Did you know that Microsoft is involved in the Unicode Standard? Did you know they were involved in the C++ standard? I believe they were even involved in the Posix standard. Big companies working with standards groups is the standard way of working for most standards groups. Microsoft probably was involved in the ECMAScript standard. Your paranoia is unwarrented.
I don't think you understand the method of GCC (formerly egcs) development. There are those getting paid for it (usually by Cygnus and CodeSourcery), and there are those who are doing it in their free time (like the Fortran 95 guys.)
There is no monolithic egcs, inc.
The only way a C# compiler will get written is if RedHat wants it (i.e. Cygnus) for some reason, or someone contracts for it (who would, besides Microsoft?), or a group gets together to write it. The last seems the most likely, so if I were you, I'd get out the Dragon book, and start working.
Where do you see this? Anyway, the Debian HURD packages are merged with the Debian Linux packages to the maximum extent possible - i.e. everything down to binutils and glibc compile from the same package.
When Slackware conforms to the rest of the distributions, it will be added. They can't add it to the list if it's not compatible. Sure, you can hack stuff to get it running on Slackware, but it nessecarily work out of the box. It being on the list or not being on the list isn't going to change anything.
(1) Debian is not a puppet of RMS. For example, RMS has asked Debian not to consider the Artistic license a free license (because of its ambiguity.) Debian disagreed.
(2) RMS doesn't care about what licenses are considered open-source.
(3) RMS doesn't consider the GPL the only free licence. The QPL**, the BSD license, the Netscape Public License and several others are considered free by him and the FSF. Go look at www.gnu.org - they have a nice list there, with explanations.
(4) (IMO) RMS has earned his clout. People listen to him because they respect him, and because he has earned that respect. His opinions are usually well thought out, and clearly explained.
Linux will never be windows but if you want Linux to remove Microsoft from the market you must compete on their battlefield.
But I don't want to remove Microsoft from the market. I'm happy with Linux being the next Macintosh; that's solid, fairly steady market share, enough programs ported to it and written for it, lots of people love it, lots of people hate it. I don't want to make the OS I like into something I wouldn't be nearly as happy with for "world domination."
In order for Linux to succeed, it needs to drop all of the proliferation of choices and focus on a single, distinctive brand image.
That's a Pyrric victory. Give up much of what makes Linux the OS of choice for many of us, so that it can be just another Windows. If you want Windows, you know where to find it.
Just as food for thought, there are also some privacy issues here. You have to ask yourself: do you really want a decade or two of your scribblings to be instantly available and indexable and searchable by anyone on the planet?
Check. Go search on dvdeug or dstarner98 on Google, and you will find all my scribblings instantly available. Including some stuff I'd just as well forget. It's life - think before you post. Use x-no-archive wisely and there won't be much of a problem.
It's nothing new - lots of people are embarressed by things they said decades ago. If you plan to go into politics, then start censoring yourself now. Otherwise, you should still think before you speak, but it's probably not going to matter.
I don't think so. I can read material far faster than I can have it read to me. I can skim material faster than that. It would also prevent me from comprehending the work as a whole.
One real life failure of a voice system: Isaac Asimov decided at one point, instead of typing his stories, he would tape them and let his wife transcribe them. After one of the first such attempts, his wife came back, saying I can't type this. His characters were having an argument and his voice had risen in rage to the point where it was just enraged squels. The expirement soon ended when his wife became pregnant.
*nix on the desktop doesn't nessecarily mean the great unwashed masses. It can (and has) meant anyone who wanted some of the ease of a GUI without sacrificing the values of Unix. I know a couple professors around campus who use *nix for that, and I'm not talking about CompSci professors either.
Nonsense! Ease of use is for everyone. For someone who can make a computer sit up and bark, that is a part of ease of use. Ease of use is to increase the productivity and enjoyment of everyone, including those who know their way around a computer.
How is that different from the Windows and Mac? On them, the program calls a bunch of functions (WriteLineHere, PutCircleThere, DrawTextHere). In Unix, the program writes that to a file. Or am I misunderstanding something?
I'm not arguing that language/tools don't make a difference. I program in Ada because it's better than C++, and I don't have to spend as much time chasing down random bugs. But also as an Ada programmer, I see that better doesn't nesecarily equal more popular.
What the original poster was promising was a programming language that was so much better than anything else both OS's and applications that everyone would jump aboard and start programming in it and produce an OS better than anything else because it was in that programming language. A utopial fantasy. There will be better languages; there will be better OS's. There won't be one OS or programming language for everything, and no new OS or programming language will get everyone to switch over to it. (One of my professors still uses Fortran 77 for everything.) It's was a utopial fantasy based around a silver bullet language.
Doubling productivity is still an enormous improvement.
And? Where do we get this "doubling productivity"? Moreso, how are we going to get a single language that doubles productivity across the board, from operating systems on up? That's what was being promised. Actually, to get the type of results he was claiming in the human sphere, you'd need an order of magnitude improvement. He was not claiming a better language, he was claiming a language so good people threw out all the old stuff and programmed in it exclusively. Something that Algol didn't do, something that Simula didn't do, something that C didn't do, something that PL/I didn't do, something that Ada didn't do, something that Java didn't do, and something that ML didn't do, no matter what the strengths of those languages. Something better than what even Fortran did, even though it probably provided order of magnitude improvements when it first came out.
There was a link to Weird Al's FAQ in one of these Slashdot discussions. Basically, he was a little worried about losing money through it (but enjoyed getting all of Metallica's songs for free (-: ), but what really annoyed him were all the songs out there mislabled as his.
That was part of the problem the Harmony people had. QT is an ever evolving standard, so Harmony would always trail behind some. So long as KDE is written for the latest and greatest QT (modern KDE (Kleopatra?) only compiles for QT2.1), there's really no hope for KDE to build with Harmony or any similar QT-emulation library.
Honestly, I think if the BSD people asked for a domain under.gnu, they would get it. I've heard they still have one machine running NetBSD at the FSF. Now, the question is whether they would swallow their ego and ask for it?
historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
What's on the web is what people put up there. The diatrabes are almost more useful than the rest, because then you get a snapshot about what people were grumbling about, that never before has been recorded. A lot of history is an attempt to record how people felt, often based off a handful of diaries of the period, mainly of the elite.
And as I said, it shows what people choose to put up there. Hence, it's not a totally unrepresentive sample of people. You missed all the stuff that is people spreading information in ways they couldn't before - all the tutorials and books. You missed a huge number of people giving away stuff (to fulfill creative urges, for egoboo, or other benign, non-commericial reasons.)
You also missed the pro-Christian diatrabes that are out there in equal number, unless you happen to include non-Christian statements of faith in the diatrabe category and not Christian statements of faith.
>If you think that evolution is what has caused >different approaches to career selection and >emotional state, you've been living with >blinders.
What happens when a child is raised as the opposite of its biological gender? Frequently, that child starts displaying properities more usually associated with its true gender.
Here's some honest questions: why are the figureheads in virtually every society male? Why are males the agressive sex in almost every society? Why do males have much higher levels of testorone (proven to increase aggression) if it's not biological?
I'm not saying there isn't discrimination. But most other species, including all the higher primates, are sexually dimorphic at a psychological level. There is no non-ideological reason to believe that humans deviate from that trend.
And you read all the fine print in each and every one of those contracts? Even highly intellegent people start skipping the fine print soon enough; it's just too much, and too unclear to anyone who hasn't passed the bar.
Unnessecary to expand Unicode beyond 4 bytes; apparently the Kligons are consistently using one character set, so it doesn't take that much space in Unicode.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know that Microsoft is involved in the Unicode Standard? Did you know they were involved in the C++ standard? I believe they were even involved in the Posix standard. Big companies working with standards groups is the standard way of working for most standards groups. Microsoft probably was involved in the ECMAScript standard. Your paranoia is unwarrented.
I don't think you understand the method of GCC (formerly egcs) development. There are those getting paid for it (usually by Cygnus and CodeSourcery), and there are those who are doing it in their free time (like the Fortran 95 guys.)
There is no monolithic egcs, inc.
The only way a C# compiler will get written is if RedHat wants it (i.e. Cygnus) for some reason, or someone contracts for it (who would, besides Microsoft?), or a group gets together to write it. The last seems the most likely, so if I were you, I'd get out the Dragon book, and start working.
Where do you see this? Anyway, the Debian HURD packages are merged with the Debian Linux packages to the maximum extent possible - i.e. everything down to binutils and glibc compile from the same package.
When Slackware conforms to the rest of the distributions, it will be added. They can't add it to the list if it's not compatible. Sure, you can hack stuff to get it running on Slackware, but it nessecarily work out of the box. It being on the list or not being on the list isn't going to change anything.
Gee, how many errors can I see?
(1) Debian is not a puppet of RMS. For example, RMS has asked Debian not to consider the Artistic license a free license (because of its ambiguity.) Debian disagreed.
(2) RMS doesn't care about what licenses are considered open-source.
(3) RMS doesn't consider the GPL the only free licence. The QPL**, the BSD license, the Netscape Public License and several others are considered free by him and the FSF. Go look at www.gnu.org - they have a nice list there, with explanations.
(4) (IMO) RMS has earned his clout. People listen to him because they respect him, and because he has earned that respect. His opinions are usually well thought out, and clearly explained.
But I don't want to remove Microsoft from the market. I'm happy with Linux being the next Macintosh; that's solid, fairly steady market share, enough programs ported to it and written for it, lots of people love it, lots of people hate it. I don't want to make the OS I like into something I wouldn't be nearly as happy with for "world domination."
That's a Pyrric victory. Give up much of what makes Linux the OS of choice for many of us, so that it can be just another Windows. If you want Windows, you know where to find it.
and indexable and searchable by anyone on the planet?
Check. Go search on dvdeug or dstarner98 on Google, and you will find all my scribblings instantly available. Including some stuff I'd just as well forget. It's life - think before you post. Use x-no-archive wisely and there won't be much of a problem.
It's nothing new - lots of people are embarressed by things they said decades ago. If you plan to go into politics, then start censoring yourself now. Otherwise, you should still think before you speak, but it's probably not going to matter.
I don't think so. I can read material far faster than I can have it read to me. I can skim material faster than that. It would also prevent me from comprehending the work as a whole.
One real life failure of a voice system: Isaac Asimov decided at one point, instead of typing his stories, he would tape them and let his wife transcribe them. After one of the first such attempts, his wife came back, saying I can't type this. His characters were having an argument and his voice had risen in rage to the point where it was just enraged squels. The expirement soon ended when his wife became pregnant.
*nix on the desktop doesn't nessecarily mean the great unwashed masses. It can (and has) meant anyone who wanted some of the ease of a GUI without sacrificing the values of Unix. I know a couple professors around campus who use *nix for that, and I'm not talking about CompSci professors either.
Nonsense! Ease of use is for everyone. For someone who can make a computer sit up and bark, that is a part of ease of use. Ease of use is to increase the productivity and enjoyment of everyone, including those who know their way around a computer.
How is that different from the Windows and Mac? On them, the program calls a bunch of functions (WriteLineHere, PutCircleThere, DrawTextHere). In Unix, the program writes that to a file. Or am I misunderstanding something?
I'm not arguing that language/tools don't make a difference. I program in Ada because it's better than C++, and I don't have to spend as much time chasing down random bugs. But also as an Ada programmer, I see that better doesn't nesecarily equal more popular.
What the original poster was promising was a programming language that was so much better than anything else both OS's and applications that everyone would jump aboard and start programming in it and produce an OS better than anything else because it was in that programming language. A utopial fantasy. There will be better languages; there will be better OS's. There won't be one OS or programming language for everything, and no new OS or programming language will get everyone to switch over to it. (One of my professors still uses Fortran 77 for everything.) It's was a utopial fantasy based around a silver bullet language.
And? Where do we get this "doubling productivity"? Moreso, how are we going to get a single language that doubles productivity across the board, from operating systems on up? That's what was being promised. Actually, to get the type of results he was claiming in the human sphere, you'd need an order of magnitude improvement. He was not claiming a better language, he was claiming a language so good people threw out all the old stuff and programmed in it exclusively. Something that Algol didn't do, something that Simula didn't do, something that C didn't do, something that PL/I didn't do, something that Ada didn't do, something that Java didn't do, and something that ML didn't do, no matter what the strengths of those languages. Something better than what even Fortran did, even though it probably provided order of magnitude improvements when it first came out.
Utopial. We've got better development languages now, no language will probably be much better than C at protable assembly, and above all:
"There is no silver bullet." - Fred Brooks
There was a link to Weird Al's FAQ in one of these Slashdot discussions. Basically, he was a little worried about losing money through it (but enjoyed getting all of Metallica's songs for free (-: ), but what really annoyed him were all the songs out there mislabled as his.
That was part of the problem the Harmony people had. QT is an ever evolving standard, so Harmony would always trail behind some. So long as KDE is written for the latest and greatest QT (modern KDE (Kleopatra?) only compiles for QT2.1), there's really no hope for KDE to build with Harmony or any similar QT-emulation library.
I've found once I use any GUI long enough, that the others have many nagging little things that rub me wrong.
Honestly, I think if the BSD people asked for a domain under .gnu, they would get it. I've heard they still have one machine running NetBSD at the FSF. Now, the question is whether they would swallow their ego and ask for it?
What's on the web is what people put up there. The diatrabes are almost more useful than the rest, because then you get a snapshot about what people were grumbling about, that never before has been recorded. A lot of history is an attempt to record how people felt, often based off a handful of diaries of the period, mainly of the elite.
And as I said, it shows what people choose to put up there. Hence, it's not a totally unrepresentive sample of people. You missed all the stuff that is people spreading information in ways they couldn't before - all the tutorials and books. You missed a huge number of people giving away stuff (to fulfill creative urges, for egoboo, or other benign, non-commericial reasons.)
You also missed the pro-Christian diatrabes that are out there in equal number, unless you happen to include non-Christian statements of faith in the diatrabe category and not Christian statements of faith.
>If you think that evolution is what has caused
>different approaches to career selection and
>emotional state, you've been living with
>blinders.
What happens when a child is raised as the opposite of its biological gender? Frequently, that child starts displaying properities more usually associated with its true gender.
Here's some honest questions: why are the figureheads in virtually every society male? Why are males the agressive sex in almost every society? Why do males have much higher levels of testorone (proven to increase aggression) if it's not biological?
I'm not saying there isn't discrimination. But most other species, including all the higher primates, are sexually dimorphic at a psychological level. There is no non-ideological reason to believe that humans deviate from that trend.
Well, they're libertarian - hand them the money, and they'll store pretty much whatever you want there.
Debian isn't selling _any_ boxes, because Debian doesn't sell anything. Some resellers (VA) sell Debian boxes, though.
And you read all the fine print in each and every one of those contracts? Even highly intellegent people start skipping the fine print soon enough; it's just too much, and too unclear to anyone who hasn't passed the bar.
Unnessecary to expand Unicode beyond 4 bytes;
apparently the Kligons are consistently using one character set, so it doesn't take that much space in Unicode.