A niche language is one which few people know. I looked at the stats for open-source projects (a good indicator of programming language popularity) on freshmeat.net. Guess what: Objective C accounts for less than 1% of those projects. Even Tcl has about 3x the number of projects. How is that not a niche language?
I'll ignore the childish insults. Let's look at open-source applications. On Freshmeat.net, there are approximately 39,000 projects listed. Out of them, about 7000 use C, 4000 use C++, another 4000 use Java, and a whopping 312 use Objective C. How is that not a niche language?
Only someone who doesn't own an iPod and is rather jealous can say such a thing. I used to think the same thing, until I saved up some cash and bought an iPod. Let's dispel a few myths here.
First, the iPods are among the lowest-cost music players in the industry. The 30GB Dell Digital Jukebox (the cheapest, crappiest equivalent) is $260 + $20 tax + $10 shipping = $290, only $9 cheaper than the iPod (no tax, free shipping). It has a black and white screen, it looks ugly, it doesn't play video, and it's a lot larger and heavier than the iPod. That's without even taking into account the iPod's awesome user interface. For instance, it's the only player that I know of that starts playing music as soon as you hit the play button -- without waiting to boot up or fill its cache. It has the most pleasant, easy-to-use navigation system I've ever seen in a portable device. It has the best sound quality of any player in its class. The main reason for its success is great engineering.
They are certainly not underfeatured. Yes, they don't have useless features like an FM tuner (which would have increased the size, decreased the battery life, reduced the sound quality, and made it more expensive). If I wanted to listen to radio, I would have bought a radio and saved about $295. I can't think of any other feature it lacks. It has video (including video output to a TV), it has top-notch audio. You can even use it as a portable hard drive, and unlike the Windows Media players, it doesn't have any of that DRM bullshit (unless you buy stuff from iTunes).
Apple has what, 5% of the market share for personal computers? Of the apps on OS X, probably 70% are written in something other than Obj-C. A language with a market share significantly less than 5% is by definition a niche language.
Yeah, Gnustep is object oriented. So is every other GUI environment designed after 1989 or so, including GTK and Qt. Unless you are a fan of obscure niche languages like ObjectiveC, you'll probably like GTK and Qt a lot more. But yeah, Gnustep is great if you want to go back in time and experience the Linux desktop like it was in 1996.
And hey, you can yell "X11 sucks" on top of your lungs all you want. The problem is, until you actually _make_ something that's better, nobody will listen to you. And last I checked, Gnustep ran on top of X11 anyhow.
Lynx doesn't even support plugins. And you could simply remove plugin support and be done with it, it's not like anyone ever uses them for anything productive. I don't think it even applies to Mozilla extensions, since they aren't even binaries, for the most part.
Yeah, because the Mozilla foundation makes so much money that it comes out of their ears. It'd be pretty hard to squeeze patent royalties from a non-profit.
Seriously, try buying a VCR nowadays - they're more expensive than dvd players.
No shit. A VCR has hundreds of precise mechanical parts. A DVD player has a $5 DVD loader (with about 10 pieces of injection-molded plastic and a cheap read head) and about $8 worth of electronics. A DVD player is a hell of a lot simpler than a VCR.
PV=nRT is an extremely rough approximation for gases, but it simply does not apply to _liquid_ nitrogen. When you heat up liquid nitrogen, it boils and expands a LOT. No container would be able to contain such pressures.
You completely misunderstood the point I was making. Here, I'll make it again, maybe it will be more clear
Huh? Go get the source. Proprietary? To whom?
OpenOffice used to be a proprietary product called StarOffice, made by a company called StarDivision. The codebase is at least 10 years old. Yes, it's open source now, but almost all of the code is the old StarDivision code. This type of code (monolithic and self-contained) does not translate well into open-source development. Nobody wants to dig around 3 gigs of source code (yes, that's how much it takes up). The only people really working on the code are Sun engineers.
If the OpenOffice codebase was developed as an open-source project, things would have been done much differently. The main problem with commercial software is that it does not build on the work of others. OpenOffice has everything built-in including its own windowing system, graphics system, database, IPC mechanisms, a component framework, and so on. It is hideously over-engineered. This yields a huge codebase, a huge memory footprint, and poor maintainability. These types of projects generally attract little or no community participation, and ultimately fail as open-source.
If I only wanted to process text, I would use vim or wordpad. Maybe you only use your word processor for 9th grade English assignments, but most normal people use them for things like research papers and reports and such. These often have more figures and equations than text.
Re:The true test of Open Source
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree. I would say the main problem is that OpenOffice is a huge, bloated source base. These types of huge, monolithic projects with a proprietary code base do not work at all for open-source development. It would probably take about a week to compile the damn thing on my system, and it would take me a lot more time than I have to get proficient with the architecture. Actually improving anything would be a challenging task, because the codebase is vast and is apparently of rather poor quality. To really improve anything like resource utilization, large parts of the codebase would likely have to be redesigned.
Closed source development is generally more efficient (thousands of well-paid full-time programmers vs. a few dozen volunteers), but open-source can generally deliver the same features with a lot less code, or at least distribute the workload among several smaller projects. The code generally tends to be better quality, simply because it's not rushed. With OpenOffice, none of these factors are true because it's an open-sourced proprietary product. We really get the worst of both worlds in this situation.
Re:shoe on other foot this time? weird.
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I didn't realize how much I hated OpenOffice until I used Word for a while last night. OpenOffice takes about 20 seconds to start on my Linux machine. The latest version of word takes about 3, on a Windows computer with half the RAM and a slower CPU. I've not managed to crash Word in quite a while, while OpenOffice crashes reliably if you paste a figure from, say, Matlab and drag it the wrong way (I have about 20 of those Sun "thank you for your crash report" emails in my inbox right now). And god help you if you want to add captions to your figures, or use "styles", or insert an equation, or do just about anything a good word processor should let you do. As it is right now, I'd rather use Word under VMWare than a native version of OpenOffice. For now, my favorite by far is LaTeX -- even with its arcane syntax, it is a hell of a lot better than anything else out there.
This would definitely be a factor if you were running it on, say, a 486. Try out the GIMP for Windows, there is no perceptible difference in GUI responsiveness, even though it uses GTK+ instead of the Windows API. I think the main problem with OpenOffice is that it's an ancient codebase and tries to do too much internally. Someone designing it today would probably use platform-specific features more actively instead of trying to make it look the same on every platform (which was the meaning of "portability" about 15 years ago). Not to mention, StarOffice was always a crappy, bloated product and OpenOffice isn't much better.
I would think the reason stuff like that is happening is because they are preproduction models. They may not have done things like figuring out the shielding and stuff, so there could be quite a bit of RF interference coming from them. Once it gets past the regulatory agencies and such, it should not produce any more interference than any other electronic device. It's actually quite amazing how much RFI a poorly shielded computer can produce, so it's not surprising their wireless scanners are getting knocked out.
Sometimes those inefficiencies add up to many times more than the theoretically required work. For example, you only need some tiny fraction of a gallon of gas to accelerate a car to 70mph. If there was no rolling friction and no air resistance, you could probably get 1000mpg out of your car on a typical highway (you would only use fuel when accelerating and climbing hills). Reality is not so kind.
Based on that, I would expect that in a space elevator system, the descending car would only be able to provide maybe 10-20% of the required energy to raise the other car. The same factors would be at work, at least when it's in the atmosphere.
Why are you so worried about the hard drive spinning up? With the design of those hard drives, it should not cause any problems. The iPod itself turns it on and off all the time. Chances are, the battery will die first.
This has nothing to do with the system response time (which is fast enough), and everything to do with the frequency. Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths and are much more directional. A sound with a frequency of 40Hz will have a wavelength of 8.6 meters. A sound with a frequency of 20 kHz will have a wavelength of 17 millimeters, about 500 times shorter.
Most systems these days use oversampling and a sigma-delta DAC, which does not need a sharp analog low-pass filter (they do this with a digital filter, which has much better response characteristics). As long as the original source was mastered at a bitrate higher than 44.1kHz, downsampling it to that in the digital domain should not reduce the quality.
The rubber tubing is what holds the electrodes in place. There is nothing special about it. Of course, I'm not sure what an EEG can show about internet addiction.
Either you live way out in the boonies or you drive an H2. My closest photo lab (wal-mart actually) is about 2 miles from my house. My car gets about 25mpg city. With gas being $2.70 around here, that's only 40 cents worth of gas.
Re:IP will give these no advantage at all.
on
TCP/IP Speakers
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· Score: 1
Any decent piece of equipment will have an isolation transformer on the coax input, which eliminates any potential ground loop issues. And yes, using proper 75 ohm coax is a hell of a lot better than the ugly cheap hack known as Toslink.
Sound travels approximately 30cm in one millisecond. Which means that even moving your head slightly will introduce significant delays. Unless you listen to your music sitting very rigidly with your head positioned _exactly_ between the speakers, I don't think you need to worry about millisecond delays.
Sounds like they wanted to hire a specific H1B worker or someone else with a visa. To do that, they have show that they can't find an American to fill the position.
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A niche language is one which few people know. I looked at the stats for open-source projects (a good indicator of programming language popularity) on freshmeat.net. Guess what: Objective C accounts for less than 1% of those projects. Even Tcl has about 3x the number of projects. How is that not a niche language?
I'll ignore the childish insults. Let's look at open-source applications. On Freshmeat.net, there are approximately 39,000 projects listed. Out of them, about 7000 use C, 4000 use C++, another 4000 use Java, and a whopping 312 use Objective C. How is that not a niche language?
Only someone who doesn't own an iPod and is rather jealous can say such a thing. I used to think the same thing, until I saved up some cash and bought an iPod. Let's dispel a few myths here.
First, the iPods are among the lowest-cost music players in the industry. The 30GB Dell Digital Jukebox (the cheapest, crappiest equivalent) is $260 + $20 tax + $10 shipping = $290, only $9 cheaper than the iPod (no tax, free shipping). It has a black and white screen, it looks ugly, it doesn't play video, and it's a lot larger and heavier than the iPod. That's without even taking into account the iPod's awesome user interface. For instance, it's the only player that I know of that starts playing music as soon as you hit the play button -- without waiting to boot up or fill its cache. It has the most pleasant, easy-to-use navigation system I've ever seen in a portable device. It has the best sound quality of any player in its class. The main reason for its success is great engineering.
They are certainly not underfeatured. Yes, they don't have useless features like an FM tuner (which would have increased the size, decreased the battery life, reduced the sound quality, and made it more expensive). If I wanted to listen to radio, I would have bought a radio and saved about $295. I can't think of any other feature it lacks. It has video (including video output to a TV), it has top-notch audio. You can even use it as a portable hard drive, and unlike the Windows Media players, it doesn't have any of that DRM bullshit (unless you buy stuff from iTunes).
Apple has what, 5% of the market share for personal computers? Of the apps on OS X, probably 70% are written in something other than Obj-C. A language with a market share significantly less than 5% is by definition a niche language.
Yeah, Gnustep is object oriented. So is every other GUI environment designed after 1989 or so, including GTK and Qt. Unless you are a fan of obscure niche languages like ObjectiveC, you'll probably like GTK and Qt a lot more. But yeah, Gnustep is great if you want to go back in time and experience the Linux desktop like it was in 1996.
And hey, you can yell "X11 sucks" on top of your lungs all you want. The problem is, until you actually _make_ something that's better, nobody will listen to you. And last I checked, Gnustep ran on top of X11 anyhow.
Lynx doesn't even support plugins. And you could simply remove plugin support and be done with it, it's not like anyone ever uses them for anything productive. I don't think it even applies to Mozilla extensions, since they aren't even binaries, for the most part.
Yeah, because the Mozilla foundation makes so much money that it comes out of their ears. It'd be pretty hard to squeeze patent royalties from a non-profit.
Seriously, try buying a VCR nowadays - they're more expensive than dvd players.
No shit. A VCR has hundreds of precise mechanical parts. A DVD player has a $5 DVD loader (with about 10 pieces of injection-molded plastic and a cheap read head) and about $8 worth of electronics. A DVD player is a hell of a lot simpler than a VCR.
PV=nRT is an extremely rough approximation for gases, but it simply does not apply to _liquid_ nitrogen. When you heat up liquid nitrogen, it boils and expands a LOT. No container would be able to contain such pressures.
You completely misunderstood the point I was making. Here, I'll make it again, maybe it will be more clear
Huh? Go get the source. Proprietary? To whom?
OpenOffice used to be a proprietary product called StarOffice, made by a company called StarDivision. The codebase is at least 10 years old. Yes, it's open source now, but almost all of the code is the old StarDivision code. This type of code (monolithic and self-contained) does not translate well into open-source development. Nobody wants to dig around 3 gigs of source code (yes, that's how much it takes up). The only people really working on the code are Sun engineers.
If the OpenOffice codebase was developed as an open-source project, things would have been done much differently. The main problem with commercial software is that it does not build on the work of others. OpenOffice has everything built-in including its own windowing system, graphics system, database, IPC mechanisms, a component framework, and so on. It is hideously over-engineered. This yields a huge codebase, a huge memory footprint, and poor maintainability. These types of projects generally attract little or no community participation, and ultimately fail as open-source.
If I only wanted to process text, I would use vim or wordpad. Maybe you only use your word processor for 9th grade English assignments, but most normal people use them for things like research papers and reports and such. These often have more figures and equations than text.
I agree. I would say the main problem is that OpenOffice is a huge, bloated source base. These types of huge, monolithic projects with a proprietary code base do not work at all for open-source development. It would probably take about a week to compile the damn thing on my system, and it would take me a lot more time than I have to get proficient with the architecture. Actually improving anything would be a challenging task, because the codebase is vast and is apparently of rather poor quality. To really improve anything like resource utilization, large parts of the codebase would likely have to be redesigned.
Closed source development is generally more efficient (thousands of well-paid full-time programmers vs. a few dozen volunteers), but open-source can generally deliver the same features with a lot less code, or at least distribute the workload among several smaller projects. The code generally tends to be better quality, simply because it's not rushed. With OpenOffice, none of these factors are true because it's an open-sourced proprietary product. We really get the worst of both worlds in this situation.
I didn't realize how much I hated OpenOffice until I used Word for a while last night. OpenOffice takes about 20 seconds to start on my Linux machine. The latest version of word takes about 3, on a Windows computer with half the RAM and a slower CPU. I've not managed to crash Word in quite a while, while OpenOffice crashes reliably if you paste a figure from, say, Matlab and drag it the wrong way (I have about 20 of those Sun "thank you for your crash report" emails in my inbox right now). And god help you if you want to add captions to your figures, or use "styles", or insert an equation, or do just about anything a good word processor should let you do. As it is right now, I'd rather use Word under VMWare than a native version of OpenOffice. For now, my favorite by far is LaTeX -- even with its arcane syntax, it is a hell of a lot better than anything else out there.
This would definitely be a factor if you were running it on, say, a 486. Try out the GIMP for Windows, there is no perceptible difference in GUI responsiveness, even though it uses GTK+ instead of the Windows API. I think the main problem with OpenOffice is that it's an ancient codebase and tries to do too much internally. Someone designing it today would probably use platform-specific features more actively instead of trying to make it look the same on every platform (which was the meaning of "portability" about 15 years ago). Not to mention, StarOffice was always a crappy, bloated product and OpenOffice isn't much better.
I would think the reason stuff like that is happening is because they are preproduction models. They may not have done things like figuring out the shielding and stuff, so there could be quite a bit of RF interference coming from them. Once it gets past the regulatory agencies and such, it should not produce any more interference than any other electronic device. It's actually quite amazing how much RFI a poorly shielded computer can produce, so it's not surprising their wireless scanners are getting knocked out.
Sometimes those inefficiencies add up to many times more than the theoretically required work. For example, you only need some tiny fraction of a gallon of gas to accelerate a car to 70mph. If there was no rolling friction and no air resistance, you could probably get 1000mpg out of your car on a typical highway (you would only use fuel when accelerating and climbing hills). Reality is not so kind.
Based on that, I would expect that in a space elevator system, the descending car would only be able to provide maybe 10-20% of the required energy to raise the other car. The same factors would be at work, at least when it's in the atmosphere.
Why are you so worried about the hard drive spinning up? With the design of those hard drives, it should not cause any problems. The iPod itself turns it on and off all the time. Chances are, the battery will die first.
This has nothing to do with the system response time (which is fast enough), and everything to do with the frequency. Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths and are much more directional. A sound with a frequency of 40Hz will have a wavelength of 8.6 meters. A sound with a frequency of 20 kHz will have a wavelength of 17 millimeters, about 500 times shorter.
Most systems these days use oversampling and a sigma-delta DAC, which does not need a sharp analog low-pass filter (they do this with a digital filter, which has much better response characteristics). As long as the original source was mastered at a bitrate higher than 44.1kHz, downsampling it to that in the digital domain should not reduce the quality.
The rubber tubing is what holds the electrodes in place. There is nothing special about it. Of course, I'm not sure what an EEG can show about internet addiction.
Either you live way out in the boonies or you drive an H2. My closest photo lab (wal-mart actually) is about 2 miles from my house. My car gets about 25mpg city. With gas being $2.70 around here, that's only 40 cents worth of gas.
Any decent piece of equipment will have an isolation transformer on the coax input, which eliminates any potential ground loop issues. And yes, using proper 75 ohm coax is a hell of a lot better than the ugly cheap hack known as Toslink.
Sound travels approximately 30cm in one millisecond. Which means that even moving your head slightly will introduce significant delays. Unless you listen to your music sitting very rigidly with your head positioned _exactly_ between the speakers, I don't think you need to worry about millisecond delays.
It's OK to say _nothing_. It's NOT OK to give false statements. If Martha Stewart kept her trap shut, she wouldn't have ended up in jail.
Sounds like they wanted to hire a specific H1B worker or someone else with a visa. To do that, they have show that they can't find an American to fill the position.