Except that both have standardized formal ways of deciding on the truth of something, that few other fields have. Art and philosophy have argued over some question for milenia without resolution, whereas the science and math both come to a resolution on the question. Really old theories that have been tested are rarely thrown out completely - they're usually modified. We still plot courses for spaceships based on Newton's laws. Once a theorem is proved, it can be found that the proof is wrong or didn't cover all the cases.
It's not a humanity. Humanities deal with human things - note that history of Greece is a humanity, but the history of the dinosaurs (paleotology) is a science - and math does not deal with human things. Not everything can be divided into science and humanities.
Why is Ada evil? I came from a C/C++ background, and now program mainly in Ada. I got tired of keeping track of all the minor details and dealing with the stupid little bugs C++ would let me make and Ada wouldn't. Not having to find a portable subset of the language (cf. Mozilla) and having portable threads is just icing on the cake.
If every broswer had rejected non-complaint code from the start, we would now have a bunch of standards complaint browsers. Unfortunetly, a standards complaint browser is worthless since the web is composed of non-standards complaint pages.
Frankly, I don't think Netscape should even bother trying to handle unclosed tables right. It's a gross violation of the HTML spec that nothing should accept. Just fix the code.
Try http://validator.w3.org on, say, Slashdot, to see how much standards invalid code Netscape accepts. At least let the line be drawn there.
Try Posix threads, which Linus and Alan Cox have said will never be Posix compliant because the standard's so broken. There is Ada bindings for Linux (Florist), though.
Honestly, Posix complaint usually refers to 1003.1 & 1003.2, and the only I know of there is that no one wants to pay for standards checking each Distro version.
What do you mean by "RPM will eventually succeed"?
In many ways, it already has. But thinking that it will eventually displace the Debian package system or, indeed all other package systems, is absurd. Debian people find debs work for us, and we have no plans to change. I'm sure the Stampede people and the Slackware people feel the same way about their packaging systems. Life doesn't have to have one winner take all.
And I'm sure that the university's computer policy doesn't allow people to run ftp servers or distribute copyrighted material.
Why? As a student here, I've never read anything about us not being able to run ftp servers - in fact I'm running one, and so are several of our friends, and we've never heard anything about it.
When the network people talk at our LUG meetings, the big complaints they have are the people running the Linux systems that running all the servers without security patchs, not the people responsibly running servers.
I hope you meant illegal copyrighted material, as most of the stuff on my website or ftpsite is copyright me, or someone else with an open source license. That would be weird to restrict.
So did the cosmonauts. Both sides have used the space pens since they were created, IIRC.
Honestly, Mir is still up there working, for longer than any American space station has. They built well enough to last, at least compared to a space program which has crash several space probes recently.
First, it's questionable that Debian isn't doing right. It releases very stable and its unstable is fairly uptodate.
If a package is being too slowly maintained, any maintner can offer to NMU it or take over the packaging. As for X, according to Branden Robinson, the only he's the maintainer is because he's the only one who wanted the trouble. If you want X4, then download the debs (see www.debian.org/~branden) and help bug-test them.
Frankly, considering how beta I've heard XFree86 4 is, I'm surprised by the number of distributions shipping it.
Re:More Debian-valid Software -- is this really go
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 1
It's all optional, but yes, there's a lot of redundant software.
What the heck is OBJC? I'm fairly familar with GCC (a lurker on gcc@gcc.gnu.org) and I've never heard of it. In fact, no one ships two versions of GCJ (GCC-Java), as there has only been one released version. Most distros only keep around the C part of GCC 2.7.2, as that's the only useful part.
So, no Unicode on the principle of 'be fast, not correct'? The future, for better or worse, is Unicode, because that's the only way to cleanly handle the world's languages, short of coding in ISO2022, SJIS, ISO8859-* and more. I think that would slow a text parser down much more than Unicode would.
It takes a lot of work setting up a ports system, and nobody has tried it yet. I can't see where it would clear up the RPM, DEB, SLP problems - it would just add another competitor.
I believe both gzip and bzip2 use original compression methods that could have been patented. Blowfish could have been patented (though I don't know whether that would count for OSS, it was promptly put with code into the public domain).
All OSS projects are not copycats of closed projects, any more than all closed projects are copycats of other projects. Try dictd (RFC 2229) and its associated projects, for example. Or look at the many OSS projects that are implementing standards in parellel with closed source projects (Unicode, XML)
Ever heard of UTF-8? It was designed so all those protocols can support any text being Unicode without changes.
The reason Linux doesn't use Unicode more places is the fact that it currently works well-enough. The Chinese use Big-5, the Japanese SJIS, the Russians KOI8-R and the Europeans ISO8859-n. Since this is a fact of life, and will be a fact of life for a long time, it must be dealt with. Many of them are in no hurry to change - it works for them.
It's not U.S. Unix geeks fault. Period. If Unix used ASCII, then it would be very little work to change to UTF-8, as it's backwardly compatible. The people to blame, if you must blame someone, are the people who used that 8th bit that UTF-8 needs, and the people who hacked weird non-Unicode multibyte systems (MULE, anyone?) into everything.
They are fast compared to what? Java? All I was saying that Java wasn't going to be slow compared to your competitors. You didn't provide any evidence or facts about that, you just insulted me. "damn fast" and "*extremely* fast" means nothing.
Actually Java is plenty fast for this - OCaml, Scheme and Icon are no speed demons either. I wouldn't bet on that low level of a language to win though; the winners have usually been people running high level languages like ML and Haskell.
Perl has entered both ICFP contests, and has got stomped. I don't know whether it's because of Perl or not, but history doesn't seem to follow your conclusion that Perl will win.
Anybody whose running X 4.0.1 or Glibc 2.2 on Debian, of which I understand there is a decent number. I'm impatient enough to some times pull programs from Incoming, which means I'll be there using unstable and making sure that at least the brown paper bag bugs get reported.
GNU probably was the start of the free software _movement_. There has been free software since the start of computers, but not formalized as a movement.
I don't think you have your timeline quite right, either.
The changelog I found on the net starts with
1984-11-09 Larry Wall
* patch.c: Initial revision
which would put Larry Wall's patch a year after the start of the GNU project. Both BSD's patches and rk05 were distributed under an AT&T license that wasn't free software. The famed BSD license didn't come about until well after 83 and the start of GNU.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that both have standardized formal ways of deciding on the truth of something, that few other fields have. Art and philosophy have argued over some question for milenia without resolution, whereas the science and math both come to a resolution on the question. Really old theories that have been tested are rarely thrown out completely - they're usually modified. We still plot courses for spaceships based on Newton's laws. Once a theorem is proved, it can be found that the proof is wrong or didn't cover all the cases.
It's not a humanity. Humanities deal with human things - note that history of Greece is a humanity, but the history of the dinosaurs (paleotology) is a science - and math does not deal with human things. Not everything can be divided into science and humanities.
That would be news, to the rest of the world, who believe that the U.S. only had nukes after ~1943, not back in 1904 when the Panama Canal was built.
Why is Ada evil? I came from a C/C++ background, and now program mainly in Ada. I got tired of keeping track of all the minor details and dealing with the stupid little bugs C++ would let me make and Ada wouldn't. Not having to find a portable subset of the language (cf. Mozilla) and having portable threads is just icing on the cake.
If every broswer had rejected non-complaint code from the start, we would now have a bunch of standards complaint browsers. Unfortunetly, a standards complaint browser is worthless since the web is composed of non-standards complaint pages.
Frankly, I don't think Netscape should even bother trying to handle unclosed tables right. It's a gross violation of the HTML spec that nothing should accept. Just fix the code.
Try http://validator.w3.org on, say, Slashdot, to see how much standards invalid code Netscape accepts. At least let the line be drawn there.
Try the gcc webpage - gcc.gnu.org
Try Posix threads, which Linus and Alan Cox have said will never be Posix compliant because the standard's so broken. There is Ada bindings for Linux (Florist), though.
Honestly, Posix complaint usually refers to 1003.1 & 1003.2, and the only I know of there is that no one wants to pay for standards checking each Distro version.
What do you mean by "RPM will eventually succeed"?
In many ways, it already has. But thinking that it will eventually displace the Debian package system or, indeed all other package systems, is absurd. Debian people find debs work for us, and we have no plans to change. I'm sure the Stampede people and the Slackware people feel the same way about their packaging systems. Life doesn't have to have one winner take all.
And I'm sure that the university's computer policy doesn't allow people to run ftp servers or distribute copyrighted material.
Why? As a student here, I've never read anything about us not being able to run ftp servers - in fact I'm running one, and so are several of our friends, and we've never heard anything about it.
When the network people talk at our LUG meetings, the big complaints they have are the people running the Linux systems that running all the servers without security patchs, not the people responsibly running servers.
I hope you meant illegal copyrighted material, as most of the stuff on my website or ftpsite is copyright me, or someone else with an open source license. That would be weird to restrict.
Bloated I can see, but why sloppy?
Export restrictions only apply to things being _exported_ from the United States, not things being imported.
So did the cosmonauts. Both sides have used the space pens since they were created, IIRC.
Honestly, Mir is still up there working, for longer than any American space station has. They built well enough to last, at least compared to a space program which has crash several space probes recently.
First, it's questionable that Debian isn't doing right. It releases very stable and its unstable is fairly uptodate.
If a package is being too slowly maintained, any maintner can offer to NMU it or take over the packaging. As for X, according to Branden Robinson, the only he's the maintainer is because he's the only one who wanted the trouble. If you want X4, then download the debs (see www.debian.org/~branden) and help bug-test them.
Frankly, considering how beta I've heard XFree86 4 is, I'm surprised by the number of distributions shipping it.
It's all optional, but yes, there's a lot of redundant software.
What the heck is OBJC? I'm fairly familar with GCC (a lurker on gcc@gcc.gnu.org) and I've never heard of it. In fact, no one ships two versions of GCJ (GCC-Java), as there has only been one released version. Most distros only keep around the C part of GCC 2.7.2, as that's the only useful part.
So, no Unicode on the principle of 'be fast, not correct'? The future, for better or worse, is Unicode, because that's the only way to cleanly handle the world's languages, short of coding in ISO2022, SJIS, ISO8859-* and more. I think that would slow a text parser down much more than Unicode would.
It takes a lot of work setting up a ports system, and nobody has tried it yet. I can't see where it would clear up the RPM, DEB, SLP problems - it would just add another competitor.
I believe both gzip and bzip2 use original compression methods that could have been patented. Blowfish could have been patented (though I don't know whether that would count for OSS, it was promptly put with code into the public domain).
All OSS projects are not copycats of closed projects, any more than all closed projects are copycats of other projects. Try dictd (RFC 2229) and its associated projects, for example. Or look at the many OSS projects that are implementing standards in parellel with closed source projects (Unicode, XML)
Not if the good guys don't have an hour to spend each time they want to open the safe.
Ever heard of UTF-8? It was designed so all those protocols can support any text being Unicode without changes.
The reason Linux doesn't use Unicode more places is the fact that it currently works well-enough. The Chinese use Big-5, the Japanese SJIS, the Russians KOI8-R and the Europeans ISO8859-n. Since this is a fact of life, and will be a fact of life for a long time, it must be dealt with. Many of them are in no hurry to change - it works for them.
It's not U.S. Unix geeks fault. Period. If Unix used ASCII, then it would be very little work to change to UTF-8, as it's backwardly compatible. The people to blame, if you must blame someone, are the people who used that 8th bit that UTF-8 needs, and the people who hacked weird non-Unicode multibyte systems (MULE, anyone?) into everything.
So basically like Java? So basically the point I was making that Java's speed won't be a detriment holds? Great.
You know, you're an asshole. You're proud of that, aren't you?
They are fast compared to what? Java? All I was saying that Java wasn't going to be slow compared to your competitors. You didn't provide any evidence or facts about that, you just insulted me. "damn fast" and "*extremely* fast" means nothing.
Actually Java is plenty fast for this - OCaml, Scheme and Icon are no speed demons either. I wouldn't bet on that low level of a language to win though; the winners have usually been people running high level languages like ML and Haskell.
Perl has entered both ICFP contests, and has got stomped. I don't know whether it's because of Perl or not, but history doesn't seem to follow your conclusion that Perl will win.
Anybody whose running X 4.0.1 or Glibc 2.2 on Debian, of which I understand there is a decent number. I'm impatient enough to some times pull programs from Incoming, which means I'll be there using unstable and making sure that at least the brown paper bag bugs get reported.
GNU probably was the start of the free software _movement_. There has been free software since the start of computers, but not formalized as a movement.
I don't think you have your timeline quite right, either.
The changelog I found on the net starts with
1984-11-09 Larry Wall
* patch.c: Initial revision
which would put Larry Wall's patch a year after the start of the GNU project. Both BSD's patches and rk05 were distributed under an AT&T license that wasn't free software. The famed BSD license didn't come about until well after 83 and the start of GNU.