do you think the automobile industry wants our cars to last longer? Hell no. And anyway, say we did have more disposable cars. How the hell would throwing away more cars possibly help the environment? Sure, a lot of a car can be recycled, but there is still a lot of junk that will just end up in a land fill.
"I can't blame the markets for pandering to demand. They're there to make money, not save the world. If most people want to turn precious reserves into pollutants, for no good reason, then the markets will respond and provide the means to do so."
Markets and demand are intimately tied. In the 70s we thought we could only buy gigantic boat-sized cars that got 10 mph and gruesomely killed passengers in any sort of serious accident. It took people doing some muckraking and bringing this to the press and really fighting government to get anything changed in the first place (_Unsafe at Any Speed_, Raph Nader).
So, no, I can't say I don't blame the markets. The markets spew toxic chemicals into the air and poison the ecology in various ways, and exploit third world workers. So YES, I blame the markets. I blame Americans for being all to willfully ignorant and greedy. I blame the money that pays the media and government to shut up.
"And we are fed up with them paying their employees and paying those taxes. Pesky jerks."
Corporations pay a disproportionately SMALL amount of taxes. In fact, in many cases, the government just gives them big "gifts" of our tax dollars.
"Find a solution that will not result in hundreds of thousands of people being laid off. Find a way that will not result in the economies of several countries being tossed down the toilet which will further result in war, unrest and more people suffering not to mention economic problems for the rest of the world."
I.e., maintain the status quo? Don't rock the boat? If we were talking about sweatshop labor would you be saying "Don't do something that would result in laying off all those employees! They will lose their jobs and income!". There has been nearly ZERO innovation in the combustion engine and automobile industry since their existence. Things like seatbelts and airbags have been around since the 50s and even 20s. The combustion engine is virtually unchanged. There is no reason to subsidize this status quo. Let cleaner options compete. All those displaced people will find new jobs in the new markets that are opened.
"Find a solution that when implemented, will be as cost affective as what it replaced. For instance, don't force everyone to buy a new car which costs two and a half times more than a gasoline powered device and then force them to use a fuel that costs several dollars a gallon and have that same device and fuel get the same mileage as their previous gasoline-powered device."
The only reason cars are as affordable as they are is because we haven't sin taxed the oil and automobile companies for their pollution record. Had we been *correctly* doing this, cleaner options would be just as economic or more. We've spent a lot of money propping up these industries which have gone on to exploit economies of scale to give us inefficient crap for cheap. Efficiency should be cheaper, not more expensive.
Why? Because big corporations run our government. Nuff said.
You think we really wouldn't be all driving clean vehicles that much better mileage, or better yet, have better public transportation systems, and using much cleaner more powerful energy sources, if big industry didn't have politicians' hands in their pockets? Government subsidizes this bullshit instead of aggressively trying to find better energy sources.
Re:A lovely summary of all that's wrong with X
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 3
Just wanted to type in his program and hit enter (If he wanted such an easy interface, why was he using a UNIX-shell in the first place?).
Remember folks, computing is an iterative process. You make a result and you start over again. Don't expect things to come out perfect at first, because it won't!
If you don't WANT normal users to be able to immediately perform basic operations, they WHY do we evangelize *nix as the solution to all problems?! If we DON'T want Linux on the desktop, then let's stop pushing it. If we DO, then let's adapt ourselves TO the user. We can't just say "Hey, Linux is the best desktop OS on earth! But, by the way, we refuse to bend in your direction to accomodate you. You have to behave the way we say."
It's just ridiculous. New users shouldn't have to expect to have to do things over and over again, before actually seeing results. If we want them to, then let's stop preaching to *normal* computer users because that is obviously then not our audience.
The problem is that X (and unix in general) don't provide a smooth learning curve. For *normal* *users* it should be easy and intuitive to start doing basic stuff, and one should gradually be able to perform more complicated and powerful things as they learn. The problem with windows and the mac is that they have such a shallow learning curve, that there really *isn't* all that much powerful you can gradully learn to do. The problem with *nix is that the learning "curve" is actually a mile high cliff face on a plateau, which must first be entirely scaled before you can do anything, simple or complicated. It's this curve, or learning cliff, that offputs a lot of newbies. Smooth the curve. Nobody is saying DON'T allow people to do complicated things, but at least have some sort of interface so that a new user sees a facade in which they can get simple things done without having to immediately be exposed to and have to assimilate a lot of complexity.
The cliff might be useful in keeping newbies away but if you *want* to attract normal users you have to make that cliff into a decent slope.
Slashdot Mirror
Edison ripped off many of his ideas from the people who worked for or with him, including AC from Tesla, who died penniless because he did not believe in restricting the application of his ideas.
You survive a collision and kill everybody in the other car. Congratulations. Oh yeah, watch out not to blow up when somebody runs into you from behind.
Don't worry...just practice safe cybersex.
I know early versions of DOS played around with file extensions but if you are talking about batch files then I don't think that's on the same level. Installing interrupt vectors, relocating memory, altering pointers...all very complicated and confusing, at least to me. Perhaps it was because the original design of the x86 was so brain damaged to begin with.
I agree wholeheartedly. And I'd mod you up if I ever got moderation points when I fscking wanted them.
(rant)
Taco: Can't we move to a moderation system where people accumulate moderation points and can use them WHENEVER they want. Just put a cap on it so people who go on vacation don't come back to 1000 moderation points or something. I NEVER get moderation points when I want them, and only get them when there is nothing really of interest to me, or just flames or hot grits.
(/rant)
"Why must Open-Source necessarily equal free? Why does Open-Source necessarily equal best?"
Because that's what Open-Source advocates advocate. That's as opposed to Free Software which claims only to be Free, and only ethically best. I think the claim is valid that Open-Source is subtley distorting the spirit of Free-Software. It results in people asking questions like these. It's my impression anyway that Open-Source tries to sell itself as a panacea.
Check out this link I found from Kuro5hin.org to the Clean functional language: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/index.html Intro to Clean language: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/About_Clean/tutorial/t utorial.html I think their 2D platform games section shows that Clean can be used for practical applications, and that functional programming is not just a research toy. They also seem to have some nice IO library. Taken from the intro to Clean, thes functional implementation of common mathematical functions just seem SO elegant: Exponentiation: power :: Int Int -> Int power x 0 = 1 power x n = x * power x (n-1) Factorial: fac :: Int -> Int fac 0 = 1 fac n = n * fac (n-1) Maximum: maximum :: Int Int -> Int maximum n m | n=m = n From a quick scan of it, Clean looks VERY cool.
Or maybe they just thought that they can make megabucks on the action figures and merchandise. Never underestimate greed as the main motivating factor. I'm waiting for the collectible X-Men card game to come out (probably already has).
I'd hazard Apache as a good example. Apache is an EXCELLENT rock solid server, whose developers are working fast and hard to integrate and support new technologies. But there really isn't anything revolutionary about Apache (well, there doesn't really need to be anything innovative about it). OS is GREAT at building the best implementations of current technologies. But I think it is the "greedy" cathedral-goers that are the cause of a lot of "innovation" (read: creating-stuff-the-customer-would-like-for-money).
In my opinion there is room for both cathedrals and bazaars and they complement each other.
Usually shield laws are state laws I believe. Do we have a federal law on shielding? Do we have international law on shielding? I think that is how they are "different". As with everything internet, *which* laws do we use, and *where* do laws apply?
Did anyone catch the Future of Digital Music hearing on CSPAN on Saturday? It was excellent. I was just flipping through, and there on CSPAN was some kid, last name Kan, who was listed under Gnutella! I *had* to see what this was about. Actually it was a great hearing. I will be writing Senators Schumer, Leahy and Hatch thanking them for keeping an open mind. They were surprisingly clueful!! The funniest part was when Hatch demanded the RIAA shill to answer the question whether it was legal or not to copy a cd to tape for his wife. She fumbled and backtracked. There was also a joke about the Senate server going down because of people downloading Schumer's voting record. I think their cluefulness should be rewarded with at least a thank you letter of recognition. I will probably post that letter somewhere on Slashdot when I finish it.
I am constantly surprised at how willing people are to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on products that myself and a few others could probably build to suit in a week, and on conferences for information I've know for six months.
My respect for a company is inversely proportional to the number of buzzwords it uses in its presentations and glossyware.
You say they're hacks, I say they're a more intuitive way of implementing a facet of OO. Attributes or properties have OO grounding. An object has some data and some actions that can be performed upon it...but it also has some attributes that can be queried. Properties are a nice way to expose/publish those attributes without clunky getters and setters.
Ok, what wiseguy moderated this down as off topic? Being a reply to a pretty frivolous post I consider it on-topic ;p
I'm standing up for my AC brethren
"I'd say KDE is pretty consistent. So is GNOME."
Sure, they are consistent with themselves. Do they use the same key combinations? Does drag and drop and cutting and pasting work the same? Does window manipulation work the same? I grant you that KDE and GNOME are both great steps. I just hope we don't have too many other great steps which splinter into an array of self-consistent but inconsistent-with-each-other window managers/GUIs.
"But that's irrelevant, because X is not a GUI, so badly designed GUIs are not really X's fault."
'My car won't go because it has badly designed blocks for wheels.'
'Well that's irrelevant because blocks are not wheels, so it is really not the blocks' fault.'
The point is that whatever X is, it has enabled and maintained inconsistency in the GUI. *Because* X doesn't have any GUI semantics itself, everything is open and everything can have its own idiosynchratic semantics.
I really wish something like Berlin would become a viable alternate. X just seems like so much of a hog for something that is so fundamental and so elegantly done in other systesm.
Oh shut up. I was talking about the threat that the US could jump on the bandwagon, which it is in a highly probable situation to do.
Yes I paid attention. Yes I knew this was about British Columbia. You get a point for being anal.
If you are posting on Slashdot you are probably of a calibre of tech savvy above the "normal" user.
I'm not saying that X is unlearnable or that it should conform to the lowest common denominator. But when people push Linux/XWindows as being not only on par with other desktop systems, but superior, they can't be startled when they realize there are actually users who have a preconception of a GUI and don't want to bend backwards trying to relearn everything.
Fortunately that behavior is very amenable to the normal behavior of an average user. So it's not really much of a stretch to ask a normal user to do something normal in windows or the mac. However, in "serious" operating systems the behavior is optimized for serious people who know what they are doing and are not afraid to spend lots of time digging through manuals. That is obviously not the typical user.
Which they should! If we tax something, that is saying that you are reaping a reward from this country that you should pay back to it. Corporations reap TONS of rewards from this country. They should be taxed. And if they do evil things, they should be taxed even more, or dismantled.
And guess who owns the patents for these hybrid and more effecient fuels? You guessed it, the automobile and oil industries. And their sitting their rich fat asses on them. Now THAT is an abuse of the patent system.
"If someone were to build disposable cars, designed to last 3-4 years, using this ultra-efficient technology, you could throw away a good percentage of the gas-guzzlers."
We already have disposable cars. Do you think the automobile industry wants our cars to last longer? Hell no. And anyway, say we did have more disposable cars. How the hell would throwing away more cars possibly help the environment? Sure, a lot of a car can be recycled, but there is still a lot of junk that will just end up in a land fill.
"I can't blame the markets for pandering to demand. They're there to make money, not save the world. If most people want to turn precious reserves into pollutants, for no good reason, then the markets will respond and provide the means to do so."
Markets and demand are intimately tied. In the 70s we thought we could only buy gigantic boat-sized cars that got 10 mph and gruesomely killed passengers in any sort of serious accident. It took people doing some muckraking and bringing this to the press and really fighting government to get anything changed in the first place (_Unsafe at Any Speed_, Raph Nader).
So, no, I can't say I don't blame the markets. The markets spew toxic chemicals into the air and poison the ecology in various ways, and exploit third world workers. So YES, I blame the markets. I blame Americans for being all to willfully ignorant and greedy. I blame the money that pays the media and government to shut up.
"And we are fed up with them paying their employees and paying those taxes. Pesky jerks."
Corporations pay a disproportionately SMALL amount of taxes. In fact, in many cases, the government just gives them big "gifts" of our tax dollars.
"Find a solution that will not result in hundreds of thousands of people being laid off. Find a way that will not result in the economies of several countries being tossed down the toilet which will further result in war, unrest and more people suffering not to mention economic problems for the rest of the world."
I.e., maintain the status quo? Don't rock the boat? If we were talking about sweatshop labor would you be saying "Don't do something that would result in laying off all those employees! They will lose their jobs and income!". There has been nearly ZERO innovation in the combustion engine and automobile industry since their existence. Things like seatbelts and airbags have been around since the 50s and even 20s. The combustion engine is virtually unchanged. There is no reason to subsidize this status quo. Let cleaner options compete. All those displaced people will find new jobs in the new markets that are opened.
"Find a solution that when implemented, will be as cost affective as what it replaced. For instance, don't force everyone to buy a new car which costs two and a half times more than a gasoline powered device and then force them to use a fuel that costs several dollars a gallon and have that same device and fuel get the same mileage as their previous gasoline-powered device."
The only reason cars are as affordable as they are is because we haven't sin taxed the oil and automobile companies for their pollution record. Had we been *correctly* doing this, cleaner options would be just as economic or more. We've spent a lot of money propping up these industries which have gone on to exploit economies of scale to give us inefficient crap for cheap. Efficiency should be cheaper, not more expensive.
Why? Because big corporations run our government. Nuff said.
You think we really wouldn't be all driving clean vehicles that much better mileage, or better yet, have better public transportation systems, and using much cleaner more powerful energy sources, if big industry didn't have politicians' hands in their pockets? Government subsidizes this bullshit instead of aggressively trying to find better energy sources.
If you don't WANT normal users to be able to immediately perform basic operations, they WHY do we evangelize *nix as the solution to all problems?! If we DON'T want Linux on the desktop, then let's stop pushing it. If we DO, then let's adapt ourselves TO the user. We can't just say "Hey, Linux is the best desktop OS on earth! But, by the way, we refuse to bend in your direction to accomodate you. You have to behave the way we say."
It's just ridiculous. New users shouldn't have to expect to have to do things over and over again, before actually seeing results. If we want them to, then let's stop preaching to *normal* computer users because that is obviously then not our audience.
The problem is that X (and unix in general) don't provide a smooth learning curve. For *normal* *users* it should be easy and intuitive to start doing basic stuff, and one should gradually be able to perform more complicated and powerful things as they learn. The problem with windows and the mac is that they have such a shallow learning curve, that there really *isn't* all that much powerful you can gradully learn to do. The problem with *nix is that the learning "curve" is actually a mile high cliff face on a plateau, which must first be entirely scaled before you can do anything, simple or complicated. It's this curve, or learning cliff, that offputs a lot of newbies. Smooth the curve. Nobody is saying DON'T allow people to do complicated things, but at least have some sort of interface so that a new user sees a facade in which they can get simple things done without having to immediately be exposed to and have to assimilate a lot of complexity.
The cliff might be useful in keeping newbies away but if you *want* to attract normal users you have to make that cliff into a decent slope.