Even better: The article claims 10 gadgets, there's only 5. And the frozen dude mouse is actually the mouse for the Falcon case mod. I don't know why you think that's more useless than a mouse controlled etch-a-sketch:P
Minor correction: Usually, Java applications require only the JVM. Usually they come bundled with all their dependencies tailored to the specified programm.
This is also true for.NET applications - Visual Studio provides an excellent packaging tool that bundles up dependencies (taking advantage of the rich versioning that.NET provides, with signed assemblies). In both cases it's a function of the tools available for each platform, I think they're roughly equal with an edge to.NET for the versioning of assemblies.
For example, the problem you describe wouldn't arise (or at least would be much easier to diagnose and resolve) in a.NET application, assuming that the library developer incremented the version number appropriately. In the Java case, while they may have chaneged the version number, it's awkward for the client application to check those numbers and it may not be able to do anything usefull anyway. MS has learned a lot about dependency hell over the years, and while theres not a whole lot they can do to fix it in Windows,.NET has really good solutions.
A webapp is good for any application that has as it's main requirement distributed access and ease of updates, coupled with a lack of a need for rich client interaction. I'm currently working on a data entry web application and it's a nightmare because of brower limitations. A report server (as mentioned above) is a great example of a good web application.
Version control of client apps really can be solved. It's not even that hard. Sadly, it's pretty easy to do badly. But if you want rich client functionality you'll find that the week you spend writing update functionality a lot less than the ages you'll spend writing customized rich client javascript. There's a very good reason that the applications most people use every day are not thin clients. One thing to bear in mind is that it's not just features that browsers lack, it's also features browsers have that interfere with your application. For example, the back button is the bane of many web applications. The kind of features people want and use when they're actually browsing hypertext are very different than the ones they need and one when they're interacting with a buisness application.
I write webapps for a living, and I would recommend against them in almost all situations, especially for medical applications. The browser is actually a pretty piss-poor environment for an application, there's very little opportunity to offload stuff to the client and you have to be extremely carefull about what you choose to because of feature mismatch.
You can do a LOT more in a client/server application. In a productive language with good tools (Python/wxPython being my preference) you'll probably be faster than deploying a web app, and you'll actually be able to get usefull, rich, client side behavior. The main advantage to a thin/web client app is the ease of deployment and updating, and while it's a fairly major gain I think the increased utility of a rich client pays off. Also, someone else may have already done the work for you, Java Web Start, for example.
It's worth pointing out that ignoring malformed XML is correct, standards compliant behavior. An XML which is malformed is hardly an XML at all. If you're debugging XML streams you should be using a lower level tool, not a browser. And especially not IE, which has (as you've no doubt noticed) zero support for such a thing.
To be fair, Firefox has had stuff that Opera was missing for years too. Like, say, a well-implemented JavaScript model. The feature sets are converging, it's not all from Operas side. That said, yes, many of the "cool" new experimental features you see in browsers today originated in Opera (not all, livemarks are a Mozilla invention afaik, for example). But Opera struggled against poor standards support for a long time (except in CSS) and may still for all I know. I used Opera up through version 6 and ditched it for Firefox.
Eh. Yes and no. It's almost certain that if his employer didn't provide computers and internet access, he wouldn't get paid more. The company absorbs it as a business expense. So in most situations (perhaps not all), yes, the employer really is paying for it.
Well, here's the basic thing. You're wrong..NET apps require, at a minimum, the.NET runtime. There's a core dependency, just like the JVM. Individual.NET apps may also require additional libraries ("assemblies"), just as Java apps would. Incidently,.NET provides excellent built in versioning support which makes some of the support horror stories you hear about Java go away.
The.NET runtime also exists for older versions of Windows, down to Windows 98..NET apps will run in 128 megs of ram, although they'll be slow just like thier Java counterparts will be.
All your points about ugrading are reasonable, although not final (there's a whole shit-ton of problems with mainframe thin clients, too, it's why people are always upgrading away from them), but also totally unrelated to your flaming of.NET OR to the topic at hand. I'll assume that whoever he's working for has already decided that upgrading is in fact something they want to do.
In summart: If you're going to flame a technology, you should probably make sure that you're right first instead of saying stuff like "Oh, I bet technology X doesn't have Y, therefore it sucks", which makes you look like a tool when technology X does in fact have Y and you're totally unable to articulate any of the reasons it actually DOES suck. Also, if you're going to go on a rant fest over a technology, stick to just that one topic, don't try to distract attention from your hand-waving by arguing tangents like "You shouldn't actually upgrade because your terminal emulators and mainframes are sufficent".
Possibly because that deity made you, and therefore has some claim on you?
If he wanted a lapdog he should have made one then. God, as described in the Bible, isn't an diety I want to have anything to do with. He's bitter and cruel and despite regularly being described as loving and forgiving, rarely demonsrates these traits. It's kinda like listening to an abused wife talk about her husband.
As for Matthew, I understand the point. I should point out that nobody is walking on water these days, though. But the whole point is that you have faith - that you choose (or are led, depending on your viewpoint) to believe these things. I don't, and require demonstration. There's no leap of faith involved here. Some people can't believe that the universe exists, or that we exist, or that X exists, and the fact that it does points to a creator. That's fine, but I don't see the correlation there and am perfectly happy with random chance and chaos being the explanation for my existance. I'd be fine with there being an intelligent creator, too, but if he's going to be God as well as a creator, ie he's going to judge us/me and demand worship and certain behavior, etc, etc then I'm not interested unless he's going to communicate a little more effectively.
Occam's Razor requires no theism and it doesn't matter if Occam was a theist or not. Darwin was a theist too. The belief that God has shown himself through some non-obvious means is exactly that, a belief, not a fact, and requires a leap of faith. It's a circular reference.
Any God who wants my worship needs to do something to deserve it. "Worship me or you go to Hell" is insufficent. Why should I put up with any crap for a diety that I wouldn't accept from a human?
Agree 100%, although I've just started playing and haven't been able to enjoy anything more than the holiday wreaths in the Undercity (on a side note, the Undercity is pretty damn jolly for a ruined, plague infested sewer populated by rotting corpses).
I'd like to mention the technical smoothness of the game, too, which is a hallmark of Blizzards. WoW, like other Blizzard games and unlike all to many others, doesn't fuss if you alt-tab away from it. It runs fine in windowed mode, with excellent performance. The UI is generally superior to most games, with stuff responding as you expect (cut & paste in text fields!). No crashes (at least for me), not anything I can say about any other MMORPG I've played.
Re:The GPL should be a little friendler.
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Revising the GPL
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· Score: 1
There's a specific reasoning behind the GPL, and it doing that is a feature, not a bug. It's explained on the page you link. That said, I agree to an extent and prefer LGPL over GPL libraries, even when writing GPL software.
As for linking, I was using "linking" in the common sense of "combining", rather than in the technical sense. OP said applications, not libraries, and most forms of IPC do not invoke the GPL.
I said it was a violation in spirit. There's very little reason, and very little freedom in, modifying the Tivo source if the Tivo hardware actively prevents you from running your modified source. It's akin to "source available", or the MS Shared Source license, rather than OSS per se.
You understand correctly, but you're drawing the wrong conclusion. What does the copyright holder get out of the GPL? They get the benefit that modifications to thier work will remain in the public. That's to the benefit of the public and (specifically) the end user, not the copyright holder themself. The copyright holder may also be an end user, but that's incidental.
The basic premise behind the GPL is that open source is better than closed. Not better in the sense that it works better (although it may), but that it's a free environment for you to work in and you're allowed to make modifications to the system as you desire. The point of the GPL is to retain this freedom for the users of software. This is one reason that Stallman and the FSF frown on the LGPL and are generally hostile to closed source - he/they feel that the ideal of a computing environment is open source and that the encouragment of closed source is a threat to that. I, along with many other people, am more pragmatic but I respect the ideal behind the GPL very much and I appreciate the freedoms it guarantees me as a user of open source software.
Re:The GPL should be a little friendler.
on
Revising the GPL
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· Score: 1
Parent should learn to clearly spell out his ideas if he doesn't want to get jumped on for posting ridiculous nonsense. Even allowing for that, half his post is still just wrong.
If all you care about is making sure nobody else can patent something, then all you have to do is publish and/or document it. When people talk about defensive patents, they mean that when company A sues you with a ridiculously overbroad patent, you can threaten to sue them basck with YOUR ridiculously broad patent, thus forcing a stalemate, so you both cross-license and shut company C, which doesn't have any patents, out in the cold. Note that option 1 means that you dislike patents and are objecting to exploitation of the sytem, whereas option 2 means you're exploiting the system for your own profit. For option 2 to work, you want as large and as ridiculously broad of a patent library as possible, because the company with the smaller, narrower patents will end up needing to pay money.
In any case, IBM's immense patent portfolio is not just there for defense. There's a reason they're the biggest patent holder in the world.
That's a good question. I suggest you go to your local library, get a copy of Bartlett's Quotations, and see if there's a "cult" of any of the people in there. If not, then shut the hell up about someone posting a relevant quote from a recognized authority as a summary of his own position.
Re:A little too far?
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Revising the GPL
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You're actually totally confused about who the GPL is trying to protect and what the freedom is about. It's about the freedom for the end user (say, me) to have and modify the source for for the software I use. I don't know if Tivo actively attempts to prevent modified versions of Linux from being run on it's hardware but if so I agree that it's a violation of the spirit of the GPL. The reason I'm getting the source is because, as a user of the product, I want the freedom to modify it. The GPL is only incidently about protecting the programmer, the primary beneficiary is the end user.
Re:The GPL should be a little friendler.
on
Revising the GPL
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Making it difficult to connect applications together because one is not under the GPL and doesn't want to be.
There's no rule that you have to use GPL software. If you don't want to use someone elses work, you are free to write it all yourself. Note that most ways of linking applications together do not trigger GPL clauses.
[...]would like to be able to use pattened by me technology in my Open Source Program but I don't want just everyone to use it
Then you don't want to produce Open Source software, you want to produce freeware or non-commercial software. The GPL (and OSS) is not for you, look at some other license.
I was going to try to address the rest of your comment but I can't even figure out what it says. By the way, it's "patent". Note the number of t's.
If the synchronization API in PocketPC wasn't such a heaping file of flaming shit you might find more apps that synced properly. Outlook works because MS embedded that functionality directly into ActiveSync. There's no equivilent api for third parties to use, you have to do lots of hacky and unstable piggybacking on top of ActiveSync.
There are a lot of people who confuse "No, just because you call it religion doesn't mean you can do anything you want" with religious oppression. I suppose from a certain point of view it's valid.
I shall refute your argument thus: so what? There's a lot of people who believe in invisible demons that torture you if you're bad. They give a lot of money to magicians who can keep the demons away. I think it's stupid, but who cares?
The US stock market is based almost (but not entirely) on psychology and a shared belief that it means something. Same with the US currency. I think both of those things are stupid too, but we don't get rid of those. That's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm not omniscient, and I'm also smart enough to know that you can't legislate away stupidity. Trying to do it means you're a tyrant.
Yay, someone who's so insecure in thier own beliefs that they spring into outright ad hominem attacks against people who don't share them.
There's some pretty basic logical fallacies going on in your statement. I'll start with the most obvious one, which is that it's impossible to prove a negative. Your belief in God is an article of faith for you. By definition, it requires no proof. An atheist doesn't make that leap of faith, and, in the absence of proof, assumes lack of existence. This is a basic Occams Razor type thing. If you want be to believe in God, he'd better show himself. And when he does, he better be ready to answer some of my questions, too.
Have you ever taken a step back and really looked at your arguments? You're claiming a belief in something that, by your own argument, can't be known or understood. It's by definition irrational. And you feel, that from this platform, you have some sort of right to demand proof? (by the way, theologians with real faith usually argue way more convincingly for the existence of God than you do. Also, they don't get upset by people who don't believe).
Slashdot Mirror
Even better: The article claims 10 gadgets, there's only 5. And the frozen dude mouse is actually the mouse for the Falcon case mod. I don't know why you think that's more useless than a mouse controlled etch-a-sketch :P
JavaScript, not java. I don't know if 8 is any better, but 6 was pathetic (half the DOM wasn't there) and 7 was not much better.
This is also true for .NET applications - Visual Studio provides an excellent packaging tool that bundles up dependencies (taking advantage of the rich versioning that .NET provides, with signed assemblies). In both cases it's a function of the tools available for each platform, I think they're roughly equal with an edge to .NET for the versioning of assemblies.
For example, the problem you describe wouldn't arise (or at least would be much easier to diagnose and resolve) in a .NET application, assuming that the library developer incremented the version number appropriately. In the Java case, while they may have chaneged the version number, it's awkward for the client application to check those numbers and it may not be able to do anything usefull anyway. MS has learned a lot about dependency hell over the years, and while theres not a whole lot they can do to fix it in Windows, .NET has really good solutions.
Version control of client apps really can be solved. It's not even that hard. Sadly, it's pretty easy to do badly. But if you want rich client functionality you'll find that the week you spend writing update functionality a lot less than the ages you'll spend writing customized rich client javascript. There's a very good reason that the applications most people use every day are not thin clients. One thing to bear in mind is that it's not just features that browsers lack, it's also features browsers have that interfere with your application. For example, the back button is the bane of many web applications. The kind of features people want and use when they're actually browsing hypertext are very different than the ones they need and one when they're interacting with a buisness application.
You can do a LOT more in a client/server application. In a productive language with good tools (Python/wxPython being my preference) you'll probably be faster than deploying a web app, and you'll actually be able to get usefull, rich, client side behavior. The main advantage to a thin/web client app is the ease of deployment and updating, and while it's a fairly major gain I think the increased utility of a rich client pays off. Also, someone else may have already done the work for you, Java Web Start, for example.
It's worth pointing out that ignoring malformed XML is correct, standards compliant behavior. An XML which is malformed is hardly an XML at all. If you're debugging XML streams you should be using a lower level tool, not a browser. And especially not IE, which has (as you've no doubt noticed) zero support for such a thing.
To be fair, Firefox has had stuff that Opera was missing for years too. Like, say, a well-implemented JavaScript model. The feature sets are converging, it's not all from Operas side. That said, yes, many of the "cool" new experimental features you see in browsers today originated in Opera (not all, livemarks are a Mozilla invention afaik, for example). But Opera struggled against poor standards support for a long time (except in CSS) and may still for all I know. I used Opera up through version 6 and ditched it for Firefox.
Eh. Yes and no. It's almost certain that if his employer didn't provide computers and internet access, he wouldn't get paid more. The company absorbs it as a business expense. So in most situations (perhaps not all), yes, the employer really is paying for it.
The .NET runtime also exists for older versions of Windows, down to Windows 98. .NET apps will run in 128 megs of ram, although they'll be slow just like thier Java counterparts will be.
All your points about ugrading are reasonable, although not final (there's a whole shit-ton of problems with mainframe thin clients, too, it's why people are always upgrading away from them), but also totally unrelated to your flaming of .NET OR to the topic at hand. I'll assume that whoever he's working for has already decided that upgrading is in fact something they want to do.
In summart: If you're going to flame a technology, you should probably make sure that you're right first instead of saying stuff like "Oh, I bet technology X doesn't have Y, therefore it sucks", which makes you look like a tool when technology X does in fact have Y and you're totally unable to articulate any of the reasons it actually DOES suck. Also, if you're going to go on a rant fest over a technology, stick to just that one topic, don't try to distract attention from your hand-waving by arguing tangents like "You shouldn't actually upgrade because your terminal emulators and mainframes are sufficent".
If he wanted a lapdog he should have made one then. God, as described in the Bible, isn't an diety I want to have anything to do with. He's bitter and cruel and despite regularly being described as loving and forgiving, rarely demonsrates these traits. It's kinda like listening to an abused wife talk about her husband.
As for Matthew, I understand the point. I should point out that nobody is walking on water these days, though. But the whole point is that you have faith - that you choose (or are led, depending on your viewpoint) to believe these things. I don't, and require demonstration. There's no leap of faith involved here. Some people can't believe that the universe exists, or that we exist, or that X exists, and the fact that it does points to a creator. That's fine, but I don't see the correlation there and am perfectly happy with random chance and chaos being the explanation for my existance. I'd be fine with there being an intelligent creator, too, but if he's going to be God as well as a creator, ie he's going to judge us/me and demand worship and certain behavior, etc, etc then I'm not interested unless he's going to communicate a little more effectively.
Any God who wants my worship needs to do something to deserve it. "Worship me or you go to Hell" is insufficent. Why should I put up with any crap for a diety that I wouldn't accept from a human?
Last time I rode the blimp I accidently fell off in the middle of the ocean :(. They need seatbelts on those things.
Yes, because it's softwarez. There's also moviez, mp3z and filez.
I'd like to mention the technical smoothness of the game, too, which is a hallmark of Blizzards. WoW, like other Blizzard games and unlike all to many others, doesn't fuss if you alt-tab away from it. It runs fine in windowed mode, with excellent performance. The UI is generally superior to most games, with stuff responding as you expect (cut & paste in text fields!). No crashes (at least for me), not anything I can say about any other MMORPG I've played.
As for linking, I was using "linking" in the common sense of "combining", rather than in the technical sense. OP said applications, not libraries, and most forms of IPC do not invoke the GPL.
I said it was a violation in spirit. There's very little reason, and very little freedom in, modifying the Tivo source if the Tivo hardware actively prevents you from running your modified source. It's akin to "source available", or the MS Shared Source license, rather than OSS per se.
The basic premise behind the GPL is that open source is better than closed. Not better in the sense that it works better (although it may), but that it's a free environment for you to work in and you're allowed to make modifications to the system as you desire. The point of the GPL is to retain this freedom for the users of software. This is one reason that Stallman and the FSF frown on the LGPL and are generally hostile to closed source - he/they feel that the ideal of a computing environment is open source and that the encouragment of closed source is a threat to that. I, along with many other people, am more pragmatic but I respect the ideal behind the GPL very much and I appreciate the freedoms it guarantees me as a user of open source software.
If all you care about is making sure nobody else can patent something, then all you have to do is publish and/or document it. When people talk about defensive patents, they mean that when company A sues you with a ridiculously overbroad patent, you can threaten to sue them basck with YOUR ridiculously broad patent, thus forcing a stalemate, so you both cross-license and shut company C, which doesn't have any patents, out in the cold. Note that option 1 means that you dislike patents and are objecting to exploitation of the sytem, whereas option 2 means you're exploiting the system for your own profit. For option 2 to work, you want as large and as ridiculously broad of a patent library as possible, because the company with the smaller, narrower patents will end up needing to pay money.
In any case, IBM's immense patent portfolio is not just there for defense. There's a reason they're the biggest patent holder in the world.
That's a good question. I suggest you go to your local library, get a copy of Bartlett's Quotations, and see if there's a "cult" of any of the people in there. If not, then shut the hell up about someone posting a relevant quote from a recognized authority as a summary of his own position.
You're actually totally confused about who the GPL is trying to protect and what the freedom is about. It's about the freedom for the end user (say, me) to have and modify the source for for the software I use. I don't know if Tivo actively attempts to prevent modified versions of Linux from being run on it's hardware but if so I agree that it's a violation of the spirit of the GPL. The reason I'm getting the source is because, as a user of the product, I want the freedom to modify it. The GPL is only incidently about protecting the programmer, the primary beneficiary is the end user.
There's no rule that you have to use GPL software. If you don't want to use someone elses work, you are free to write it all yourself. Note that most ways of linking applications together do not trigger GPL clauses.
[...]would like to be able to use pattened by me technology in my Open Source Program but I don't want just everyone to use it
Then you don't want to produce Open Source software, you want to produce freeware or non-commercial software. The GPL (and OSS) is not for you, look at some other license.
I was going to try to address the rest of your comment but I can't even figure out what it says. By the way, it's "patent". Note the number of t's.
If the synchronization API in PocketPC wasn't such a heaping file of flaming shit you might find more apps that synced properly. Outlook works because MS embedded that functionality directly into ActiveSync. There's no equivilent api for third parties to use, you have to do lots of hacky and unstable piggybacking on top of ActiveSync.
There are a lot of people who confuse "No, just because you call it religion doesn't mean you can do anything you want" with religious oppression. I suppose from a certain point of view it's valid.
The US stock market is based almost (but not entirely) on psychology and a shared belief that it means something. Same with the US currency. I think both of those things are stupid too, but we don't get rid of those. That's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm not omniscient, and I'm also smart enough to know that you can't legislate away stupidity. Trying to do it means you're a tyrant.
There's some pretty basic logical fallacies going on in your statement. I'll start with the most obvious one, which is that it's impossible to prove a negative. Your belief in God is an article of faith for you. By definition, it requires no proof. An atheist doesn't make that leap of faith, and, in the absence of proof, assumes lack of existence. This is a basic Occams Razor type thing. If you want be to believe in God, he'd better show himself. And when he does, he better be ready to answer some of my questions, too.
Have you ever taken a step back and really looked at your arguments? You're claiming a belief in something that, by your own argument, can't be known or understood. It's by definition irrational. And you feel, that from this platform, you have some sort of right to demand proof? (by the way, theologians with real faith usually argue way more convincingly for the existence of God than you do. Also, they don't get upset by people who don't believe).