Microsoft and/or Intel have no right to criticize because they are Microsoft and/or Intel and we are doing this for "poor children", and we're using open source and we know that open source is great and it doesn't matter what the outcome is because as long as it "feels good" to us MITers and as long as its open source and....
If I hadn't just burned my mod points, I would mod up MSfanboi just to piss you off further. You want people banned for being a "msfanboi". Screw you and the fascist horse you rode in on.
After there was a complete GNU system with Linux that you could get to run, people started thinking that it was Linux
and...
However after people started using essentially the GNU system with Linux added, and called it Linux,
We've seen this before. Why it's a GNU system "with linux". Linux is just an afterthought. This a reoccuring theme he spouts off about.
The apolitical philosophy of Linus Torvalds who thinks that all software licences are legitimate and it is wrong ever to violate them. So his views on this are more or less the same as Microsoft's.
Listen Dick, not everybody that uses Linux or any other "free" system thinks we're suddenly "free" because we have source code. I guess if I had the design for every product that I used I would be freeeeeeeeee.
Yes, source code gives us "freedom" of change and a nice technical curiousity for those that aren't going to dick with the kernel or glibc, but stop your futile arguments that source code is freedom as in speech.
Oh, and that was a nice slam at Torvalds. If it wasn't for Torvald's "unfree/apolitical" attitude we wouldn't have nice GPU accelerated drivers (or very limited at best).
But there are 100's of millions of users of proprietary operating systems and even the people using free operating systems often use proprietary programs on top of that. So we have a tremendous amount of work to do.
Sorry, but your Cambodian re-education style newspeak will always fail with the rational.
If you see a website using flash, complain. Complain to the site developer saying you are excluding people who believe in maintaining their freedom. Please get rid of the flash from your site.
Oh, and that will help the image of open source users as rational people and not GPL jihadists.
"RMS on RMS"
Well, I guess the whole post was made up after I got to that point, but it's hard to tell since before that it jibed with all of his usual nonsense.
I'll give Stallman a positive mark for his tinfoil hat episode at the UN conference in Tunisia. Fsck rfid tags on humans.
AJAX (or rather DHTML) has some serious limitations that cannot be overcome without significant changes that would take years and years for all the browsers to implement. Just as Microsoft gave us XMLHttpRequest, I have a feeling WPF/E that will be a small plugin for at least Firefox and IE on windows and mac will bring the web to the next level. Flash is in the same category, but (to me) has a disadvantage of sending bytecode to the browser and not markup. XAML is just markup that can be scripted with standard Javascript or a subset of C# and VB.
AJAX is definitely cool for small app-like functionality on the web. It's raised the bar for sure. Thank God for pop-up blocking or you'd probably have most people turning off Javascript:)
For an organisation (and convicted monopolist) that spends - or is supposed to spend - 7 Billion Dollars per year on "innovation" I think we're pretty much entitled to ask them to do better than the rest, to actually lead, put their money where their mouths are for a change.
The only thing you're entitled to is the software that is on the CD that you purchased. And you don't speak for "we" - no matter how much of a slashborg you think you are.
One of the follies of fourth- and fifth-generation programming languages was the assumption that programmers wanted their programming hidden from them as well. It is certainly true that software designers need to have a high level of abstraction, as they don't need to know the details (and shouldn't). It is also true that there are special cases in programming where you need minor scripting changes to have a big impact on the end result. In these cases, high level programming is entirely correct. The rest of the time, when details are everything, you don't want any more abstraction than you can possibly get away with.
The fallicies of 4th, 5th generation programming (hmm, reminds me of that big 5th generation japanese flop), were the same fallacies of COBOL - that every joe middle-level business manager would be willing and able to hack code, even if it was in some 1960s interpretation of natural langauge programming. My contention is that you don't need to dumb down the language to allow higher-level constructs or even visual programming. Smalltalk/Squeak (yeah, i'm being fanboy lately) can allow that and also allow you dive down into the bowels of the kernel to do whatever you want.
It was inevitable and of course it has a bright future. We don't need anybody to tell us this. Those of us that used to play around on BBSs back in the early 80s on our Apple IIes, and such, could see that.
What we do need to realize is that closed-source/proprietary has its role as well. If the goal is "freedom" for the user then that has to encompass all the tools available. The GPL and the strong leadership of Torvalds has insured a level playing field for that above it on the software stack but we need to be wary of Stallman/FSF fascist dogma. Open Source tends to work very well at the lower levels of the software stack - glibc, the kernel, other libraries, but we need to recognize that we need to provide incentives to innovate at the ever higher-ends of the software stack as well. I consider the rather luke-warm adoption of desktop linux (yes it is, I've been using it a work for the past 8 years) to be indicative of both factionalization and the perils of "giving everything away" at the higher-end of the software stack.
I would keep an eye out on croquet (or something in that realm), for what will be the next leap in collaboration. Definitely check out this recent video (might be windows only). I consider this web 3.0
Someone already mentioned it, but OpenCroquet is probably the next MOO, plus a whole lot more. I recommend watching this fairly recent video (October of last year) to see what it's all about.
Most studies show that this is blatantly untrue -- programmer productivity is generally independent of language chosen. In other words, given an 'average' programmer with X years of experience in their language, they will take about the same amount of time to complete a given task in their language.
I call bullshit on that. The studies that are usually touted say that the number of lines of code that any particular developer writes in any language will be roughly equivalent, not that it will take about the same amount of time to complete a given task irregardless of the language.
But that should be obvious. Assembly compared to Ruby for manipulating some text?
Don't worry though. The AC is just parroting crap he's seen on the net and has never done anything meaningful in Lisp.
If Lisp was the greatest thing since sliced bread it would have gained more acceptance. Or maybe the smug lisp weenies are busy wanking on how great their language is instead of actually producing stuff - like RoR.
If I was parachuting as much as I was 'alternative firing mode' that might be appropriate. My whole left side of my keyboard is mapped out to the most common actions I do.
Some games just require complex interaction and there's just no way around it. Not every game interaction is going to be as easy as PacMan. For example, in FPS I like to have all my keyboard input mapped to the left side of the keyboard so I can have my right hand on the mouse. If you look at a game like BattleField 2, I can't even even manage that. "Oh, oh, my chopper is going down...time to bail...hope I can find number 9 on the keyboard for my parachute before I splat". The only other option is lots of menus, and that is even more clumsy.
How do you play something like WoW or EQ2 without a keyboard? I guess it's possible if you don't want to talk much or don't mind a clumsy pointer virtual-keyboard interaction.
Swing really has been a disaster and it didn't have to be that way. Sun screwed up with AWT, blundered again with Swing, decided in the 2001-2003 timeframe that they weren't going to put many resources into Swing because they did recognize java's strength on the server, and then to top it off, didn't even get subpixel rendering in Java 5. Java 5 rollouts are just starting to become mainstream and since Mustang doesn't bring much to the table in the way of language features we can expect it's acceptance to taken even longer.
I've got Mustang b72 right now. I tend to download builds every month or so. Just take a look at Netbeans or IDEA on an LCD. Maybe the Netbeans and Intellij guys need to rework some of their code for the new subpixel fonts, but they don't look anything close to native. Everybody can tell it's not native, and will always be able to tell, because it's not native. Sun screwed up by insisting on painting everything themselves. Even if Mustang was on par with cleartype and native look-n-feel, it's too late in the game.
Apple got their Swing implementation right. Sun should have taken notice years ago.
And the Mustang betas still have font rasterization issues that will unlikely be cleaned up by the time it ships. You're right. It's just too late in the ballgame for Swing to ever be anything except something server side guys use to leverage their Java skills and produce something that will never see the light of day outside of a corporate office.
Smalltalk is fine. I played around with it about a year ago. It's drop dead simple to learn and pretty powerful. The problem I was alluding to though is that we have to deal with what we already in the browsers: html,css,javascript. I mentioned SVG because that would open up a whole new world of really nice widgets that would be possible. If I have to deal with javascript on the client - so be it. It's not my favorite, but prototype-based language flexibility has always intrigued me.
Yes, I should have mentioned Flash. It has a market penetration of 98% for Flash 6 and above. I guess it all depends on how much "richness" you really need. AFLAX looks interesting, and the new Flex 2 development environment (an Eclipse plugin) seems very nice from the limited amount of time I've played with it. Also, Macromedia's development pricing is going in the right direction. It seems all tools will be free, and only the development environment costing. Some of the open source frameworks look promising over at osflash.org, but they seem to be immature at this point. The open source actionscript compiler is really nice though.
Of course Flash has gotten a somewhat undeserved bad rap because of the way people have used it, but as a RIA platform it looks very promising.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft and/or Intel have no right to criticize because they are Microsoft and/or Intel and we are doing this for "poor children", and we're using open source and we know that open source is great and it doesn't matter what the outcome is because as long as it "feels good" to us MITers and as long as its open source and....
If I hadn't just burned my mod points, I would mod up MSfanboi just to piss you off further. You want people banned for being a "msfanboi". Screw you and the fascist horse you rode in on.
too bad I just used up all my mod points :) Remember, he got that half-million dollar grant a while back.
After there was a complete GNU system with Linux that you could get to run, people started thinking that it was Linux
and...
However after people started using essentially the GNU system with Linux added, and called it Linux,
We've seen this before. Why it's a GNU system "with linux". Linux is just an afterthought. This a reoccuring theme he spouts off about.
The apolitical philosophy of Linus Torvalds who thinks that all software licences are legitimate and it is wrong ever to violate them. So his views on this are more or less the same as Microsoft's.
Listen Dick, not everybody that uses Linux or any other "free" system thinks we're suddenly "free" because we have source code. I guess if I had the design for every product that I used I would be freeeeeeeeee.
Yes, source code gives us "freedom" of change and a nice technical curiousity for those that aren't going to dick with the kernel or glibc, but stop your futile arguments that source code is freedom as in speech.
Oh, and that was a nice slam at Torvalds. If it wasn't for Torvald's "unfree/apolitical" attitude we wouldn't have nice GPU accelerated drivers (or very limited at best).
But there are 100's of millions of users of proprietary operating systems and even the people using free operating systems often use proprietary programs on top of that. So we have a tremendous amount of work to do.
Sorry, but your Cambodian re-education style newspeak will always fail with the rational.
If you see a website using flash, complain. Complain to the site developer saying you are excluding people who believe in maintaining their freedom. Please get rid of the flash from your site.
Oh, and that will help the image of open source users as rational people and not GPL jihadists.
"RMS on RMS"
Well, I guess the whole post was made up after I got to that point, but it's hard to tell since before that it jibed with all of his usual nonsense.
I'll give Stallman a positive mark for his tinfoil hat episode at the UN conference in Tunisia. Fsck rfid tags on humans.
Once they start talking about "social computing" I'm ready to hurl.
Damn. I wonder if there was anything they could have done about that?
I'm sure they considered it, but then decided to use a free license instead.
AJAX (or rather DHTML) has some serious limitations that cannot be overcome without significant changes that would take years and years for all the browsers to implement. Just as Microsoft gave us XMLHttpRequest, I have a feeling WPF/E that will be a small plugin for at least Firefox and IE on windows and mac will bring the web to the next level. Flash is in the same category, but (to me) has a disadvantage of sending bytecode to the browser and not markup. XAML is just markup that can be scripted with standard Javascript or a subset of C# and VB.
:)
AJAX is definitely cool for small app-like functionality on the web. It's raised the bar for sure. Thank God for pop-up blocking or you'd probably have most people turning off Javascript
For an organisation (and convicted monopolist) that spends - or is supposed to spend - 7 Billion Dollars per year on "innovation" I think we're pretty much entitled to ask them to do better than the rest, to actually lead, put their money where their mouths are for a change.
The only thing you're entitled to is the software that is on the CD that you purchased. And you don't speak for "we" - no matter how much of a slashborg you think you are.
One of the follies of fourth- and fifth-generation programming languages was the assumption that programmers wanted their programming hidden from them as well. It is certainly true that software designers need to have a high level of abstraction, as they don't need to know the details (and shouldn't). It is also true that there are special cases in programming where you need minor scripting changes to have a big impact on the end result. In these cases, high level programming is entirely correct. The rest of the time, when details are everything, you don't want any more abstraction than you can possibly get away with.
The fallicies of 4th, 5th generation programming (hmm, reminds me of that big 5th generation japanese flop), were the same fallacies of COBOL - that every joe middle-level business manager would be willing and able to hack code, even if it was in some 1960s interpretation of natural langauge programming. My contention is that you don't need to dumb down the language to allow higher-level constructs or even visual programming. Smalltalk/Squeak (yeah, i'm being fanboy lately) can allow that and also allow you dive down into the bowels of the kernel to do whatever you want.
It was inevitable and of course it has a bright future. We don't need anybody to tell us this. Those of us that used to play around on BBSs back in the early 80s on our Apple IIes, and such, could see that.
What we do need to realize is that closed-source/proprietary has its role as well. If the goal is "freedom" for the user then that has to encompass all the tools available. The GPL and the strong leadership of Torvalds has insured a level playing field for that above it on the software stack but we need to be wary of Stallman/FSF fascist dogma. Open Source tends to work very well at the lower levels of the software stack - glibc, the kernel, other libraries, but we need to recognize that we need to provide incentives to innovate at the ever higher-ends of the software stack as well. I consider the rather luke-warm adoption of desktop linux (yes it is, I've been using it a work for the past 8 years) to be indicative of both factionalization and the perils of "giving everything away" at the higher-end of the software stack.
I would keep an eye out on croquet (or something in that realm), for what will be the next leap in collaboration. Definitely check out this recent video (might be windows only). I consider this web 3.0
Someone already mentioned it, but OpenCroquet is probably the next MOO, plus a whole lot more. I recommend watching this fairly recent video (October of last year) to see what it's all about.
If you get hit by a bus...
This was modded funny, but Microsoft continues to dominate because they actually know that a lot of people want this and so provide it.
Most studies show that this is blatantly untrue -- programmer productivity is generally independent of language chosen. In other words, given an 'average' programmer with X years of experience in their language, they will take about the same amount of time to complete a given task in their language.
I call bullshit on that. The studies that are usually touted say that the number of lines of code that any particular developer writes in any language will be roughly equivalent, not that it will take about the same amount of time to complete a given task irregardless of the language.
But that should be obvious. Assembly compared to Ruby for manipulating some text?
There's a reason they are called Smug Lisp Weenies.
Don't worry though. The AC is just parroting crap he's seen on the net and has never done anything meaningful in Lisp.
If Lisp was the greatest thing since sliced bread it would have gained more acceptance. Or maybe the smug lisp weenies are busy wanking on how great their language is instead of actually producing stuff - like RoR.
Yes, chording seems reasonable, but I'm not sure how well that would play out on a console.
re-map the parachute key to something like 'q'.
If I was parachuting as much as I was 'alternative firing mode' that might be appropriate. My whole left side of my keyboard is mapped out to the most common actions I do.
Some games just require complex interaction and there's just no way around it. Not every game interaction is going to be as easy as PacMan. For example, in FPS I like to have all my keyboard input mapped to the left side of the keyboard so I can have my right hand on the mouse. If you look at a game like BattleField 2, I can't even even manage that. "Oh, oh, my chopper is going down...time to bail...hope I can find number 9 on the keyboard for my parachute before I splat". The only other option is lots of menus, and that is even more clumsy.
How do you play something like WoW or EQ2 without a keyboard? I guess it's possible if you don't want to talk much or don't mind a clumsy pointer virtual-keyboard interaction.
That was beautifull. Can I quote you?
Hehe, of course.
Swing really has been a disaster and it didn't have to be that way. Sun screwed up with AWT, blundered again with Swing, decided in the 2001-2003 timeframe that they weren't going to put many resources into Swing because they did recognize java's strength on the server, and then to top it off, didn't even get subpixel rendering in Java 5. Java 5 rollouts are just starting to become mainstream and since Mustang doesn't bring much to the table in the way of language features we can expect it's acceptance to taken even longer.
I've got Mustang b72 right now. I tend to download builds every month or so. Just take a look at Netbeans or IDEA on an LCD. Maybe the Netbeans and Intellij guys need to rework some of their code for the new subpixel fonts, but they don't look anything close to native. Everybody can tell it's not native, and will always be able to tell, because it's not native. Sun screwed up by insisting on painting everything themselves. Even if Mustang was on par with cleartype and native look-n-feel, it's too late in the game.
Apple got their Swing implementation right. Sun should have taken notice years ago.
And the Mustang betas still have font rasterization issues that will unlikely be cleaned up by the time it ships. You're right. It's just too late in the ballgame for Swing to ever be anything except something server side guys use to leverage their Java skills and produce something that will never see the light of day outside of a corporate office.
...but it also takes on the native appearance perfectly regardless of your platform or theme.
Haha, only if that was true. It's a nice try by Sun, but too little too late.
You are right. Many windows (MS) toolkits are designed not for use by programmers, but by wizard users.
.net/Mono is a waste of time for linux programmers.
Windows programmers are wizards? That's a nice compliment
That's why
Oops, but you don't get to decide that. Too bad for you.
The Wine-based Windows.Forms implementaion is especially a waste of time for linux users (maybe not for windows/wine users).
You sure are knowledgeable about Mono. The wine-based winforms implementation has been for a while now.
Smalltalk is fine. I played around with it about a year ago. It's drop dead simple to learn and pretty powerful. The problem I was alluding to though is that we have to deal with what we already in the browsers: html,css,javascript. I mentioned SVG because that would open up a whole new world of really nice widgets that would be possible. If I have to deal with javascript on the client - so be it. It's not my favorite, but prototype-based language flexibility has always intrigued me.
Yes, I should have mentioned Flash. It has a market penetration of 98% for Flash 6 and above. I guess it all depends on how much "richness" you really need. AFLAX looks interesting, and the new Flex 2 development environment (an Eclipse plugin) seems very nice from the limited amount of time I've played with it. Also, Macromedia's development pricing is going in the right direction. It seems all tools will be free, and only the development environment costing. Some of the open source frameworks look promising over at osflash.org, but they seem to be immature at this point. The open source actionscript compiler is really nice though.
Of course Flash has gotten a somewhat undeserved bad rap because of the way people have used it, but as a RIA platform it looks very promising.