I think Stallman would respond that you are arguing from a premise he doesn't hold. Stallman says that if GNU/GNOME, etc. become obsolete *but* still foster a community of code sharing and "freedom", then GNU/GNOME, etc. will have succeeded. Whereas you are saying these will only succeed if they start being used by the masses. I think Stallman would say "so what" about Joe Windows User, it's not worth compromising "freedom".
Personally I think there's room for compromise, but by starting off with the presumption that the goal is to gain wider acceptence in the first place, I think you illustrate the ideological divide. Stallman would rather preserve the "purity" of Free Software than to convert users, whereas you seem to have the reversed opinion. Not making a judgment - just pointing it out.
Porn is kept in a separate section, because just like cigarrettes, there is a law against *purchasing* the items. Kids don't get arrested for smoking or looking at porn, just attempting to *buy* those products. Censorware won't be legally justified unless there is a law that first makes it illegal for certain types of people to see "obscene" behavior. Of course local courts are free to do whatever they want, and they should. Just don't let the federal government make blanket proclamations. If the federal government really thinks this needs to be done, let it be fought out in the courts (where it will lose at the federal level).
WHY do we need all these directories? The explanation of/usr/local is that it is used for distributions of software "local" to a particular network (e.g. for administration ease). This might have some place in a farm of servers, but what place does it have on a desktop machine??
And what sense does/usr/sbin make? If it is a *system* binary, what is it doing in a/usr volume? Ok, I admit some of these distinctions may be for technical reasons of partitioning, distributing volumes accross disks, whatever. But really, that is the file system's problem, not the users problem. File hierarchy should be completely independent of being able to maintain integrity of the file system. I should be able to format one humongous honking partition and have the file system take care of the rest...not bother myself with cutting my file system into different fixed-sized partitions. What is this, DOS and FAT12??
Here's something radical (and instantly distasteful because of its analog in Windows)
BLAM! Done. No/usr,/usr/local, no/etc with a pile of random configuration files. And for chrissakes, no/usr/local! Modern filesystems should be able to merge-mount remote filesystems (e.g. into/programs)...or just put them into/programs/remote/ or something, or some entirely different path. Really I haven't seen an adequate rationale for/usr/local being used for software "local" to a network. What it usually is used for is software that is installed ad-hoc by users, and/programs will serve just fine for that.
Microsoft did NOT gain its monopoly solely legitimately. It has used coercive secretive anti-competitive contracts with OEMs to keep any other operating systems off desktops. So yes we grew up with it, but we didn't have much of a choice in the first place. Who's to say that, e.g., if BeOS was allowed to flourish on desktops it wouldn't have a large chunk of desktop users. There is no real technical reason Microsoft is a monopoly. It's just that it has been able to leverage its position into other markets (yeah, ok it has great marketing and a good relationship with the developer community).
Yeah, just safety switches on firearms and nuclear weapons are for "lazy" gunmen and silo missile controllers, traffice lights and airbags are for "lazy" automobilists?
There is a ring in the Inferno dedicated to people like you.
What about function pointers? What "region" do they live in? Say I create a struct with a bunch of function pointers (dur, to emulate OO), and the struct goes out of scope, what about the functions? I guess my question is, are all functions in global scope?
This is a non-issue. You can run any protocol over any port. If you thwart your own firewalls by running all services through the same port that's your own damn fault (or your clients' fault).
Which means it will run with all promised features only on Win32, with some drawbacks under Solaris, with other drawbacks under Linux (where it has a strange status between supported and unsupported) and is not supported at all under *BSD. The situation for Mac is not known to me, Jave seems to be available lately.
What "promised features"? Are you aware of how many companies actually rely on Java for really critical stuff, and use it accross platforms? We have production systems that run a whole slew of Java software on AIX (yes, IBM AIX!), Windows, and Solaris (client applications, servlet engines w/ servlets/jsp, backended by Java CORBA objects and JDBC database connections). Mac OS has finally caught up with the rest of the world and produced a Java 2 VM. Microsoft is "dropping" Java support, but that doesn't mean a damn thing because we run Sun's reference VM anyway. Is using QT really that less difficult than a Java GUI in the first place?
Both is not true in general. Only non GUI programs, using only established APIs have a change to run without modification, so much for source compatibility. For byte code it turned out, that while the byte code it self might be stable, other stuff changed so much over time, that you are forced to recompile old classes (I had this experience with many security related APIs).
Where's your evidence? The only time I've seen incompatibilities is when Mac OS added an extra Help menu (oh horrors). Seriously, have you looked at Java since the mid nineties? APIs changing is a *version* issue, not a *platform* issue, and is an identical problem encountered by C and C++ programs (what version of libc, what version of GCC, etc. etc.).
Multi-threading is still a complicated matter under Java, perhaps it is a bit easier because one just deals with one implementation per plattform in general.
But implementation is still different. Under Win32 you get preemptive multitasking, under other implementations (like Solaris up to certain revision) you have only cooperative multitasking. So you are still forced to stray yield() or sleep() into your loops.
I found debugging multithreaded apps under Java complicated as well, not too much help from the JBuilder IDE I used, and I was not able to detect certain stall conditions with JProbe's threadalizer. (Blame it on me or the tool:) I had to work things out with classic printf style debugging that gave me a hint, what thread was doing what.
Multithreading is "complicated" period. A native language would painfully expose you to all those incompatibilities *anyway*, so I don't see how the case is any different. Do you have any arguments to lodge that aren't moreso applicable to native languages (yeah, writing conditional code for different native threading models for Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. on top of the complexity of multithreading in the first place is *exactly* what I want *choke*).
Berkley sockets are quite standard, be it UNIX or Win32 (WinSocks) that is not that hard.
And they are just as "not that hard" in Java. Your point?
I think that statement is bullshit. It largely depends on the experience of your programmer what is easier to use.
Java security policy files. You set it, you forget it. Your code WILL NOT access resources you have not given it permission to. One the other hand, native code is notorious for security holes, accidental or otherwise. High availability is partly dependent on robustness of security. "Scaleability" is probably a lark, but as the poster says, you probably will get it with less effort given that you're not hardware bound.
So, in conclusion Java *does* meet all the requirements he posted. Perhaps C or C++ meets some more and some less than others but that wasn't the argument. C/C++ wins in performance, and integration with other native libraries. I can't think of anything else though.
What I'm wondering is how the synchronization primitives SCALE with number of threads. Really, who uses synchronization for *single-threaded* applications? I'd like to see graphs over thread count and see how operating systems handle higher contention over shared resources. In this test, no blocking was going on whatsoever, because it was just one thread locking and unlocking.
My PC is up in my office. My consoles are down in my living room, hooked up to my entertainment center. This is the case for everybody else I know, as well. Given the choice, I'd rather kick back on my couch and let the surround sound wash over me while watching the action on my TV than sit at my keyboard.
Holy shit. If we all lived in the bourgeois luxury that you do, sure consoles would be better, and we'd buy a new system every freakin' year. However, even though computers are getting faster all the time, generally computers, and computer games last a lot longer than console games...so those that can afford to have a computer go with computer games instead of burning money for a whole new console system they'll throw away in a year.
Man, I just can't believe some techies out there. WTF do you do to have such disposable incomes? Or are you still burning through some foolish VCs wad?
Re:Globalisation must be an effect, not a cause
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2
"in favour of more decentralised power structures"
I'd argue that economic globalization (i.e. WTO) isn't "decentralised" and is in fact much more centralized, except at a level *higher* than nations. Multinational corporations have more power than the UN and have more wealth than hundreds of nations combined, and are not accountable to anybody. That is not decentralized. That's centralized in the worst manner. Unfortunately since economic globalization is such a big win for these corporations, they have been the ones writing the laws and defining this brave new world in their own interests, instead of real people under real elected governments.
Re:Problems with Globalism
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
"look at Japan, they have blended their old culture with a modern one."
Yeah, and it only took 2 atom bombs to do it.
Re:GLOBALIZATION ON WHOSE TERMS?
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Trade-based globalization will result in the shifting of power from cultural states (i.e. countries), to economic "states" (i.e. multinational corporations), transcending national law, and a lot of the social reasons governments are formed, and law is written in the first place. We need then to fill this vacuum with strong international law and cooperation of the peoples of many nations. Otherwise we are just going to end up with a cabal of extremely wealthy and exploitive corporations with no allegiance to any particular peoples, exploiting and oppressing for profit.
It's probably too late to reverse globalization(understatement of the century), both economic and cultural/social, but we can at least try to keep it on track and make sure it looks out for the many instead of just the few entrenched players.
In addition, quite a significant part of the Be community (if a community ever existed) believed that BeOS was a multimedia operating system, for doing professional audio and video stuff, even long after Be had announced that they weretargeting the Internet appliances market.
And the only reason they claimed it was a "multimedia operating system" was to avoid a direct collision with Microsoft. BeOS is a general purpose end user desktop system. Sure, it does multimedia great, but that is a "feature" of a general purpose end user desktop system, not some special niche. Going for "Internet Appliances" was just a desparate last-ditch measure to re-pitch itself, which obviously failed. From what I've read and seen, BeOS is/was a beautiful operating system and it is an absolute shame and travesty that a market dominated by a criminal monopolist had to kill such a thing. There is absolutely no reason that operating systems like BeOS and other "alternative" operating systems can't live and thrive peacefully in the market with Windows and MacOS. BeOS was innovation...changing the theme of the start menu in Windows XP is NOT innovation.
Yes, I know about indymedia.org (hey I voted for Nader, I get some alterna-points right?), but I think falling for Taliban propaganda is just as bad as falling for American propaganda. Yes British and Soviet imperialism fucked around with their country (in the list of many) and left it a desolate wasteland of squabbling tribes, but the Taliban are zealotous thugs and deserve no apologists. Stalin and Hitler would have told you the same things about what they did for their country.
Why don't you find out what 50% of the population (i.e. women) of Afghanistan think about the Taliban:
http://www.rawa.org
Now whether our military action, or the method in which it is being carried out, is the correct response is another question entirely.
Dr. Evil: I propose that we design a new ''input device'' to what is commonly known now as a ''computer''. This device will be glove-shaped - we shall call it the ''PowerGlove''. Now, we will sell this ''PowerGlove'' along with a specialized computer for playing video games...this will lead directly to the <cackle>
ruination of analytic thought of a whole generation of American youth! Muahahahaha!!</cackle>
Number One: *cough* Ehem...that's already been done. It was called the Nintendo. All it did was inspire creativity in youths that went on to lucrative careers in a booming video game industry.
* You'd pay a predefined tax every time you bought an empty bottle
* The water would be poisoned in such a manner that you could drink it but you couldn't let friends have a sip
* You couldn't transfer the water from their bottle to a different container (people in uniforms would knock down your door and throw you in jail)
* You couldn't *describe* a manner in which to extract water from their bottles and put it into a different container (again, you might get thrown in jail)
* The government would be lobbied so that all manufacturers of bottles of any type must conform to the rules the RIAA sets out, namely not allow the transfer of contents between bottles. This might even extend to straws or spigots. It would also obviously impact containers that were never specifically intended or designed to contain water.
* You might not even be able to resell the bottled water if you didn't use it, or found you didn't like it
* The price of water would go through the roof
* The water would taste like crap anyway, all the good springs having long since run out of business
OEMs would be more than glad to bundle other operating systems, but Microsoft forbids them. Remember what happened to that Sony (I believe) product? Everything was designed for BeOS, and BeOS ran just fine, but they were forced to use Windows and hide BeOS entirely - Be Inc. had to issue instructions for users on how to get BeOS back! Entirely ridiculous. So lessee: BeOS, AtheOS, um *Linux*, OS/2, any number of other operating systems out there...it costs OEMs almost nothing to add OSs, but increases the value of the product they ship to the consumer (e.g. if Dell started packing, say, Mandrake Linux, with it's machines, it would be adding more value than an equivalent Gateway machine).
A. Microsoft shall not retaliate against an OEM by altering Microsoft's commercial relations with that OEM, or by withholding newly introduced forms of non-monetary Consideration (including but not limited to new versions of existing forms of non-monetary Consideration) from that OEM, because it is known to Microsoft that the OEM is or is contemplating:
...
2. shipping a Personal Computer that (a) includes both a Windows Operating System Product and a non-Microsoft Operating System, or (b) will boot with more than one Operating System;
Nice troll. DUH - if you post to a PUBLIC site on the INTERNET expect that your ip will be logged...hell, they'd have to turn off Apache logs to erase the record. If you have problems with this, post from an Internet Cafe or something. Or just keep it to yourself. Jeezus.
Re:MS-DOS doesn't deserve a fond remembrance
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 2
Bahahahah! I just tried F2 on the Windows 2000 command prompt, and I got a big dorky text dialog right in the middle of the console prompting me to "Enter char to copy up to:". Lovely! DOS is dead, long live DOS!
Slashdot Mirror
I think Stallman would respond that you are arguing from a premise he doesn't hold. Stallman says that if GNU/GNOME, etc. become obsolete *but* still foster a community of code sharing and "freedom", then GNU/GNOME, etc. will have succeeded. Whereas you are saying these will only succeed if they start being used by the masses. I think Stallman would say "so what" about Joe Windows User, it's not worth compromising "freedom".
Personally I think there's room for compromise, but by starting off with the presumption that the goal is to gain wider acceptence in the first place, I think you illustrate the ideological divide. Stallman would rather preserve the "purity" of Free Software than to convert users, whereas you seem to have the reversed opinion. Not making a judgment - just pointing it out.
Porn is kept in a separate section, because just like cigarrettes, there is a law against *purchasing* the items. Kids don't get arrested for smoking or looking at porn, just attempting to *buy* those products. Censorware won't be legally justified unless there is a law that first makes it illegal for certain types of people to see "obscene" behavior. Of course local courts are free to do whatever they want, and they should. Just don't let the federal government make blanket proclamations. If the federal government really thinks this needs to be done, let it be fought out in the courts (where it will lose at the federal level).
/bin
/usr/local is that it is used for distributions of software "local" to a particular network (e.g. for administration ease). This might have some place in a farm of servers, but what place does it have on a desktop machine??
/usr/sbin make? If it is a *system* binary, what is it doing in a /usr volume? Ok, I admit some of these distinctions may be for technical reasons of partitioning, distributing volumes accross disks, whatever. But really, that is the file system's problem, not the users problem. File hierarchy should be completely independent of being able to maintain integrity of the file system. I should be able to format one humongous honking partition and have the file system take care of the rest...not bother myself with cutting my file system into different fixed-sized partitions. What is this, DOS and FAT12??
/usr, /usr/local, no /etc with a pile of random configuration files. And for chrissakes, no /usr/local! Modern filesystems should be able to merge-mount remote filesystems (e.g. into /programs)...or just put them into /programs/remote/ or something, or some entirely different path. Really I haven't seen an adequate rationale for /usr/local being used for software "local" to a network. What it usually is used for is software that is installed ad-hoc by users, and /programs will serve just fine for that.
/sbin
/usr/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/sbin
WHY do we need all these directories? The explanation of
And what sense does
Here's something radical (and instantly distasteful because of its analog in Windows)
/system/conf
/system/bin
/system/...
/programs/bin
/programs/conf
/programs/...
BLAM! Done. No
Stop the insanity.
Microsoft did NOT gain its monopoly solely legitimately. It has used coercive secretive anti-competitive contracts with OEMs to keep any other operating systems off desktops. So yes we grew up with it, but we didn't have much of a choice in the first place. Who's to say that, e.g., if BeOS was allowed to flourish on desktops it wouldn't have a large chunk of desktop users. There is no real technical reason Microsoft is a monopoly. It's just that it has been able to leverage its position into other markets (yeah, ok it has great marketing and a good relationship with the developer community).
Yeah, just safety switches on firearms and nuclear weapons are for "lazy" gunmen and silo missile controllers, traffice lights and airbags are for "lazy" automobilists?
There is a ring in the Inferno dedicated to people like you.
What about function pointers? What "region" do they live in? Say I create a struct with a bunch of function pointers (dur, to emulate OO), and the struct goes out of scope, what about the functions? I guess my question is, are all functions in global scope?
This is a non-issue. You can run any protocol over any port. If you thwart your own firewalls by running all services through the same port that's your own damn fault (or your clients' fault).
Isn't Star Trek X supposed to be like, hundreds of years before the Wesley Crusher character? Oh well, just throw in another time-machine worm-hole.
What "promised features"? Are you aware of how many companies actually rely on Java for really critical stuff, and use it accross platforms? We have production systems that run a whole slew of Java software on AIX (yes, IBM AIX!), Windows, and Solaris (client applications, servlet engines w/ servlets/jsp, backended by Java CORBA objects and JDBC database connections). Mac OS has finally caught up with the rest of the world and produced a Java 2 VM. Microsoft is "dropping" Java support, but that doesn't mean a damn thing because we run Sun's reference VM anyway. Is using QT really that less difficult than a Java GUI in the first place?
Where's your evidence? The only time I've seen incompatibilities is when Mac OS added an extra Help menu (oh horrors). Seriously, have you looked at Java since the mid nineties? APIs changing is a *version* issue, not a *platform* issue, and is an identical problem encountered by C and C++ programs (what version of libc, what version of GCC, etc. etc.).
Multithreading is "complicated" period. A native language would painfully expose you to all those incompatibilities *anyway*, so I don't see how the case is any different. Do you have any arguments to lodge that aren't moreso applicable to native languages (yeah, writing conditional code for different native threading models for Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. on top of the complexity of multithreading in the first place is *exactly* what I want *choke*).
And they are just as "not that hard" in Java. Your point?
Java security policy files. You set it, you forget it. Your code WILL NOT access resources you have not given it permission to. One the other hand, native code is notorious for security holes, accidental or otherwise. High availability is partly dependent on robustness of security. "Scaleability" is probably a lark, but as the poster says, you probably will get it with less effort given that you're not hardware bound.
So, in conclusion Java *does* meet all the requirements he posted. Perhaps C or C++ meets some more and some less than others but that wasn't the argument. C/C++ wins in performance, and integration with other native libraries. I can't think of anything else though.
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What I'm wondering is how the synchronization primitives SCALE with number of threads. Really, who uses synchronization for *single-threaded* applications? I'd like to see graphs over thread count and see how operating systems handle higher contention over shared resources. In this test, no blocking was going on whatsoever, because it was just one thread locking and unlocking.
Holy shit. If we all lived in the bourgeois luxury that you do, sure consoles would be better, and we'd buy a new system every freakin' year. However, even though computers are getting faster all the time, generally computers, and computer games last a lot longer than console games...so those that can afford to have a computer go with computer games instead of burning money for a whole new console system they'll throw away in a year.
Man, I just can't believe some techies out there. WTF do you do to have such disposable incomes? Or are you still burning through some foolish VCs wad?
"in favour of more decentralised power structures"
I'd argue that economic globalization (i.e. WTO) isn't "decentralised" and is in fact much more centralized, except at a level *higher* than nations. Multinational corporations have more power than the UN and have more wealth than hundreds of nations combined, and are not accountable to anybody. That is not decentralized. That's centralized in the worst manner. Unfortunately since economic globalization is such a big win for these corporations, they have been the ones writing the laws and defining this brave new world in their own interests, instead of real people under real elected governments.
"look at Japan, they have blended their old culture with a modern one."
Yeah, and it only took 2 atom bombs to do it.
Trade-based globalization will result in the shifting of power from cultural states (i.e. countries), to economic "states" (i.e. multinational corporations), transcending national law, and a lot of the social reasons governments are formed, and law is written in the first place. We need then to fill this vacuum with strong international law and cooperation of the peoples of many nations. Otherwise we are just going to end up with a cabal of extremely wealthy and exploitive corporations with no allegiance to any particular peoples, exploiting and oppressing for profit.
It's probably too late to reverse globalization(understatement of the century), both economic and cultural/social, but we can at least try to keep it on track and make sure it looks out for the many instead of just the few entrenched players.
And the only reason they claimed it was a "multimedia operating system" was to avoid a direct collision with Microsoft. BeOS is a general purpose end user desktop system. Sure, it does multimedia great, but that is a "feature" of a general purpose end user desktop system, not some special niche. Going for "Internet Appliances" was just a desparate last-ditch measure to re-pitch itself, which obviously failed. From what I've read and seen, BeOS is/was a beautiful operating system and it is an absolute shame and travesty that a market dominated by a criminal monopolist had to kill such a thing. There is absolutely no reason that operating systems like BeOS and other "alternative" operating systems can't live and thrive peacefully in the market with Windows and MacOS. BeOS was innovation...changing the theme of the start menu in Windows XP is NOT innovation.
"The lies of the USA [indymedia.org]"
Yes, I know about indymedia.org (hey I voted for Nader, I get some alterna-points right?), but I think falling for Taliban propaganda is just as bad as falling for American propaganda. Yes British and Soviet imperialism fucked around with their country (in the list of many) and left it a desolate wasteland of squabbling tribes, but the Taliban are zealotous thugs and deserve no apologists. Stalin and Hitler would have told you the same things about what they did for their country.
Why don't you find out what 50% of the population (i.e. women) of Afghanistan think about the Taliban:
http://www.rawa.org
Now whether our military action, or the method in which it is being carried out, is the correct response is another question entirely.
...I'm so glad they're putting my tax money to good use...
(ok, I know this is flamebait...)
* You'd pay a predefined tax every time you bought an empty bottle
* The water would be poisoned in such a manner that you could drink it but you couldn't let friends have a sip
* You couldn't transfer the water from their bottle to a different container (people in uniforms would knock down your door and throw you in jail)
* You couldn't *describe* a manner in which to extract water from their bottles and put it into a different container (again, you might get thrown in jail)
* The government would be lobbied so that all manufacturers of bottles of any type must conform to the rules the RIAA sets out, namely not allow the transfer of contents between bottles. This might even extend to straws or spigots. It would also obviously impact containers that were never specifically intended or designed to contain water.
* You might not even be able to resell the bottled water if you didn't use it, or found you didn't like it
* The price of water would go through the roof
* The water would taste like crap anyway, all the good springs having long since run out of business
OEMs would be more than glad to bundle other operating systems, but Microsoft forbids them. Remember what happened to that Sony (I believe) product? Everything was designed for BeOS, and BeOS ran just fine, but they were forced to use Windows and hide BeOS entirely - Be Inc. had to issue instructions for users on how to get BeOS back! Entirely ridiculous. So lessee: BeOS, AtheOS, um *Linux*, OS/2, any number of other operating systems out there...it costs OEMs almost nothing to add OSs, but increases the value of the product they ship to the consumer (e.g. if Dell started packing, say, Mandrake Linux, with it's machines, it would be adding more value than an equivalent Gateway machine).
Woohoo! I hope that means what I think it means!
Nice troll. DUH - if you post to a PUBLIC site on the INTERNET expect that your ip will be logged...hell, they'd have to turn off Apache logs to erase the record. If you have problems with this, post from an Internet Cafe or something. Or just keep it to yourself. Jeezus.
Bahahahah! I just tried F2 on the Windows 2000 command prompt, and I got a big dorky text dialog right in the middle of the console prompting me to "Enter char to copy up to:". Lovely! DOS is dead, long live DOS!