And clicking on and item in the list would have your editor jump to that section of the code. Actually, There are a couple of IDE's that do this, but nothing that plugs into my editor, as far as I know. Maybe if I get bored enough...
Honestly, if windows is so bad, so full of bugs, why does it keep selling?
Well, let's start at the beginning...
Why did DOS sell? Because it was the cheapest functional OS IBM could license for it's machines.
Why did DOS become prevasive? Because IBM was dumb enough to contract DOS on a non-exclusive basis (MS could license it to anyone they wanted) and stupid enough to start using an open hardware model...viola, a bunch of IBM-clones running DOS.
So DOS became a standard. Win3.1 comes out, people start moving to that (it runs with DOS, and ooh, shiney!).
As Windows became the dominant OS, MS was able to tie people/groups into using it by using proprietary formats for documents and killing/buying it's competitors.
Yadda yadda yadda, Google for Microsoft anti trust, read the rest there.
I do not believe in the tyranny of the majority. I believe even less in the tryanny of the minority. Before we force the government to our will, be must have sufficient cause.
No, no, no, no, no. The people of a democracy should never have to force the government to their will; if they do, it has ceased to be a democracy.
American government is based on three basic principles; one, that the majority of people will be right the majority of the time, two, that the rights of the minority must be protected, and three, people are stupid, so we need to have a layer of abstraction (i.e. government) in place to buffer knee-jerk reactions and ill-thought policies.
In most situations, the first principle is enough. If people actually sit down and openly debate something, I believe that the moajority of people will see the truth. This is what most people think of when they think "democracy."
Still, the constitution we have now never would have passed without the Bill of Rights. Those ammendments provided two very important protections; one, they protected the common people from the government to which they were giving authority, and two, they protected the rights of the minority in the face of the power of the majority. In theory, they still do so, but I use the past tense because this is slowly but surely being forgotten by the people of our country. I have heard/read too many people say such things as "good people have nothing to hide from the government" and "I don't mind sacrificing a little freedom to protect my safety." This is wrong on two counts; first, the men who created our system of government thought that good people did have things to hide from the govenrment, and second, they recognized that it is human nature for those in power to try and aquire more power; if we give up the right to gather together today, those in power will go after our right to speak freely tomorrow.
Finally, the stupidity of people, while still true in many instances, is becoming less and less of a problem. Education is available to most, and must be made more available and of better quality. Information is available in ways that it never has been before, and it must become more available if this country is to become what it is capable of being. These two things, more than any other, will give people the real power and facility to govern themselves.
Originally, it was white, land-owning males who ran the government. Why? Because they were educated. They knew the issues. They were competent to have a voice in the govenrment in a way that other people weren't, not because of inherent supiriority or divine mandate, but because that is what the culture of the time allowed. Eventually, the right to participate in govenrment was opened up to women, and minorities.
We face a choice; we can continue the evolution of democracy, and have a govenrment that is just and responsive to the will of the people while protecting the rights of all, or we can turn out back on education and civic resonsiblity and have a government that is responsive to the will of those already in power. The DMCA passed because average people no longer believe that their voice matters in government, and do not bother to educate themselves about the issues of the day, which left the sole voice in the "debate" the corporations with the money to finance campaigns.
Downloads for the Java Media Framework were disabled August 2nd, due to a "licensing issue," which I assume is the MPS decoder fee, so it was most likely announced some time before then.
criminals can be caught quicker (or even before the act)
That is scary. Get them before they do anything illegal. People are scared and jumpy, they want something to happen, but arresting people before they commit a crime is wrong.
It is already illegal to plan a crime, now we're going to bust people for "maybe thinking about planning a crime". This is nuts.
I think you're nitpicking. He is talking about cathing people who are "talking about blowing up this building" instead of "people who just blew up this building." As you said, planning a crime is in itself a crime, at least in some cases.
During the 80's, more people went all the way from the lowest income bracket to the top income bracket than moved down a single income bracket. "The poor get poorer" is a myth.
The mouse may be faster for some things, but for the usual text editing the people on this board probably do, the keyboard is the way to go.
A friend asked me to debug some of his java code the other night; I moved to the spot in the code where I needed to be, put in a few debug statements ( sout C-; turns into System.out.println()), saved, meta-tabbed to my compiler terminal, compiled, and ran the new code, all in a few of seconds, all without taking my hands from the keyboard. There is absolutly no way that I could have done that faster with a mouse.
I think the real speed advantage of a mouse is seen when the progarm uses a visual paradgym, or the people using the program are unfamiliar with it. Most of us have the important keystrokes burned into our heads already, so it is much easier for us to, say, hit C-a-n-v to copy a file, open a new buffer, and paste the file into that buffer, than it is to go to edit > select all then edit > copy then buffers > new
then edit > paste.
Re:Yeah but in reality shouldn't vim be called Ema
on
Vi IMproved -- Vim
·
· Score: 1
I was wondering, anyone remember the controversy over "Hit Man," that book that detailed (albeit badly) how to kill someone? They tried to ban it but the courts upheld it on 1st Amend. How is detailing security flaws any different?
Yeah, I remember that...IIRC, the company got sued back to the stone age for contributing to some guy's death. So, while there may be a 1st ammendment right to publish that book, as far as I know, it is no longer available. Also, books on homemade explosives are actually banned.
Freedom of speach used to be the most important value in America; now, it it corporate profits. I have nothing against corporate profits; my livelyhood depends by and large on the fortunes of the company I work for. Still, when those profits are built on the foundation of fallen liberties...
The DMCA is a four letter recipe for a reign of corporate terror. Stupid sharks, you think 9/11 would have taught them terror is a no-no.
I agree with most of what you say, but people really need to stop with the "terrorist" thing. I know terrorism is the latest fad and all, but all you accomplish by equating the DMCA with the wholesale slaughter of innocents is make yourself look the fool.
What I find interesting are the people who insist on saying UF is shite... If they really hate it, and if they aren't willing to have an open mind on the subject, why read this review?
Then I challenge you to come up with a better system.
Someone once asked me how to fix all the bugs in their code. I told them to type rm *.cc and start over again. I suggest the same in this instance.
Software patents in general need to go away; copyright is enough protection for code. I understand an entities right to profit from code they have created, but there is absolutly no good reason to prevent someone else from figuring out how to do the same thing. Copyright also needs to be reformed, but that's a topic for another day.
What is the fix, you ask? Penalties for invalid patents.
A good start, at least, but the people issuing these idiotic patents need to be held accountable as well. No where in the real world could you exhibit such low performance and keep your job.
Re:Great, there goes more of our freedom
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 1
Define property.
I would make it illegal to dammage physical objects or data that belong to another person. Burning someone's house would be illegal. Deleting the WinXP code from MS's computers would be illegal. Modifiying that code on your own box would not.
Much of the law is composed of definitions and is rooted in the fact that the law really is not too tolerant of grey areas. Lawyers like things in black and white and all the laws are just rying to get every conceiveable action into either the white or the black. Usually they do not anticipate the future too well and we end up with a messed up system.
That's why we need to go to a "common sense" system of laws. If you keep them basic, and interpret them according to common sense, you wouldn't need 16 tons of books to figure out if Johny was a bad boy for keying the neighbor's car.
Another problem we have is an over-reliance on the government to protect us. Some bad things are going to happen to us whether we like it or not, but that should not lead to a whole new set of laws that weaken our already ailing rights.
BTW I think that ALL laws (save a few obvious ones) should have sunset clauses which causes the lawmakers to periodically review them. Without this review, we end up with out of date or irrelevant laws.
Amen. If the problem has gone away in five years, the law doesn't need to be there any more. Otherwise, pass it again. Especially when you consider how much legislation is passed by the congress each year.
I have no doubt that.doc was spawned in the pits of hell, but to have any change of gaining market share, our stuff has to be able to read and write it. When we can do that, it will be time to start pushing towards that XML-based, open, well-defined and cleanly-implemented format.
Re:Great, there goes more of our freedom
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 1
We really need something analagous to the ten commandments.
Hear hear!
The laws should be boiled down to prevent people from assaulting/killing one another, stealing, dammagin other's property, commiting fraud, slandering/libeling someone, infringing on people's rights to communicate, and infringing on people's rights to practice religion. I think that covers just about everything.
Re:Great, there goes more of our freedom
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 1
Some day, I am going to write a well thought out, reasonable, easy-to-follow essay on all of the insanity related to copyrights, licences, and intellectual property, and send it to my congress-people. But for right now, I am just going to get drunk. I should really stop reading Slashdot; this stuff depresses me.
It can, and sometimes it does, though not always. The truth is, though, that the source code to MS Word will not be as useful to us as the file formats it uses.
No government grunt is going to walk through the source to Office, but if they put a requierment out that Office's primary document format be public and freely implementable, it would become irrelivant; we could write our own editors for the format.
This would kill two birds with one stone; public data would no longer be locked into a proprietary format, and it would help the competition reclaim some ground on a convicted, illegal monopoly.
Interesting that a group calling itself Software Choice is trying to tell people not to choose certain software.
Well, I suppose that MS et al woul dbe very happy if governments refused to look at Open Source projects, but that doesn't seem to be what they are lobbying for. Rather, they are lobbying against laws that would force governments to use Open Source software.
At least in this matter, I agree with them. There are some very good open source programs out there. There are some cases when it simply doesn't make sense to use the closed-source alternative; for exaple, IIS sould never be used over Apache. There are, however, many examples where the Open Source community has not created a viable alternative.
This is primarily the case in contracted software, and more common in the Federal government than in the states. Governments buy a lot of specialized software, software that hasn't been looked at by the OS community. In these cases, you have to go with a proprietary solution. Companies are not going to write this software for you if they cannot make money off of it, and they cannot make money off of it if they have to give away the source code.
If you really want to make government open, open the file formats. That way, we can go out and write a program that can read everything the proprietary programs spit out; file formats, as well as protocols, are where the battle is going to be won or lost. I would be in full support of a bill requiering any government software provider to open the file formats and protocols used in their applications.
If you read the article, he mentions that the FCC is apparently preparing to mandate the BPDG recommendations. This removes the pesky Congress from the picture entirely. I have a couple questions about this: 1) Can they do this constitutinally? 2) who do I bitch-slap at the FCC for this insanity?
Yes, they can do this. Congress, once upon a time, decided that it couldn't be bothered to actually "debate" or "pass" all of the laws that they claimed were necessary, so they gave the executive branch (the President and everyone under him, i.e. the FCC), the ability to make "regulations" instead. These regulations have the force of law, but are not voted on by any elected representative. Congress can, I believe, overturn a regulation with a simple mojority vote, and the President, since he controls the various executive bodies, can say "bad monkey" and make them go away, but for the most part, these groups can do whatever they feel like, and it will be ignored.
This should be unconstitutional, but I have no idea if this has ever been tried in a court of law. It just amazesme that we talk so much about democracy, and then give so much power to people who are, in all honesty, not accountable to those they govern.
Slashdot Mirror
So "Ogg" is unintuitive for you, but you can easily make the leap from "MP3" to "Motion Picture Expert Group Layer Three" to "Music"?
EYARG!
Sorry...emacs...shudder.
I'm a jEdit guy, myself.
What I wouldn't mind is a little window floating somewhere off to the side of my editor that lists:
...
PackageOne
ClassOne
FunctionOne()
FunctionTwo()
ClassTwo
FunctionOne()
PackageTwo
ClassOne
And clicking on and item in the list would have your editor jump to that section of the code. Actually, There are a couple of IDE's that do this, but nothing that plugs into my editor, as far as I know. Maybe if I get bored enough...
If someone meant to write
...
if (n = 0)
they should be shot. I hate some of the shortcuts C/C++ lets you get away with.
n = 0;
if (false)
{
}
is much easier to understand (though I'd probable vote for cluesticking him anyway, because of the if false).
Honestly, if windows is so bad, so full of bugs, why does it keep selling?
Well, let's start at the beginning...
Why did DOS sell? Because it was the cheapest functional OS IBM could license for it's machines.
Why did DOS become prevasive? Because IBM was dumb enough to contract DOS on a non-exclusive basis (MS could license it to anyone they wanted) and stupid enough to start using an open hardware model...viola, a bunch of IBM-clones running DOS.
So DOS became a standard. Win3.1 comes out, people start moving to that (it runs with DOS, and ooh, shiney!).
As Windows became the dominant OS, MS was able to tie people/groups into using it by using proprietary formats for documents and killing/buying it's competitors.
Yadda yadda yadda, Google for Microsoft anti trust, read the rest there.
I do not believe in the tyranny of the majority. I believe even less in the tryanny of the minority. Before we force the government to our will, be must have sufficient cause.
No, no, no, no, no. The people of a democracy should never have to force the government to their will; if they do, it has ceased to be a democracy.
American government is based on three basic principles; one, that the majority of people will be right the majority of the time, two, that the rights of the minority must be protected, and three, people are stupid, so we need to have a layer of abstraction (i.e. government) in place to buffer knee-jerk reactions and ill-thought policies.
In most situations, the first principle is enough. If people actually sit down and openly debate something, I believe that the moajority of people will see the truth. This is what most people think of when they think "democracy."
Still, the constitution we have now never would have passed without the Bill of Rights. Those ammendments provided two very important protections; one, they protected the common people from the government to which they were giving authority, and two, they protected the rights of the minority in the face of the power of the majority. In theory, they still do so, but I use the past tense because this is slowly but surely being forgotten by the people of our country. I have heard/read too many people say such things as "good people have nothing to hide from the government" and "I don't mind sacrificing a little freedom to protect my safety." This is wrong on two counts; first, the men who created our system of government thought that good people did have things to hide from the govenrment, and second, they recognized that it is human nature for those in power to try and aquire more power; if we give up the right to gather together today, those in power will go after our right to speak freely tomorrow.
Finally, the stupidity of people, while still true in many instances, is becoming less and less of a problem. Education is available to most, and must be made more available and of better quality. Information is available in ways that it never has been before, and it must become more available if this country is to become what it is capable of being. These two things, more than any other, will give people the real power and facility to govern themselves.
Originally, it was white, land-owning males who ran the government. Why? Because they were educated. They knew the issues. They were competent to have a voice in the govenrment in a way that other people weren't, not because of inherent supiriority or divine mandate, but because that is what the culture of the time allowed. Eventually, the right to participate in govenrment was opened up to women, and minorities.
We face a choice; we can continue the evolution of democracy, and have a govenrment that is just and responsive to the will of the people while protecting the rights of all, or we can turn out back on education and civic resonsiblity and have a government that is responsive to the will of those already in power. The DMCA passed because average people no longer believe that their voice matters in government, and do not bother to educate themselves about the issues of the day, which left the sole voice in the "debate" the corporations with the money to finance campaigns.
Downloads for the Java Media Framework were disabled August 2nd, due to a "licensing issue," which I assume is the MPS decoder fee, so it was most likely announced some time before then.
criminals can be caught quicker (or even before the act)
That is scary. Get them before they do anything illegal. People are scared and jumpy, they want something to happen, but arresting people before they commit a crime is wrong.
It is already illegal to plan a crime, now we're going to bust people for "maybe thinking about planning a crime". This is nuts.
I think you're nitpicking. He is talking about cathing people who are "talking about blowing up this building" instead of "people who just blew up this building." As you said, planning a crime is in itself a crime, at least in some cases.
During the 80's, more people went all the way from the lowest income bracket to the top income bracket than moved down a single income bracket. "The poor get poorer" is a myth.
The mouse may be faster for some things, but for the usual text editing the people on this board probably do, the keyboard is the way to go.
A friend asked me to debug some of his java code the other night; I moved to the spot in the code where I needed to be, put in a few debug statements ( sout C-; turns into System.out.println()), saved, meta-tabbed to my compiler terminal, compiled, and ran the new code, all in a few of seconds, all without taking my hands from the keyboard. There is absolutly no way that I could have done that faster with a mouse.
I think the real speed advantage of a mouse is seen when the progarm uses a visual paradgym, or the people using the program are unfamiliar with it. Most of us have the important keystrokes burned into our heads already, so it is much easier for us to, say, hit C-a-n-v to copy a file, open a new buffer, and paste the file into that buffer, than it is to go to edit > select all then edit > copy then buffers > new then edit > paste.
Notepad is the way to go, baby!
I was wondering, anyone remember the controversy over "Hit Man," that book that detailed (albeit badly) how to kill someone? They tried to ban it but the courts upheld it on 1st Amend. How is detailing security flaws any different?
Yeah, I remember that...IIRC, the company got sued back to the stone age for contributing to some guy's death. So, while there may be a 1st ammendment right to publish that book, as far as I know, it is no longer available. Also, books on homemade explosives are actually banned.
Freedom of speach used to be the most important value in America; now, it it corporate profits. I have nothing against corporate profits; my livelyhood depends by and large on the fortunes of the company I work for. Still, when those profits are built on the foundation of fallen liberties...
The DMCA is a four letter recipe for a reign of corporate terror. Stupid sharks, you think 9/11 would have taught them terror is a no-no.
I agree with most of what you say, but people really need to stop with the "terrorist" thing. I know terrorism is the latest fad and all, but all you accomplish by equating the DMCA with the wholesale slaughter of innocents is make yourself look the fool.
What I find interesting are the people who insist on saying UF is shite... If they really hate it, and if they aren't willing to have an open mind on the subject, why read this review?
Consult the jargon file.
Wouldn't it be amazing if campaign finance contributions could only come from valid, registered voters?
Blink. Blink. My God. Write your congressman!
Then I challenge you to come up with a better system.
Someone once asked me how to fix all the bugs in their code. I told them to type rm *.cc and start over again. I suggest the same in this instance.
Software patents in general need to go away; copyright is enough protection for code. I understand an entities right to profit from code they have created, but there is absolutly no good reason to prevent someone else from figuring out how to do the same thing. Copyright also needs to be reformed, but that's a topic for another day.
What is the fix, you ask? Penalties for invalid patents.
A good start, at least, but the people issuing these idiotic patents need to be held accountable as well. No where in the real world could you exhibit such low performance and keep your job.
Define property.
I would make it illegal to dammage physical objects or data that belong to another person. Burning someone's house would be illegal. Deleting the WinXP code from MS's computers would be illegal. Modifiying that code on your own box would not.
Much of the law is composed of definitions and is rooted in the fact that the law really is not too tolerant of grey areas. Lawyers like things in black and white and all the laws are just rying to get every conceiveable action into either the white or the black. Usually they do not anticipate the future too well and we end up with a messed up system.
That's why we need to go to a "common sense" system of laws. If you keep them basic, and interpret them according to common sense, you wouldn't need 16 tons of books to figure out if Johny was a bad boy for keying the neighbor's car.
Another problem we have is an over-reliance on the government to protect us. Some bad things are going to happen to us whether we like it or not, but that should not lead to a whole new set of laws that weaken our already ailing rights.
BTW I think that ALL laws (save a few obvious ones) should have sunset clauses which causes the lawmakers to periodically review them. Without this review, we end up with out of date or irrelevant laws.
Amen. If the problem has gone away in five years, the law doesn't need to be there any more. Otherwise, pass it again. Especially when you consider how much legislation is passed by the congress each year.
I have no doubt that .doc was spawned in the pits of hell, but to have any change of gaining market share, our stuff has to be able to read and write it. When we can do that, it will be time to start pushing towards that XML-based, open, well-defined and cleanly-implemented format.
We really need something analagous to the ten commandments.
Hear hear!
The laws should be boiled down to prevent people from assaulting/killing one another, stealing, dammagin other's property, commiting fraud, slandering/libeling someone, infringing on people's rights to communicate, and infringing on people's rights to practice religion. I think that covers just about everything.
Some day, I am going to write a well thought out, reasonable, easy-to-follow essay on all of the insanity related to copyrights, licences, and intellectual property, and send it to my congress-people. But for right now, I am just going to get drunk. I should really stop reading Slashdot; this stuff depresses me.
It can, and sometimes it does, though not always. The truth is, though, that the source code to MS Word will not be as useful to us as the file formats it uses.
No government grunt is going to walk through the source to Office, but if they put a requierment out that Office's primary document format be public and freely implementable, it would become irrelivant; we could write our own editors for the format.
This would kill two birds with one stone; public data would no longer be locked into a proprietary format, and it would help the competition reclaim some ground on a convicted, illegal monopoly.
Nope. When the Government contracts for software, the copyright remains with the authors.
That's not from the Holy Bible; I think it's form the Book of Mormon.
Interesting that a group calling itself Software Choice is trying to tell people not to choose certain software.
Well, I suppose that MS et al woul dbe very happy if governments refused to look at Open Source projects, but that doesn't seem to be what they are lobbying for. Rather, they are lobbying against laws that would force governments to use Open Source software.
At least in this matter, I agree with them. There are some very good open source programs out there. There are some cases when it simply doesn't make sense to use the closed-source alternative; for exaple, IIS sould never be used over Apache. There are, however, many examples where the Open Source community has not created a viable alternative.
This is primarily the case in contracted software, and more common in the Federal government than in the states. Governments buy a lot of specialized software, software that hasn't been looked at by the OS community. In these cases, you have to go with a proprietary solution. Companies are not going to write this software for you if they cannot make money off of it, and they cannot make money off of it if they have to give away the source code.
If you really want to make government open, open the file formats. That way, we can go out and write a program that can read everything the proprietary programs spit out; file formats, as well as protocols, are where the battle is going to be won or lost. I would be in full support of a bill requiering any government software provider to open the file formats and protocols used in their applications.
If you read the article, he mentions that the FCC is apparently preparing to mandate the BPDG recommendations. This removes the pesky Congress from the picture entirely. I have a couple questions about this: 1) Can they do this constitutinally? 2) who do I bitch-slap at the FCC for this insanity?
Yes, they can do this. Congress, once upon a time, decided that it couldn't be bothered to actually "debate" or "pass" all of the laws that they claimed were necessary, so they gave the executive branch (the President and everyone under him, i.e. the FCC), the ability to make "regulations" instead. These regulations have the force of law, but are not voted on by any elected representative. Congress can, I believe, overturn a regulation with a simple mojority vote, and the President, since he controls the various executive bodies, can say "bad monkey" and make them go away, but for the most part, these groups can do whatever they feel like, and it will be ignored.
This should be unconstitutional, but I have no idea if this has ever been tried in a court of law. It just amazesme that we talk so much about democracy, and then give so much power to people who are, in all honesty, not accountable to those they govern.