That works OK as long as the program is a standalone application that does not export anything useful to the outside world.
Export what? The shared libs are in "frameworks" - whole bundled trees of libs, headers, and API docs. Programs communicate via fifos, pipes, sockets, clipboards, or object broker systems such as CORBA or GNUstep Distributed Objects - just like they normally do. Shared data is in known locations:/home/joepublic,/home/httpd, in an SQL database, and so on. I don't see the problem here.
Answer: because each little program spews a morass of files all over the filesystem and is near-impossible to delete by hand.
How about instead of fussing over package manager formats, we do instead what has been a tried and tested approach to the whole business: bundle directories. A directory with a.app extension containing a binary and icons in predefined places, plus libs, config, documentation, whatever the program needs. And, for when libraries should be shared (eg:GTK) a system called "frameworks" - basically bundlesd shared libs, plus include-files, plus docs, plus whatever.
The important point is: Joe Average never needs to know what's inside a bundle. The filesystem GUI treats them like single files. To install a program, double click the tarball and a window opens with a bundle icon. Drag the bundle icon to/Local/Apps and tadaaah! one program installed. To run the program, double click the app bundle.
Now isn't that a bit nicer?
(hint: GNUstep is already using this, and it should be fairly trivial to configure the misc binary support to run the launch script on execution of an app bundle)
Because nothing ever truly repeats, it's necessary to "pigeonhole" experience according to theories in order to sort some sort of signal from the noise. The error of bigots is the belief that no theories besides their own are true, and therefore that their pigeonholes are infact part of experience, rather than imposed over it.
Your approach of a series of scales for each feature (eg: moneymaking, preaching, having fun, self expession, informing) seems optimal to me.
Now is the time to mail the companies that are making this and tell them we won't accept or buy anything as hacked around for extortion purposes as DVD has been. No area locks, no encrypted data weak or otherwise, no "licensed players".
A copyright gives you the right to dispose of your own work as you will; it makes the creations of ideas behave like like physical property. This is good and fair.
A patent on the other hand is a lie, that says you own someone else's work as long as it falls within the range of your patent claims. It's a charade, a system of legally enforced rigged competition, and it's only function is to make a gift of the market to the patent holder, in order to beg him to invent more things.
By choosing to "fight on their terms" you make of yourself a liar and you invest your self-interest in maintaining your mutual charade; you use the law as your own hired gun to rig competition on your own behalf. Do that, and you lose the right and the leverage to call them on the lie itself.
The USA isn't frightened of invasion by the Godless Reds anymore (they can hardly kick ass in a country still barely out of the stone age). But they are scared silly that some boozy fool in the president's office will push the Big Red Button in a fit of pique. Okay so only one in ten nukes makes it to the USA without sputtering out, diverting to Azerbaijan, or blowing up halfway. But that is still a lot of nukes and some serious shit going down. So, the USA is going to tread softly around Russia, right up until those same nukes have rusted into radioactive junk piles.
In amongst the fuss about click-o-matic licenses, a more important point has been ignored till now; the law makes anyone who doesn't modify the default by using a shrinkwrap contract totally liable in law for bugs. In other words, ordinary free software authors and especially public domain software authors are giving almost anyone a license to sue if they lose so much as a dime from any bug in the program.
The feel of GTK can safely be described as butt ugly.
My worst gripes in this regard are the behavior of word wrapping in GTK (I hate being unable to WYSIWYG move the cursor using arrows, instead of jumping up/down by paragraphs), and the behavior of scroll bars (middle click for absolute scroll works but won't drag, scrollbars should go non-proportional when they get as tall as they are wide, not shrink to a sliver, and why the outdated one-arrow-at-each-end assumption?).
PDF is "good" specifically because it's weaker. Postscript is a fully fledged interpreted stack based language, and the only way to get the output is to run the program. PDF is more like HTML - a page description language which looks very similar to PS and shares its imaging model, but without the Turing-completeness. Basically this means less processor churn at the expense of flexibility and nifty hacks (eg: defining PS subroutines for your graphical elements and just calling them later).
OpenStep used to use a full PS interpreter to drive the GUI. Apple's new system just allocates a chunk of screen real estate, and the program links against the "Quartz" libraries that use PDF to draw into it. One annoying consequence is you can no longer in MacOS X use "NSHosting" - basically, sending the PS stream from a remote machine to display locally, similar to how X works.
I've used a proper OpenStep derived OS (Apple's Rhapsody betas) and I've used the current front runner linux UIs, Gnome and KDE. OpenStep is a lot nicer. Why is OpenStep nicer? Because it's integrated. Because it has things like color wells you can drag out of onto things, document proxy icons in the window manager you can drag to the filer, app bundles that contain an app and all it's global config in a single unit, system services that dynamically detect what you have selected and offer relevant options to tweak it.
Gnome and KDE can be snazzified with themes and config and whatnot, but in the end it's mostly just chrome. They are struggling to retrofit the same degree of dynamism and integration that OpenStep had from the get-go.
Capitalism and the socialist anarchism you seem to be suggesting are both good ideas in theory, but they both fail to take account of evolution, each in a different way.
Capitalism fails to take account of the fact that evolutionary systems only optimize for the deciding factor - money, in capitalism's case. Hence true laissez-faire will always gravitate towards the most stable state: one ruler-by-force and everyone else as slaves. Laws that get in the way of this can be made, but they need co-ordinated creation and enforcement. One that happens, you have a government. So it would be more accurate to say that capitalism optimizes for greed, and greed necessitates government
Socialist anarchy on the other hand fails to take account of a certain product of evolution - the instincts of humans. Territory, heirarchy, the desire to make war for more territory, all are instinctive. Any social system that ignores them will inevitably rip apart - or in fighting so hard to suppress them, morph into a police state.
To put it another way: what is the first thing that an anarcho-socialist commune nation would do? Coalesce around and hero worship the dominant heroic types who led the revolution. Follow the leader. Form movements and *isms. Establish enmities and alliances with other groups. Engage in feuding (whether conceptual, arguing, fisticuffs, or thermo-nukes).
No system that depends on humans behaving in a totally non-heirarchical non-invasive territory-less way will ever work. For a better idea of what would work, read Nietzsche.
Broken links are an inescapable part of the idea that the web allows each site to be accessed or linked from billions of other pages. Imagine if Yahoo had to keep a live connection for every incoming link and a java-style "listeners" array for every page so as to back-propagate changes. They would have to dedicate whole servers to it.
Good. but tunnel it through Jabber, to piggyback off an existing infrastructure and to prevent just your one protocol being banned in the way Napster's is. And, forget about traffic analysis, in a Napster style situation and with multiple random wrapped bounces between sender and recipient, there simply isn't going to be time for the Feds to trace individuals. Better to optimize those packets so as to shorten the time available to eavesdroppers.
A file sharing system like Napster, but it shares arbitrary files, using a heirarchical directory structure.
* Its pseudonymous and anonymous, and uses multiple-bounce remailer-style protocols to guarantee an untraceable data stream from file provider to recipient. Traffic analysis is irrelevant, so it can operate at full normal speed. Pseudonyms are unique but are destroyed again at log-off.
* The entire data stream is encrypted (and re-encrypted in wrappers for each remailer-type bounce).
* It uses a serverless protocol, Jabber would be ideal, leaving no main server to shut down. Also by piggybacking on Jabber, it would be impossible to block just this file server protocol from within Jabber, and it would be commercial suicide for the ISPs to agree to block Jabber altogether.
* When you share a diectory full of files, you can merge it into the category heirarchy under an existing category, or under new categories, subcategories, etc. If you create a category, others will then see it as an option to merge their directories with. Directories can be shared under multiple categories.
* Searches are "search in category" and "search category and sub categories".
Should be do-able. Would be Fed-proof. Any takers?
Can someone explain what the diff between this code morphing and an emulator written in assembler is? Is it that the emulator binary is loaded into a fast on-chip cache, or something?
Second, this isn't as much of a problem as you think, as long as you aren't being charged for modem time and/or bandwidth.
I'm in England, we have metered local phone calls. Any time my computer dials online, I am being charged. To pay for (at a guess) a day or two of solid online, slowly grabbing new debs, would cost about an order of magnitude more than a CD of the same files.
It's a cool idea to say "grab the CDs of the (heavily dated but rock stable) release version, and tell apt to download the upgrades" but when most of the packages have gone through several releases, this more or less means downloading the OS from scratch. Trivial on a T1, non-trivial on a modem.
Take a look at the other species of social apes and you'll see that:
the adults are all naked, especially so in the sexual-display areas wich are usually not even furred
the adults actively display and behave sexually, in the open and well within the sense range of the young
the adults have sex without thought for "modesty"
and, most importantly:
the young both see and ignore all of these goings on, and are in no way psychologically damaged
Question for the non-stupid: what besides the prudishness brainwashed into you by society makes you think that exposing our kids to an environment containing these things will do them any harm?
...is possible using an Alcubierre warp geometry - something which is not possible for us but becomes trivial for any civilisation advanced enough to manupulate the distortion of spacetime in controlled ways. Basically by moving spacetime while the ship sits still (similar to the expansion of spacetime just after the big bang), you have no time-speedup, no temporal paradoxes, and no feeling of acceleration for the ship's crew.
1) Inconsistency. Is the file system bassed in a "my computer", or in a: c: etc drives? depends what you ask. Why does "my computer" look ike a normal directory but you can't add things to it? How come you can see the treeview in one way of accessing the filesystem, but not another? Is the file system capable of long names, or only 8.3 ones? Too many different ways of doing the same thing, each with differing side effects and capabilities.
2) Spurious crap. Internet explorer as a window viewer. Half the dir window taken up by a pane full of non-useful info. The MSDOS underpinnings. A start bar, desktop icons, a MSOffice toolbar, all to launch apps in different ways.
3) Un-protected access to stuff you absolutely do not wish to touch (unless you are very fond of the color blue). Complicated and hard ways of altering things you frequently want to alter.
4) The fact that it's designed to fulfil the interests of M$ over your own, where they conflict.
5) minor design faux-pas like putting the quit command in the file menu, or putting scroll bar arrowheads at each end
Do you have a clue ? Companies just spent billions on y2k and now you think they will upgrade to Win2k just because it is there? You need a really good reason to spend millions on a new OS.
The reason: M$ office 2002
It runs on win2k only, and you're starting to get important documents in that format. Oddly enough, Office '02 seems to have problems re-exporting documents that work with Office 2000. AbiWord 5 for windows handles both formats with ease, but the boss won't authorise it (he likes the new realtime-radiosity-rendered talking pencil sharpener in Word).
Slashdot Mirror
That works OK as long as the program is a standalone application that does not export anything useful to the outside world.
/home/joepublic, /home/httpd, in an SQL database, and so on. I don't see the problem here.
Export what? The shared libs are in "frameworks" - whole bundled trees of libs, headers, and API docs. Programs communicate via fifos, pipes, sockets, clipboards, or object broker systems such as CORBA or GNUstep Distributed Objects - just like they normally do. Shared data is in known locations:
Answer: because each little program spews a morass of files all over the filesystem and is near-impossible to delete by hand.
.app extension containing a binary and icons in predefined places, plus libs, config, documentation, whatever the program needs. And, for when libraries should be shared (eg:GTK) a system called "frameworks" - basically bundlesd shared libs, plus include-files, plus docs, plus whatever.
/Local/Apps and tadaaah! one program installed. To run the program, double click the app bundle.
How about instead of fussing over package manager formats, we do instead what has been a tried and tested approach to the whole business: bundle directories. A directory with a
The important point is: Joe Average never needs to know what's inside a bundle. The filesystem GUI treats them like single files. To install a program, double click the tarball and a window opens with a bundle icon. Drag the bundle icon to
Now isn't that a bit nicer?
(hint: GNUstep is already using this, and it should be fairly trivial to configure the misc binary support to run the launch script on execution of an app bundle)
Because nothing ever truly repeats, it's necessary to "pigeonhole" experience according to theories in order to sort some sort of signal from the noise. The error of bigots is the belief that no theories besides their own are true, and therefore that their pigeonholes are infact part of experience, rather than imposed over it.
Your approach of a series of scales for each feature (eg: moneymaking, preaching, having fun, self expession, informing) seems optimal to me.
Now is the time to mail the companies that are making this and tell them we won't accept or buy anything as hacked around for extortion purposes as DVD has been. No area locks, no encrypted data weak or otherwise, no "licensed players".
A copyright gives you the right to dispose of your own work as you will; it makes the creations of ideas behave like like physical property. This is good and fair.
A patent on the other hand is a lie, that says you own someone else's work as long as it falls within the range of your patent claims. It's a charade, a system of legally enforced rigged competition, and it's only function is to make a gift of the market to the patent holder, in order to beg him to invent more things.
By choosing to "fight on their terms" you make of yourself a liar and you invest your self-interest in maintaining your mutual charade; you use the law as your own hired gun to rig competition on your own behalf. Do that, and you lose the right and the leverage to call them on the lie itself.
The USA isn't frightened of invasion by the Godless Reds anymore (they can hardly kick ass in a country still barely out of the stone age). But they are scared silly that some boozy fool in the president's office will push the Big Red Button in a fit of pique. Okay so only one in ten nukes makes it to the USA without sputtering out, diverting to Azerbaijan, or blowing up halfway. But that is still a lot of nukes and some serious shit going down. So, the USA is going to tread softly around Russia, right up until those same nukes have rusted into radioactive junk piles.
In amongst the fuss about click-o-matic licenses, a more important point has been ignored till now; the law makes anyone who doesn't modify the default by using a shrinkwrap contract totally liable in law for bugs. In other words, ordinary free software authors and especially public domain software authors are giving almost anyone a license to sue if they lose so much as a dime from any bug in the program.
The feel of GTK can safely be described as butt ugly.
My worst gripes in this regard are the behavior of word wrapping in GTK (I hate being unable to WYSIWYG move the cursor using arrows, instead of jumping up/down by paragraphs), and the behavior of scroll bars (middle click for absolute scroll works but won't drag, scrollbars should go non-proportional when they get as tall as they are wide, not shrink to a sliver, and why the outdated one-arrow-at-each-end assumption?).
PDF is "good" specifically because it's weaker. Postscript is a fully fledged interpreted stack based language, and the only way to get the output is to run the program. PDF is more like HTML - a page description language which looks very similar to PS and shares its imaging model, but without the Turing-completeness. Basically this means less processor churn at the expense of flexibility and nifty hacks (eg: defining PS subroutines for your graphical elements and just calling them later).
OpenStep used to use a full PS interpreter to drive the GUI. Apple's new system just allocates a chunk of screen real estate, and the program links against the "Quartz" libraries that use PDF to draw into it. One annoying consequence is you can no longer in MacOS X use "NSHosting" - basically, sending the PS stream from a remote machine to display locally, similar to how X works.
I've used a proper OpenStep derived OS (Apple's Rhapsody betas) and I've used the current front runner linux UIs, Gnome and KDE. OpenStep is a lot nicer. Why is OpenStep nicer? Because it's integrated. Because it has things like color wells you can drag out of onto things, document proxy icons in the window manager you can drag to the filer, app bundles that contain an app and all it's global config in a single unit, system services that dynamically detect what you have selected and offer relevant options to tweak it.
Gnome and KDE can be snazzified with themes and config and whatnot, but in the end it's mostly just chrome. They are struggling to retrofit the same degree of dynamism and integration that OpenStep had from the get-go.
Capitalism and the socialist anarchism you seem to be suggesting are both good ideas in theory, but they both fail to take account of evolution, each in a different way.
Capitalism fails to take account of the fact that evolutionary systems only optimize for the deciding factor - money, in capitalism's case. Hence true laissez-faire will always gravitate towards the most stable state: one ruler-by-force and everyone else as slaves. Laws that get in the way of this can be made, but they need co-ordinated creation and enforcement. One that happens, you have a government. So it would be more accurate to say that capitalism optimizes for greed, and greed necessitates government
Socialist anarchy on the other hand fails to take account of a certain product of evolution - the instincts of humans. Territory, heirarchy, the desire to make war for more territory, all are instinctive. Any social system that ignores them will inevitably rip apart - or in fighting so hard to suppress them, morph into a police state.
To put it another way: what is the first thing that an anarcho-socialist commune nation would do? Coalesce around and hero worship the dominant heroic types who led the revolution. Follow the leader. Form movements and *isms. Establish enmities and alliances with other groups. Engage in feuding (whether conceptual, arguing, fisticuffs, or thermo-nukes).
No system that depends on humans behaving in a totally non-heirarchical non-invasive territory-less way will ever work. For a better idea of what would work, read Nietzsche.
Broken links are an inescapable part of the idea that the web allows each site to be accessed or linked from billions of other pages. Imagine if Yahoo had to keep a live connection for every incoming link and a java-style "listeners" array for every page so as to back-propagate changes. They would have to dedicate whole servers to it.
Good. but tunnel it through Jabber, to piggyback off an existing infrastructure and to prevent just your one protocol being banned in the way Napster's is. And, forget about traffic analysis, in a Napster style situation and with multiple random wrapped bounces between sender and recipient, there simply isn't going to be time for the Feds to trace individuals. Better to optimize those packets so as to shorten the time available to eavesdroppers.
Here's an idea to implement:
A file sharing system like Napster, but it shares arbitrary files, using a heirarchical directory structure.
* Its pseudonymous and anonymous, and uses multiple-bounce remailer-style protocols to guarantee an untraceable data stream from file provider to recipient. Traffic analysis is irrelevant, so it can operate at full normal speed. Pseudonyms are unique but are destroyed again at log-off.
* The entire data stream is encrypted (and re-encrypted in wrappers for each remailer-type bounce).
* It uses a serverless protocol, Jabber would be ideal, leaving no main server to shut down. Also by piggybacking on Jabber, it would be impossible to block just this file server protocol from within Jabber, and it would be commercial suicide for the ISPs to agree to block Jabber altogether.
* When you share a diectory full of files, you can merge it into the category heirarchy under an existing category, or under new categories, subcategories, etc. If you create a category, others will then see it as an option to merge their directories with. Directories can be shared under multiple categories.
* Searches are "search in category" and "search category and sub categories".
Should be do-able. Would be Fed-proof. Any takers?
although I wish they had a "email notify on update for this product" thing
Can someone explain what the diff between this code morphing and an emulator written in assembler is? Is it that the emulator binary is loaded into a fast on-chip cache, or something?
shouldn't that be
:-) [esc]
:set flame
aBesides, real men use vim.
:set noflame
:x
Second, this isn't as much of a problem as you think, as long as you aren't being charged for modem time and/or bandwidth.
I'm in England, we have metered local phone calls. Any time my computer dials online, I am being charged. To pay for (at a guess) a day or two of solid online, slowly grabbing new debs, would cost about an order of magnitude more than a CD of the same files.
It's a cool idea to say "grab the CDs of the (heavily dated but rock stable) release version, and tell apt to download the upgrades" but when most of the packages have gone through several releases, this more or less means downloading the OS from scratch. Trivial on a T1, non-trivial on a modem.
- the adults are all naked, especially so in the sexual-display areas wich are usually not even furred
- the adults actively display and behave sexually, in the open and well within the sense range of the young
- the adults have sex without thought for "modesty"
and, most importantly:Question for the non-stupid: what besides the prudishness brainwashed into you by society makes you think that exposing our kids to an environment containing these things will do them any harm?
Other links:
Unfortunately the paper itself has been taken down by Cardiff university, and I couldn't find it mirrored anywhere.
1) Inconsistency. Is the file system bassed in a "my computer", or in a: c: etc drives? depends what you ask. Why does "my computer" look ike a normal directory but you can't add things to it? How come you can see the treeview in one way of accessing the filesystem, but not another? Is the file system capable of long names, or only 8.3 ones? Too many different ways of doing the same thing, each with differing side effects and capabilities.
2) Spurious crap. Internet explorer as a window viewer. Half the dir window taken up by a pane full of non-useful info. The MSDOS underpinnings. A start bar, desktop icons, a MSOffice toolbar, all to launch apps in different ways.
3) Un-protected access to stuff you absolutely do not wish to touch (unless you are very fond of the color blue). Complicated and hard ways of altering things you frequently want to alter.
4) The fact that it's designed to fulfil the interests of M$ over your own, where they conflict.
5) minor design faux-pas like putting the quit command in the file menu, or putting scroll bar arrowheads at each end
6) no security worth spit
I bet they'll be real popular in high school. Girl watching will be replaced by girl scanning. Ahhh, progress. :-)
That would be a real nuisance. All the cute girls would die of skin cancer, from being scanned over and over.
The script for The Terminator said it well: "the future is not set, there is no fate but what we make for ourselves".
If you don't like corporatism, go change it, beginning now.
Do you have a clue ? Companies just spent billions on y2k and now you think they will upgrade to Win2k just because it is there? You need a really good reason to spend millions on a new OS.
The reason: M$ office 2002
It runs on win2k only, and you're starting to get important documents in that format. Oddly enough, Office '02 seems to have problems re-exporting documents that work with Office 2000. AbiWord 5 for windows handles both formats with ease, but the boss won't authorise it (he likes the new realtime-radiosity-rendered talking pencil sharpener in Word).