C would have been the language of choice simply because more people know C than java, porting would have been faster.
It's much easier to write network applications in Java than C, and cross-platform compatibility is far better. Performance is another matter, but apparently they would rather make it work first and then make it work faster, which is entirely reasonable.
While I konw C, i dont know java.
There's your problem:) I know both, and in my opinion Java is a much better choice for what Freenet is trying to do.
*I* want to mess with those config files, rather than have some app(s) messing with one really important file.
You're right about the registry, but a better designed system can give you the best of both worlds. Mac OS X's plist files are human readable and writable, easily accessible via a standard API (1 line of code to get or set any property), and do not involve a single point of failure.
I'd recommend setting up two partitions, one UFS for OS X and one HFS+ for your older apps.
I wouldn't do that, unless you really need case-sensitivity for some reason. HFS+ is the "preferred" format in OS X; it has much better performance, and deals with forked files better.
Trust me, it's the Mac's that needed more maintenance.
Sorry, but I don't trust you, since this contradicts countless other reports, as well as my own experience as a college lab admin where 8 PCs required as much maintenance time as ~50 Macs. It sounds like your techs were much more experienced with Wintel machines than Macs.
Exactly. I keep pulling out this Heinlein quote, because it keeps being applicable so often:
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A. Heinlein, "Life Line"
Now, if we were dealing with a GPL app, and you suddenly decided you wanted to modify it, distribute your version, and not release source, you'd raise hell. But if we were dealing with a proprietary app, and you decide you want to run it on your notebook, home machine, and work machine, most slashdotters wouldn't care. They're the same thing -- you're breaking the license.
In the GPL scenario, you are redistributing the software, which would normally be forbidden by copyright law. Your only defense to copyright infringement is the GPL, which you can't claim if you don't accept it. With proprietary software, you can perform actions which do not violate copyright law (modification, reverse engineering, resale), which are only (allegedly) forbidden by the EULA. The GPL and other open source licenses only give you additional rights, EULAs only remove your existing rights.
My point was that until RMS gets his Candy Land dream, end users will never "own" the software they run
Agreed, but that's the case with all intellectual property. When I buy a book, I don't own the actual words, but I can do whatever I want with it as long as I don't violate copyright law. Long ago, publishers tried to impose EULA-like conditions on book sales, and they were laughed out of court.
Even Open Source software and Free Software still deal with licenses
Unlike EULAs, the GPL does not pretend that you must accept its terms in order to simply use the software, because you don't have to. The GPL only comes into play when you redistribute the software. Under standard copyright law you can't do that at all; the GPL grants you the right to do this provided you fulfill certain conditions.
This will continue to be the case until RMS gets his communistic fantasy world, where programmers never get paid
False dilemna. "All software must be free" and "Anything put into a EULA constitutes a valid contract" are not the only alternatives. Standard copyright law is entirely adequate to protect the rights of software publishers.
I do not buy a license or simply a right to use software, I buy software.
Exactly. We need to focus on this point, rather than debating about which terms in a EULA are reasonable or not. EULAs are not contracts. In any context other than software they would be laughed out of court (and have been, in the case of books). When software that I own puts up a dialog box with pages of legal drivel, and I click a button that says "I Agree", that is of no significance whatsoever, since I can lie to my software if I want to.
So? If the top 1% make 5000 times what the bottom 50% of earners make
Which they don't. The "greedy fucks" you are so fond of demonizing earned about 15% of the national income and payed 30% of the taxes (source here). The top 5% earn 29% and pay 49%. Your welfare programs couldn't exist without the evil and greedy people who fund most of them.
are earning money as a biproduct of a desire to help the people around them
No, in general they're helping people as a byproduct of earning money. The only legitimate way for a capitalist to make a profit is to offer products or services at a price people will voluntarily pay. Of course there are some, such as the RIAA and MPAA thugs, who prefer to use government force to secure their profits, but that is a failing of excessive government power, not capitalism.
greedy fucks that should be taxed more and should stop trying to sell useless bullshit to people who have more important things to try and focus on
I guarantee you that the computer you typed this rant on was produced by a company whose leaders fall into that group. Apparently you don't find all their products to be completely useless. Perhaps you should make a list of which products are beneficial to society and whose sale should be permitted, and which should not. Worked great for the USSR.
if freeloading is so wonderful, why not do it? Maybe cause you feel you're doing things you dont want to do in order to live the life you're living
Or maybe some of us feel it is fundamentally immoral to survive off of resources forcibly taken from those who worked for them, if we have the ability not to.
if they did help themselves, you might not have to give up taxes, but you would have to give up some of the inequality of your salary and opportunities, which, when you claim money is your primary motivator, is pretty much exactly the same thing.
Classic socialist fallacy. The economy is not a zero-sum game. If you have more, that does not mean that someone else must have less. Republicans very much want poor people to become richer. After all, if Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats the party of the poor, which of them has a vested interest in maintaining poverty?
Pay less taxes, and watch your salary drop.
Funny, I did pay less taxes this year, as did most Americans, and yet my salary didn't drop. Are you also going to claim that tax increases raise salaries?
I believe that Gore was ahead nationally by ~500K votes. Not a statistical tie.
Which is irrelevant. If the election was to be decided strictly on the popular vote, the campaign would have been very different. For example, Bush and Gore would actually have spent time campaigning in states where it was obvious who would win the majority of votes (New York, Texas, etc). Furthermore, voters would have also behaved differently; many who voted Libertarian or Green in uncontested states would have instead voted for whomever they saw as the lesser of two evils.
What is it that actualy protects software from piracy? Is it the EULA or copyright law?
(IANAL) The latter.
If it is the later, how is it that the GPL works?
As far as I know, the GPL has never been tested in court. But if it were, it would have a much stronger case than a traditional EULA. A EULA attempts to retroactively alter the terms of sale (converting a purchase into a license) and removes your rights, in exchange for nothing at all. (They claim to "give" you the right to run the software, but you already have that right.) On the other hand, the GPL adds rather than removes rights by allowing you to distribute copies. It does place restrictions on how you can exercise that right, but under standard copyright law you can't redistribute it at all, so it's still a net gain for you.
Sun proved, when they sued Microsoft, that they don't want Java-the-language being used to generate code to run anywhere but inside Java-the-VM or have direct access to anything but the Java classes.
Not true at all. Look at Apple's Cocoa framework, which allows you to write native Mac OS X applications in Java. Sun has no problem with that, because Mac OS X also includes the 100% compatible pure Java envrionment. Sun sued Microsoft not because MS added features, but because they deliberately introduced incompatibilities in the core Java classes.
Somebody at Tivo needs to read your remarks and figure out a way to clear up your misconceptions, because I think your misconceptions happen to be very widely shared.
I think you're right. This thread has done a better job of selling me on the concept than all of Tivo's advertising combined. Previously I hadn't paid it much attention, it just seemed like a VCR with some extra features (and limitations). But actually spending some time thinking about how I could use it based on the comments here, I'm much more interested; I may very well stop at Best Buy over the weekend. Heck, I'm already paying Time Warner a fortune for cable; might as well use it as efficiently as possible.
Agree 100%. I've got a 15" LCD and 17" CRT at home, both at 1024x768. At work I have my TiBook driving its LCD (1152x768) and a 19" CRT at 1152x870. I've become sufficiently spoiled that any single display system feels confining, no matter how big it is.
Once again, the rest of the industry is figuring out that Apple had the right idea over 10 years ago...
Yes, that's why I said (perhaps not clearly) integer or half multipliers. So 733 is 133x5.5, and the next available speed is 800=133x6. Ditto for 867 (133x6.5) and 933 (133x7).
Actually, I always understood "real conservatives" to mean people who wanted to preserve the status quo.
Yeah, the term is unfortunately overloaded quite a bit. In the US political climate today, conservatives tend to be the ones pushing for change (cutting taxes, Social Security privatization, etc), while liberals generally defend the status quo. And DarkZero has a good point that the labels mean a lot less than they used to.
Thus... anything C++ can do, C can do. Thus... the ONLY reason to use C++ is that (A) your boss can read it (???) or (B) your a lousy programmer.
That's just silly. By Turing equivalence, just about any language can do anything that any other language can do. You could write scientific number-crunching apps in Perl and text processing utilities in FORTRAN, but it would be foolish to do so. Part of being a good developer is choosing the right tools so that you can spend your time implementing your program's functionality instead of fighting with the language.
Bastardizations of a standard language such as C, into deviants such as C++ and Objective C, do nothing good for anyone.
You might want to give Objective C another chance in the future. Unlike C++, Objective C is a 100% backwards compatible OO extension to C. The OpenStep/Cocoa APIs are specifically designed to use the features of Objective C and are outstanding for most types of application development, although possibly not for action-oriented games.
a "quantum" is the SMALLEST increment allowed by nature
Well, the previous low and midrange speeds were 733 and 867. They run on a 133 MHz bus and the processor has to be an integer or half multiple of the bus speed, so actually the 800 and 933 upgrades are the smallest increments possible. So Apple is sort of right, just not in the way they intended.
Probably a troll, but I'll bite. "Real conservatives" do not have increasing business profits as their primary goal. Real conservatives stand for limited government and individual freedom as described in the Constitution. Sometimes (ok, often) conservative politicians will get bought by lobbyists and support anti-freedom initiatives like the DMCA, but exactly the same is true of liberals.
Without supporting facts, this looks like a "Post Hoc, Ergo Poster Hoc" [texas.net] fallacy
You're right, but the poster you were responding to wasn't claiming that Enron is Clinton's fault, just that it isn't W's. The Democratic strategy is to repeat the words "Enron", "big oil", and "criminals" in as many sentences as possible in an attempt to smear Bush, despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by his administration in this matter.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much easier to write network applications in Java than C, and cross-platform compatibility is far better. Performance is another matter, but apparently they would rather make it work first and then make it work faster, which is entirely reasonable.
While I konw C, i dont know java.
There's your problem
You're right about the registry, but a better designed system can give you the best of both worlds. Mac OS X's plist files are human readable and writable, easily accessible via a standard API (1 line of code to get or set any property), and do not involve a single point of failure.
I wouldn't do that, unless you really need case-sensitivity for some reason. HFS+ is the "preferred" format in OS X; it has much better performance, and deals with forked files better.
Sorry, but I don't trust you, since this contradicts countless other reports, as well as my own experience as a college lab admin where 8 PCs required as much maintenance time as ~50 Macs. It sounds like your techs were much more experienced with Wintel machines than Macs.
Assuming that license agreements are valid, which is far from certain.
In the GPL scenario, you are redistributing the software, which would normally be forbidden by copyright law. Your only defense to copyright infringement is the GPL, which you can't claim if you don't accept it. With proprietary software, you can perform actions which do not violate copyright law (modification, reverse engineering, resale), which are only (allegedly) forbidden by the EULA. The GPL and other open source licenses only give you additional rights, EULAs only remove your existing rights.
My point was that until RMS gets his Candy Land dream, end users will never "own" the software they run
Agreed, but that's the case with all intellectual property. When I buy a book, I don't own the actual words, but I can do whatever I want with it as long as I don't violate copyright law. Long ago, publishers tried to impose EULA-like conditions on book sales, and they were laughed out of court.
Unlike EULAs, the GPL does not pretend that you must accept its terms in order to simply use the software, because you don't have to. The GPL only comes into play when you redistribute the software. Under standard copyright law you can't do that at all; the GPL grants you the right to do this provided you fulfill certain conditions.
This will continue to be the case until RMS gets his communistic fantasy world, where programmers never get paid
False dilemna. "All software must be free" and "Anything put into a EULA constitutes a valid contract" are not the only alternatives. Standard copyright law is entirely adequate to protect the rights of software publishers.
Exactly. We need to focus on this point, rather than debating about which terms in a EULA are reasonable or not. EULAs are not contracts. In any context other than software they would be laughed out of court (and have been, in the case of books). When software that I own puts up a dialog box with pages of legal drivel, and I click a button that says "I Agree", that is of no significance whatsoever, since I can lie to my software if I want to.
Which they don't. The "greedy fucks" you are so fond of demonizing earned about 15% of the national income and payed 30% of the taxes (source here). The top 5% earn 29% and pay 49%. Your welfare programs couldn't exist without the evil and greedy people who fund most of them.
are earning money as a biproduct of a desire to help the people around them
No, in general they're helping people as a byproduct of earning money. The only legitimate way for a capitalist to make a profit is to offer products or services at a price people will voluntarily pay. Of course there are some, such as the RIAA and MPAA thugs, who prefer to use government force to secure their profits, but that is a failing of excessive government power, not capitalism.
greedy fucks that should be taxed more and should stop trying to sell useless bullshit to people who have more important things to try and focus on
I guarantee you that the computer you typed this rant on was produced by a company whose leaders fall into that group. Apparently you don't find all their products to be completely useless. Perhaps you should make a list of which products are beneficial to society and whose sale should be permitted, and which should not. Worked great for the USSR.
if freeloading is so wonderful, why not do it? Maybe cause you feel you're doing things you dont want to do in order to live the life you're living
Or maybe some of us feel it is fundamentally immoral to survive off of resources forcibly taken from those who worked for them, if we have the ability not to.
if they did help themselves, you might not have to give up taxes, but you would have to give up some of the inequality of your salary and opportunities, which, when you claim money is your primary motivator, is pretty much exactly the same thing.
Classic socialist fallacy. The economy is not a zero-sum game. If you have more, that does not mean that someone else must have less. Republicans very much want poor people to become richer. After all, if Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats the party of the poor, which of them has a vested interest in maintaining poverty?
Pay less taxes, and watch your salary drop.
Funny, I did pay less taxes this year, as did most Americans, and yet my salary didn't drop. Are you also going to claim that tax increases raise salaries?
Which is irrelevant. If the election was to be decided strictly on the popular vote, the campaign would have been very different. For example, Bush and Gore would actually have spent time campaigning in states where it was obvious who would win the majority of votes (New York, Texas, etc). Furthermore, voters would have also behaved differently; many who voted Libertarian or Green in uncontested states would have instead voted for whomever they saw as the lesser of two evils.
(IANAL) The latter.
If it is the later, how is it that the GPL works?
As far as I know, the GPL has never been tested in court. But if it were, it would have a much stronger case than a traditional EULA. A EULA attempts to retroactively alter the terms of sale (converting a purchase into a license) and removes your rights, in exchange for nothing at all. (They claim to "give" you the right to run the software, but you already have that right.) On the other hand, the GPL adds rather than removes rights by allowing you to distribute copies. It does place restrictions on how you can exercise that right, but under standard copyright law you can't redistribute it at all, so it's still a net gain for you.
Not true at all. Look at Apple's Cocoa framework, which allows you to write native Mac OS X applications in Java. Sun has no problem with that, because Mac OS X also includes the 100% compatible pure Java envrionment. Sun sued Microsoft not because MS added features, but because they deliberately introduced incompatibilities in the core Java classes.
I think you're right. This thread has done a better job of selling me on the concept than all of Tivo's advertising combined. Previously I hadn't paid it much attention, it just seemed like a VCR with some extra features (and limitations). But actually spending some time thinking about how I could use it based on the comments here, I'm much more interested; I may very well stop at Best Buy over the weekend. Heck, I'm already paying Time Warner a fortune for cable; might as well use it as efficiently as possible.
Once again, the rest of the industry is figuring out that Apple had the right idea over 10 years ago...
While this is a fine idea, they really need to put similar warnings on the Social Security web site.
Umm, no. The entire point of Carbon is to provide most of the "Classic" Mac OS API so that developers have an easier transition to OS X.
Yes, that's why I said (perhaps not clearly) integer or half multipliers. So 733 is 133x5.5, and the next available speed is 800=133x6. Ditto for 867 (133x6.5) and 933 (133x7).
Yeah, the term is unfortunately overloaded quite a bit. In the US political climate today, conservatives tend to be the ones pushing for change (cutting taxes, Social Security privatization, etc), while liberals generally defend the status quo. And DarkZero has a good point that the labels mean a lot less than they used to.
That's just silly. By Turing equivalence, just about any language can do anything that any other language can do. You could write scientific number-crunching apps in Perl and text processing utilities in FORTRAN, but it would be foolish to do so. Part of being a good developer is choosing the right tools so that you can spend your time implementing your program's functionality instead of fighting with the language.
You might want to give Objective C another chance in the future. Unlike C++, Objective C is a 100% backwards compatible OO extension to C. The OpenStep/Cocoa APIs are specifically designed to use the features of Objective C and are outstanding for most types of application development, although possibly not for action-oriented games.
Are there C++ equivalents for these common Objective C/Cocoa uses?
- if ([object respondsToSelector:@selector(foo)]) [object foo];
(Determines if object responds to the "foo" method, and invokes it if so)
- id newObject = [[NSClassFromString(someString) alloc] init];
(Allocates an object of the class named in the someString variable)
Last I checked C++ had nowhere near this level of dynamic capability, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Well, the previous low and midrange speeds were 733 and 867. They run on a 133 MHz bus and the processor has to be an integer or half multiple of the bus speed, so actually the 800 and 933 upgrades are the smallest increments possible. So Apple is sort of right, just not in the way they intended.
Probably a troll, but I'll bite. "Real conservatives" do not have increasing business profits as their primary goal. Real conservatives stand for limited government and individual freedom as described in the Constitution. Sometimes (ok, often) conservative politicians will get bought by lobbyists and support anti-freedom initiatives like the DMCA, but exactly the same is true of liberals.
You're right, but the poster you were responding to wasn't claiming that Enron is Clinton's fault, just that it isn't W's. The Democratic strategy is to repeat the words "Enron", "big oil", and "criminals" in as many sentences as possible in an attempt to smear Bush, despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by his administration in this matter.