Can't you skin GTK or something on Linux to make it not look quite as much like ass? Is there any way of making the Windows port do this, at all?
Yes, the GTK default skin is awful. Everybody uses a a more modern theme such as Mist, ThinICE, BlueCurve et al. You can choose the theme on Windows, but I dunno how. Go find some GNOME2 screenshots at gnome.org to see that GTK can actually look very nice and professional.
The windows situation should improve soon, GTK2.2 has much better windows support and the next stable version of the gimp uses it (along with much nicer artwork and looks all round).
Ahhh, well that's sort of cheating. A better example would be using a high level language. That doesn't use Glade (UIs loaded externally). I've written a hello world GTK app in Python that is only 4 lines of code using glade, one of which is loading the file.
If you're going to compare APIs you should at least make use of the features of each, and use languages of similar levels. No, ObjC is not a low level language either.
GTK UI construction in C is verbose yeah, but so is anything in C. You can make GTK apps very simply if you use the right bindings and use Glade (equivalent to.nib files), ditto for any part of the GNOME apis. Oh and I'd much rather not use Objective-C for anything, I find it incredibly hard to read, and I know many languages. I'm sure I could learn it if I wanted to, but I don't, language neutral APIs are generally much nicer imho.
Re:What about a GTK version that uses native widge
on
GTK+OSX for Mac OS X Aqua
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think that it is great that they have ported GTK to so many places, but there is one major problem in my opinion. GTK reimplements all of the native OS widgets
I think you missed something pretty important. GTK is the native OS widgets for Linux (well, originally written for, you can use Qt as well). What they have actually ported is GDK, which is a display system abstraction library. A GTK program will never use Windows/MacOS widgets natively because that is not its purpose, if you want that you should be using a widget toolkit abstraction lib like SWT or wxWindows. Or you could of course write a theme engine for GTK that simulates other platforms.
The latest release notes for the upcoming GTK2.2 release said a lot of work has been put into the Windows port, which is now apparently excellent. I haven't tried it though.
But, why would anyone use GTK when OS X provides the vastly better Aqua?
Because GTK lets you write apps for Linux, Windows and now MacOS X, whereas Aqua is OS X only?
Also, how are you comparing GTK to Aqua? Looks? Have you got extensive programming experience of both? Or are you just assuming it's worse?
I think you could make a good case that GTK is superior to Aqua (as a widget toolkit).
GTK2 is much better than GTK1 bear in mind (I think they ported gtk1). I personally think the most common theme engines look much better than Aqua, because the flat, clean look appeals to me. Seeing screenshots of Aqua apps makes me glad I'm not using it, I mean every effing widget is full of stripey lines: I find it incredibly visually distracting. Of course GTK is natively themable (Aqua is not without some horrid hacks) and has been for some time, so if you must have an Aqua style GUI you can have one, but I much prefer for instance Mist which is stylish without getting in your way.
Programming wise, although I don't know much about MacOS coding, I do know that GTK2 has more bindings than Aqua (it's based on object oriented C meaning it's incredibly easy to bind to other languages), can have multiple backends (which is where it gets its display portability from), with the X backend can be network transparent, uses FreeType for superior text antialiasing (OS X has heavier, fuzzier AA at small sizes), has full accessibility support (aqua may have this too, i dunno) and of course is open source (which is why this is possible in the first place).
So - if you have credible arguments for why Aqua is better as a toolkit than GTK, let's hear them. And no, "I like animated buttons" is not a credible argument, you can have them with GTK too if you write a theme that uses them.
See here for some good discussion of relational filing systems. In general, the author concludes that relational structures are not always the best fit, and something better can be used.
Object models are primarly good for boosting programmer productivity by reducing wheel reinvention, and by allowing you to use languages that are most appropriate for the task at hand. If you're writing a media player, C is not the best language to use. If you're writing a high performance codec, maybe it is. Object models that let you share code a la COM/.NET mean you don't have to choose langauges based on what code is already available to you in that language.
Your point about binary compatability on linux is almost painfully valid at times.[1] It'd get a LOT easier if glibc/gcc would finally decide to stop breaking backwards compatability.
The problem I was thinking about wasn't actually related to glibc (which actually doesn't break binary compatability at all, it uses symbol versioning) or gcc (which was only for C++, and hopefully will not break binary compatability again now it's standardised).
I'm mainly thinking of the problem that the link tree always has to be identical to the system a binary was compiled on. For instance, if you have a frozen bubble game, which was compiled against libpng3 and libSDL, then you run it on a distro where libSDL was compiled against libpng2, then two ABI incompatible versions of libpng will be linked into the same address space and you'll get an instant segfault.
Well, those sort of symbol collisions can be 95% resolved by either making everybody use symbol versioning (hard) or applying some patches to the linker and ld (easy, but libc maintainers won't do it). But you still have problems if for instance frozen-bubble passes structs between the 2 versions of the library.
I think the real solution in the long run is for people to stop using C for writing libs and apps. Higher level langauges that can do reflectivity (python/ruby/java/.net/in fact, anything other than C/C++ basically) don't tend to suffer ABI problems in quite the same way, and we'd all have higher productivity anyway.
But there are problems with trying to write everything in such langauges. I've got ideas for how to solve them too, but can only tackle one thing at a time, and pulling people away from C is going to be very hard. MS can sort of do it through sheer marketing will and forcing Windows in that direction, even for them introducing.NET will take years. We can't do that though, it's not so easy.
Though I can't say I'm surprised, I think this is one of the first times where Microsoft seems to have stated that they are persuing similar technologies.
Actually, the next version of IIS has dropped the binary metabase and has replaced it with XML config files, so IIS can be administered by hand, just like Apache (but with a pretty GUI if you want one). Maybe as part of this next-gen shell they'll introduce a good command line text editor.
This sounds to me very much like Microsoft is having a good hard look at what Linux/open source does well, and copying it. Fair game - we've copied them plenty, and are continuing to do so. We could well find that Windows moves on a lot thanks to the competition offered by Linux: will we be able to keep up, and keep pushing things forward to? I think so. I hope so. But the era of kicking Windows for being unstable is already over, insecure looks on its way out (I read coders can get fired now for writing insecure code at redmond), and soon traditional UNIX strongholds like good remote administration may no longer be unique either.
We have our own stupid problems to fix too of course. Lack of a decent object model? Lack of binary portability? That one is killing us at the moment, and there is no good solution (as I'm finding out as part of my project). We really really don't want to have to setup build farms (a binary for every distro version), that'd suck. But it seems the very nature of Linux itself dictates it. Now Windows is moving to.NET they are tidying up a lot of these problems, while we're still playing catchup.
It's certainly going to get interesting soon. Microsoft have sort of woken up.
Ever since seeing The Matrix, I've sometimes wondered what would happen if somebody attempted to build a completely generic world engine, by applying the techniques of OO programming to virtual reality. For instance, by loading terrain programs, tree-growing programs, erosion programs and a weather/sky program, you have built yourself an outdoor world. By subclassing those programs, you can alter the trees, develop new kinds of trees and so on. ViscousBody -> Liquid -> Sand -> Desert.
The open source model would apply, with people taking already existing programs and modifying them, to make the world richer and richer. The world (the construct?) would be an enormous continous space, with parts being fantasy, parts futuristic sci-fi cities, and other parts being similar to the real world.
Once a "critical mass" of programs had been achieved, it would become possible for people to create their own games in this virtual world. I love playing Supreme Snowboarding, it's a bit old now, and pretty simple, but I love the feeling of speed you get as you board down the course. Perhaps that world could be a virtual ski resort - some people could play "Sim Ski Resort", I could play snowboarding, and 007-wannabes could use it as a virtual film set. We'd all play together in this huge virtual world, adapting it to create new games and scenarios as we saw fit.
Of course, there are lots of practical design problems here. How to make a programming language that is simple enough to be understood by people without lots of prior programming experience. How to build a world that doesn't get killed by latency. Can you even simulate the natural world using only mathematics etc? I think so - look at some of the GIMP filters for instance.
It's just a pipe dream of course. I for one don't plan on attempting it anytime soon. I think WorldForge are trying something similar though.
We made the VGL as a skinnable OpenGL widget toolkit as part of the Pythian Project, and if you're OK with Delphi it's a fine piece of work (even if I do say so myself:p). Looks good, and very high performance (as it was built for a 3D game). It's been through quite a few generations too.
Obviously if you're not coding in Delphi/Kylix, then it's not much use.
I know for one that I would definately go and buy a copy of OSX!
No you wouldn't. It's pretty much 95% certain that your hardware wouldn't work with it. Do you see how long it took for Linux to get decent hardware compatability? Over 10 years, and it's still not perfect. The moment people started putting OS X to work anything less than highly controlled hardware, the "Just Works(tm)" factor would go out the window. Nobody, I repeat, nobody has ever been able to crack the x86 OS market before, partly because of this problem. In the real world, computers are at saturation because you can pay basically what you want for them - doesn't mean the hardware is high quality but for many low quality is better than nothing at all.
It's for this reason that OS X will never be mainstream. Just forget about it.
Too bad for Microsoft that Macromedia documented and made the SWF format open a long time ago now. Even if they pulled the flash player from any platform except IE on Windows, we still have libflash.
But when will OS X code be integrated into FreeBSD? So far they only appear to have received one or two minor patches and some test suites, hardly big contributions.
Its not very logical to try to turn bits of information into a product, it doenst benifit the majority of the people in this world.
Nonetheless, it IS necessary. We operate under capitalism, and capitalism works by rewarding people for resources they produce. A tin of beans is a resource. The girl at the checkout is selling a resource (her time/skills). Lawyers sell resources (their services).
These things are resources because they are scarce - they are tied down to something in the physical world, either a physical object (a tin of beans) or time (a service).
Creative works are not bounded by these rules - once made, they cannot be unmade, and they can be copied for zero cost. Capitalism cannot deal with this situation, so stop things going wrong we try and pin creative works, either to something physical (CDs/DVDs/books), or in time (patents/copyrights).
This is the only way that people can make a living out of producing non-scare resources. Without it, there would be no way that people could produce these things full time.
Until somebody reinvents capitalism, we're going to be stuck with these systems, imperfect as they are.
While we're at it, let's ban Colt semi-automatic pistols, Saab cars, and Hitachi VCR's, because they're all specific examples of technology that can be used for bad things.
I can't agree with that. I think it's fair enough to consider something bad, even worth banning, if the vast majority of its uses are illegal. Hence I want to see guns made illegal (and they are generally here). Cars and VCRs are generally not used more than 90% of the time for illegal things. Cars can kill people but they aren't meant for that and are hardly ever used for that. VCRs can pirate videos, but because of the complexities involved and loss of quality, they're mostly used for timeshifting TV programs and renting videos.
Kazaa on the other hand is practically all college students swapping gigs of ripped MP3s, games, warez, porn etc. If anybody here thinks Kazaa is mostly used for anything else, they're insane. Although it could be used for say load balancing of large downloads, it practically never is, so in this case yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing it banned. The load reduction on the backbone and speedup for the rest of us would certainly make it worthwhile.
These guys don't even have the excuse of it being a good cause like the Freenet guys do. They just want pop music, hit games, and expensive pro level software for nothing.
The War on Sharing is about as winnable as the War on Drugs or War on Terror. They all have the same purpose anyway: making the hard-of-thinking feel safe and happy and protected.
Unwinnable perhaps, but definately worth it. I'd rather see us fight an unwinnable war against drugs if it means there are fewer crack dealers on the street, even if it isn't possible to eliminate them entirely.
Most of you are probably thinking this is only to do with audio/video/content.
Actually, MS are salivating over DRM for an entirely different reason: they think business will pay them pots of cash for it.
Just imagine how good a "your documents can't be leaked, can't be stolen, changes can be tracked and you have total control over which employees see what" must sound. It'd make business confidentiality much easier. Pay-per-play is a lucrative area, but DRM has far wider uses than just that.
I've been told by MS execs that there is kind of an internal debate raging about whether micropayments or DRM is the way forward, but that DRM was winning because it could be commercialised and sold as a feature to business. They didn't seem to regard the content industry as the main target for it: individuals and organizations who wished to control their own business information were a big deal.
It'd be good if you could state some specific criticisms and arguments for arch vs subversion. We don't all have time to follow many dev lists closely (I follow several and to do it properly takes time). In particular, considering how different arch is from CVS/SVN, what are the advantages? Subversion may not be perfect, and the need to run Apache 2 scared me off, but it has the advantage that it takes all of 2 minutes to learn it if you have used CVS.
For instance, when I set up my project a few months ago, I did look at other code control systems, but CVS won because everybody had it practically installed by default, and it was good enough. Considering how many different commands there are to do very similar operations in arch, it'd be better for you to give it a proper intro methinks. The Linux Journal article just left me with questions.
I would try baiting mac users, I do it all the time with a machead friend of mine, but I think my sig would give the game away. Still, fun to watch, in a slightly sick "wow, you guys take it seriously don't you" kind of way.
Well, I waste enough time on slashdot as it is... there's work to be done and readymeals to be bought.... till next time
I was just about to release to the world the greatest invention ever, when I read Sklyarov's
article, and that part about the lockpick possibly being illegal got to me! I realized a teleporter could be used to bypass shrink-wrap licenses
Good analogy. A better one would have been that such a teleporter, other than saving the world from the oil crisis by making cars and trucks redundant, would also allow people to teleport themselves into and out of bank vaults.
You'd think it'd be an easy choice: save the ecosystem, or ban a tool because it might have illegal uses.
Huh, I don't really know where this is coming from. Unix is hardly the same operating system that it was 20 years ago, it can improve too.
Sure, but only in little pieces. Windows is evolving too, but they still don't have DLL versioning, and the Win32 API is still messy.
I also think that the system itself is important--both kde and gnome are free, a difference largely of API--so if api isn't important, why are there still two project?
I'm sure you know that, it's just history. Gnome was started because KDE wasn't free, rather than because they thought the KDE APIs were evil.
In my book being able to make a commercial unix is a good thing. You think Apple would have made OS X if they would have had to GPL the entire thing and Cocoa et al could be run for free on linux? I somehow doubt it.
Why is commercial UNIX a good thing? Why is UNIX a good thing anyway, compared to say, BeOS, Symbolics style OSes etc. I'd rather Apple hadn't made OS X really, it just dilutes the issues and is yet another proprietary OS, I mean, don't we have enough of them already?
First you chastise the original poster for not taking the time to read an article and understand the project he's slamming before doing so
Yes....
then YOU turn around and barf undigested corn all over the entire Unix movement while at the same time admitting that you could care less about it and see it merely in terms of colored directory listings.
No. UNIX is a fine platform, but it has been bettered since then. If your aim is to create an OS that you know will work, and you want to utilise the vast amount of unix experience in the world, and originality isn't a big deal, then recreating UNIX is a good idea. Hence the fact that Stallman chose UNIX for his GNU project. In fact he said at the time, well there are better things than UNIX (he was probably referring to lisp machines), but it's not bad. Also, everybody uses it, so it makes sense to clone it. Ok, fair reasoning.
The coloured directory listings was an exagguration to ram home the point - UNIX as a technology is not what matters in the bigger picture as far as I'm concerned.
If OS originality is also your only metric for success then you'd do well to look at some of the original OS efforts launched during the 80's and 90's and see how well they did
It depends on how we define success doesn't it. Originality/new ideas is one way of defining it. Popularity is another. Putting control of computing back into the hands of the people would be another.
So, you have to say - what is the purpose of this project? In the case of Plan9, it was research new ideas. In the case of FreeBSD it was to recreate UNIX and make it available to anybody who wanted it. In the case of Linux it was to create an OS that wouldn't be owned by anybody (except maybe "society" as a general concept), and would always be free, guaranteed, forever. Now of course that's the general goal of Linux as defined by the licensing, obviously people who work on it have all sorts of different motivations.
Now, when I said I didn't see the point of FreeBSD what I meant was, the purpose of it seems to be to make unix technology available to everybody, which I guess is a fair purpose in and of itself, but also I don't think UNIX is all that great. UNIX is hardly a secret - if a corporation wished to use UNIX then it could go and license a version of it from Sun, HP, IBM, whoever. If individual users wished to use it, then it seems Linux is a safer long term bet, as it cannot be closed. So where does FreeBSD fit?
Obviously there are good answers to that. FreeBSD is UNIX for everybody, it's got almost no restrictions on what you can do with it. For some, that is reason enough. The point I was making is that the original poster was slamming the guys decisions and project based on no better reason that he couldn't immediately understand the logic behind the decision to go GPL - it can work both ways.
Well, in C# you can switch off garbage collection and bounds checking to get direct memory access for when it's really needed by pinning stuff. But yes, I know C isn't always appropriate. I think C is used in inappropriate places far more often than Python is used in inappropriate places though for instance.
Well, there is, which is, don't insist on writing all your software in C and C++. Java/Python/Ruby/Perl/C# for instance aren't susceptible to this kind of problem.
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Yes, the GTK default skin is awful. Everybody uses a a more modern theme such as Mist, ThinICE, BlueCurve et al. You can choose the theme on Windows, but I dunno how. Go find some GNOME2 screenshots at gnome.org to see that GTK can actually look very nice and professional.
The windows situation should improve soon, GTK2.2 has much better windows support and the next stable version of the gimp uses it (along with much nicer artwork and looks all round).
It could be done, but would require massive effort. GTK was never really designed for that sort of thing.
If you're going to compare APIs you should at least make use of the features of each, and use languages of similar levels. No, ObjC is not a low level language either.
GTK UI construction in C is verbose yeah, but so is anything in C. You can make GTK apps very simply if you use the right bindings and use Glade (equivalent to .nib files), ditto for any part of the GNOME apis. Oh and I'd much rather not use Objective-C for anything, I find it incredibly hard to read, and I know many languages. I'm sure I could learn it if I wanted to, but I don't, language neutral APIs are generally much nicer imho.
I think you missed something pretty important. GTK is the native OS widgets for Linux (well, originally written for, you can use Qt as well). What they have actually ported is GDK, which is a display system abstraction library. A GTK program will never use Windows/MacOS widgets natively because that is not its purpose, if you want that you should be using a widget toolkit abstraction lib like SWT or wxWindows. Or you could of course write a theme engine for GTK that simulates other platforms.
The latest release notes for the upcoming GTK2.2 release said a lot of work has been put into the Windows port, which is now apparently excellent. I haven't tried it though.
Because GTK lets you write apps for Linux, Windows and now MacOS X, whereas Aqua is OS X only?
Also, how are you comparing GTK to Aqua? Looks? Have you got extensive programming experience of both? Or are you just assuming it's worse?
I think you could make a good case that GTK is superior to Aqua (as a widget toolkit).
GTK2 is much better than GTK1 bear in mind (I think they ported gtk1). I personally think the most common theme engines look much better than Aqua, because the flat, clean look appeals to me. Seeing screenshots of Aqua apps makes me glad I'm not using it, I mean every effing widget is full of stripey lines: I find it incredibly visually distracting. Of course GTK is natively themable (Aqua is not without some horrid hacks) and has been for some time, so if you must have an Aqua style GUI you can have one, but I much prefer for instance Mist which is stylish without getting in your way.
Programming wise, although I don't know much about MacOS coding, I do know that GTK2 has more bindings than Aqua (it's based on object oriented C meaning it's incredibly easy to bind to other languages), can have multiple backends (which is where it gets its display portability from), with the X backend can be network transparent, uses FreeType for superior text antialiasing (OS X has heavier, fuzzier AA at small sizes), has full accessibility support (aqua may have this too, i dunno) and of course is open source (which is why this is possible in the first place).
So - if you have credible arguments for why Aqua is better as a toolkit than GTK, let's hear them. And no, "I like animated buttons" is not a credible argument, you can have them with GTK too if you write a theme that uses them.
Object models are primarly good for boosting programmer productivity by reducing wheel reinvention, and by allowing you to use languages that are most appropriate for the task at hand. If you're writing a media player, C is not the best language to use. If you're writing a high performance codec, maybe it is. Object models that let you share code a la COM/.NET mean you don't have to choose langauges based on what code is already available to you in that language.
The problem I was thinking about wasn't actually related to glibc (which actually doesn't break binary compatability at all, it uses symbol versioning) or gcc (which was only for C++, and hopefully will not break binary compatability again now it's standardised).
I'm mainly thinking of the problem that the link tree always has to be identical to the system a binary was compiled on. For instance, if you have a frozen bubble game, which was compiled against libpng3 and libSDL, then you run it on a distro where libSDL was compiled against libpng2, then two ABI incompatible versions of libpng will be linked into the same address space and you'll get an instant segfault.
Well, those sort of symbol collisions can be 95% resolved by either making everybody use symbol versioning (hard) or applying some patches to the linker and ld (easy, but libc maintainers won't do it). But you still have problems if for instance frozen-bubble passes structs between the 2 versions of the library.
I think the real solution in the long run is for people to stop using C for writing libs and apps. Higher level langauges that can do reflectivity (python/ruby/java/.net/in fact, anything other than C/C++ basically) don't tend to suffer ABI problems in quite the same way, and we'd all have higher productivity anyway.
But there are problems with trying to write everything in such langauges. I've got ideas for how to solve them too, but can only tackle one thing at a time, and pulling people away from C is going to be very hard. MS can sort of do it through sheer marketing will and forcing Windows in that direction, even for them introducing .NET will take years. We can't do that though, it's not so easy.
Actually, the next version of IIS has dropped the binary metabase and has replaced it with XML config files, so IIS can be administered by hand, just like Apache (but with a pretty GUI if you want one). Maybe as part of this next-gen shell they'll introduce a good command line text editor.
This sounds to me very much like Microsoft is having a good hard look at what Linux/open source does well, and copying it. Fair game - we've copied them plenty, and are continuing to do so. We could well find that Windows moves on a lot thanks to the competition offered by Linux: will we be able to keep up, and keep pushing things forward to? I think so. I hope so. But the era of kicking Windows for being unstable is already over, insecure looks on its way out (I read coders can get fired now for writing insecure code at redmond), and soon traditional UNIX strongholds like good remote administration may no longer be unique either.
We have our own stupid problems to fix too of course. Lack of a decent object model? Lack of binary portability? That one is killing us at the moment, and there is no good solution (as I'm finding out as part of my project). We really really don't want to have to setup build farms (a binary for every distro version), that'd suck. But it seems the very nature of Linux itself dictates it. Now Windows is moving to .NET they are tidying up a lot of these problems, while we're still playing catchup.
It's certainly going to get interesting soon. Microsoft have sort of woken up.
The open source model would apply, with people taking already existing programs and modifying them, to make the world richer and richer. The world (the construct?) would be an enormous continous space, with parts being fantasy, parts futuristic sci-fi cities, and other parts being similar to the real world.
Once a "critical mass" of programs had been achieved, it would become possible for people to create their own games in this virtual world. I love playing Supreme Snowboarding, it's a bit old now, and pretty simple, but I love the feeling of speed you get as you board down the course. Perhaps that world could be a virtual ski resort - some people could play "Sim Ski Resort", I could play snowboarding, and 007-wannabes could use it as a virtual film set. We'd all play together in this huge virtual world, adapting it to create new games and scenarios as we saw fit.
Of course, there are lots of practical design problems here. How to make a programming language that is simple enough to be understood by people without lots of prior programming experience. How to build a world that doesn't get killed by latency. Can you even simulate the natural world using only mathematics etc? I think so - look at some of the GIMP filters for instance.
It's just a pipe dream of course. I for one don't plan on attempting it anytime soon. I think WorldForge are trying something similar though.
Obviously if you're not coding in Delphi/Kylix, then it's not much use.
No you wouldn't. It's pretty much 95% certain that your hardware wouldn't work with it. Do you see how long it took for Linux to get decent hardware compatability? Over 10 years, and it's still not perfect. The moment people started putting OS X to work anything less than highly controlled hardware, the "Just Works(tm)" factor would go out the window. Nobody, I repeat, nobody has ever been able to crack the x86 OS market before, partly because of this problem. In the real world, computers are at saturation because you can pay basically what you want for them - doesn't mean the hardware is high quality but for many low quality is better than nothing at all.
It's for this reason that OS X will never be mainstream. Just forget about it.
Too bad for Microsoft that Macromedia documented and made the SWF format open a long time ago now. Even if they pulled the flash player from any platform except IE on Windows, we still have libflash.
But when will OS X code be integrated into FreeBSD? So far they only appear to have received one or two minor patches and some test suites, hardly big contributions.
Nonetheless, it IS necessary. We operate under capitalism, and capitalism works by rewarding people for resources they produce. A tin of beans is a resource. The girl at the checkout is selling a resource (her time/skills). Lawyers sell resources (their services).
These things are resources because they are scarce - they are tied down to something in the physical world, either a physical object (a tin of beans) or time (a service).
Creative works are not bounded by these rules - once made, they cannot be unmade, and they can be copied for zero cost. Capitalism cannot deal with this situation, so stop things going wrong we try and pin creative works, either to something physical (CDs/DVDs/books), or in time (patents/copyrights).
This is the only way that people can make a living out of producing non-scare resources. Without it, there would be no way that people could produce these things full time.
Until somebody reinvents capitalism, we're going to be stuck with these systems, imperfect as they are.
I can't agree with that. I think it's fair enough to consider something bad, even worth banning, if the vast majority of its uses are illegal. Hence I want to see guns made illegal (and they are generally here). Cars and VCRs are generally not used more than 90% of the time for illegal things. Cars can kill people but they aren't meant for that and are hardly ever used for that. VCRs can pirate videos, but because of the complexities involved and loss of quality, they're mostly used for timeshifting TV programs and renting videos.
Kazaa on the other hand is practically all college students swapping gigs of ripped MP3s, games, warez, porn etc. If anybody here thinks Kazaa is mostly used for anything else, they're insane. Although it could be used for say load balancing of large downloads, it practically never is, so in this case yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing it banned. The load reduction on the backbone and speedup for the rest of us would certainly make it worthwhile.
These guys don't even have the excuse of it being a good cause like the Freenet guys do. They just want pop music, hit games, and expensive pro level software for nothing.
The War on Sharing is about as winnable as the War on Drugs or War on Terror. They all have the same purpose anyway: making the hard-of-thinking feel safe and happy and protected.
Unwinnable perhaps, but definately worth it. I'd rather see us fight an unwinnable war against drugs if it means there are fewer crack dealers on the street, even if it isn't possible to eliminate them entirely.
Actually, MS are salivating over DRM for an entirely different reason: they think business will pay them pots of cash for it.
Just imagine how good a "your documents can't be leaked, can't be stolen, changes can be tracked and you have total control over which employees see what" must sound. It'd make business confidentiality much easier. Pay-per-play is a lucrative area, but DRM has far wider uses than just that.
I've been told by MS execs that there is kind of an internal debate raging about whether micropayments or DRM is the way forward, but that DRM was winning because it could be commercialised and sold as a feature to business. They didn't seem to regard the content industry as the main target for it: individuals and organizations who wished to control their own business information were a big deal.
For instance, when I set up my project a few months ago, I did look at other code control systems, but CVS won because everybody had it practically installed by default, and it was good enough. Considering how many different commands there are to do very similar operations in arch, it'd be better for you to give it a proper intro methinks. The Linux Journal article just left me with questions.
Well, I waste enough time on slashdot as it is... there's work to be done and readymeals to be bought.... till next time
Good analogy. A better one would have been that such a teleporter, other than saving the world from the oil crisis by making cars and trucks redundant, would also allow people to teleport themselves into and out of bank vaults.
You'd think it'd be an easy choice: save the ecosystem, or ban a tool because it might have illegal uses.
Sure, but only in little pieces. Windows is evolving too, but they still don't have DLL versioning, and the Win32 API is still messy.
I also think that the system itself is important--both kde and gnome are free, a difference largely of API--so if api isn't important, why are there still two project?
I'm sure you know that, it's just history. Gnome was started because KDE wasn't free, rather than because they thought the KDE APIs were evil.
In my book being able to make a commercial unix is a good thing. You think Apple would have made OS X if they would have had to GPL the entire thing and Cocoa et al could be run for free on linux? I somehow doubt it.
Why is commercial UNIX a good thing? Why is UNIX a good thing anyway, compared to say, BeOS, Symbolics style OSes etc. I'd rather Apple hadn't made OS X really, it just dilutes the issues and is yet another proprietary OS, I mean, don't we have enough of them already?
How could anybody not see the sarcasm in that? It says a lot about some of the mods here on slashdot I think.
Yes....
then YOU turn around and barf undigested corn all over the entire Unix movement while at the same time admitting that you could care less about it and see it merely in terms of colored directory listings.
No. UNIX is a fine platform, but it has been bettered since then. If your aim is to create an OS that you know will work, and you want to utilise the vast amount of unix experience in the world, and originality isn't a big deal, then recreating UNIX is a good idea. Hence the fact that Stallman chose UNIX for his GNU project. In fact he said at the time, well there are better things than UNIX (he was probably referring to lisp machines), but it's not bad. Also, everybody uses it, so it makes sense to clone it. Ok, fair reasoning.
The coloured directory listings was an exagguration to ram home the point - UNIX as a technology is not what matters in the bigger picture as far as I'm concerned.
If OS originality is also your only metric for success then you'd do well to look at some of the original OS efforts launched during the 80's and 90's and see how well they did
It depends on how we define success doesn't it. Originality/new ideas is one way of defining it. Popularity is another. Putting control of computing back into the hands of the people would be another.
So, you have to say - what is the purpose of this project? In the case of Plan9, it was research new ideas. In the case of FreeBSD it was to recreate UNIX and make it available to anybody who wanted it. In the case of Linux it was to create an OS that wouldn't be owned by anybody (except maybe "society" as a general concept), and would always be free, guaranteed, forever. Now of course that's the general goal of Linux as defined by the licensing, obviously people who work on it have all sorts of different motivations.
Now, when I said I didn't see the point of FreeBSD what I meant was, the purpose of it seems to be to make unix technology available to everybody, which I guess is a fair purpose in and of itself, but also I don't think UNIX is all that great. UNIX is hardly a secret - if a corporation wished to use UNIX then it could go and license a version of it from Sun, HP, IBM, whoever. If individual users wished to use it, then it seems Linux is a safer long term bet, as it cannot be closed. So where does FreeBSD fit?
Obviously there are good answers to that. FreeBSD is UNIX for everybody, it's got almost no restrictions on what you can do with it. For some, that is reason enough. The point I was making is that the original poster was slamming the guys decisions and project based on no better reason that he couldn't immediately understand the logic behind the decision to go GPL - it can work both ways.
Well, in C# you can switch off garbage collection and bounds checking to get direct memory access for when it's really needed by pinning stuff. But yes, I know C isn't always appropriate. I think C is used in inappropriate places far more often than Python is used in inappropriate places though for instance.
Well, there is, which is, don't insist on writing all your software in C and C++. Java/Python/Ruby/Perl/C# for instance aren't susceptible to this kind of problem.