When i saw how Groovy does blocks, i immediately thought of Ruby. basically you have a block of code like this:
array = [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] array.each do |i| puts i end
which outputs 1 2 3 and 4 on a line. the cool thing about this style of coding is it makes it's very easy to extend functionality like this to hashes such as:
notice how that code was able to do that much, without having to use "special" syntax like perl and php (foreach blocks, etc).
i definitely will have to give this language a shot.
They STILL haven't fixed the Mail.app bug that i probably submitted in October last year. If you use a mail server with imap-ssl that doesn't have a verified certificate, you get a pop up complaining whenever you open mail. If you click show certificate, there's a certificate icon you can supposedly drag to the desktop and then use in keychain according to apple's support webpages. Well, dragging that image still crashes Mail.app (and hard).
I always figured "complete crash" bugs were high priority. sigh.
or, you might want to check out an even more superior combo: mod_ruby and eruby which does the same thing as mod_python but it isn't as crappy of a langauge as python.
I think the best solution is a mix of both. A proprietary governing body to make decisions about the API, toolkit, etc such that there aren't UI forks everywhere creating an inconsistent system, and an open kernel and subsystem to make additions easy and powerful. You don't have to look much further than this if you are looking for stability (UNIX), usability (Mac), and power (BSD).
developer #1: i have an idea
developer #2: what?
developer #1: you know how no one had ever really heard of GTA 1 and 2, but 3 was a great success right?
developer #2: of course
developer #1: well, lets take the already written game engine and capitalize off it's success by making the same game over and over with different cities!
developer #2: brilliant!
developer #1: brilliant!
hi. welcome to the year 2004, where you can find such wonderful advancements as mozilla or perhaps firefox that have been around for some time. these wonderful free open source programs work on every major platform and contain built in pop up blocking and a google search bar. in fact with a few minutes of searching, you can even add a userContent.css file to your profile to block the vast majority of webpage advertisement images as well. thanks, and stop using IE.
when i ordered my 12" powerbook from apple i got a BTO. it came with a spanish keyboard and spanish software. it was known around my dorm as "el laptop"
i had 0 problems getting a full refund. (eventually bought it for even less through a friends and family discount).
i was under the impression that artists (if you can call eminem that) didn't really have control over how their music was used, but the label did since they are the ones who own the music due to we-own-your-first-born licenses. course, typical IANAL applies.
the 17" pb gets about 4 hours of battery life and is 1" thick. it's also 7 pounds. it also has a backlit keyboard. please inform me if there's a PC laptop with similar specs, because i'm unaware of one.
you'll notice nowhere above there do i say 8-9 pounds, 1 hour battery life, and > 1" thick.
do laptops really NEED to be faster? thinner? lighter? better looking? for one half the cost of a laptop you can typically get a machine twice as powerful. what's the point in laptops if a deskotp is so much cheaper.
</sarcasm>
laptops are meant to be portable. your average 8-9 pound 1 hour battery life monster isn't portable. it's a portable desktop. apple doesn't make portable desktops, it makes laptops. there's a difference between the two. they could have easily put a 1.6-2ghz g5 in a 2" thick laptop months ago, but apple doesn't make ugly pieces of crap so they take their time.
and apple also claims they make no money off iTMS, but use it as a way to sell iPods which they do cash in on.
companies like napster have quite an uphill battle.
macs haven't had floppy drives since 1998 (first iMac) and you consider this a bad thing? wow. i could only wish the PC industry would keep up. i bet we'll still have floppy drives in PCs as long as motherboards require floppies to flash the bios (in other words a very long time). though this couldn't POSSIBLY be considered a flaw in x86's design. of course not.. even though it is.
in a world with 256mb usb pendrives, i really fail to see the usefulness in a slower, larger, more power sucking drive with more than a 100 times less storage.
it should also be noted that firewire was out for some years before usb2 arrived. that's a longgg time in the computer world, and usb2 still doesn't transfer as much power as firewire nor have as high of a consistent data transfer rate. yes usb2 is 480mb/s and firewire is 400, but usb2's 480 claim is in bursts not sustained transfer rate so firewire is still as fast. the coolest thing about usb2 though is it's backwards compatability (usb2 devices can be plugged into usb 1.1 ports).
and yes, firewire 800 devices are common but only in devices capable of that much bandwidth, which is really only portable harddrives. and last i checked, 800mbps is a tad higher than 480mb/s.
because c syntax is generally very strict. whereas perl is lax, and heavily context sensitive with lots of "magic" stuff like <> and $_ which have absolutely no meaning to a person who doesn't know perl.
and generally i agree. if you can't look at a line and no what it does without understanding the datatype, or what the interpreter will do then it's not a straightforward language. i.e., ugly.
that doesn't change the fact that things should be rendered with the GPU and not the CPU through software. despite what you hardcore ratpoison users think, some people appreciate an aesthetically pleasing environment. you seem to think it's not possible to have both eye candy and productivity, but you're wrong.
i also think you're complaining because you're a have-not. XFree86 doesn't have those nice eye candy features, so by god i don't need them! and i'm sure when keith packard's xserver becomes the defacto and you do have all these pretty effects you won't be able to stop showing your windows friends all the things linux can do that windows can't. i love hypocrites, especially anonymous ones.
Really? Specifically what problems do you have with XFree86, or are you just talking about the most common themes in XFree86 desktop environments?
i just mentioned all the problems, but read the next few comments to get a better idea.
You know, one of the things that people like about Linux is that it doesn't have crazy hardware requirements. Unlike OS X, or, to a lesser extent, Windows.
as i said before, this is the way the industry is moving (that means microsft too, and mac has already implemented all these things i'm complaining about). the people who want lesser hardware requirements can keep on using Xfree86. there's NOTHING wrong with that. transparency is not just for eye candy. when used properly, it does have usability impacts that benefit the user. iChat is a perfect example in os x, where aim popup windows are initially transparent and out of the way. You are probably aware of how windows AIM handles this. it's obnoxious, gets in your way, and overlaps whatever you working on. what if that window appeared transparently on top of your current window allowing you to first finish your task then answer the message? this is just one of many examples i could give where true transparency is not only "eye candy" but genuinely useful.
XFree86 can do vector graphics via OpenGL.
so you're telling me XFree86 can do this? sorry, nope.
XFree86 has extensive support for both 2d and 3d acceleration.
so that means X11 can do this type of 3d animation without resorting to taking screenshots of each desktop and rendering them in a fullscreen opengl window temporarily? (which is what 3ddesktop does, and it's a slow cheap hack in comparison). again, this cannot be done in Xfree86.
I'm sorry, but whether you like or not advancement will occur. The simple truth is XFree86 is not capable of the features one should expect from a modern display system. Take one look at Mac OS X's Quartz Extreme in a CompUSA to get a good example as to why XFree86 (NOT X11, that isn't the problem) needs to shape up it's act.
It's one thing to want to keep compatability with older systems, it's another to outright deny the forward progress of utilizing modern hardware for the greater benefit. X11 is a protocol, and as such it will remain implementation neutral. Let the ludites running 486's keep their XFree86, and let us get on with our lives using a modern X11 implementation with real features like true transparency, vector scaling, and GPU acceleration.
whoops, replying to own msg. that should read:
My conclusion was that as long as linux has 5 competing packaging formats it's going to be a moving target for comapnies to release packages.
Me and my friend had a long discussion about this last night. My conclusion was that as long as linux has 5 competing packaging formats. FreeBSD is a perfect example of a community united.
however i'm under the firm belief that linux will always be a fragmented mess, and the only reason BSD is so united is because of it's commercial liscensing.
a man can dream though. i'd like to stop having to worry about redhat-rpms, mandrake-rpms, debs, ebuilds, and tar.gzs and boy am i sick of compiling from source.
VB is a horrible language to teach someone who might be interested in being an actual computer scientist.
I'm not into languages that lock you into one platform, so that rules VB out.
I'm not into languages that have bad syntax and require expensive compilers and IDEs to teach, since that doesn't work well for the less fortuned.
And lastly the first timer's language needs to be useful for large scale projects.
I would say scripting languages are a good start, such as ruby or python. (Not perl!) They are cross platform and free, with 0 compliation time/effort (so no dealing with make files for anything more than 1 source file) and plenty of libraries written for windows/linux/mac..
the other nice thing about most scripting languages is they don't require special syntax everywhere. for example in ruby you can teach someone the basics of output before you get to control structures, then functions, then objects. all without requiring "magic" code like int main( int argc, char** argv ). the last thing a newbie needs to see are things they don't understand mixed in with a slew of other things they barely get yet. it just adds to the confusion.
every time i see this argument i cringe. it's simply not true.
gee you send me an attachment in mac os x. pardon me while i open a terminal, chmod it to +x, and then run it with./command. that's assuming you sent a plain binary. consider the same with a mac Folder.app. just to test this, i took an application and sent it to myself as an attachment. apple's mail.app automatically zips the.app (since you can't send folders). so the average user would have to unzip and then run it. clicking the attachment say: Warning, this attachment is an application. since applications can contain viruses or be harmful to your computer, be sure this attachment is from a trustworhty sender before saving or opening it. that sounds a hell of a lot more cautionary than outlook express and outlook.
i don't know if you're getting the trend here, but it's a LOT harder to quickly run an application sent as an attachment in os x. enough to the point that most users won't impulse run something.
even after all this, the most viruses on os x can do is wipe files you own. granted this could mean all your personal files, this does not mean your system folder or other user's home folders which are safe.
that doesn't mean much to the average user, who is going to be buying the consumer level chip (like an amd64). opterons and their motherboards currently still fetch a premium and aren't in the average consumer's price range. though at least opterons are more consumer-oriented than xeons in price.
Slashdot Mirror
which outputs 1 2 3 and 4 on a line. the cool thing about this style of coding is it makes it's very easy to extend functionality like this to hashes such as:
notice how that code was able to do that much, without having to use "special" syntax like perl and php (foreach blocks, etc).
i definitely will have to give this language a shot.
i just did this.. i'm not having any luck either.
They STILL haven't fixed the Mail.app bug that i probably submitted in October last year. If you use a mail server with imap-ssl that doesn't have a verified certificate, you get a pop up complaining whenever you open mail. If you click show certificate, there's a certificate icon you can supposedly drag to the desktop and then use in keychain according to apple's support webpages. Well, dragging that image still crashes Mail.app (and hard).
I always figured "complete crash" bugs were high priority. sigh.
or, you might want to check out an even more superior combo: mod_ruby and eruby which does the same thing as mod_python but it isn't as crappy of a langauge as python.
I think the best solution is a mix of both. A proprietary governing body to make decisions about the API, toolkit, etc such that there aren't UI forks everywhere creating an inconsistent system, and an open kernel and subsystem to make additions easy and powerful. You don't have to look much further than this if you are looking for stability (UNIX), usability (Mac), and power (BSD).
developer #1: i have an idea
developer #2: what?
developer #1: you know how no one had ever really heard of GTA 1 and 2, but 3 was a great success right?
developer #2: of course
developer #1: well, lets take the already written game engine and capitalize off it's success by making the same game over and over with different cities!
developer #2: brilliant!
developer #1: brilliant!
hi. welcome to the year 2004, where you can find such wonderful advancements as mozilla or perhaps firefox that have been around for some time. these wonderful free open source programs work on every major platform and contain built in pop up blocking and a google search bar. in fact with a few minutes of searching, you can even add a userContent.css file to your profile to block the vast majority of webpage advertisement images as well. thanks, and stop using IE.
when i ordered my 12" powerbook from apple i got a BTO. it came with a spanish keyboard and spanish software. it was known around my dorm as "el laptop"
i had 0 problems getting a full refund. (eventually bought it for even less through a friends and family discount).
i was under the impression that artists (if you can call eminem that) didn't really have control over how their music was used, but the label did since they are the ones who own the music due to we-own-your-first-born licenses. course, typical IANAL applies.
the 17" pb gets about 4 hours of battery life and is 1" thick. it's also 7 pounds. it also has a backlit keyboard. please inform me if there's a PC laptop with similar specs, because i'm unaware of one.
you'll notice nowhere above there do i say 8-9 pounds, 1 hour battery life, and > 1" thick.
do laptops really NEED to be faster? thinner? lighter? better looking? for one half the cost of a laptop you can typically get a machine twice as powerful. what's the point in laptops if a deskotp is so much cheaper.
</sarcasm>
laptops are meant to be portable. your average 8-9 pound 1 hour battery life monster isn't portable. it's a portable desktop. apple doesn't make portable desktops, it makes laptops. there's a difference between the two. they could have easily put a 1.6-2ghz g5 in a 2" thick laptop months ago, but apple doesn't make ugly pieces of crap so they take their time.
and will your athlon64 laptop be 1" thick or less? probably not.
and apple also claims they make no money off iTMS, but use it as a way to sell iPods which they do cash in on.
companies like napster have quite an uphill battle.
macs haven't had floppy drives since 1998 (first iMac) and you consider this a bad thing? wow. i could only wish the PC industry would keep up. i bet we'll still have floppy drives in PCs as long as motherboards require floppies to flash the bios (in other words a very long time). though this couldn't POSSIBLY be considered a flaw in x86's design. of course not.. even though it is.
in a world with 256mb usb pendrives, i really fail to see the usefulness in a slower, larger, more power sucking drive with more than a 100 times less storage.
it should also be noted that firewire was out for some years before usb2 arrived. that's a longgg time in the computer world, and usb2 still doesn't transfer as much power as firewire nor have as high of a consistent data transfer rate. yes usb2 is 480mb/s and firewire is 400, but usb2's 480 claim is in bursts not sustained transfer rate so firewire is still as fast. the coolest thing about usb2 though is it's backwards compatability (usb2 devices can be plugged into usb 1.1 ports).
and yes, firewire 800 devices are common but only in devices capable of that much bandwidth, which is really only portable harddrives. and last i checked, 800mbps is a tad higher than 480mb/s.
because c syntax is generally very strict. whereas perl is lax, and heavily context sensitive with lots of "magic" stuff like <> and $_ which have absolutely no meaning to a person who doesn't know perl.
and generally i agree. if you can't look at a line and no what it does without understanding the datatype, or what the interpreter will do then it's not a straightforward language. i.e., ugly.
that doesn't change the fact that things should be rendered with the GPU and not the CPU through software. despite what you hardcore ratpoison users think, some people appreciate an aesthetically pleasing environment. you seem to think it's not possible to have both eye candy and productivity, but you're wrong.
i also think you're complaining because you're a have-not. XFree86 doesn't have those nice eye candy features, so by god i don't need them! and i'm sure when keith packard's xserver becomes the defacto and you do have all these pretty effects you won't be able to stop showing your windows friends all the things linux can do that windows can't. i love hypocrites, especially anonymous ones.
Really? Specifically what problems do you have with XFree86, or are you just talking about the most common themes in XFree86 desktop environments?
i just mentioned all the problems, but read the next few comments to get a better idea.
You know, one of the things that people like about Linux is that it doesn't have crazy hardware requirements. Unlike OS X, or, to a lesser extent, Windows.
as i said before, this is the way the industry is moving (that means microsft too, and mac has already implemented all these things i'm complaining about). the people who want lesser hardware requirements can keep on using Xfree86. there's NOTHING wrong with that. transparency is not just for eye candy. when used properly, it does have usability impacts that benefit the user. iChat is a perfect example in os x, where aim popup windows are initially transparent and out of the way. You are probably aware of how windows AIM handles this. it's obnoxious, gets in your way, and overlaps whatever you working on. what if that window appeared transparently on top of your current window allowing you to first finish your task then answer the message? this is just one of many examples i could give where true transparency is not only "eye candy" but genuinely useful.
XFree86 can do vector graphics via OpenGL.
so you're telling me XFree86 can do this? sorry, nope.
XFree86 has extensive support for both 2d and 3d acceleration.
so that means X11 can do this type of 3d animation without resorting to taking screenshots of each desktop and rendering them in a fullscreen opengl window temporarily? (which is what 3ddesktop does, and it's a slow cheap hack in comparison). again, this cannot be done in Xfree86.
I'm sorry, but whether you like or not advancement will occur. The simple truth is XFree86 is not capable of the features one should expect from a modern display system. Take one look at Mac OS X's Quartz Extreme in a CompUSA to get a good example as to why XFree86 (NOT X11, that isn't the problem) needs to shape up it's act.
It's one thing to want to keep compatability with older systems, it's another to outright deny the forward progress of utilizing modern hardware for the greater benefit. X11 is a protocol, and as such it will remain implementation neutral. Let the ludites running 486's keep their XFree86, and let us get on with our lives using a modern X11 implementation with real features like true transparency, vector scaling, and GPU acceleration.
i'm sorry, but that's just bs. i've written several darwinports, and the maintainers are very strict about adhereing to directory polices.
whoops, replying to own msg. that should read:
My conclusion was that as long as linux has 5 competing packaging formats it's going to be a moving target for comapnies to release packages.
Me and my friend had a long discussion about this last night. My conclusion was that as long as linux has 5 competing packaging formats. FreeBSD is a perfect example of a community united.
however i'm under the firm belief that linux will always be a fragmented mess, and the only reason BSD is so united is because of it's commercial liscensing.
a man can dream though. i'd like to stop having to worry about redhat-rpms, mandrake-rpms, debs, ebuilds, and tar.gzs and boy am i sick of compiling from source.
VB is a horrible language to teach someone who might be interested in being an actual computer scientist.
I'm not into languages that lock you into one platform, so that rules VB out.
I'm not into languages that have bad syntax and require expensive compilers and IDEs to teach, since that doesn't work well for the less fortuned.
And lastly the first timer's language needs to be useful for large scale projects.
I would say scripting languages are a good start, such as ruby or python. (Not perl!) They are cross platform and free, with 0 compliation time/effort (so no dealing with make files for anything more than 1 source file) and plenty of libraries written for windows/linux/mac..
the other nice thing about most scripting languages is they don't require special syntax everywhere. for example in ruby you can teach someone the basics of output before you get to control structures, then functions, then objects. all without requiring "magic" code like int main( int argc, char** argv ). the last thing a newbie needs to see are things they don't understand mixed in with a slew of other things they barely get yet. it just adds to the confusion.
every time i see this argument i cringe. it's simply not true. gee you send me an attachment in mac os x. pardon me while i open a terminal, chmod it to +x, and then run it with ./command. that's assuming you sent a plain binary. consider the same with a mac Folder.app. just to test this, i took an application and sent it to myself as an attachment. apple's mail.app automatically zips the .app (since you can't send folders). so the average user would have to unzip and then run it. clicking the attachment say: Warning, this attachment is an application. since applications can contain viruses or be harmful to your computer, be sure this attachment is from a trustworhty sender before saving or opening it. that sounds a hell of a lot more cautionary than outlook express and outlook.
i don't know if you're getting the trend here, but it's a LOT harder to quickly run an application sent as an attachment in os x. enough to the point that most users won't impulse run something.
even after all this, the most viruses on os x can do is wipe files you own. granted this could mean all your personal files, this does not mean your system folder or other user's home folders which are safe.
that doesn't mean much to the average user, who is going to be buying the consumer level chip (like an amd64). opterons and their motherboards currently still fetch a premium and aren't in the average consumer's price range. though at least opterons are more consumer-oriented than xeons in price.