I mean, for chrissake. Anyone else remember the umich Mac freeware/shareware archive? Predated Info-Mac by a bit, but was excellent. Only notable thing I'm aware of about umich, too.:-)
And EXCEL MACROS are a must in most research places.
I dunno what kind of "research place" *you've* worked in, but that does not resound here. The two researchers I've talked to about tools were (a) CS research, which did not use Excel and (b) some guy that did years of economic analysis and used a bunch of high end statistical analysis software, not some crappy little spreadsheet.
Researchers are the *least* likely set of people I can think of to want to use Excel -- they're the most likely to have massive data sets and the least likely to have conventional computing needs that can be solved easily with premade functionality (which is where Excel excels).
Okay, this is taken a smidgen out of context. I'm also at CMU. And CMU is about as *anti*-MS as it gets (partly because MS hired away all the faculty that were willing to work for them a few years ago).
I do not know of a single CS course (for CS majors) that is taught based on Windows. All development is done on Solaris or (increasingly) Linux. Pushed tools include emacs, gdb, LaTeX, and OpenGL. I have never been required or encouraged to do any work that interfaced in any way with Windows.
How many universities have a video game programming class -- with a Linux target?
There's a Microsoft club? Hell, I wasn't even aware of it. The Linux users group is a lot more visible (frequently putting up posters for Linux Installation Days). Go into the Wean clusters (where most of the CS people do work, if they're working in a cluster) and you see Linux, Solaris, and few (in their own tiny room) Windows boxes.
CMU officially provides free support for a number of different Linux distros to its students. It has banned at least one Windows release from campus usage (NT Server, due to DHCP problems).
Yes, Microsoft recruits aggressively here. The campus does not encourage it more than any other company. There are people that intern at MS, and there are people that intern at IBM. RTLinux had a booth at the last job fair, and IBM's first question for people dropping resumes that mentioned Linux was "Have you written a patch for the Linux kernel?"
I know one professor that allowed MS to come and do a presentation on campus (basically, they'd pay to do a workshot on some of their stuff if they got a room to do it in). He ended up in hot water because of some pretty strong anti-MS sentiment in the CS department.
Now, CMU may not be perfect, but one thing it sure as hell is not doing is promoting Microsoft.
If you want to complain about moronic misallocation of tuition funds at CMU, complain about the annual rip-out-the-flower-planters-and-plant-full-size-ba nana-trees-two-weeks-before-first-frost scandal.
Or (while it was cool, I'm not sure it qualifies as research) the guy that got an undergraduate research grant to build a shack adjoining Doherty Hall and then live in it for two months without talking to anyone and wearing a lobster suit.
Java is, IMHO, a really really awful choice for a teaching language.
As a matter of fact, I have serious doubts about an OO language *period* as a first language.
What I've pretty consistently seen is people getting started on Java having to deal with a pretty high up-front cost. They have to get OO architecture, a ton of terminology, protection, and casting shoved down their throat before they can really write simple programs (more than Hello World).
What I've seen in a lot of intro CS classes is that the profs try to teach all the terminology and concepts first (in a pretty abstract manner) so that they can use the terms, and then start teaching the mechanics of the language. Everyone promptly gets lost.
BASIC was a really great language to get people programming in, because it was so incredibly simple to start someone coding reasonably well. You could teach everything needed to write a full-blown program very quickly, then spend time building on a concrete foundation, instead of a bunch of abstracts.
Pascal is pretty simple that way. C is a pain to debug and has a few syntax warts (the syntax of the for loop, the printf syntax...), but it's almost as good to teach things to students with. C++ is only usable as a first language if it's used pretty much like C at first. If you start introducing the entire language up front, you lose a lot of people.
Some people have promoted Scheme as a good first language. I personally think decent static typing is pretty important to someone that may be making type errors left and right, but Scheme is still probably not a bad choice.
Anyway, like I said, Java is a truly shitty language to introduce someone to coding on. It's (potentially) a really sexy language to someone that has a C++ history.
Personally, I'd say that a procedural version of BASIC is probably the best sort of intro language I can think of. Very low cost to entry, not a lot of concepts to bang your head into.
Have the people that dote on VS actually *used* etags, fume-mode, or any of the other rather important-to-development features in xemacs, or are they just deciding that plain Jane xemacs is no good for development?
I have a couple of friends that use VS. Pretty much what I've heard is that it's not bad, that the interface isn't perfect, but it's pretty easy to use. However, the only feature that I could see using as justification for being married to it is the compiler/debugger's support for modifying running code at the source level.
Is there any other reason to like VS versus gcc, with xemacs?
While I could see a trademark being copyrighted (say, a very elaborate logo), I haven't heard of it.
Neither of the articles you linked to contains, AFAI can tell, an instance of a copyrighted trademark. It's mostly journalists using language loosely.
In the Mickey Mouse one, Mickey Mouse works are copyrighted. Mickey Mouse himself (the famous silhouette, at least) is a trademark. The trademark does not apply to the works, and I'm fairly sure that the copyrights do not apply to the trademark.
And in the Apple one has the use of trademark in a non-legalistic way, unfortunately (a distinctive characteristic rather than a registered symbol) in "copy its copyrighted trademark themes". Even more unfortunately, it *also* mentions trademarks (in the legal sense) in the same article, which is a bit confusing. Now, the themes in question contain both copyrighted images (like Apple's famous "glassies") and Apple's "apple" logo, which is a trademark.:-)
Writing a compiler not that hard
on
Linus Is A Hero
·
· Score: 2
if writing a compiler is so simple
Writing a compiler is not actually very difficult. Oh, it's not "hello world", but if you have a basic grounding in assembly and some documentation, it's quite doable for a single person to have a quite usable compiler for a simple language in a month.
Carnegie Mellon University (as well as many other universities) have a compilers course, in which you write a compiler, so many people actually do so each year.
Writing a compiler that does really good optimization, on the other hand, is very, very difficult.
And, last of all, benchmarking and tweaking a compiler is not trivial and takes a *huge* amount of time. If you're compiling for a really simple cacheless architecture, maybe it's a piece of cake, but trying to make a good x86 optimizing compiler (especially one for multiple generations of x86 processors) is a tremendous amount of work.
While I like Linux more than OS X, OS X is quite capable of keeping a UNIX guy happy.
1. the powerful shell
I don't think much of csh either, but BSD uses it. You going to call BSD not UNIXy enough? If you want, you can plop zsh or bash or whatever on your machine.
2. everything is a file (Plan9 is even better)
I though OS X had/dev, though I could be wrong.
everything in simple text files
Netinfo isn't used for *everything*...
4 the terminal
I'm sure there's a fullscreen terminal app.
5. the fork/exec model
OS X definitely has this. It wouldn't run many UNIX programs without it...:-)
The big advantage OS X has over Linux is maturity. Apple's had tons and tons of people working on OS X full time for longer than there were tons and tons of people working on Linux full time.
They want to install on the corporate network, you get your Office Apps, you get connection to the intranet, you get your database. You do NOT sit and listen to mp3's, watch porno avi's, and download w4r3z. That's what Mandrake is for.
No, that's what Mandrake *aspires* to be. And RH certainly does not ignore the desktop. RH simply has more deals with large-machine and server vendors than Mandrake. Neither distro ignores the desktop user.
Anyway, the reason why more people run linux is b/c x86 is cheaper than mac.
Which is not something that one can ignore. The reason Apple can do OS X at all is because they make huge quantities of money off hardware. And to use Apple software, one must purchase Apple hardware.
1) Produce prohibitively expensive technology. 2) Have complete and utter lack of a plan to make money on this.
Surprise, no one *else* wants to buy you and try to make money off your product *either*.
I'm going to be quite surprised if the Tablet PC takes off either. Oh, I doubt it'll be a complete flop, but the overwhelming majority of people are better off with a keyboard. Maybe if it had better battery life and was sold as an e-book reader as well...
And the tradition of using "generation" in names is getting more popular.
Apple *could* have called their processors the 730 and 740 (or whatever, names could be wrong here), but instead it's the Generation 3 and Generation 4 PowerPC.
Sprint should just call their phones, which *obviously* come *after* 3G (in Japan at least) "4G". This is technically correct, would piss off their competitors, and prevent other people from benefitting from the hype.
It isn't really vaporware -- no one's promised it. Slashdot likes taking research articles, trumpeting them, and then including a little blurb from the editor about how much he'd like one.
Iraq War - how long have we been waiting for this to happen? Maybe it'll come out next year?
Only in America. Clinton gets impeached for lying about having sex with a (willing) girl. Dubya doesn't get impeached for starting a war with a country to continue a family feud.
Vaporware traditionally refers to when you have a bunch of promises from a company but no software. You can grab CVS from Ximian -- they've got plenty of code in it.
That's a *really* awful definition, when I think about it.
I mean, I can see saying that a demo on stage doesn't count (Apple's put out plenty of programs "built" in Director to get people excited) but beta software in your hands means that there's code there.
If you had read the venom pouring forth from some members of the_gdf you'd realize "bitter" is a rather severe understatement. There are definitely some egotistical kids involved in all this, but I think your labelling has been misdirected.
I've worked on gtk-gnutella with Raphael Manfretti, and while I haven't been in touch with him for a bit, your comment sort of stopped me cold.
Raphael and the other main developers have put *huge* amounts of time into developing and *carefully documenting* a protocol that's pretty backwards compatible. They've been in contact with each other to ensure that their clients work well, and are one of the more impressive examples of competitors working together for everyone's good.
Now, after all this work to avoid protocol fragmentation, one guy makes a new protocol. He uses some work from existing members, and refuses to publish any specifications. He then *takes* the name from this project that has seen *so* much work to be open (because he wants to grab a bit more PR and a few more $$$), and uses it.
Now, these developers are, more than understandably, frusterated. This leads to lots of end-user confusion. It's bad for *everyone involved*. Had Make said "I'm making a new protocol and calling it Sharella" or something, it would have been okay. But he created incompatibility, *he* refused to publish specs to let other developers remedy that, and *he* is out trying to profit off the users of the network.
So, I have to disagree. I've seen a lot of Raph's writing, and while sometimes he turns something down, he acts a lot more mature than, say, Linus does.
This optimizations may be nvidia-specific stuff, since I never used other 3D hardware than nvidia. But that seems to be the beauty of OpenGL, one can extend it since it is open...
I spoke with one of the higher-ups of hardware development at NVidia recently -- he doesn't like DirectX, as it's a battle to get MS to support each new feature, and in an industry where a six month lead on a new feature is important, that's a big deal. OpenGL has a standard way of supporting new extensions, which he really likes.
What is fact is that OpenGL does a tiny fraction of what DirectX does.
And do you say that DirectX sucks because "Direct3D only does 3D"? No. You use a bunch of libraries of varying quality because MS has marketed them under a single name ("DirectX")? I suppose if you use OpenGL, you cannot use OpenAL?
Hell, I can fix that right now. I name the combination of SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL_ttf, SDLSprite and SDL_image "HyperX". Voila! By your criteria, now HyperX is better, because it does more!
Dvorak has a long and rich history of being hired to write "provocative" columns. He's the closest thing there is to a professional troll. I remember him writing (for MacWorld) about how the Mac should have an Alt key instead of an Option key. Christ.
Examples:
Rotten roots. You'd hope that the open-source movement would have made a wild leap that would get it off the treadmill of featurism and onto something entirely new. After all, we are told that millions of coders on the Web can match and beat Microsoft and its mere 20,000 to 30,000 drones.
Okay, managed to insult both MS ("drones", "rotten roots") and Linux coders "treadmill of featurism".
After all, Linux was designed for the x86.
Fair enough, but then he concludes:
This is the simple but overlooked fact of the Linux revolution: Its roots are in Wintel.
Huh? Dvorak's loved the term "Wintel" for ever and ever (probably coined it and trying to ensure that everyone uses it), but it's totally inappropriate here. He's trying to use the fact that both Linux and Windows have as their primary target the most common personal computing platform to show that Linux is derivative of Windows?
Linux has become a pale imitation of the evil OS it intends to replace
Oooh, good. Managed to piss off Windows and Linux users.
It's no coincidence that Apple, which dominates the creative-artist scene, manages to be creative.
Ummm...*what*? Apple's most famous and impressive creative moments were in the 80s and 70s, when it was designing computers originally intended for *managers*, not *artists*.
If the open-source folks just want to copy what's already out there, why not look around more? Surely they can find something more interesting than a copy of a copy of a copy.
Dvorak's such an idiot. He uses, say, GNOME because it comes with his prebuilt, idiot-proof consumer Linux box. It's crafted by RH to be accessable to Windows users. Then he complains that Linux isn't *different* enough. Wake up, Dvorak! There are Linux boxes with voice input, with 3d file managers, with only a console, hell, inside your PDA! You can use *any* of these interfaces!
How do you know they were not interfering anybody, if that is the case how did the FCC ever found out about it??? Appearantly they were not completly 'out in the boonies' were they?
Well, they *did* run a Slashdot story describing behavior that was breaking FCC regs.
...due to the fact that most people work inside in office environments, humans are sure to soon lose their ability to percieve depth at a distance. Also at risk is the human ability to tolerate absolute silence or darkness (both mostly eliminated in our modern workplace and dwellings). The ability of humans to withstand pain is vanishing, and allergies are being introduced, due to cleaner environments in our youth. Oh, and electronic calculators are eliminating the human ability to do mathematics.
In conclusion, the world is going to end in five...four...three...two...one...damn. Well, maybe tomorrow...
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, for chrissake. Anyone else remember the umich Mac freeware/shareware archive? Predated Info-Mac by a bit, but was excellent. Only notable thing I'm aware of about umich, too. :-)
And now they've made a complete about-face?
Okay, I'll buy most of that, but WTF is this?
And EXCEL MACROS are a must in most research places.
I dunno what kind of "research place" *you've* worked in, but that does not resound here. The two researchers I've talked to about tools were (a) CS research, which did not use Excel and (b) some guy that did years of economic analysis and used a bunch of high end statistical analysis software, not some crappy little spreadsheet.
Researchers are the *least* likely set of people I can think of to want to use Excel -- they're the most likely to have massive data sets and the least likely to have conventional computing needs that can be solved easily with premade functionality (which is where Excel excels).
Okay, this is taken a smidgen out of context. I'm also at CMU. And CMU is about as *anti*-MS as it gets (partly because MS hired away all the faculty that were willing to work for them a few years ago).
a nana-trees-two-weeks-before-first-frost scandal.
I do not know of a single CS course (for CS majors) that is taught based on Windows. All development is done on Solaris or (increasingly) Linux. Pushed tools include emacs, gdb, LaTeX, and OpenGL. I have never been required or encouraged to do any work that interfaced in any way with Windows.
How many universities have a video game programming class -- with a Linux target?
There's a Microsoft club? Hell, I wasn't even aware of it. The Linux users group is a lot more visible (frequently putting up posters for Linux Installation Days). Go into the Wean clusters (where most of the CS people do work, if they're working in a cluster) and you see Linux, Solaris, and few (in their own tiny room) Windows boxes.
CMU officially provides free support for a number of different Linux distros to its students. It has banned at least one Windows release from campus usage (NT Server, due to DHCP problems).
Yes, Microsoft recruits aggressively here. The campus does not encourage it more than any other company. There are people that intern at MS, and there are people that intern at IBM. RTLinux had a booth at the last job fair, and IBM's first question for people dropping resumes that mentioned Linux was "Have you written a patch for the Linux kernel?"
I know one professor that allowed MS to come and do a presentation on campus (basically, they'd pay to do a workshot on some of their stuff if they got a room to do it in). He ended up in hot water because of some pretty strong anti-MS sentiment in the CS department.
Now, CMU may not be perfect, but one thing it sure as hell is not doing is promoting Microsoft.
If you want to complain about moronic misallocation of tuition funds at CMU, complain about the annual rip-out-the-flower-planters-and-plant-full-size-b
Or (while it was cool, I'm not sure it qualifies as research) the guy that got an undergraduate research grant to build a shack adjoining Doherty Hall and then live in it for two months without talking to anyone and wearing a lobster suit.
Java is, IMHO, a really really awful choice for a teaching language.
As a matter of fact, I have serious doubts about an OO language *period* as a first language.
What I've pretty consistently seen is people getting started on Java having to deal with a pretty high up-front cost. They have to get OO architecture, a ton of terminology, protection, and casting shoved down their throat before they can really write simple programs (more than Hello World).
What I've seen in a lot of intro CS classes is that the profs try to teach all the terminology and concepts first (in a pretty abstract manner) so that they can use the terms, and then start teaching the mechanics of the language. Everyone promptly gets lost.
BASIC was a really great language to get people programming in, because it was so incredibly simple to start someone coding reasonably well. You could teach everything needed to write a full-blown program very quickly, then spend time building on a concrete foundation, instead of a bunch of abstracts.
Pascal is pretty simple that way. C is a pain to debug and has a few syntax warts (the syntax of the for loop, the printf syntax...), but it's almost as good to teach things to students with. C++ is only usable as a first language if it's used pretty much like C at first. If you start introducing the entire language up front, you lose a lot of people.
Some people have promoted Scheme as a good first language. I personally think decent static typing is pretty important to someone that may be making type errors left and right, but Scheme is still probably not a bad choice.
Anyway, like I said, Java is a truly shitty language to introduce someone to coding on. It's (potentially) a really sexy language to someone that has a C++ history.
Personally, I'd say that a procedural version of BASIC is probably the best sort of intro language I can think of. Very low cost to entry, not a lot of concepts to bang your head into.
Have the people that dote on VS actually *used* etags, fume-mode, or any of the other rather important-to-development features in xemacs, or are they just deciding that plain Jane xemacs is no good for development?
I have a couple of friends that use VS. Pretty much what I've heard is that it's not bad, that the interface isn't perfect, but it's pretty easy to use. However, the only feature that I could see using as justification for being married to it is the compiler/debugger's support for modifying running code at the source level.
Is there any other reason to like VS versus gcc, with xemacs?
While I could see a trademark being copyrighted (say, a very elaborate logo), I haven't heard of it.
:-)
Neither of the articles you linked to contains, AFAI can tell, an instance of a copyrighted trademark. It's mostly journalists using language loosely.
In the Mickey Mouse one, Mickey Mouse works are copyrighted. Mickey Mouse himself (the famous silhouette, at least) is a trademark. The trademark does not apply to the works, and I'm fairly sure that the copyrights do not apply to the trademark.
And in the Apple one has the use of trademark in a non-legalistic way, unfortunately (a distinctive characteristic rather than a registered symbol) in "copy its copyrighted trademark themes". Even more unfortunately, it *also* mentions trademarks (in the legal sense) in the same article, which is a bit confusing. Now, the themes in question contain both copyrighted images (like Apple's famous "glassies") and Apple's "apple" logo, which is a trademark.
if writing a compiler is so simple
Writing a compiler is not actually very difficult. Oh, it's not "hello world", but if you have a basic grounding in assembly and some documentation, it's quite doable for a single person to have a quite usable compiler for a simple language in a month.
Carnegie Mellon University (as well as many other universities) have a compilers course, in which you write a compiler, so many people actually do so each year.
Writing a compiler that does really good optimization, on the other hand, is very, very difficult.
And, last of all, benchmarking and tweaking a compiler is not trivial and takes a *huge* amount of time. If you're compiling for a really simple cacheless architecture, maybe it's a piece of cake, but trying to make a good x86 optimizing compiler (especially one for multiple generations of x86 processors) is a tremendous amount of work.
While I like Linux more than OS X, OS X is quite capable of keeping a UNIX guy happy.
/dev, though I could be wrong.
1. the powerful shell
I don't think much of csh either, but BSD uses it. You going to call BSD not UNIXy enough? If you want, you can plop zsh or bash or whatever on your machine.
2. everything is a file (Plan9 is even better)
I though OS X had
everything in simple text files
Netinfo isn't used for *everything*...
4 the terminal
I'm sure there's a fullscreen terminal app.
5. the fork/exec model
OS X definitely has this. It wouldn't run many UNIX programs without it...:-)
The big advantage OS X has over Linux is maturity. Apple's had tons and tons of people working on OS X full time for longer than there were tons and tons of people working on Linux full time.
They want to install on the corporate network, you get your Office Apps, you get connection to the intranet, you get your database. You do NOT sit and listen to mp3's, watch porno avi's, and download w4r3z. That's what Mandrake is for.
No, that's what Mandrake *aspires* to be. And RH certainly does not ignore the desktop. RH simply has more deals with large-machine and server vendors than Mandrake. Neither distro ignores the desktop user.
Anyway, the reason why more people run linux is b/c x86 is cheaper than mac.
Which is not something that one can ignore. The reason Apple can do OS X at all is because they make huge quantities of money off hardware. And to use Apple software, one must purchase Apple hardware.
The migration on the server is already happening.
3G wireless networks (Although not what we were promised. I have a 3G phone from sprint, but cannot do things like video on demand)
I demand not to have to carry a cell *and* not to watch video on ridiculously tiny screens...and *I* got it!
1) Produce prohibitively expensive technology.
2) Have complete and utter lack of a plan to make money on this.
Surprise, no one *else* wants to buy you and try to make money off your product *either*.
I'm going to be quite surprised if the Tablet PC takes off either. Oh, I doubt it'll be a complete flop, but the overwhelming majority of people are better off with a keyboard. Maybe if it had better battery life and was sold as an e-book reader as well...
And the tradition of using "generation" in names is getting more popular.
Apple *could* have called their processors the 730 and 740 (or whatever, names could be wrong here), but instead it's the Generation 3 and Generation 4 PowerPC.
Sprint should just call their phones, which *obviously* come *after* 3G (in Japan at least) "4G". This is technically correct, would piss off their competitors, and prevent other people from benefitting from the hype.
It isn't really vaporware -- no one's promised it. Slashdot likes taking research articles, trumpeting them, and then including a little blurb from the editor about how much he'd like one.
Iraq War - how long have we been waiting for this to happen? Maybe it'll come out next year?
Only in America. Clinton gets impeached for lying about having sex with a (willing) girl. Dubya doesn't get impeached for starting a war with a country to continue a family feud.
Vaporware traditionally refers to when you have a bunch of promises from a company but no software. You can grab CVS from Ximian -- they've got plenty of code in it.
That's a *really* awful definition, when I think about it.
I mean, I can see saying that a demo on stage doesn't count (Apple's put out plenty of programs "built" in Director to get people excited) but beta software in your hands means that there's code there.
If you had read the venom pouring forth from some members of the_gdf you'd realize "bitter" is a rather severe understatement. There are definitely some egotistical kids involved in all this, but I think your labelling has been misdirected.
I've worked on gtk-gnutella with Raphael Manfretti, and while I haven't been in touch with him for a bit, your comment sort of stopped me cold.
Raphael and the other main developers have put *huge* amounts of time into developing and *carefully documenting* a protocol that's pretty backwards compatible. They've been in contact with each other to ensure that their clients work well, and are one of the more impressive examples of competitors working together for everyone's good.
Now, after all this work to avoid protocol fragmentation, one guy makes a new protocol. He uses some work from existing members, and refuses to publish any specifications. He then *takes* the name from this project that has seen *so* much work to be open (because he wants to grab a bit more PR and a few more $$$), and uses it.
Now, these developers are, more than understandably, frusterated. This leads to lots of end-user confusion. It's bad for *everyone involved*. Had Make said "I'm making a new protocol and calling it Sharella" or something, it would have been okay. But he created incompatibility, *he* refused to publish specs to let other developers remedy that, and *he* is out trying to profit off the users of the network.
So, I have to disagree. I've seen a lot of Raph's writing, and while sometimes he turns something down, he acts a lot more mature than, say, Linus does.
Your criticism of him is unfounded.
I strongly doubt that "Gnutella" is trademarked as a P2P name by anyone involved, so lawsuits are not an issue.
This optimizations may be nvidia-specific stuff, since I never used other 3D hardware than nvidia. But that seems to be the beauty of OpenGL, one can extend it since it is open...
I spoke with one of the higher-ups of hardware development at NVidia recently -- he doesn't like DirectX, as it's a battle to get MS to support each new feature, and in an industry where a six month lead on a new feature is important, that's a big deal. OpenGL has a standard way of supporting new extensions, which he really likes.
What is fact is that OpenGL does a tiny fraction of what DirectX does.
And do you say that DirectX sucks because "Direct3D only does 3D"? No. You use a bunch of libraries of varying quality because MS has marketed them under a single name ("DirectX")? I suppose if you use OpenGL, you cannot use OpenAL?
Hell, I can fix that right now. I name the combination of SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL_ttf, SDLSprite and SDL_image "HyperX". Voila! By your criteria, now HyperX is better, because it does more!
Dvorak has a long and rich history of being hired to write "provocative" columns. He's the closest thing there is to a professional troll. I remember him writing (for MacWorld) about how the Mac should have an Alt key instead of an Option key. Christ.
Examples:
Rotten roots. You'd hope that the open-source movement would have made a wild leap that would get it off the treadmill of featurism and onto something entirely new. After all, we are told that millions of coders on the Web can match and beat Microsoft and its mere 20,000 to 30,000 drones.
Okay, managed to insult both MS ("drones", "rotten roots") and Linux coders "treadmill of featurism".
After all, Linux was designed for the x86.
Fair enough, but then he concludes:
This is the simple but overlooked fact of the Linux revolution: Its roots are in Wintel.
Huh? Dvorak's loved the term "Wintel" for ever and ever (probably coined it and trying to ensure that everyone uses it), but it's totally inappropriate here. He's trying to use the fact that both Linux and Windows have as their primary target the most common personal computing platform to show that Linux is derivative of Windows?
Linux has become a pale imitation of the evil OS it intends to replace
Oooh, good. Managed to piss off Windows and Linux users.
It's no coincidence that Apple, which dominates the creative-artist scene, manages to be creative.
Ummm...*what*? Apple's most famous and impressive creative moments were in the 80s and 70s, when it was designing computers originally intended for *managers*, not *artists*.
If the open-source folks just want to copy what's already out there, why not look around more? Surely they can find something more interesting than a copy of a copy of a copy.
Dvorak's such an idiot. He uses, say, GNOME because it comes with his prebuilt, idiot-proof consumer Linux box. It's crafted by RH to be accessable to Windows users. Then he complains that Linux isn't *different* enough. Wake up, Dvorak! There are Linux boxes with voice input, with 3d file managers, with only a console, hell, inside your PDA! You can use *any* of these interfaces!
How do you know they were not interfering anybody, if that is the case how did the FCC ever found out about it??? Appearantly they were not completly 'out in the boonies' were they?
Well, they *did* run a Slashdot story describing behavior that was breaking FCC regs.
...due to the fact that most people work inside in office environments, humans are sure to soon lose their ability to percieve depth at a distance. Also at risk is the human ability to tolerate absolute silence or darkness (both mostly eliminated in our modern workplace and dwellings). The ability of humans to withstand pain is vanishing, and allergies are being introduced, due to cleaner environments in our youth. Oh, and electronic calculators are eliminating the human ability to do mathematics.
In conclusion, the world is going to end in five...four...three...two...one...damn. Well, maybe tomorrow...