https://leastauthority.com/ Distributed secure backup with the encryption happening on your local machine before hitting the cloud, so the hosting service can't release your data to Uncle Sammy, hacker X, or disgruntled employees.
It's fully open source, so you can run the whole thing yourself if you want.
This is Debian we're talking about. If they go with systemd in release Jessie, it won't go out until it's rock solid. If that takes three years, it won't be unusual for Debian.
Interesting that Fedora boots slower than Ubuntu for you. I hadn't noticed a difference, but then I wasn't booting them at the same time either.
I think in examining a next technology choice, you have to put the emphasis on "simple", as in "uses the minimal amount of complexity required to effectively complete the task" versus "easy" as in "creates the smallest learning curve for people using the current technology choice". If you're under a hard deadline, "easy" trumps "simple" because it is faster to transition. Otherwise, "simple" gives you something that takes less work to understand, requires less knowledge of the predecessor technology with makes it "easy" to bring in new talent that does not know the previous technology, and requires less work to customize because there is less to know.
Debian isn't run by a company, they have all the time in the world to get this decision right. So forget what init has now, forget that lots of current administrators know init, forget that lots of current administrators know shell scripting. What replacement for init is the simplest way to get the features they want?
I suspect the very backwards compatibility that makes the transition to Upstart easier will hurt it in the long term. Systemd's break with the past makes a transition headache but may make more sense in the long term. Or maybe there are a number of other options that are superior but not well known.
My understanding is that inter-core communications, while fast, are not as fast as the things a single core can do by itself when only interacting with the level 1 cache. Since the rings of a microkernel would be communicating very frequently and as fast as possible, I'm not sure it would work better.
But more importantly, free software is full of tens of thousands of experiments that didn't seem to make sense at a start. Most wither and die, a few become very big and hugely popular, and even the ones that never see widespread use often serve as a way their authors learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. Maybe the next major revision of the HURD will contain some architectural innovation that improves speed. Maybe some HURD developer, or even just someone reading the HURD source code, will learn something that makes them a better contributor to monolithic kernels. Any benefit is great, nobody is forced to work on it or use it.
Free software is like natural selection - millions of things come out, most suck and die. But the ones that win go big: GCC, LLVM, Firefox, Linux kernel, Perl, Python, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL.
Work on and use what you like, don't work on and don't use what you don't like.
Your analogy is wrong, a comparable mechanic would be one that fixes race cars in his spare time. And in both cases, the spare time work probably makes them better at their primary job.
1. Writing software isn't like pumping gas, cleaning hotel rooms, or driving a delivery van. Unless you are a world class genius, even a very slight amount of effort devoted to self-improvement means that you will be able to write cleaner, less error prone, easier to read, easier to maintain, more flexible code every year than you did the year before. If you have zero interest in writing software outside your day job, I can be confident the code quality I get from you today will be the exact same I get from you in five years, ten years, or twenty years and you will be exactly as competent to handle any given task then as you are now. In certain tasks that's fine with me - provided you only ever want salary increases to match inflation.
2. In my own career, I've found that the better I became at writing software, documenting it, designing it, writing tests for it, using source control, setting up development environments, etc.... the more I enjoyed it. I phoned it in at my job from age 24-30, and the only thing that made me improve was getting assigned tasks outside my comfort zone when no one else at the company was available to bail me out. Then in my early 30s, I had a little bit of enjoyment in what I do and started reading Slashdot and Lambda the Ultimate and so forth. Now in my late 30s, I love my work. I may be an awful developer relative to most of the software developer population, I can't judge that accurately. But I am certain my skill today is dramatically superior to what it was five years ago, and in turn that's well beyond where it was ten years ago. So when I see someone that works in this field but never willingly learns new things or discusses ideas beyond exactly what is required for work, I believe in most cases it means they're not skilled enough to enjoy it.
I am not asking anyone to make writing software their sole passion or give up nights and weekends to read on the topic or write code on side projects. I don't do that myself. I read about one non-work-related technology book a year, or take one Coursera class, and tackle a few little personal projects (e.g. setting up a Minecraft server on a VPS for my kids). That is barely a hundred or two hundred hours of work related to my career outside the day job, but the payoff is enormous.
Good point. I think Valve has a tough but not impossible path to take. I think some casual gamers will switch exclusively to Android and iOS. I think some portion of the serious gamers will be satisfied to use the Windows Application Store plus Xbox, especially as the application stores for Windows RT, Windows 8/8.1/9, Windows Phone, and Xbox converge.
But you're right that in five years - and probably sooner - a SteamBox with better performance than an Xbox One will cost less and have a much wider and cheaper game selection.
Now I grant that the games in the sales statistics are mostly indie games, not a list of top level titles. But the sales revenue percentage from Linux ranged from 1-6%, which is much better than I expected.
But I have a hard time seeing SteamOS get much of a foothold. I would love to be proven wrong. But it has got a weaker selection of big name games than the competing consoles are expected to get, and a weaker selection of big name games than the Windows version of Steam will have, and most of the hardware skews will be more expensive than an Xbox One and Playstation 4. Plus, last time I checked, it won't have support for Netflix, Skype, and similar services. That's a hard sell!
I want to get a SteamBox. But I would not be surprised if we have the only one in town.
I posted this elsewhere, but I read that the CEO of Motorola had been threatening to sue the other Android device manufacturers with Motorola's patents. So Google didn't buy those patents to protect other Android device manufacturers from Microsoft, it bought them to protect those manufacturers from Motorola.
All good points, but I keep looking at the Nokia Lumia 1020 and getting jealous of that camera. It's tough these days because so many vendors have been caught paying shills for fake reviews. But I'm hoping some Android device will be as good as the Moto X in most respects and also match - or at least come close - to the camera in the 1020.
I could have sworn I read somewhere that the CEO of Motorola had been threatening to use Motorola's patent portfolio to sue other manufacturers selling Android devices. So supposedly the top reason Google bought them was to prevent them from adding a Motorola Android Tax on top of the Microsoft Android Tax and Apple Android Tax.
Conversely, the biggest problem with the purchase for Google is that it could make the other Android device manufacturers nervous that Google would give Motorola preferential treatment. In turn, they might contemplate a jump to Windows Phone, Samsung's Tizen, or the Chinese fork of Android called Aliyun.
So to me, what Google did here may have been expensive, but I can see the logic behind it. They stop Motorola from extorting the other Android device makers. They move Motorola's devices from 'suck' to 'decent'. They strengthen their own patent portfolio in the Intellectual Property Legal Wars. Then they sell off Motorola so that it's clear they won't screw the other Android vendors to strengthen the brand they own.
I don't follow your logic. I have seen nothing to indicate that relationships involving lesbians or one woman and multiple men have more legal standing in the US than relationships between gay men or with one man and multiple women.
Right, right. I think that's the most likely explanation too. But I didn't want to open another can of worms by making that point, because every Slashdot discussion remotely related to food or health has a tendency to deteriorate into a flame war in which we the fatties are demonized.
Regardless how much personal responsibility is related to the obesity epidemic, the headlines and promotions based on the idea that it's getting worse are mostly just sales vehicles for the diet, fitness, and liposuction industries.
Keep in mind that, despite all the headlines built to grab ad revenue, the obesity epidemic in the US reached its peak in the late 1990s and obesity rates have been high but stable (not increasing further) since then. So the real question is what changed in food, plastics, personal eating habits, and social patterns from 1980 to 2000 but then stopped getting worse from 2000 until now.
The other interesting thing to note is that much of the rest of the world - except the parts where people are starving - is experiencing its own growth in obesity rates.
Why "against the male population"? A polyamorous relationship involving one woman and more than one man, or more than one woman and more than one man, would have the same legal difficulties.
I think the practical problem with legal benefits to polyamorous relationships is that they become more expensive to the government. There's a small tax break for married couples, and they can share among other things social security and medical insurance benefits. I don't have a problem extending that to any two adults. Once you extend it to any three or more, it gets more expensive. Say five people have a legally recognized polyamorous relationship - does that mean they get all five get a substantially larger tax break? What if four are dead and the last one is 88 years old, does the last survivor get five Social Security checks? etc... etc...
I'm fine with that. If there's no legal benefit to marriage, no matter whether you're gay, straight, transvestite, trans-sexual, or just two friends in a platonic relationship that live together, that's fine with me. But what we have right now is unfair - the Judeo-Christian religious definition of marriage carries legal benefits, and all other definitions do not. Either grant the benefits to any two adults that want a secular partnership, or to none.
I agreed with your line of thinking for almost 20 years, but I no longer do.
The lesser of two evils argument is a big deal. I support abortion rights. I support separation of Church and State with respect to marriage (give any two adults that want legal marriage rights those rights, or give no two adults those legal marriage rights, don't selectively define who can and can't have them based on religious law). I support social welfare programs. I support a tax system that shifts the tax burden into a purely progressive system - which is not what we have now, because of the differences between the income tax and the capital gains tax. The Democratic Party supports those things, the Republican Party does not, so the Democrats are my lesser of two evils.
But both parties are hopelessly corrupt.
The current surveillance without court oversight and indefinite detention of terror suspects without court oversight was started under a Republican President and majority Republican Congress and perpetuated by a Democrat President with a majority Democrat progress.
The Democrats that made me one of the hopeful in 2008 are trying to block, trap, and prosecute the whistleblowers that Obama promised to protect in his campaign. There was a Slashdot article when that statement was removed from the Obama campaign websites a few months ago.
No Child Left Behind was the last serious attempt to reform education on a national level, and it was bipartisan and undoubtedly started with the best of intentions, but it takes money away from schools that need it most, gives money to schools that need it least, buries teachers in paperwork, and sucks the love of learning out of kids by grilling them with standardized tests.
The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to save the environment by increasing fuel economy are a token gesture meant to appear like action without doing anything - the US uses 70% of its petroleum per year on transportation, but that's not all personal passenger vehicles - commercial vehicles aren't subject to any similar big jumps in fuel economy standards. A big chunk of the energy and other natural resources used in the country is used by businesses, and in many cases it's cheaper to deal with inefficient energy use on an ongoing basis than to make a big one time investment in more efficient equipment and then either pay interest on the loans you made to get it or deal with the opportunity costs associated with investing in efficiency instead of something else. CAFE is a classic case of "make it look like you're doing something!"
The War on Drugs against marijuana is the latest form of the make-work programs under FDR's New Deal. Employ some people (DEA and associated prosecutors, plus lots of prison staff) and keep other people out of the work force (drug offenders in prison). We should have just put the pot heads to work digging ditches, spent the rest of the money funding free rehab clinics for any citizen, and saved ourselves a lot of heartache - and it's taken too damn long for the federal view of a substance clearly less dangerous in all respects than alcohol to change.
Our freedoms are eroding, our education is failing, our veterans are suffering, and the middle class is shrinking. These clowns are all either incompetent to fix it or too busy profiting from the problems. I will still support a local candidate that's Democrat or Republican based on the person. But on the national level, I will be voting third party, even if I think that third party is looney, because the other two parties are Sauron and Saruman trading jokes between Mordor and Isengard while the world burns.
The future of most of consumer computing is mobile. Microsoft desperately wants a big piece of that market, so they did something they knew full well would enrage millions of loyal customers - they forced their mobile UI onto desktop and server devices as a way to get people who were avoiding Windows Phone 7 like the plague to get used to its user interface. Windows Phone has under 5% of the mobile market in the US but closer to 8 or 10% in other countries, and Microsoft is still spending money like water to grow marketshare.
If Windows 8 was merely Windows 7 2.0, it would have sold dramatically better and Microsoft's mobile future would be dead instead of alive but weak.
Going your own way is one of the best things about open source. 50 people come up with 50 different approaches to solve a problem, 45 suck, 3 end up more or less the same as previously existing solutions but with a slightly different set of headaches, and 2 innovate.
I've never dealt with the GTK source code or their developer community, so I'm just speculating. If in fact the code is poorly written and especially if the community is rude and unhelpful, then that's a problem. But there's nothing inherently wrong with trying to do your own thing when creating a library. If "doing your own thing" makes something that sucks, people just won't use it.
Java on the desktop never took off because the initial push happened when the JVM was dramatically less resource-efficient than it is now and computers were dramatically less powerful than they are now, and the Java language had (even) fewer useful features.
C++, on the other hand, has tons of warts but with the right tools and libraries it's no worse to use than Java for many applications and resource efficiency is not a problem. I think the real problem is that so much stuff is moving to web-based that C++ and Qt are poised to be the clear best choice for developing new apps in a constantly shrinking space.
Agreed. The NSA can a National Security Letter to demand that Wickr release an update to their software that forwards all of the plain text to the NSA. Wickr will be unable to challenge that directive in court or make public that it was received.
There are many good arguments for allowing proprietary software in the public sphere, but when it comes to privacy and encryption, I think we have no choice but to accept open source as the only way to go.
Parrot is register-based, you can get that from the main website or the wikipedia article. Does that automatically mean it's also CPS, or can register-based still be SSA?
I don't understand CPS or SSA and register-based vs. stack-based well enough to know the answer.
Excellent point, definitely. I agree. But I will note that I haven't attended any open source software enthusiast gatherings, yet. It's on my to-do list. The lone KDE developer I did meet was a big fan of C++ and Javascript, so he could switch back and forth easily. Take that as a statistical sampling of one.:)
Slashdot Mirror
https://leastauthority.com/ Distributed secure backup with the encryption happening on your local machine before hitting the cloud, so the hosting service can't release your data to Uncle Sammy, hacker X, or disgruntled employees.
It's fully open source, so you can run the whole thing yourself if you want.
This is Debian we're talking about. If they go with systemd in release Jessie, it won't go out until it's rock solid. If that takes three years, it won't be unusual for Debian.
Interesting that Fedora boots slower than Ubuntu for you. I hadn't noticed a difference, but then I wasn't booting them at the same time either.
I think in examining a next technology choice, you have to put the emphasis on "simple", as in "uses the minimal amount of complexity required to effectively complete the task" versus "easy" as in "creates the smallest learning curve for people using the current technology choice". If you're under a hard deadline, "easy" trumps "simple" because it is faster to transition. Otherwise, "simple" gives you something that takes less work to understand, requires less knowledge of the predecessor technology with makes it "easy" to bring in new talent that does not know the previous technology, and requires less work to customize because there is less to know.
Debian isn't run by a company, they have all the time in the world to get this decision right. So forget what init has now, forget that lots of current administrators know init, forget that lots of current administrators know shell scripting. What replacement for init is the simplest way to get the features they want?
I suspect the very backwards compatibility that makes the transition to Upstart easier will hurt it in the long term. Systemd's break with the past makes a transition headache but may make more sense in the long term. Or maybe there are a number of other options that are superior but not well known.
My understanding is that inter-core communications, while fast, are not as fast as the things a single core can do by itself when only interacting with the level 1 cache. Since the rings of a microkernel would be communicating very frequently and as fast as possible, I'm not sure it would work better.
But more importantly, free software is full of tens of thousands of experiments that didn't seem to make sense at a start. Most wither and die, a few become very big and hugely popular, and even the ones that never see widespread use often serve as a way their authors learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. Maybe the next major revision of the HURD will contain some architectural innovation that improves speed. Maybe some HURD developer, or even just someone reading the HURD source code, will learn something that makes them a better contributor to monolithic kernels. Any benefit is great, nobody is forced to work on it or use it.
Free software is like natural selection - millions of things come out, most suck and die. But the ones that win go big: GCC, LLVM, Firefox, Linux kernel, Perl, Python, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL.
Work on and use what you like, don't work on and don't use what you don't like.
Your analogy is wrong, a comparable mechanic would be one that fixes race cars in his spare time. And in both cases, the spare time work probably makes them better at their primary job.
I have two points along those lines:
1. Writing software isn't like pumping gas, cleaning hotel rooms, or driving a delivery van. Unless you are a world class genius, even a very slight amount of effort devoted to self-improvement means that you will be able to write cleaner, less error prone, easier to read, easier to maintain, more flexible code every year than you did the year before. If you have zero interest in writing software outside your day job, I can be confident the code quality I get from you today will be the exact same I get from you in five years, ten years, or twenty years and you will be exactly as competent to handle any given task then as you are now. In certain tasks that's fine with me - provided you only ever want salary increases to match inflation.
2. In my own career, I've found that the better I became at writing software, documenting it, designing it, writing tests for it, using source control, setting up development environments, etc.... the more I enjoyed it. I phoned it in at my job from age 24-30, and the only thing that made me improve was getting assigned tasks outside my comfort zone when no one else at the company was available to bail me out. Then in my early 30s, I had a little bit of enjoyment in what I do and started reading Slashdot and Lambda the Ultimate and so forth. Now in my late 30s, I love my work. I may be an awful developer relative to most of the software developer population, I can't judge that accurately. But I am certain my skill today is dramatically superior to what it was five years ago, and in turn that's well beyond where it was ten years ago. So when I see someone that works in this field but never willingly learns new things or discusses ideas beyond exactly what is required for work, I believe in most cases it means they're not skilled enough to enjoy it.
I am not asking anyone to make writing software their sole passion or give up nights and weekends to read on the topic or write code on side projects. I don't do that myself. I read about one non-work-related technology book a year, or take one Coursera class, and tackle a few little personal projects (e.g. setting up a Minecraft server on a VPS for my kids). That is barely a hundred or two hundred hours of work related to my career outside the day job, but the payoff is enormous.
Good point. I think Valve has a tough but not impossible path to take. I think some casual gamers will switch exclusively to Android and iOS. I think some portion of the serious gamers will be satisfied to use the Windows Application Store plus Xbox, especially as the application stores for Windows RT, Windows 8/8.1/9, Windows Phone, and Xbox converge.
But you're right that in five years - and probably sooner - a SteamBox with better performance than an Xbox One will cost less and have a much wider and cheaper game selection.
Now I grant that the games in the sales statistics are mostly indie games, not a list of top level titles. But the sales revenue percentage from Linux ranged from 1-6%, which is much better than I expected.
But I have a hard time seeing SteamOS get much of a foothold. I would love to be proven wrong. But it has got a weaker selection of big name games than the competing consoles are expected to get, and a weaker selection of big name games than the Windows version of Steam will have, and most of the hardware skews will be more expensive than an Xbox One and Playstation 4. Plus, last time I checked, it won't have support for Netflix, Skype, and similar services. That's a hard sell!
I want to get a SteamBox. But I would not be surprised if we have the only one in town.
I posted this elsewhere, but I read that the CEO of Motorola had been threatening to sue the other Android device manufacturers with Motorola's patents. So Google didn't buy those patents to protect other Android device manufacturers from Microsoft, it bought them to protect those manufacturers from Motorola.
All good points, but I keep looking at the Nokia Lumia 1020 and getting jealous of that camera. It's tough these days because so many vendors have been caught paying shills for fake reviews. But I'm hoping some Android device will be as good as the Moto X in most respects and also match - or at least come close - to the camera in the 1020.
I could have sworn I read somewhere that the CEO of Motorola had been threatening to use Motorola's patent portfolio to sue other manufacturers selling Android devices. So supposedly the top reason Google bought them was to prevent them from adding a Motorola Android Tax on top of the Microsoft Android Tax and Apple Android Tax.
Conversely, the biggest problem with the purchase for Google is that it could make the other Android device manufacturers nervous that Google would give Motorola preferential treatment. In turn, they might contemplate a jump to Windows Phone, Samsung's Tizen, or the Chinese fork of Android called Aliyun.
So to me, what Google did here may have been expensive, but I can see the logic behind it. They stop Motorola from extorting the other Android device makers. They move Motorola's devices from 'suck' to 'decent'. They strengthen their own patent portfolio in the Intellectual Property Legal Wars. Then they sell off Motorola so that it's clear they won't screw the other Android vendors to strengthen the brand they own.
I don't follow your logic. I have seen nothing to indicate that relationships involving lesbians or one woman and multiple men have more legal standing in the US than relationships between gay men or with one man and multiple women.
Right, right. I think that's the most likely explanation too. But I didn't want to open another can of worms by making that point, because every Slashdot discussion remotely related to food or health has a tendency to deteriorate into a flame war in which we the fatties are demonized.
Regardless how much personal responsibility is related to the obesity epidemic, the headlines and promotions based on the idea that it's getting worse are mostly just sales vehicles for the diet, fitness, and liposuction industries.
Keep in mind that, despite all the headlines built to grab ad revenue, the obesity epidemic in the US reached its peak in the late 1990s and obesity rates have been high but stable (not increasing further) since then. So the real question is what changed in food, plastics, personal eating habits, and social patterns from 1980 to 2000 but then stopped getting worse from 2000 until now.
The other interesting thing to note is that much of the rest of the world - except the parts where people are starving - is experiencing its own growth in obesity rates.
Why "against the male population"? A polyamorous relationship involving one woman and more than one man, or more than one woman and more than one man, would have the same legal difficulties.
I think the practical problem with legal benefits to polyamorous relationships is that they become more expensive to the government. There's a small tax break for married couples, and they can share among other things social security and medical insurance benefits. I don't have a problem extending that to any two adults. Once you extend it to any three or more, it gets more expensive. Say five people have a legally recognized polyamorous relationship - does that mean they get all five get a substantially larger tax break? What if four are dead and the last one is 88 years old, does the last survivor get five Social Security checks? etc... etc...
I'm fine with that. If there's no legal benefit to marriage, no matter whether you're gay, straight, transvestite, trans-sexual, or just two friends in a platonic relationship that live together, that's fine with me. But what we have right now is unfair - the Judeo-Christian religious definition of marriage carries legal benefits, and all other definitions do not. Either grant the benefits to any two adults that want a secular partnership, or to none.
I agreed with your line of thinking for almost 20 years, but I no longer do.
The lesser of two evils argument is a big deal. I support abortion rights. I support separation of Church and State with respect to marriage (give any two adults that want legal marriage rights those rights, or give no two adults those legal marriage rights, don't selectively define who can and can't have them based on religious law). I support social welfare programs. I support a tax system that shifts the tax burden into a purely progressive system - which is not what we have now, because of the differences between the income tax and the capital gains tax. The Democratic Party supports those things, the Republican Party does not, so the Democrats are my lesser of two evils. But both parties are hopelessly corrupt.
The current surveillance without court oversight and indefinite detention of terror suspects without court oversight was started under a Republican President and majority Republican Congress and perpetuated by a Democrat President with a majority Democrat progress.
The Democrats that made me one of the hopeful in 2008 are trying to block, trap, and prosecute the whistleblowers that Obama promised to protect in his campaign. There was a Slashdot article when that statement was removed from the Obama campaign websites a few months ago.
No Child Left Behind was the last serious attempt to reform education on a national level, and it was bipartisan and undoubtedly started with the best of intentions, but it takes money away from schools that need it most, gives money to schools that need it least, buries teachers in paperwork, and sucks the love of learning out of kids by grilling them with standardized tests.
The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to save the environment by increasing fuel economy are a token gesture meant to appear like action without doing anything - the US uses 70% of its petroleum per year on transportation, but that's not all personal passenger vehicles - commercial vehicles aren't subject to any similar big jumps in fuel economy standards. A big chunk of the energy and other natural resources used in the country is used by businesses, and in many cases it's cheaper to deal with inefficient energy use on an ongoing basis than to make a big one time investment in more efficient equipment and then either pay interest on the loans you made to get it or deal with the opportunity costs associated with investing in efficiency instead of something else. CAFE is a classic case of "make it look like you're doing something!"
The War on Drugs against marijuana is the latest form of the make-work programs under FDR's New Deal. Employ some people (DEA and associated prosecutors, plus lots of prison staff) and keep other people out of the work force (drug offenders in prison). We should have just put the pot heads to work digging ditches, spent the rest of the money funding free rehab clinics for any citizen, and saved ourselves a lot of heartache - and it's taken too damn long for the federal view of a substance clearly less dangerous in all respects than alcohol to change.
Our freedoms are eroding, our education is failing, our veterans are suffering, and the middle class is shrinking. These clowns are all either incompetent to fix it or too busy profiting from the problems. I will still support a local candidate that's Democrat or Republican based on the person. But on the national level, I will be voting third party, even if I think that third party is looney, because the other two parties are Sauron and Saruman trading jokes between Mordor and Isengard while the world burns.
Thanks. Again, I didn't know.
The future of most of consumer computing is mobile. Microsoft desperately wants a big piece of that market, so they did something they knew full well would enrage millions of loyal customers - they forced their mobile UI onto desktop and server devices as a way to get people who were avoiding Windows Phone 7 like the plague to get used to its user interface. Windows Phone has under 5% of the mobile market in the US but closer to 8 or 10% in other countries, and Microsoft is still spending money like water to grow marketshare.
If Windows 8 was merely Windows 7 2.0, it would have sold dramatically better and Microsoft's mobile future would be dead instead of alive but weak.
Going your own way is one of the best things about open source. 50 people come up with 50 different approaches to solve a problem, 45 suck, 3 end up more or less the same as previously existing solutions but with a slightly different set of headaches, and 2 innovate.
I've never dealt with the GTK source code or their developer community, so I'm just speculating. If in fact the code is poorly written and especially if the community is rude and unhelpful, then that's a problem. But there's nothing inherently wrong with trying to do your own thing when creating a library. If "doing your own thing" makes something that sucks, people just won't use it.
Java on the desktop never took off because the initial push happened when the JVM was dramatically less resource-efficient than it is now and computers were dramatically less powerful than they are now, and the Java language had (even) fewer useful features.
C++, on the other hand, has tons of warts but with the right tools and libraries it's no worse to use than Java for many applications and resource efficiency is not a problem. I think the real problem is that so much stuff is moving to web-based that C++ and Qt are poised to be the clear best choice for developing new apps in a constantly shrinking space.
Agreed. The NSA can a National Security Letter to demand that Wickr release an update to their software that forwards all of the plain text to the NSA. Wickr will be unable to challenge that directive in court or make public that it was received.
There are many good arguments for allowing proprietary software in the public sphere, but when it comes to privacy and encryption, I think we have no choice but to accept open source as the only way to go.
Parrot is register-based, you can get that from the main website or the wikipedia article. Does that automatically mean it's also CPS, or can register-based still be SSA?
I don't understand CPS or SSA and register-based vs. stack-based well enough to know the answer.
Excellent point, definitely. I agree. But I will note that I haven't attended any open source software enthusiast gatherings, yet. It's on my to-do list. The lone KDE developer I did meet was a big fan of C++ and Javascript, so he could switch back and forth easily. Take that as a statistical sampling of one. :)