I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Without exception, code I've seen that was written by people with some sort of formal training in programming is superior (and sometimes massively so) to code written by completely self-taught programmers. Without exception.
I'm very close to finishing my own degree, and I am determined to finish. It's a sign to potential employers that I have recieved formal instruction over a certain skill set, and that I can finish a big project that I started. Plus, it will open more doors for me than might have been open without the degree.
Every piece of software that's worth anything probably has some badly designed parts. I'm sure that much of my code could be better designed. It's just the nature of the beast. All they are saying is that just because some code is open source, that doesn't make it instantly better for any reason. A turd with a flower on it is still just a turd, however nice the flower may be.
I think, too, that Microsoft knows full well how they treat the rest of the industry (with contempt and distrust), and I'm sure they know how much of the industry, especially the OSS community, views them (the same way). You are exactly correct that people expect nothing but 'empty demonstrations and half-measures' from Microsoft, and I'm sure that Microsoft is aware of that fact. They basically invented the concept of vapourware, and practice it often!
As far as having respect for Microsoft, I don't see that we need to. They have been treating the industry with nothing but disrespect for years now. Should we not treat them with the same disrespect? The Golden Rule, indeed!
There have, for a long time, been the commands installpkg and removepkg (or is it pkginstall and pkgremove? I can never remember) which do exactly what you might think they do.
I still think it's funny that when doing an install of a Redhat system, the installer uses --force --nodeps to install everything. Even Redhat doesn't trust their own system.
I tried it out this weekend with a heavily updated Slack 3.4 system, and the only problem I had was getting it to link with my native GL libs instead of Mesa. I ended up hacking the configure scripts, and it worked fine. Config options, please!
As far as using it, I think it's a very well-done system. The only problem I had/am having is getting kfm to recognize WordPerfect 8 files without an extension (my roommate doesn't use extensions on his files). Isn't that what the magic file is for? I added the appropriate lines to the file, and nothing happened, so I ended up putting some extensions for the type. Anybody have any ideas? Perhaps adding mime-types and applications could be streamlined a bit...
Agreed. From the looks of things, Word Perfect uses the same format it has since version 6.0, and it seems to work just fine, even exchanging files between Linux WP8 and Win-don't WP8. Word's constant format changes have to be just another way to suck up consumers' money. Either that, or just shoddy software engineering to begin with. I would put my money on the former.
Before the Brood War expansion, you could do the spawn install and run 8 people off the same disc, and everything was cool. Now after Brood War EVERYBODY has to have the full original version AND the Brood War expansion disc. If you try the disc-swapping trick, whoever doesn't have the disc at the end of the game gets a nice bluescreen. Whatta bunch of blood sucking pricks! And half the new units in Brood War (all the new air units) suck my ass. Why do we put up with this crap? And of course we'll NEVER get a Linux port either.
The TCP/IP thing is pretty stupid too; it's Win-don't, and it's supposed to take care of all that stuff FOR YOU. Whatever your default transport is, Starcraft should just shut up and use it.
I've seen people using OS/2 off and on since the 2.1 days, and I've always been fairly impressed with the desktop. The "everything's an object" concept is quite powerful. I always got a kick out of the shredder's sound file too. Now that Big Blue is officially supporting Linux, I'd be interested to see the OS/2 desktop (Workplace Shell, is it?) running on top of Linux and X. Think it'll ever happen? Probably not, given the way IBM seems to feel about anything related to OS/2. It's a damn shame.
Same thing with HPFS. IBM could offer some valuable help and/or code to the HPFS folks. But they probably won't, and likely don't even care.
One of the links at the bottom of this article is a nice comparison of Linux and W2K. Now, it was 5 pages long, and I didn't feel like reading it, but I'm curious how they can compare a product that is here right now to a product that won't be here until at LEAST the year 2000 (probably later, if I know Microschlock). It boggles the mind. The masters of vapourware are at it again...
They wrote it in assembly language, or raw opcodes, just like most everything else they did back then.
Supposedly that's one of the big tests of the viability of a language: whether you can write a compiler for the language in the language. But you've always gotta write the first compiler in some other language.
After taking my compiler design course, I've never looked at programming the same way. Same with assembly programming. IMNSHO, every programmer should be exposed to both of these topics.
Is it just me, or does that guy really not grasp the concept of the GPL and how it applies to Linux? He was saying something about application add-ons to the system being required to be GPLed since the kernel was. Hello? He just doesn't get it.
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http://www.io.com/~wwagner/pics/linux-ad2.gif
I'm very close to finishing my own degree, and I am determined to finish. It's a sign to potential employers that I have recieved formal instruction over a certain skill set, and that I can finish a big project that I started. Plus, it will open more doors for me than might have been open without the degree.
I think, too, that Microsoft knows full well how they treat the rest of the industry (with contempt and distrust), and I'm sure they know how much of the industry, especially the OSS community, views them (the same way). You are exactly correct that people expect nothing but 'empty demonstrations and half-measures' from Microsoft, and I'm sure that Microsoft is aware of that fact. They basically invented the concept of vapourware, and practice it often!
As far as having respect for Microsoft, I don't see that we need to. They have been treating the industry with nothing but disrespect for years now. Should we not treat them with the same disrespect? The Golden Rule, indeed!
I don't think it's really important whether or not gotos are used, but whether or not they're used correctly.
There have, for a long time, been the commands installpkg and removepkg (or is it pkginstall and pkgremove? I can never remember) which do exactly what you might think they do.
I still think it's funny that when doing an install of a Redhat system, the installer uses --force --nodeps to install everything. Even Redhat doesn't trust their own system.
I tried it out this weekend with a heavily updated Slack 3.4 system, and the only problem I had was getting it to link with my native GL libs instead of Mesa. I ended up hacking the configure scripts, and it worked fine. Config options, please!
As far as using it, I think it's a very well-done system. The only problem I had/am having is getting kfm to recognize WordPerfect 8 files without an extension (my roommate doesn't use extensions on his files). Isn't that what the magic file is for? I added the appropriate lines to the file, and nothing happened, so I ended up putting some extensions for the type. Anybody have any ideas? Perhaps adding mime-types and applications could be streamlined a bit...
Agreed. From the looks of things, Word Perfect uses the same format it has since version 6.0, and it seems to work just fine, even exchanging files between Linux WP8 and Win-don't WP8. Word's constant format changes have to be just another way to suck up consumers' money. Either that, or just shoddy software engineering to begin with. I would put my money on the former.
I Am Killing All Lawyers? Now that's a step in the right direction... :P
Is there any chance that IBM will do some work on read-write HPFS?
Before the Brood War expansion, you could do the spawn install and run 8 people off the same disc, and everything was cool. Now after Brood War EVERYBODY has to have the full original version AND the Brood War expansion disc. If you try the disc-swapping trick, whoever doesn't have the disc at the end of the game gets a nice bluescreen. Whatta bunch of blood sucking pricks! And half the new units in Brood War (all the new air units) suck my ass. Why do we put up with this crap? And of course we'll NEVER get a Linux port either.
The TCP/IP thing is pretty stupid too; it's Win-don't, and it's supposed to take care of all that stuff FOR YOU. Whatever your default transport is, Starcraft should just shut up and use it.
I've seen people using OS/2 off and on since the 2.1 days, and I've always been fairly impressed with the desktop. The "everything's an object" concept is quite powerful. I always got a kick out of the shredder's sound file too. Now that Big Blue is officially supporting Linux, I'd be interested to see the OS/2 desktop (Workplace Shell, is it?) running on top of Linux and X. Think it'll ever happen? Probably not, given the way IBM seems to feel about anything related to OS/2. It's a damn shame.
Same thing with HPFS. IBM could offer some valuable help and/or code to the HPFS folks. But they probably won't, and likely don't even care.
One of the links at the bottom of this article is a nice comparison of Linux and W2K. Now, it was 5 pages long, and I didn't feel like reading it, but I'm curious how they can compare a product that is here right now to a product that won't be here until at LEAST the year 2000 (probably later, if I know Microschlock). It boggles the mind. The masters of vapourware are at it again...
Supposedly that's one of the big tests of the viability of a language: whether you can write a compiler for the language in the language. But you've always gotta write the first compiler in some other language.
After taking my compiler design course, I've never looked at programming the same way. Same with assembly programming. IMNSHO, every programmer should be exposed to both of these topics.
Is it just me, or does that guy really not grasp the concept of the GPL and how it applies to Linux? He was saying something about application add-ons to the system being required to be GPLed since the kernel was. Hello? He just doesn't get it.