> I have a copy of the annotated draft standard at home [...]
Comparing apples to apples, the Ada95 standard is 800 pages, and IIRC the C++ standard is well over a thousand.
> Ada was the right answer in 1979 -- C hadn't yet achieved its current prominence,
Actually, C was taken out of the running by AT&T who pointed out that it was unsuitable for what the government needed.
> design of Ada is not enough like its closest ancestor Pascal to be really familiar to anybody
I don't understand why this is an issue. It's not far enough from any other imperative language to be difficult to learn. C has no well known close ancestors (unless you count B). Neither does Perl (a lot of ancestors, but you can't say that it's closer to any of them than Ada is to Pascal.)
> it became rather antiquated [...] simply because it didn't catch on outside the defense industry.
(Antiquated: so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period - Wordnet.) I don't see how it not catching on outside the defense industry could make it antiqutated.
> a niche product akin to Fortran
Which sticks around in part because it combines the utmost in efficency with easy and powerful array and numeric handling in a way that no other language does.
> As for calling it object-oriented, that's a stretch [...]
No. It has proper objects with dynamically dispatched methods, so it's object-orientated by definition. It's not object-dominated like Java or Smalltalk, but then neither is C++.
> OO was a bag on the side added to the system in the 1995 standard.
Sort of like OO was added to C to make C++? It's no less elegant IMO.
> Ada simply is no longer necessary
True. OTOH, you can say the same about most languages out there - only one of Perl, Python, Ruby and the other scripting languages are necessary, but they all still exist and have their little subnitches.
> it won't ever take the place that its supporters want for it.
That's undoubtedly true. The question is, how much of the reason is technical, and how much is socipolitical?
> Hell, defence contracting is the only reason Ada exist today.
How is Ada "outdated, dilapidated, and otherwise useless"? It's a object-orientated language with many of the features of C++ and Java. Ada programmers can write code based on the latest standard, which isn't true for C or C++ - heck, the GNU toolchain still doesn't use many features from the 10 year old C89 standard, for fear of incompatibility. It's in a number of non-DOD places where 100% reliability and formal provability is needed, so it's obviously not useless.
Just because you don't like the language, doesn't make it stupid or pointless to use. There are many odd languages out there that keep their place because they do what they do better than their competitors.
> The simplicity of Unicode is only in its authors' imagination.
Come on. I've read the Unicode standard, I read unicode@unicode.org, I've read most of the publicly accessable proposals and I'm familiar with all the Technical Reports. There is a lot of complexity in Unicode, but it's mostly derived from the inescapable complexity of the writing systems and compatibility with older systems, and most of the complexity can be ignored if you willing to support some subset (European systems, or European/Russian/CJKV systems). That complexity is going to exist whether you use Unicode or some other multilingual system. Supporting Unicode at the Xterm/Yudit-level is simple, and supporting Unicode in an application with Pango & GTK 2.0 should be just as simple.
> When the goal is just to make a text that can be printed in pretty letters [...] even in this case a complex typesetting system [...] would be more appropriate
The goal of Project Gutenberg is to transcribe public domain texts in a format readable for the largest audience possible. Unicode HTML and UTF-8 plain text are those formats. Some proprietary and/or obscure complex typesetting format is neither portable nor accessible to a wide audience. Project Gutenberg has existed for 30 years. What "complex typesetting system" format can claim the same? How many "complex typesetting system"s that could handle it are available on many different platforms? At least 70% of the people on the net can read Unicode HTML, and many of the rest could with little work and no cash expenditure. What "complex typesetting system" can say the same? How is a "complex typesetting system" simpler than Unicode plain text?
> he needs them to be supported with input methods (how to enter greek on this particular keyboard?), formatting rules, ordering, at least references to spellcheckers, etc.
Nonsense. For "Old High German", I will map ALT-Z to ȥ in XEmacs. Spellcheckers don't exist for this language, I'm not going to sort the data, and it's just a z with a hook, so there's no special formatting rules. The people who read the book don't even need a way to enter the character, any more than reading the original book precipitated a need to enter it into the computer.
Displaying pretty letters isn't the end all and be all of multilingual computing, but it's a damn good start. The only registered character set (ISO 2022 registry or IANA registry) that supports Lakota or the Cherokee syllablary is Unicode. No, on most systems, they can't get decent support; handcrafted keyboard maps must be used, there's no spelling or sorting support. But they can type the characters in and send them across the net and print up papers, which is better than nothing.
The fact that you chose to dismiss this stuff as demos does not change the fact that it's in actual use. Revo's author doesn't feel like changing the format of his dictionary because you don't agree with it. The web is full of gimmicks, but people like their gimmicks; why do you think Java took off? You can't just call it a gimmick and dismiss it; if that's what people to do, then that's what people want to do.
You're also missing the other selling point of Unicode: it's simple. Yes, there are plenty of ways for an application to handle multiple character sets, but they're all more complex then just using Unicode. I'm sure when typing up "German and English Sounds" for Project Gutenberg, that I could switch between Latin-1, some IPA character set, a character set with o-macron, a character set with u-breve, and whatever I need for the rest of characters Dr. Grandgent used, but it's much easier for me to use Unicode. When I start on "Old High German", I could dig up some obscure High German character set and switch to a Greek character set when he uses Greek words as examples . . . or I could just use Unicode. No matter how much you would dismiss it, it is a real problem and some of us use Unicode because it is a real and a simple solution to the problems we face.
The problem is, the actual problem that it will solve does not exist yet, its time didn't come.
Because, gee, the need to communicate with someone in another language is new. I've never seen VCR instructions in multiple languages, I've never seen a bilingual dictionary, and the EU driver licenses only have one language on them, not every language of the EU.
Multilingual documents, for all purposes, don't exist beyind demos.
So Reta Vortaro, an Esperanto dictionary with translations to many languages, is a demo. (Click on the j^ in the left frame, and then on the j^audo in the same frame, for the translation of that word into English, German, Polish and Russian, among others.) Or Freedict, a source of bilingual dictionaries for dict (including German and Greek, and German and Japanese) is just a demo too. And the Debian main page, where it lists the names of the languages in which the page has been translated to in their own script at the bottom, is just a demo too.
> Using Unicode in that case doubles your
> net traffic for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
>
> To sum it up: East Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew,
> and assorted other peoples will never use
> Unicode under no circumstances whatsoever.
Then what will they use? Revo is an Esperanto dictionary with German, Turkish, Czech and Russian translations, that's currently in UTF-8. What would the Cyrillic way of solving this be? ISO-2022? Transliterating everything into English characters? People want to do stuff like revo, and Unicode is pretty much the only supported solution.
What's with the space concerns, anyway? Project Gutenberg is over 3000 texts, and still fits on one CD (if you exclude the Human Genome data). My hard drive is filled with mp3's and jpg's and ASCII program source code (invariant under UTF-8), not text files. My time on the modem is usually spent waiting for graphics to download, not text.
If you're really concerned, use gzip everywhere, or get SCSU working. SCSU (Simple Compression Scheme for Unicode) compresses Greek and Russian strings to one byte per character (plus a byte overhead), and gzip can still compress the resulting text.
Why is the character order a problem for the Japenese, and not the Germans, the French, the Lithuanians, the Belarusians, and almost every other language in the world? Latin-* does not encode anything besides English in alphabetical order, and neither does Unicode. (It's theoritically impossible; the Lithuanians want the Y to precede the J, and the Danish and the Swedes disagree about where the a with ring above goes.)
If you go to the Unicode standard (found online at http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/u2.html ) they have an index with all the characters by radical and stroke. They also have an index with all the characters found in JIS sorted by their JIS index.
> ISO 2022 is a very poor implementation of stateful multi-charset character stream,
You've ranted on this everytime Unicode has came up on Unicode, but assertion does not a proof make. You've never sketched out a better system, or said what makes ISO 2022 a poor implementation of what it is. Write an RFC, create a rough implementation of the system and if it really is better, then and only then can people evaluate and decide whether or not to use it. Until then, the choices are basically ISO 2022 or Unicode, and people will pick the choice that works best for them, and not worry about what could be the optimal solution.
Part of the point of UTF-8 is that non-ASCII characters don't get encoded with ASCII characters. In your system, you can get an '/' or a '\0' or '\e' byte that doesn't represent that character, meaning that all Unix software needs to be changed to support your encoding. As it is, Linux accepts bytes for filenames without caring whether it's UTF-8 or some 8-bit code or some other multibyte code that obeys the same rule, knowing only that the byte '/' is uniquely the directory seperator.
> the allocation of characters is handled by a single [...] organization,
Slightly incorrect. It's handled by the Unicode Consortium AND the ISO 10646 standards group.
> not in any way open, organization
It's as open as, say, the ISO C++ standards group. That is, unless you're connected to the right corporation or country, you won't get a seat, but they still accept outside submissions and respect experts outside the group.
> Unicode consortium would be benevolent enough, that we all know that it is not.
Benevolent how? Benevolent enough for what? It took them less than a year to get LATIN CAPITAL N WITH LONG RIGHT LEG encoded, for a minor language with no political power (Lakota). They're constantly encoding new letters and scripts for groups with no political or economic clout (Z with hook below for Old High German, various Phillipine scripts in 3.2).
And no one's stopping you from hacking up your own multi-charset system, and using it whereever you want. But loudly claiming that you're being oppressed doens't prove that you are, and doesn't prove that your system would actually be superior to Unicode.
> Get off this socialistic attitude people, if things lose their value whats the point of striving to make it better.
[Value == money, right, since socialism doesn't affect any other form of value?]
You strive to make it better because for the respect and honor of your peers, because the inperfections annoy you, because you want to help others, or just because it's in your heart and soul to make it better. Socrates, Jesus and Budda would all probably take umbrage at your suggestion that money is the only reason to make things better.
Re:alternative to nvidia linux only drivers?
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XFree 4.1.0 Out
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All of you, cut it out! This has been argued over and over, even if you're only counting the last few weeks of Slashdot. Some people like the GPL license and consider it more "free", some people like the BSD license and consider it more "free". Arguing about it some more isn't going to help, and it's off-topic here.
Everybody knows and understands that if you don't get open-source software from the original author, someone might have changed it. But in reality, I've never heard of a backdoor in open source software. If you're worried about your reputation, you can ask that the name of the software be changed (Artistic) or that any change be noted, and marked with when it occurred (GPL).
Sometimes software needs to be modified. If Debian doesn't like where you put your files, we need to modify the code to change where you put the files. If there's a serious security hole, we need to fix it now, not when he gets back from vacation in 6 weeks. If you die, then we would like to continue making needed bug fixes and improvements.
"it's just software - not like the world will cease spinning"; this is one of personal pet peeves, people minimizing the importance of what other people care about. Very little will stop the world spinning; the complete extinction of the human race could happen and probably wouldn't touch it all. But OpenBSD needs the ability to modify the software, so a small group of people is probably going to spend many hours working on the code for a new firewall. Others are going to have to consider modifying their current firewalls or not updating them. To those people, this problem will take up many hours that could be spent doing more productive things. To me, it's just an example of why we care about licenses - because people will have to spend those hours.
> I just love the way sexism is endemic to this community
Sexism is endemic to most of human society, and there's no reason to think this community is any better . . . or any worse. As an anonymous coward pointed out, in your responce, you made the assumption that a person being raped must be female, another sexist view.
Why do you think you'd have to run different distributions of Linux on all of them? Debian runs on all three platforms. I think Debian runs on almost any 'major' platform Linux runs on; i386, Alpha, Sparc, M68K, PowerPC, ARM, and MIPS and IA64 may go out with the next release.
I'm no huge fan of capitalism, but all-in-all, I feel it works for me better than so-called "socialism," the likes of which exist in China and in the former Soviet Union, would.
China and the former Soviet Union practiced communism. Socialism is practiced by places like France and Sweden, and it's not generally associated with oppression. In fact, I would argue that it's associated with less oppression than capitalism, as stuff like the events of The Grapes of Wrath generally don't happen under socialist societies.
Actually, I believe that God doesn't exist. In any case, if your god does exist, I don't think he had any human's best interests in mind when he did the plagues, not that his reasoning was wrong. This is all of course unanswerable, since an omnipotent diety has ways of manipulating facts that would put Big Brother to shame.
Just because you think you understand something, doesn't mean that something does exist, or that it exists in the way you interpret it to exist. Given that reason is the best tool I have, I will continue to try and use it
>> Funny, you ignore our religion and culture: a vengeful, violent biblical God who thinks nothing of wiping people out with plague
> When one understands the nature of God, while not pulling the reality of violence out of context, you will understand that the Bible comunicates a loving God.
Your god, being omnipotent, had a thousand other options that would have harmed no one. He decided to send a series of plagues. If that's okay, then what's wrong with what the Palestenians are doing? They don't have good options, yet we get upset about them picking one of the few effective ones, the same one your god consisently chose.
Re:Spent fuel MUST BE stored on site. No appeals.
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> A Nevada resident with more than enough power from zero emmissions Hoover Dam.
You don't get nearly enough from the Hoover Dam. IIRC, Nevada only gets 25% of the power from Hoover Dam, which only covers 13% of Las Vegas's power needs. Even if you somehow got the California and Arizona to relinguish their share of the power from Hoover Dam, that still wouldn't cover Las Vegas's power needs. The lion's share of Nevada's power comes from fossil fuels.
I'm opposed to a failed attempt to create such a language but making it have a screwy data model (typing is too strong).
The typing is too strong? I pulled out my copy of the Revised Report on Algol 60 and looked again. There are three types in Algol 60 - Boolean, Integer and Real, and arrays on those. Since it automatically converts between Real and Integer as neccessary, and doesn't check the type of an array you pass in to a function, I don't know how you know the language and can claim the typing is too strong.
In any case, do you oppose all old languages for their misfeatures? It's not like any one really uses Algol anymore . ..
Language choice depends on a lot of issues, and there are several strong choices
Like what?
It was the right choice then, although not today.
Proof by assertion. Very convincing.
I know of financial stuff done in many other languages, so I think that's phoney, anyway.
Understand Turing machines? Of course you emulate Binary Coded Decimal in other languages! The legal issue is that the interest on $103,355,883,888.97 must be accurate to one cent. That's longer than a C long on 32 bit machines and doubles would introduce illegal rounding. In COBOL you define a BCD type with two digits to the right of the decimal point, and 18 to the left, and go on with your life.
> BTW, I'm not against most languages (exceptions include Algol,
Interesting. So you're opposed to powerful non-GOTO control structrues and source code that doesn't depend on counting columns (Fortran IV) or lots of parentheses (LISP)? Because ALGOL happens to be the pioneer of those concepts.
> COBOL
So what's your suggested replacement? There's reasons COBOL has stayed where it is; Binary-Coded Decimal (the only legal way to handle financial matters) is one.
Actually, most distributions will just go straight to GCC 3.0. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that a fork of a beta GCC that still isn't released (the release branch of CVS hasn't even bootstraped for days on end recently) is perfect, especially considering that no previous release has ever been perfect.
Just because code is poorly written doesn't mean that gcc can get away with not compiling it. Sucky but standards complaint is still standards compliant code, that needs to be compiled.
Yes. 2.95.3 is a minor bugfix release. That means all the problems with 2.95 (C++ incompatibility, etc.) are still there, with the excpetion of a couple major bugs that had easy/small fixes.
Why does everybody in the linux world need to bitch and whine when a new feature is added that *they* don't need,
licq has several frontends, including a Gnome and a QT frontend. All the umpteen Gnome libraries, GDK, GTK and Glib loaded by the Gnome frontend take up less memory than just QT alone. Duplication of already existing database and HTTP libraries in QT doesn't help the time and thrashing it already takes to load any QT program.
Slashdot Mirror
> I have a copy of the annotated draft standard at home [...]
Comparing apples to apples, the Ada95 standard is 800 pages, and IIRC the C++ standard is well over a thousand.
> Ada was the right answer in 1979 -- C hadn't yet achieved its current prominence,
Actually, C was taken out of the running by AT&T who pointed out that it was unsuitable for what the government needed.
> design of Ada is not enough like its closest ancestor Pascal to be really familiar to anybody
I don't understand why this is an issue. It's not far enough from any other imperative language to be difficult to learn. C has no well known close ancestors (unless you count B). Neither does Perl (a lot of ancestors, but you can't say that it's closer to any of them than Ada is to Pascal.)
> it became rather antiquated [...] simply because it didn't catch on outside the defense industry.
(Antiquated: so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period - Wordnet.) I don't see how it not catching on outside the defense industry could make it antiqutated.
> a niche product akin to Fortran
Which sticks around in part because it combines the utmost in efficency with easy and powerful array and numeric handling in a way that no other language does.
> As for calling it object-oriented, that's a stretch [...]
No. It has proper objects with dynamically dispatched methods, so it's object-orientated by definition. It's not object-dominated like Java or Smalltalk, but then neither is C++.
> OO was a bag on the side added to the system in the 1995 standard.
Sort of like OO was added to C to make C++? It's no less elegant IMO.
> Ada simply is no longer necessary
True. OTOH, you can say the same about most languages out there - only one of Perl, Python, Ruby and the other scripting languages are necessary, but they all still exist and have their little subnitches.
> it won't ever take the place that its supporters want for it.
That's undoubtedly true. The question is, how much of the reason is technical, and how much is socipolitical?
> Hell, defence contracting is the only reason Ada exist today.
How is Ada "outdated, dilapidated, and otherwise useless"? It's a object-orientated language with many of the features of C++ and Java. Ada programmers can write code based on the latest standard, which isn't true for C or C++ - heck, the GNU toolchain still doesn't use many features from the 10 year old C89 standard, for fear of incompatibility. It's in a number of non-DOD places where 100% reliability and formal provability is needed, so it's obviously not useless.
Just because you don't like the language, doesn't make it stupid or pointless to use. There are many odd languages out there that keep their place because they do what they do better than their competitors.
> The simplicity of Unicode is only in its authors' imagination.
Come on. I've read the Unicode standard, I read unicode@unicode.org, I've read most of the publicly accessable proposals and I'm familiar with all the Technical Reports. There is a lot of complexity in Unicode, but it's mostly derived from the inescapable complexity of the writing systems and compatibility with older systems, and most of the complexity can be ignored if you willing to support some subset (European systems, or European/Russian/CJKV systems). That complexity is going to exist whether you use Unicode or some other multilingual system. Supporting Unicode at the Xterm/Yudit-level is simple, and supporting Unicode in an application with Pango & GTK 2.0 should be just as simple.
> When the goal is just to make a text that can be printed in pretty letters [...] even in this case a complex typesetting system [...] would be more appropriate
The goal of Project Gutenberg is to transcribe public domain texts in a format readable for the largest audience possible. Unicode HTML and UTF-8 plain text are those formats. Some proprietary and/or obscure complex typesetting format is neither portable nor accessible to a wide audience. Project Gutenberg has existed for 30 years. What "complex typesetting system" format can claim the same? How many "complex typesetting system"s that could handle it are available on many different platforms? At least 70% of the people on the net can read Unicode HTML, and many of the rest could with little work and no cash expenditure. What "complex typesetting system" can say the same? How is a "complex typesetting system" simpler than Unicode plain text?
> he needs them to be supported with input methods (how to enter greek on this particular keyboard?), formatting rules, ordering, at least references to spellcheckers, etc.
Nonsense. For "Old High German", I will map ALT-Z to ȥ in XEmacs. Spellcheckers don't exist for this language, I'm not going to sort the data, and it's just a z with a hook, so there's no special formatting rules. The people who read the book don't even need a way to enter the character, any more than reading the original book precipitated a need to enter it into the computer.
Displaying pretty letters isn't the end all and be all of multilingual computing, but it's a damn good start. The only registered character set (ISO 2022 registry or IANA registry) that supports Lakota or the Cherokee syllablary is Unicode. No, on most systems, they can't get decent support; handcrafted keyboard maps must be used, there's no spelling or sorting support. But they can type the characters in and send them across the net and print up papers, which is better than nothing.
The fact that you chose to dismiss this stuff as demos does not change the fact that it's in actual use. Revo's author doesn't feel like changing the format of his dictionary because you don't agree with it. The web is full of gimmicks, but people like their gimmicks; why do you think Java took off? You can't just call it a gimmick and dismiss it; if that's what people to do, then that's what people want to do.
You're also missing the other selling point of Unicode: it's simple. Yes, there are plenty of ways for an application to handle multiple character sets, but they're all more complex then just using Unicode. I'm sure when typing up "German and English Sounds" for Project Gutenberg, that I could switch between Latin-1, some IPA character set, a character set with o-macron, a character set with u-breve, and whatever I need for the rest of characters Dr. Grandgent used, but it's much easier for me to use Unicode. When I start on "Old High German", I could dig up some obscure High German character set and switch to a Greek character set when he uses Greek words as examples . . . or I could just use Unicode. No matter how much you would dismiss it, it is a real problem and some of us use Unicode because it is a real and a simple solution to the problems we face.
Because, gee, the need to communicate with someone in another language is new. I've never seen VCR instructions in multiple languages, I've never seen a bilingual dictionary, and the EU driver licenses only have one language on them, not every language of the EU.
Multilingual documents, for all purposes, don't exist beyind demos.
So Reta Vortaro, an Esperanto dictionary with translations to many languages, is a demo. (Click on the j^ in the left frame, and then on the j^audo in the same frame, for the translation of that word into English, German, Polish and Russian, among others.) Or Freedict, a source of bilingual dictionaries for dict (including German and Greek, and German and Japanese) is just a demo too. And the Debian main page, where it lists the names of the languages in which the page has been translated to in their own script at the bottom, is just a demo too.
> Using Unicode in that case doubles your
> net traffic for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
>
> To sum it up: East Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew,
> and assorted other peoples will never use
> Unicode under no circumstances whatsoever.
Then what will they use? Revo is an Esperanto dictionary with German, Turkish, Czech and Russian translations, that's currently in UTF-8. What would the Cyrillic way of solving this be? ISO-2022? Transliterating everything into English characters? People want to do stuff like revo, and Unicode is pretty much the only supported solution.
What's with the space concerns, anyway? Project Gutenberg is over 3000 texts, and still fits on one CD (if you exclude the Human Genome data). My hard drive is filled with mp3's and jpg's and ASCII program source code (invariant under UTF-8), not text files. My time on the modem is usually spent waiting for graphics to download, not text.
If you're really concerned, use gzip everywhere, or get SCSU working. SCSU (Simple Compression Scheme for Unicode) compresses Greek and Russian strings to one byte per character (plus a byte overhead), and gzip can still compress the resulting text.
Why is the character order a problem for the Japenese, and not the Germans, the French, the Lithuanians, the Belarusians, and almost every other language in the world? Latin-* does not encode anything besides English in alphabetical order, and neither does Unicode. (It's theoritically impossible; the Lithuanians want the Y to precede the J, and the Danish and the Swedes disagree about where the a with ring above goes.)
If you go to the Unicode standard (found online at http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/u2.html ) they have an index with all the characters by radical and stroke. They also have an index with all the characters found in JIS sorted by their JIS index.
> ISO 2022 is a very poor implementation of stateful multi-charset character stream,
You've ranted on this everytime Unicode has came up on Unicode, but assertion does not a proof make. You've never sketched out a better system, or said what makes ISO 2022 a poor implementation of what it is. Write an RFC, create a rough implementation of the system and if it really is better, then and only then can people evaluate and decide whether or not to use it. Until then, the choices are basically ISO 2022 or Unicode, and people will pick the choice that works best for them, and not worry about what could be the optimal solution.
Part of the point of UTF-8 is that non-ASCII characters don't get encoded with ASCII characters. In your system, you can get an '/' or a '\0' or '\e' byte that doesn't represent that character, meaning that all Unix software needs to be changed to support your encoding. As it is, Linux accepts bytes for filenames without caring whether it's UTF-8 or some 8-bit code or some other multibyte code that obeys the same rule, knowing only that the byte '/' is uniquely the directory seperator.
> the allocation of characters is handled by a single [...] organization,
Slightly incorrect. It's handled by the Unicode Consortium AND the ISO 10646 standards group.
> not in any way open, organization
It's as open as, say, the ISO C++ standards group. That is, unless you're connected to the right corporation or country, you won't get a seat, but they still accept outside submissions and respect experts outside the group.
> Unicode consortium would be benevolent enough, that we all know that it is not.
Benevolent how? Benevolent enough for what? It took them less than a year to get LATIN CAPITAL N WITH LONG RIGHT LEG encoded, for a minor language with no political power (Lakota). They're constantly encoding new letters and scripts for groups with no political or economic clout (Z with hook below for Old High German, various Phillipine scripts in 3.2).
And no one's stopping you from hacking up your own multi-charset system, and using it whereever you want. But loudly claiming that you're being oppressed doens't prove that you are, and doesn't prove that your system would actually be superior to Unicode.
> Get off this socialistic attitude people, if things lose their value whats the point of striving to make it better.
[Value == money, right, since socialism doesn't affect any other form of value?]
You strive to make it better because for the respect and honor of your peers, because the inperfections annoy you, because you want to help others, or just because it's in your heart and soul to make it better. Socrates, Jesus and Budda would all probably take umbrage at your suggestion that money is the only reason to make things better.
All of you, cut it out! This has been argued over and over, even if you're only counting the last few weeks of Slashdot. Some people like the GPL license and consider it more "free", some people like the BSD license and consider it more "free". Arguing about it some more isn't going to help, and it's off-topic here.
Everybody knows and understands that if you don't get open-source software from the original author, someone might have changed it. But in reality, I've never heard of a backdoor in open source software. If you're worried about your reputation, you can ask that the name of the software be changed (Artistic) or that any change be noted, and marked with when it occurred (GPL).
Sometimes software needs to be modified. If Debian doesn't like where you put your files, we need to modify the code to change where you put the files. If there's a serious security hole, we need to fix it now, not when he gets back from vacation in 6 weeks. If you die, then we would like to continue making needed bug fixes and improvements.
"it's just software - not like the world will cease spinning"; this is one of personal pet peeves, people minimizing the importance of what other people care about. Very little will stop the world spinning; the complete extinction of the human race could happen and probably wouldn't touch it all. But OpenBSD needs the ability to modify the software, so a small group of people is probably going to spend many hours working on the code for a new firewall. Others are going to have to consider modifying their current firewalls or not updating them. To those people, this problem will take up many hours that could be spent doing more productive things. To me, it's just an example of why we care about licenses - because people will have to spend those hours.
> I just love the way sexism is endemic to this community
Sexism is endemic to most of human society, and there's no reason to think this community is any better . . . or any worse. As an anonymous coward pointed out, in your responce, you made the assumption that a person being raped must be female, another sexist view.
Why do you think you'd have to run different distributions of Linux on all of them? Debian runs on all three platforms. I think Debian runs on almost any 'major' platform Linux runs on; i386, Alpha, Sparc, M68K, PowerPC, ARM, and MIPS and IA64 may go out with the next release.
China and the former Soviet Union practiced communism. Socialism is practiced by places like France and Sweden, and it's not generally associated with oppression. In fact, I would argue that it's associated with less oppression than capitalism, as stuff like the events of The Grapes of Wrath generally don't happen under socialist societies.
Actually, I believe that God doesn't exist. In any case, if your god does exist, I don't think he had any human's best interests in mind when he did the plagues, not that his reasoning was wrong. This is all of course unanswerable, since an omnipotent diety has ways of manipulating facts that would put Big Brother to shame.
Just because you think you understand something, doesn't mean that something does exist, or that it exists in the way you interpret it to exist. Given that reason is the best tool I have, I will continue to try and use it
>> Funny, you ignore our religion and culture: a vengeful, violent biblical God who thinks nothing of wiping people out with plague
> When one understands the nature of God, while not pulling the reality of violence out of context, you will understand that the Bible comunicates a loving God.
Your god, being omnipotent, had a thousand other options that would have harmed no one. He decided to send a series of plagues. If that's okay, then what's wrong with what the Palestenians are doing? They don't have good options, yet we get upset about them picking one of the few effective ones, the same one your god consisently chose.
> A Nevada resident with more than enough power from zero emmissions Hoover Dam.
You don't get nearly enough from the Hoover Dam. IIRC, Nevada only gets 25% of the power from Hoover Dam, which only covers 13% of Las Vegas's power needs. Even if you somehow got the California and Arizona to relinguish their share of the power from Hoover Dam, that still wouldn't cover Las Vegas's power needs. The lion's share of Nevada's power comes from fossil fuels.
The typing is too strong? I pulled out my copy of the Revised Report on Algol 60 and looked again. There are three types in Algol 60 - Boolean, Integer and Real, and arrays on those. Since it automatically converts between Real and Integer as neccessary, and doesn't check the type of an array you pass in to a function, I don't know how you know the language and can claim the typing is too strong.
In any case, do you oppose all old languages for their misfeatures? It's not like any one really uses Algol anymore . . .
Language choice depends on a lot of issues, and there are several strong choices
Like what?
It was the right choice then, although not today.
Proof by assertion. Very convincing.
I know of financial stuff done in many other languages, so I think that's phoney, anyway.
Understand Turing machines? Of course you emulate Binary Coded Decimal in other languages! The legal issue is that the interest on $103,355,883,888.97 must be accurate to one cent. That's longer than a C long on 32 bit machines and doubles would introduce illegal rounding. In COBOL you define a BCD type with two digits to the right of the decimal point, and 18 to the left, and go on with your life.
> BTW, I'm not against most languages (exceptions include Algol,
Interesting. So you're opposed to powerful non-GOTO control structrues and source code that doesn't depend on counting columns (Fortran IV) or lots of parentheses (LISP)? Because ALGOL happens to be the pioneer of those concepts.
> COBOL
So what's your suggested replacement? There's reasons COBOL has stayed where it is; Binary-Coded Decimal (the only legal way to handle financial matters) is one.
Actually, most distributions will just go straight to GCC 3.0. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that a fork of a beta GCC that still isn't released (the release branch of CVS hasn't even bootstraped for days on end recently) is perfect, especially considering that no previous release has ever been perfect.
Just because code is poorly written doesn't mean that gcc can get away with not compiling it. Sucky but standards complaint is still standards compliant code, that needs to be compiled.
Yes. 2.95.3 is a minor bugfix release. That means all the problems with 2.95 (C++ incompatibility, etc.) are still there, with the excpetion of a couple major bugs that had easy/small fixes.
This goes in my quote file as bizzare quote of the day.
licq has several frontends, including a Gnome and a QT frontend. All the umpteen Gnome libraries, GDK, GTK and Glib loaded by the Gnome frontend take up less memory than just QT alone. Duplication of already existing database and HTTP libraries in QT doesn't help the time and thrashing it already takes to load any QT program.