do you not believe that humans everywhere should have certain fundamental rights? Such as the freedom of speech, the freedom to assemble peacefully, or the freedom to elect their own leaders?
No.
The concept that any right is "fundamental"
derives from belief. For example, when you
believe a God, and that God says humans have
the right to life, then you believe that a
human has a "fundamental" right to life.
(Feel free to substitute "God" for another
source of fundamentalism, such as conscience.
It doesn't matter.) When the source of the
belief is different, then what is considered
a fundamental right can also differ.
In fact, a resident alien (green card holder)
in the US is granted the right to live and
work, but not vote, even at the local level.
The election of leaders that affect such
alien's day-to-day life is apparently not
fundamental. In fact, it constitutes
taxation without representation.
Another example is the right to exploit our
environment. The Christian Bible vaguely
says something about lording over all of
creation, but another culture may say
something entirely different (such as taking
only what you really need). Such a
culture might, for example, ban drilling
for oil in nature preserves.
How about right to life? Pulling the plug
on a comatose patient deprives him of the
right to life, because he dies. This sort
of thing is governed by different laws in
different lands, probably even with the US.
Some nations think that the death penalty
infringes on even the criminal's right to
life. Abortion is another obvious issue
where minds differ greatly.
Now, there are obviously many things that
virtually all human cultures share as
fundamental rights. However, there is no
common authority from which those rights
derive, which is why they're not really
fundamental, and why anybody should be very
careful telling other people what their
fundamental rights should be.
Maybe, but a very big difference is in how
the culture occurs. You voluntarily
extend GPL software, and in return, you are
bound by the license. Many other instances
of communism involve coercing the members
who would rather not join.
Oversimplified, this is why a small commune
of like-minded individuals might work (possibly
even very well), but no nation managed to
exercise true communism.
Yes, but engineers do. This is why security
people usually notify vendors in advance of
the publication of a new security hole, to
give them a chance to fix things.
There are also technologies that have no
other purpose. You can argue
that a nuclear warhead can someday deflect
a meteor bound for earth, but the fact is
that the Manhattan Project was launched for
another specific purpose.
Advocates like to say "guns don't kill
people", and they are right to that extent.
However, body armor piercing bullets have
no other objective, because bears don't
wear body armor.
I'm not objecting to your point that many
technologies are neutral. I'm also not
commenting on the specific ethics of the
examples I cite, rather just pointing out
that they are not ethics neutral.
I'm not sure what he meant by "cannot fit a 100 ft dish", but the example you cite as rebuttal is less than 40 feet (12.25m * 39inches = 39.8125 feet), so what you said makes no sense either...
And the satellite I cited is in GEO, not around
another planet. I'm well aware of the
difference. I'm just pointing out that a 40 ft
dish can in fact be launched, because it is
deployed only in space.
Therefore, if we can do this now, it doesn't
make much sense to say we can't do it ever.
Which is why I asked what he/she meant.
The world he was born in to was one someone born 500 years before would have recongnized. The world you were born into is one that that hypothetical person couldn't possibly even have conceived of.
Let me assure you that I have no intention of
getting into a pissing match on whose world
will change more. I was just saying
that I think our future can be as
exciting, especially if we put our minds to
it. For example, we can now afford financially
to explore for exploring's sake.
Can you imagine the impact to society if SETI
turned up anything?
You are talking differences in quantity. I am talking differences in quality.
There is no difference. Before the invention
of the printing press, books were copied by
hand, and therefore scarce. The only thing
that the printing press did was to make more
and cheaper books. However, the qualitative
effect was mass education.
The quantity at which resources are available
inevitably lead to qualitative changes.
More and cheaper flight means more people get
to see foreign lands, and perhaps learn
something they didn't know.
There is no essential difference in type or quality of life today than there was 40 years ago when I first entered school.
Then praise your deity that you were born into
the First World. Your experiences are, on a
global scale, somewhat unique. Some people
don't have flushing toilets yet, today.
And I'm *damned* glad the internet hasn't come up with one single reason for me not to go to London. That would suck.
Indeed. What I said was that you mostly don't
have to go, perhaps just to attend a
short meeting or deliver a document.
You CANNOT fit a 100 foot dish to a satellite and orbit it around Mars or Jupiter, etc, to pick up signals from further out and relay them to earth. Its simply not possible.
Are you saying we can't do it now or we can't
do it ever? The Thuraya satellite, which
serves mobile phones from geosynchronous earth
orbit, has a 12.25 meter dish antenna.
Your world has hardly moved at all compared
to his.
When he was born, traveling from London to
New York might take a month or two. Today
we do it in a few hours.
My first computer had a 6502 CPU, running at
1 MHz or so. I'm typing this on an 800 MHz
CPU, which is probably at least 1600x more
powerful. It had 64 KB of memory. I now have
256 MB, over 4000x more. I can easily afford
quadruple the computing power and memory if I
really need it. More importantly, we've
eliminated many reasons for having to travel
from London to New York.
It hasn't even been twenty years.
I think we live in interesting times, but it's
up to us to move our world.
There's a difference between reporting something that's politically sensitive and
being irresponsible.
That line is imaginary, and keeps moving.
A good recent example is the publication of
the Unabomber Manifesto, which led directly
to his capture because his brother recognized
the writing. If not for that, however, all
you've done is submit to blackmail and
encourage any loonie to randomly bomb people
if they want a political statement published.
many reporters aren't after the truth these days; they're after the big stories and the prestige they bring.
Sure, but do you want the government to decide
who is after the truth and who is after the
glory? After all, the readers and viewers
already have a powerful tool to control media
excesses.
The reason the US didn't rank well was due to their hesitacny to allow unprepared reporters into combat zones.
The Pentagon also managed the Gulf War press
in a very heavy handed way, controlling what
gets published. Things like Gulf War Syndrome,
actual performance of "smart" munitions, and
general Iraqi civilian suffering were mostly
underreported, or reported only much later.
I'm not saying the US Government explicitly
did anything. The relationship between media
and government is an intricate beast, and
influence or pressure is often not so simply
detected. For example, a reporter who gets
too "annoying" can lose access to key sources,
which in turn harms her career, whether or
not she was serving the public good.
All of these are measures of press freedom.
As it is, virtually all US media are owned
by a handful of interests. Do you really
think that doesn't harm your right to know?
The report was heavily biased BTW, for Political Reasons.
Do you have anything that constitutes proof,
or do you just deeply believe that the US
must've ranked higher?
Microsoft [...] give[s] people the option to only purchase Word.
Hardly. Office v.X for the Mac is $446.99.
Word X is $379.99. Excel X is $349.99.
Powerpoint is $389.99. Entourage X is $94.99.
[Amazon.com]
Individually purchased, the four cost over
2.7x more than the Office bundle, and buying
any two individually will already reach or
exceed the cost of Office.
Software pricing, more than any other industry,
reflects intent. Since engineering costs
(and profit, of course) dominate the price of
packaged software, it's clear to me that
Microsoft isn't interested in selling just
Word at all. Assuming a generous per-unit
cost (including Office) of $50, Microsoft
wants to make $320 if I buy just Word and
$400 for the whole Office suite.
If there was a real option here, I should
at least be able to get two of the four for
significantly less than the bundle.
Linux "ui cloners" should copi Apple design interfaces.
The problem is that is infinitely easier to get access to a Windows machine than an Apple one.
Apple publishes its Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. In fact,
since Apple violates some of its own
guidelines, the guidelines themselves might
be an even better source than actual Apple
apps.
Re:ok, so he removes it from his lexicon so what?
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
is Google going to stop everyone else from using the seemingly more popular "go google for it"?
No, but they have to at least be seen as trying
to protect against the dilution of their trademark.
Wouldn't Google want this sort of publicity? Become a common-place-word?
If "Google" becomes the common word that means
"to search on a search engine", then everybody
can and will set up "google engines". That
can confuse people, and allow competitors to
ride on the marketing and popularity of
Google. I remember an advertisement from
Xerox that pleaded for people to use "photocopy"
instead of "xerox", for the same reason.
Worse, when it stops being a trademark, the
company loses control over the meaning of the
word. Over time, "microsoft" can become
"mean and ugly", and the original trademark
holder will have to suffer the connotation
or change names.
Reasons for using RISC designs varies. In Acorn's case, [...] control. In the PowerPC's case, a scalable architecture that could reasonable replace the 680xx range and compete with Intel [...]. There's the CLIPPER, a CPU whose primary attribute is reliability [...]
As you can see, then, none of them emphasize
ease of programming at the assembly level,
contrary to what you earlier suggested.
The underlying design assumption was that
most users will be programming in HLLs.
Pipelining is just one the most obvious
examples of such a feature that exhibits
this assumption.
So please, the point is not that RISC
and pipelining are tied together. The point
is, as shown by many pipelined RISC
designs, that the designers care more for
other attributes than ease of programming in
assembly.
I know that. However, RISC designs in
general are easier to pipeline, and it was
one obvious thing you could do to achieve
similar or better performance at the same
CPU clock over CISC.
In particular, I bring up pipelining to
refute your earlier statement:
[...] easily be done via a sequence of simpler instructions that may well, for a programmer who's actually programming at that level, be easier to understand.
My point is that RISC is generally not easier
to program at assembly level, because so many
of them are pipelined. The designers were
instead counting on good compilers hiding
that from most programmers.
Actually, the proponents of RISC were not terribly concerned about the assembly language
programmer. In fact, one of the early
advantages of RISC was pipelining, which is
actually quite a bit harder to program for,
compared to non-pipelined CISC.
What they counted on was that fewer and fewer
people would be writing in assembly, and the
complications can be hidden behind a good
compiler. What they also failed to foresee
was that a RISC/CISC hybrid like the later
x86 chips got nearly the best of both worlds.
Some people says students should be t[a]ught to use the software being used in the "real life". Why?
This problem affects all levels of schooling
everywhere. All schools must choose a path
somewhere between teaching pure learning
skills (all abstract) and pure vocational
skills (all concrete). The downside of the
former approach is that their graduates will
usually fall behind initially, and sometimes
never catch up, in the real world. The
downside of the latter is that their graduates
may not be able to keep up with the newest
thing, and becomes obsolete.
The problem cannot be summarized with a
simple rhetorical "how can that be bad?"
Specifically, "I know OpenOffice, and more
importantly I know how to learn new things"
doesn't get you the job that requires
"Microsoft Word experience".
CVS is in most cases just unnecessary and complicates and slows stuff down if you are the single developer. You can make backups through normal file copying.
By "backup", I presume you mean the kind to
recover the code you wish you didn't
overwrite while drunk last night, not the
kind due to a disk crash.
It's a lot easier to get lazy about backups.
With proper source control software, your
source files aren't writable unless you check
them out, so you're forced to remember.
Secondly, and I admit it's probably rare
among free software authors, source control
makes it a lot easier to support bug fixes
to older versions of released software.
Anyone who wants to improve the preformance of code needs a profiler to find those places, but profilers slow down your code themselves, so you need a faster machine to get the same speed.
No, that is almost completely mistaken.
A Pentium 4 is not simply a faster version of the
80386! The fast CPU may have extra execution
units, different pipelining, more (visible or
hidden) registers, more cache, better memory or
I/O bandwidth, etc. Any of these improvements
can completely change the location of the
bottleneck, or even show no obvious bottleneck
at all.
Just to take an example, a common cause of
slowness is that a tight loop doesn't fit in
the cache. The correct fix is to make
that code small enough to fit. If profiled
on a machine with a bigger L1 cache, you
may not even notice the problem, and will
waste your time fixing something else.
In theory you can find the slow spots on a slow machine, but you are wasting a lot of
time
Which is why you can either analytically
predict some suspects, or use a fast machine
to help predict the suspects, and then
profile only those suspects and not the
entire executable. In any case, it can't
be stressed enough that architectural
differences on the fast machine cannot be
overlooked.
Your point about the absolute necessity of
a profiler is well placed, however.
If you want to waste time educating the general public in a difference in units be my guest. It's a thankless task.
I agree completely, but I was not educating
the general public. I was posting on
Slashdot - News for Nerds. Still
using Microsoft units here is just lazy.
It's also not just Microsoft. Intel is
largely responsible for the MHz is everything
(even though Apple's objections are not
entirely true either), and hard disk
manufacturers are responsible for redefining
the megabyte.
You have something of a point, but is it worth the effort to actually go through the thousands of Windows programs and determine uniqueness?
You don't actually have to. In a hypothetical
argument against a Windows advocate, you just
claim that there are many useful apps available
on Linux or MacOS or whatever, and when the
other person claims that Windows has thousands
of apps, call the bluff. Make him
count them.
Joe twelvepack's $600 dell will run any consumer application faster than it needs to.
Excuse me? Intel is saying that our cheap
desktops are already fast enough, so they're
putting off 64-bit CPUs?
Why should I even buy a new 32-bit CPU from
Intel, then?
(You are of course right. I'm just wondering
aloud why Intel is admitting it, and how they
plan to dig themselves out once they convince
the public of it.)
Support is important, but it's already available (it you want non-RTFM support, you have to either accept abuse from the usenet folks
It's been a while, but I remember Usenet to
generally tell people to RTFM, sometimes
without even telling people where the FM is.
Seriously, even free software should try to
achieve the ideal that it just works for
a great majority of its users. Just Works.
This means no problems during installation,
and only occasional needs to read a context-
sensitive, up-to-date, and relevant on-line
help screen. One page.
There will always be a minority whose needs
are so unanticipated they'll need some help.
Let them go to Usenet or pay for support.
or pay for it, just like with any other software).
"Ah, so what you're saying is that the software
is not really free? So why should I risk my
career to use your software, when I can just
pay Microsoft? In fact, am I not in effect
subsidizing all the other copies of software
you give away for free?" - PHB
OS X is no more a single OS than Linux is a single OS. Linux interoperates just fine with other Linux machines. Don't confuse the operating system with the applications.
Don't underestimate this problem. It's
difficult today to make binary distributions
of Linux software, and like it or not binary
distributions are essential to acceptance
and market share on the desktop.
When I look around (meaning, at smaller
projects, rather than Mozilla or OpenOffice),
my general impression is that binaries are
available for the distro used by the developer,
while other binaries are only sometimes
available from third party volunteers. Are
they as well tested (against possibly a
slightly different shared library)? Does
the packager even know what he's doing?
If you use "hacks" like unrpm to run RPMs on
a Debian system, for example, how sure can
you be about things working?
[navigating web browser windows] just an area where the windows taskbar shines over the dock
And in other cases, it doesn't. The Windows taskbar gets cluttered a lot more quickly than the Dock, because every window gets a "tab". I don't need a "tab" for the window I'm typing email in, because I don't type too many of them at the same time, so clicking the mail application icon is sufficient to switch back.
This is why tabbed browsing, implemented in the
browser, is better. It's available where it's
needed, but doesn't clutter up other applications that don't need it. Perhaps Apple will update Cocoa so that Document-based applications can
get tabbed navigation for free.
Do you think that Microsoft partisans don't count Quicken and MS Money and the other 8 or 10 Windows accounting packages merely because they are not unique?
First of all, I think we're not using the
same definition for "unique", and I apologize
for being vague.
By "unique", I mean to discount yet-another-Tetris-clone. I do not mean to discount
substantial feature differences between
large apps. For example, Vi and Emacs
certainly should count as two apps, even
though their main function - edit text
files - overlap entirely.
That's a double standard vis a vis the Windows world.
So call the bluff when a Windows advocate
uses the argument. Are you suggesting we
descend to their level instead?
Slashdot Mirror
No.
The concept that any right is "fundamental" derives from belief. For example, when you believe a God, and that God says humans have the right to life, then you believe that a human has a "fundamental" right to life. (Feel free to substitute "God" for another source of fundamentalism, such as conscience. It doesn't matter.) When the source of the belief is different, then what is considered a fundamental right can also differ.
In fact, a resident alien (green card holder) in the US is granted the right to live and work, but not vote, even at the local level. The election of leaders that affect such alien's day-to-day life is apparently not fundamental. In fact, it constitutes taxation without representation.
Another example is the right to exploit our environment. The Christian Bible vaguely says something about lording over all of creation, but another culture may say something entirely different (such as taking only what you really need). Such a culture might, for example, ban drilling for oil in nature preserves.
How about right to life? Pulling the plug on a comatose patient deprives him of the right to life, because he dies. This sort of thing is governed by different laws in different lands, probably even with the US. Some nations think that the death penalty infringes on even the criminal's right to life. Abortion is another obvious issue where minds differ greatly.
Now, there are obviously many things that virtually all human cultures share as fundamental rights. However, there is no common authority from which those rights derive, which is why they're not really fundamental, and why anybody should be very careful telling other people what their fundamental rights should be.
Maybe, but a very big difference is in how the culture occurs. You voluntarily extend GPL software, and in return, you are bound by the license. Many other instances of communism involve coercing the members who would rather not join.
Oversimplified, this is why a small commune of like-minded individuals might work (possibly even very well), but no nation managed to exercise true communism.
Yes, but engineers do. This is why security people usually notify vendors in advance of the publication of a new security hole, to give them a chance to fix things.
There are also technologies that have no other purpose. You can argue that a nuclear warhead can someday deflect a meteor bound for earth, but the fact is that the Manhattan Project was launched for another specific purpose.
Advocates like to say "guns don't kill people", and they are right to that extent. However, body armor piercing bullets have no other objective, because bears don't wear body armor.
I'm not objecting to your point that many technologies are neutral. I'm also not commenting on the specific ethics of the examples I cite, rather just pointing out that they are not ethics neutral.
And the satellite I cited is in GEO, not around another planet. I'm well aware of the difference. I'm just pointing out that a 40 ft dish can in fact be launched, because it is deployed only in space.
Therefore, if we can do this now, it doesn't make much sense to say we can't do it ever. Which is why I asked what he/she meant.
Let me assure you that I have no intention of getting into a pissing match on whose world will change more. I was just saying that I think our future can be as exciting, especially if we put our minds to it. For example, we can now afford financially to explore for exploring's sake.
Can you imagine the impact to society if SETI turned up anything?
You are talking differences in quantity. I am talking differences in quality.
There is no difference. Before the invention of the printing press, books were copied by hand, and therefore scarce. The only thing that the printing press did was to make more and cheaper books. However, the qualitative effect was mass education.
The quantity at which resources are available inevitably lead to qualitative changes. More and cheaper flight means more people get to see foreign lands, and perhaps learn something they didn't know.
There is no essential difference in type or quality of life today than there was 40 years ago when I first entered school.
Then praise your deity that you were born into the First World. Your experiences are, on a global scale, somewhat unique. Some people don't have flushing toilets yet, today.
And I'm *damned* glad the internet hasn't come up with one single reason for me not to go to London. That would suck.
Indeed. What I said was that you mostly don't have to go, perhaps just to attend a short meeting or deliver a document.
Are you saying we can't do it now or we can't do it ever? The Thuraya satellite, which serves mobile phones from geosynchronous earth orbit, has a 12.25 meter dish antenna.
When he was born, traveling from London to New York might take a month or two. Today we do it in a few hours.
My first computer had a 6502 CPU, running at 1 MHz or so. I'm typing this on an 800 MHz CPU, which is probably at least 1600x more powerful. It had 64 KB of memory. I now have 256 MB, over 4000x more. I can easily afford quadruple the computing power and memory if I really need it. More importantly, we've eliminated many reasons for having to travel from London to New York.
It hasn't even been twenty years.
I think we live in interesting times, but it's up to us to move our world.
That line is imaginary, and keeps moving.
A good recent example is the publication of the Unabomber Manifesto, which led directly to his capture because his brother recognized the writing. If not for that, however, all you've done is submit to blackmail and encourage any loonie to randomly bomb people if they want a political statement published.
many reporters aren't after the truth these days; they're after the big stories and the prestige they bring.
Sure, but do you want the government to decide who is after the truth and who is after the glory? After all, the readers and viewers already have a powerful tool to control media excesses.
The Pentagon also managed the Gulf War press in a very heavy handed way, controlling what gets published. Things like Gulf War Syndrome, actual performance of "smart" munitions, and general Iraqi civilian suffering were mostly underreported, or reported only much later.
I'm not saying the US Government explicitly did anything. The relationship between media and government is an intricate beast, and influence or pressure is often not so simply detected. For example, a reporter who gets too "annoying" can lose access to key sources, which in turn harms her career, whether or not she was serving the public good.
All of these are measures of press freedom. As it is, virtually all US media are owned by a handful of interests. Do you really think that doesn't harm your right to know?
The report was heavily biased BTW, for Political Reasons.
Do you have anything that constitutes proof, or do you just deeply believe that the US must've ranked higher?
Hardly. Office v.X for the Mac is $446.99. Word X is $379.99. Excel X is $349.99. Powerpoint is $389.99. Entourage X is $94.99. [Amazon.com]
Individually purchased, the four cost over 2.7x more than the Office bundle, and buying any two individually will already reach or exceed the cost of Office.
Software pricing, more than any other industry, reflects intent. Since engineering costs (and profit, of course) dominate the price of packaged software, it's clear to me that Microsoft isn't interested in selling just Word at all. Assuming a generous per-unit cost (including Office) of $50, Microsoft wants to make $320 if I buy just Word and $400 for the whole Office suite.
If there was a real option here, I should at least be able to get two of the four for significantly less than the bundle.
The problem is that is infinitely easier to get access to a Windows machine than an Apple one.
Apple publishes its Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. In fact, since Apple violates some of its own guidelines, the guidelines themselves might be an even better source than actual Apple apps.
No, but they have to at least be seen as trying to protect against the dilution of their trademark.
Wouldn't Google want this sort of publicity? Become a common-place-word?
If "Google" becomes the common word that means "to search on a search engine", then everybody can and will set up "google engines". That can confuse people, and allow competitors to ride on the marketing and popularity of Google. I remember an advertisement from Xerox that pleaded for people to use "photocopy" instead of "xerox", for the same reason.
Worse, when it stops being a trademark, the company loses control over the meaning of the word. Over time, "microsoft" can become "mean and ugly", and the original trademark holder will have to suffer the connotation or change names.
As you can see, then, none of them emphasize ease of programming at the assembly level, contrary to what you earlier suggested. The underlying design assumption was that most users will be programming in HLLs. Pipelining is just one the most obvious examples of such a feature that exhibits this assumption.
So please, the point is not that RISC and pipelining are tied together. The point is, as shown by many pipelined RISC designs, that the designers care more for other attributes than ease of programming in assembly.
I know that. However, RISC designs in general are easier to pipeline, and it was one obvious thing you could do to achieve similar or better performance at the same CPU clock over CISC.
In particular, I bring up pipelining to refute your earlier statement:
[...] easily be done via a sequence of simpler instructions that may well, for a programmer who's actually programming at that level, be easier to understand.
My point is that RISC is generally not easier to program at assembly level, because so many of them are pipelined. The designers were instead counting on good compilers hiding that from most programmers.
What they counted on was that fewer and fewer people would be writing in assembly, and the complications can be hidden behind a good compiler. What they also failed to foresee was that a RISC/CISC hybrid like the later x86 chips got nearly the best of both worlds.
This problem affects all levels of schooling everywhere. All schools must choose a path somewhere between teaching pure learning skills (all abstract) and pure vocational skills (all concrete). The downside of the former approach is that their graduates will usually fall behind initially, and sometimes never catch up, in the real world. The downside of the latter is that their graduates may not be able to keep up with the newest thing, and becomes obsolete.
The problem cannot be summarized with a simple rhetorical "how can that be bad?" Specifically, "I know OpenOffice, and more importantly I know how to learn new things" doesn't get you the job that requires "Microsoft Word experience".
Doesn't bother you that a computer capable of voice recognition, among other marvelous things, cannot automatically timestamp a dictated log entry?
By "backup", I presume you mean the kind to recover the code you wish you didn't overwrite while drunk last night, not the kind due to a disk crash.
It's a lot easier to get lazy about backups. With proper source control software, your source files aren't writable unless you check them out, so you're forced to remember.
Secondly, and I admit it's probably rare among free software authors, source control makes it a lot easier to support bug fixes to older versions of released software.
No, that is almost completely mistaken.
A Pentium 4 is not simply a faster version of the 80386! The fast CPU may have extra execution units, different pipelining, more (visible or hidden) registers, more cache, better memory or I/O bandwidth, etc. Any of these improvements can completely change the location of the bottleneck, or even show no obvious bottleneck at all.
Just to take an example, a common cause of slowness is that a tight loop doesn't fit in the cache. The correct fix is to make that code small enough to fit. If profiled on a machine with a bigger L1 cache, you may not even notice the problem, and will waste your time fixing something else.
In theory you can find the slow spots on a slow machine, but you are wasting a lot of time
Which is why you can either analytically predict some suspects, or use a fast machine to help predict the suspects, and then profile only those suspects and not the entire executable. In any case, it can't be stressed enough that architectural differences on the fast machine cannot be overlooked.
Your point about the absolute necessity of a profiler is well placed, however.
I agree completely, but I was not educating the general public. I was posting on Slashdot - News for Nerds. Still using Microsoft units here is just lazy.
It's also not just Microsoft. Intel is largely responsible for the MHz is everything (even though Apple's objections are not entirely true either), and hard disk manufacturers are responsible for redefining the megabyte.
You have something of a point, but is it worth the effort to actually go through the thousands of Windows programs and determine uniqueness?
You don't actually have to. In a hypothetical argument against a Windows advocate, you just claim that there are many useful apps available on Linux or MacOS or whatever, and when the other person claims that Windows has thousands of apps, call the bluff. Make him count them.
Excuse me? Intel is saying that our cheap desktops are already fast enough, so they're putting off 64-bit CPUs?
Why should I even buy a new 32-bit CPU from Intel, then?
(You are of course right. I'm just wondering aloud why Intel is admitting it, and how they plan to dig themselves out once they convince the public of it.)
It's been a while, but I remember Usenet to generally tell people to RTFM, sometimes without even telling people where the FM is.
Seriously, even free software should try to achieve the ideal that it just works for a great majority of its users. Just Works. This means no problems during installation, and only occasional needs to read a context- sensitive, up-to-date, and relevant on-line help screen. One page.
There will always be a minority whose needs are so unanticipated they'll need some help. Let them go to Usenet or pay for support.
or pay for it, just like with any other software).
"Ah, so what you're saying is that the software is not really free? So why should I risk my career to use your software, when I can just pay Microsoft? In fact, am I not in effect subsidizing all the other copies of software you give away for free?" - PHB
Don't underestimate this problem. It's difficult today to make binary distributions of Linux software, and like it or not binary distributions are essential to acceptance and market share on the desktop.
When I look around (meaning, at smaller projects, rather than Mozilla or OpenOffice), my general impression is that binaries are available for the distro used by the developer, while other binaries are only sometimes available from third party volunteers. Are they as well tested (against possibly a slightly different shared library)? Does the packager even know what he's doing? If you use "hacks" like unrpm to run RPMs on a Debian system, for example, how sure can you be about things working?
And in other cases, it doesn't. The Windows taskbar gets cluttered a lot more quickly than the Dock, because every window gets a "tab". I don't need a "tab" for the window I'm typing email in, because I don't type too many of them at the same time, so clicking the mail application icon is sufficient to switch back.
This is why tabbed browsing, implemented in the browser, is better. It's available where it's needed, but doesn't clutter up other applications that don't need it. Perhaps Apple will update Cocoa so that Document-based applications can get tabbed navigation for free.
First of all, I think we're not using the same definition for "unique", and I apologize for being vague.
By "unique", I mean to discount yet-another-Tetris-clone. I do not mean to discount substantial feature differences between large apps. For example, Vi and Emacs certainly should count as two apps, even though their main function - edit text files - overlap entirely.
That's a double standard vis a vis the Windows world.
So call the bluff when a Windows advocate uses the argument. Are you suggesting we descend to their level instead?