High level scripting languages are a dime a dozen. Systems like expectk and wxPython give you similar ease of programming. If you like something more Lisp-ish, there are various Scheme systems with built-in GUIs. The main thing that distinguishes Rebol is that you can't get an open source implementation of it and that it has a much smaller user community.
As for "going against.NET", big efforts like that are not about technology, they are about marketing and people. And they are also about the long-term availability and tools support that a large company like Microsoft (or Sun, in the case of Java) brings to the table.
But even technologically, it is an error to confuse a scripting language with a system like.NET or Java. Yes, Rebol, Python, and Perl are much simpler to program than.NET or Java. Yes, they run a few important things somewhat faster. But.NET and Java are natively compiled, fast, general-purpose programming environments with static type checking and large libraries (written in Java itself in the case of Java), and that just makes them much more useful for large-real world problems. You see, another misconception is that the easier you make programming in a language, the more useful it is in real-world applications.
Journaling file systems have extra runtime overhead. If your system is disk bound, you lose more time on journaling while the system is up than you would over the rare fsck. Your recommendation is particularly incongruent because you recommend, at the same time, web servers that give better performance only in very highly loaded systems (unlikely to be encountered in practice).
Other problems with journaling file systems are that they are more complex, less mature, and have appeared only more recently in the Linux kernel, meaning there is a higher probability that they have some problem.
If you can't tolerate the few minutes of downtime resulting from an fsck, then a journaling file system is not going to help you either since machines become unavailable for lots of other reasons. In that case, you need network mirroring with a hot failover. Journaling file systems are more about convenience than any particularly rational engineering tradeoff.
Altogether, my recommendation is: don't pick software just because it's hot and new. For most users, ext2 with Apache makes a great web server platform. Apache is fast enough for any kind of Internet connection you are likely to have (Microsoft could probably serve all their static content from a single Apache server). If you like the convenience of a journaling file system and don't mind the performance hit, maybe you want to consider ReiserFS, which offers a lot of other useful features.
It seems very clear that sony is only trying to prevent this guy from
a) Distributing software that sony definately has the copyright on
and
b) Telling people how to break sony's copy protection mechanisms to get such software.
That's nonsense. Sony sells copy protected memory sticks to people. In order to break the copy protection, you already have to own a memory stick. In fact, Sony is trying to do an end-run around copyright: they claim copyright protection on something but at the same time don't let you treat it as published materials under the fair use doctrines. Furthermore, Sony is interfering with reverse engineering of their hardware and software, something many countries recognize as a right, and for good reasons.
I find Sony's conduct reprehensible and anti-competitive. And if this kind of conduct is permitted to spread to other areas of software and hardware, the industry is in trouble.
Python needs to bite the bullet, suck it up, pick one of the existing actively-maintained modern toolkits despite the possible flamewar, and then simply address its limitations (e.g. porting to platforms as required). Until then it won't have a standard GUI. Sometimes there is no silver bullet.;-)
Alternatively, Python should mature to the point that people can write a toolkit in Python itself, relying only on drawing primitives from the platform (the same could be said about Perl).
Mertz writes: A popular joke about Java is that it is "write once, debug everywhere."
Pretty much all the portability problems with AWT came from the use of native widgets. So, why is Mertz going to repeat the same mistake in his implementation? In fact, it looks like he is going to work hard to make things worse by exposing different APIs on different platforms.
There are a couple of good cross-platform GUIs for Python: FLTK with Python bindings, Fox with Python bindings, and wxWindows (universal or native) with Python bindings. Mertz's project seems like it recreates something whose functionality already exists--a typical case of N.I.H.
They left a repressive society that dictated how, where and what they must worship to a place where they could worship following the dictates of their conciense. How is this a bad thing?
Where did I say it was "bad"? I was merely responding to the allegation that Europeans are "followers" while Americans (supposedly) fight for their freedom. The fact is that there is no historical evidence that Americans are any more willing to defend their freedoms than Europeans.
Again you are arguing with nothing more than inflamatory rhetoric, or "HOT AIR".
Actually, I was merely responding to the "inflammatory rhetoric" that Europeans are sheepish followers.
The US is a good country with a decent political system. But an inflated sense of the strength of its political system is dangerous because Americans are too willingly going down the road towards more and more government control. The recently passed laws show that.
Too bad korganizer requires a lot of KDE and Qt libraries, and it probably requires you to run bits and pieces of the KDE desktop. (In terms of bloat, if you do run the whole KDE desktop, it takes up more than 100M of memory, so don't point fingers at Mozilla.) And I have yet to see an actual distribution of KDE software for an OS other than Linux.
In terms of functionality, I didn't find it too impressive either: limited drag-and-drop functionality, little groupware functionality, little web integration, lots of annyoing dialog boxes.
KOrganizer is s nice looking, basic organizer. But as far as I'm concerned, it isn't the ultimate organizer by a long shot. A calendar add-on to Mozilla reaches more people and takes up less space. I don't know how good the OEone calendar is, but it certainly makes a lot of sense.
If you make one of the applications "vmware", maybe it doesn't matter that much. This could still make the company happy because the basic machines will keep on running, E-mail and web browsing keeps on working, and the virtual machines don't do anything bad when it comes to networking. Also, resetting a virtual machine to a pristine state only requires removing a file.
Unfortunately, vmware has gotten rather expensive, and plex86 probably isn't ready yet (please, if you can help the author of plex86 find a good job, preferably working on plex86, do so). But if you are willing to pay for Win2k and Win2k software, the cost of vmware is small in comparison.
Otherwise, you may be able to work on your own laptop...
Oh, if you are doing real-world Microsoft Windows development in Visual C++, a "locked down" environment is probably too constraining. If you are just developing algorithms in C++, or if you develop in Java, it's probably doable. But forcing people to use a specific set of tools is not exactly the way to keep developers happy.
Open source is hardly alone in this. Commercial software may detect errors with greater regularity, but it, too, rarely does the right thing when it actually finds an error (a dialog box is not usually the right thing). Languages also often do the wrong thing: C has no exception handling or automatic cleanup, Java encourages programmers to handle exceptions poorly, and only very few languages have restartable operations. I think to address this, we need a lot more training and education, but what else is new.
Folks, putting computers into plexiglass housings looks nifty (if it goes with your interior design), but it is really anti-social. Those components put out lots of RF interference and can affect public safety communications, amateur radio, wireless networking, medical devices, radio and TV reception, etc. The fact that the FCC doesn't have the resources to enforce the law is no excuse to break it. Many regulations don't make sense, but this one really does.
Put this stuff into a metal box where it belongs. (You will notice that Apple puts their computers into shielded metal boxes, even when the outside is plexiglass.)
Actually, they Europeans did NOT. In fact, historically many areas of Europe (the one I know of personally is Russia, but I believe this extends to other areas of Europe as well) have a very strong 'follow the leader' mentality. They have no particular desire or will to lead or go against the lead of others.
Oh? You mean the Europeans that got themselves killed by the millions fighting for their freedom and democracy throughout the last few centuries? The Europeans that developed the philosophies and ideas on which the United States was founded?
Let's look at the US. Historically, the US was populated by people who fled rather than effect political change in their countries of origin. Political problems could be dealt with in the US by avoiding them rather than dealing with them. And except for declaring independence from a country thousands of miles away, the US population has not exactly demonstrated much eagerness or involvement in significant political change. There was the civil war, but both its causes and its outcome hardly make it a shining example of independent thought. And if you want to have an example of how sheepishly the US population accepts governmental power, look no further than the last presidential election.
So is your stance is that fascism is a successful tactic, or that the US will become fascist? Or neither of the above?
I don't know whether the US will go down the road of fascism (roughly, nationalism+strong leader+totalitarianism), but I think the US is in grave danger of going down the road of some form of totalitarianism. People here think that they are somehow immune to it, and that's probably the biggest mistake you can make about totalitarianism.
The missing piece in the argument is that the American democratic republic is radically different in several key areas from other democracies and republics, especially European ones. Americans historically have a very high sense of self-preservation.
And you think Europeans didn't? Come on, what kind of argument is that?
The main historical difference is that until the mid-20th century, the US was an agricultural frontier society: if you didn't like goverment, you could move or change your identity (as long as you were white and male). Europe at the time already was densely populated and had a well-functioning administration in place.
It's only over the last few decades that the US has gotten the technology to track, supervise, and control its population. But now that it's here, the US political system has not caught up with it, and neither have the political sensitivities of the US population.
And even in its earlier periods, the US managed to almost completely exterminate American Indians, deny democracy to the majority of its citizens, and enslave blacks. The US does not have a stellar record of democracy, individual freedoms, or justice. And unlike those European countries, the US still has the same political and legal systems in place that allowed those abuses.
If abuses start, the public will speak out, and this bill will be quickly curbed.
If people risk their jobs, credit records, government surveillance, and being thrown in jail for being "suspected terrorists", "the public" will quickly become quiet.
Just looking around quickly: Addonics FireWire bus-powered drive, $309 with 20GB drive. SmartDisk VST FireWire Drives, 10G for $249 or 20G for $299. There are several other drives available from the same site, including the 5GB FireFly. If you look around, you'll also find cheaper drives and a few other small drives from other manufacturers.
At least when it comes to transporting files in a portable device, those seem more practical that the iPod. Of course, they don't have an MP3 player.
Do many people actually install from CD?
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 2
Everybody I know installs a base system from CD and then uses apt to bring it up to the latest version.
If you read the news stories and press releases, you will see that Microsoft does consider this "part of.NET". That's what the analysts see. That's what the investors see. That's what the regulators see. Or should Microsoft be able to answer every criticism by saying "that's not part of.NET" just because.NET is such an amorphous project?
The fact is that this system is part of.NET in common language, Diffie rightly criticizes it, and he uses the right terminology for doing so.
What would we think? We'd probably be cursing McNealy, Sun would probably behave towards their competitors just like IBM and Microsoft, and Sun would probably be making much worse products.
But the fact is that Sun isn't in the position that Microsoft is. Right now, Sun does produce ideas, systems, software, and standards that are often more open, better thought through, and better specified than Microsoft's. And it is those ideas and standards that we should support if they are technically to our interest.
You see, this isn't about Sun or Microsoft or McNealy or Gates, it's about what actually comes out of these companies.
The article doesn't mention Java once. In fact, I doubt Diffie much cares. He is concerned that.NET centralizes all your personal information on Microsoft servers (mostly written in C/C++ incidentally).
Microsoft has submitted a small part of.NET for standardization. For most of it, they rely on proprietary, often incompletely documented APIs in Windows. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that Microsoft's own implementation will conform to the standard--why should it?
There is little that is "proprietary" about the Java language or the APIs: they are very well documented and anybody can implement them. In fact, there are several third party implementations, and they do interoperate.
Java and its libraries are much more open than C# or.NET.
It is only the linux mentality that has people write beta quality software and call it a revolution.
Actually, I wasn't talking about Linux at all, I was talking about traditional business systems.
Outlook is everywhere because it works.
Over the decades, there has been lots of commercial software with Outlook-like functionality that works. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Outlook actually works, the reason why it succeeded, rather than the many other systems with equivalent functionality, is because of Microsoft's position and approach to business, not any particular advantages.
I'm not some windows nut. I have to use it at work, but at home it's MacOS, Solaris, and Yellow Dog.
So, you use a Microsoft OS, a consumer desktop OS, a commercial UNIX, and a free UNIX clone. What real pre-Microsoft business systems have you actually used?
The fact is that Microsoft's predominance has lowered standards and redefined expectations downwards so far that a whole culture of business computing has disappeared.
All of your employees know how to use Windows coming in, not so for Unix. Retraining people costs money.
In my experience, the actual knowledge most employees have of Windows is pretty shallow. Switching them to a good Linux-based office suite is no more costly or difficult than switching them to a new release of MS Office.
In the corporate scenario, no mention is made of the need to share files with other companies. This requires Windows. No corporation really cares about the evils of closed file formats until they get in the way.
Linux office suites import and export the parts of MS Office documents that you care about: content and formatting. If a vendor sends you documents containing executable code, you should return them unopened or say that they didn't make it through your virus filter.
To be realistic, both situations should have compared the cost of a Windows setup vs. a mixed Unix/Windows setup, since that's how it work in the real world.
I don't think that's necessarily realistic at all. A mixed Windows/Linux setup incurs a lot of unnecessary costs for the Windows support and the Windows software licenses. The fact that Microsoft will, one way or another, try to force a site license on you also makes that undesirable.
Unix would be a lot more beneficial in specialized situations, where employees use a lot of custom or specialized software
Scheduling, calendaring, data analysis, order fulfillment, business intelligence, and all that are "specialized situations". It is only the Windows mentality that has people dump a bunch of low-quality MS Office programs and macros on their highly-paid employees' desks and say "here, try to get your work done with this, and become a system administrator for your own machine".
Open source software is not possessed or controlled by any one group, and therefore it doesn't meet the criteria for a "monopoly". Microsoft can use it as much as the next guy. It gives nobody a commercial advantage or disadvantage, and if people want to write proprietary software in an open source environment, nothing is stopping them from doing so.
What open source does is something very logical and economically rational. The technologies underlying Windows and UNIX were developed years ago and do not require much investment to keep up or "manufacture", yet commercial vendors keep charging a premium. Open source software simply reflects the fact that these old technologies should cost little or nothing nowadays. Open source is simply a mechanism of a rational, efficient market. And as such, open source software will indeed become dominant, unless the government enacts market-distorting laws for the benefit of companies like Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
As for "going against .NET", big efforts like that are not about technology, they are about marketing and people. And they are also about the long-term availability and tools support that a large company like Microsoft (or Sun, in the case of Java) brings to the table.
But even technologically, it is an error to confuse a scripting language with a system like .NET or Java. Yes, Rebol, Python, and Perl are much simpler to program than .NET or Java. Yes, they run a few important things somewhat faster. But .NET and Java are natively compiled, fast, general-purpose programming environments with static type checking and large libraries (written in Java itself in the case of Java), and that just makes them much more useful for large-real world problems. You see, another misconception is that the easier you make programming in a language, the more useful it is in real-world applications.
Other problems with journaling file systems are that they are more complex, less mature, and have appeared only more recently in the Linux kernel, meaning there is a higher probability that they have some problem.
If you can't tolerate the few minutes of downtime resulting from an fsck, then a journaling file system is not going to help you either since machines become unavailable for lots of other reasons. In that case, you need network mirroring with a hot failover. Journaling file systems are more about convenience than any particularly rational engineering tradeoff.
Altogether, my recommendation is: don't pick software just because it's hot and new. For most users, ext2 with Apache makes a great web server platform. Apache is fast enough for any kind of Internet connection you are likely to have (Microsoft could probably serve all their static content from a single Apache server). If you like the convenience of a journaling file system and don't mind the performance hit, maybe you want to consider ReiserFS, which offers a lot of other useful features.
That's true also of IBM's JFS, and probably XFS. Microsoft's NTFS makes even fewer guarantees. Journalling data is very slow and usually unnecessary.
I could imagine having a lot of fun with that one.
That's nonsense. Sony sells copy protected memory sticks to people. In order to break the copy protection, you already have to own a memory stick. In fact, Sony is trying to do an end-run around copyright: they claim copyright protection on something but at the same time don't let you treat it as published materials under the fair use doctrines. Furthermore, Sony is interfering with reverse engineering of their hardware and software, something many countries recognize as a right, and for good reasons.
I find Sony's conduct reprehensible and anti-competitive. And if this kind of conduct is permitted to spread to other areas of software and hardware, the industry is in trouble.
Alternatively, Python should mature to the point that people can write a toolkit in Python itself, relying only on drawing primitives from the platform (the same could be said about Perl).
Mertz's affiliation is given as "Gnosis, Inc.", not IBM. The article is simply published in IBM's DeveloperWorks for Linux.
Pretty much all the portability problems with AWT came from the use of native widgets. So, why is Mertz going to repeat the same mistake in his implementation? In fact, it looks like he is going to work hard to make things worse by exposing different APIs on different platforms.
There are a couple of good cross-platform GUIs for Python: FLTK with Python bindings, Fox with Python bindings, and wxWindows (universal or native) with Python bindings. Mertz's project seems like it recreates something whose functionality already exists--a typical case of N.I.H.
Where did I say it was "bad"? I was merely responding to the allegation that Europeans are "followers" while Americans (supposedly) fight for their freedom. The fact is that there is no historical evidence that Americans are any more willing to defend their freedoms than Europeans.
Again you are arguing with nothing more than inflamatory rhetoric, or "HOT AIR".
Actually, I was merely responding to the "inflammatory rhetoric" that Europeans are sheepish followers.
The US is a good country with a decent political system. But an inflated sense of the strength of its political system is dangerous because Americans are too willingly going down the road towards more and more government control. The recently passed laws show that.
In terms of functionality, I didn't find it too impressive either: limited drag-and-drop functionality, little groupware functionality, little web integration, lots of annyoing dialog boxes.
KOrganizer is s nice looking, basic organizer. But as far as I'm concerned, it isn't the ultimate organizer by a long shot. A calendar add-on to Mozilla reaches more people and takes up less space. I don't know how good the OEone calendar is, but it certainly makes a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, vmware has gotten rather expensive, and plex86 probably isn't ready yet (please, if you can help the author of plex86 find a good job, preferably working on plex86, do so). But if you are willing to pay for Win2k and Win2k software, the cost of vmware is small in comparison.
Otherwise, you may be able to work on your own laptop...
Oh, if you are doing real-world Microsoft Windows development in Visual C++, a "locked down" environment is probably too constraining. If you are just developing algorithms in C++, or if you develop in Java, it's probably doable. But forcing people to use a specific set of tools is not exactly the way to keep developers happy.
Open source is hardly alone in this. Commercial software may detect errors with greater regularity, but it, too, rarely does the right thing when it actually finds an error (a dialog box is not usually the right thing). Languages also often do the wrong thing: C has no exception handling or automatic cleanup, Java encourages programmers to handle exceptions poorly, and only very few languages have restartable operations. I think to address this, we need a lot more training and education, but what else is new.
Put this stuff into a metal box where it belongs. (You will notice that Apple puts their computers into shielded metal boxes, even when the outside is plexiglass.)
Oh? You mean the Europeans that got themselves killed by the millions fighting for their freedom and democracy throughout the last few centuries? The Europeans that developed the philosophies and ideas on which the United States was founded?
Let's look at the US. Historically, the US was populated by people who fled rather than effect political change in their countries of origin. Political problems could be dealt with in the US by avoiding them rather than dealing with them. And except for declaring independence from a country thousands of miles away, the US population has not exactly demonstrated much eagerness or involvement in significant political change. There was the civil war, but both its causes and its outcome hardly make it a shining example of independent thought. And if you want to have an example of how sheepishly the US population accepts governmental power, look no further than the last presidential election.
So is your stance is that fascism is a successful tactic, or that the US will become fascist? Or neither of the above?
I don't know whether the US will go down the road of fascism (roughly, nationalism+strong leader+totalitarianism), but I think the US is in grave danger of going down the road of some form of totalitarianism. People here think that they are somehow immune to it, and that's probably the biggest mistake you can make about totalitarianism.
And you think Europeans didn't? Come on, what kind of argument is that?
The main historical difference is that until the mid-20th century, the US was an agricultural frontier society: if you didn't like goverment, you could move or change your identity (as long as you were white and male). Europe at the time already was densely populated and had a well-functioning administration in place.
It's only over the last few decades that the US has gotten the technology to track, supervise, and control its population. But now that it's here, the US political system has not caught up with it, and neither have the political sensitivities of the US population.
And even in its earlier periods, the US managed to almost completely exterminate American Indians, deny democracy to the majority of its citizens, and enslave blacks. The US does not have a stellar record of democracy, individual freedoms, or justice. And unlike those European countries, the US still has the same political and legal systems in place that allowed those abuses.
If abuses start, the public will speak out, and this bill will be quickly curbed.
If people risk their jobs, credit records, government surveillance, and being thrown in jail for being "suspected terrorists", "the public" will quickly become quiet.
Is this similar to the SD scheme? Does the iPod look like a standard FireWire drive or does it use a special protocol?
At least when it comes to transporting files in a portable device, those seem more practical that the iPod. Of course, they don't have an MP3 player.
Everybody I know installs a base system from CD and then uses apt to bring it up to the latest version.
The fact is that this system is part of .NET in common language, Diffie rightly criticizes it, and he uses the right terminology for doing so.
But the fact is that Sun isn't in the position that Microsoft is. Right now, Sun does produce ideas, systems, software, and standards that are often more open, better thought through, and better specified than Microsoft's. And it is those ideas and standards that we should support if they are technically to our interest.
You see, this isn't about Sun or Microsoft or McNealy or Gates, it's about what actually comes out of these companies.
The article doesn't mention Java once. In fact, I doubt Diffie much cares. He is concerned that .NET centralizes all your personal information on Microsoft servers (mostly written in C/C++ incidentally).
There is little that is "proprietary" about the Java language or the APIs: they are very well documented and anybody can implement them. In fact, there are several third party implementations, and they do interoperate.
Java and its libraries are much more open than C# or .NET.
Actually, I wasn't talking about Linux at all, I was talking about traditional business systems.
Outlook is everywhere because it works.
Over the decades, there has been lots of commercial software with Outlook-like functionality that works. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Outlook actually works, the reason why it succeeded, rather than the many other systems with equivalent functionality, is because of Microsoft's position and approach to business, not any particular advantages.
I'm not some windows nut. I have to use it at work, but at home it's MacOS, Solaris, and Yellow Dog.
So, you use a Microsoft OS, a consumer desktop OS, a commercial UNIX, and a free UNIX clone. What real pre-Microsoft business systems have you actually used?
The fact is that Microsoft's predominance has lowered standards and redefined expectations downwards so far that a whole culture of business computing has disappeared.
In my experience, the actual knowledge most employees have of Windows is pretty shallow. Switching them to a good Linux-based office suite is no more costly or difficult than switching them to a new release of MS Office.
In the corporate scenario, no mention is made of the need to share files with other companies. This requires Windows. No corporation really cares about the evils of closed file formats until they get in the way.
Linux office suites import and export the parts of MS Office documents that you care about: content and formatting. If a vendor sends you documents containing executable code, you should return them unopened or say that they didn't make it through your virus filter.
To be realistic, both situations should have compared the cost of a Windows setup vs. a mixed Unix/Windows setup, since that's how it work in the real world.
I don't think that's necessarily realistic at all. A mixed Windows/Linux setup incurs a lot of unnecessary costs for the Windows support and the Windows software licenses. The fact that Microsoft will, one way or another, try to force a site license on you also makes that undesirable.
Unix would be a lot more beneficial in specialized situations, where employees use a lot of custom or specialized software
Scheduling, calendaring, data analysis, order fulfillment, business intelligence, and all that are "specialized situations". It is only the Windows mentality that has people dump a bunch of low-quality MS Office programs and macros on their highly-paid employees' desks and say "here, try to get your work done with this, and become a system administrator for your own machine".
What open source does is something very logical and economically rational. The technologies underlying Windows and UNIX were developed years ago and do not require much investment to keep up or "manufacture", yet commercial vendors keep charging a premium. Open source software simply reflects the fact that these old technologies should cost little or nothing nowadays. Open source is simply a mechanism of a rational, efficient market. And as such, open source software will indeed become dominant, unless the government enacts market-distorting laws for the benefit of companies like Microsoft.