### I literally have not had to deal this supposedly tricky whitespace in years.
You don't do copy paste? You never insert a "if foo:" above a already existing piece of code? As soon as you have to move a already existing piece of code a block deeper the lack of block markers gets a huge annoyance, since its just as easy to mess up.
Beside, you are doing the classic pro-whitespace mistake, the arguments always go like this:
Q: Why whitespace? A: So people are forced to indent properly and make pretty code. Q: But whitespace is a pain, causes trouble, etc.? A: Use a proper editor! Q: But if I use a proper editor it will indent my code automatically anyway, I don't need the language to force me! A: Hm..
When you are already using something else like Notepad, it simply doesn't make sense to have whitespace blocks. If everybody would use Notepad I could see a reason behind it, but people just don't.
How can one properly dual license and still comply with #2? If I just slap GPL and BSDL into a file it looks horribly broken, since BSDL grands you some freedoms that the GPL doesn't and different licenses might end up applying to different portions of the code. Have I mark each line with a license? What if I modify a BSDL licensed line of code and insert my own one under GPL?
### The problem here is that Theo and others seem to not understand that their license is one that allows relicensing.
Where does the BSDL give you the right to relicense? I know that BSDL code is considered by many to be free to take and use however they want, but that is not what the license actually says or at least not how I understand it. To quote from the license:
| Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
That sounds to me very much like BSDL code is meant to stay under BSDL, you are allowed to change it, but not to change the license itself.
Now, my understanding of the BSDL might be wrong, but I don't see how one can properly mix the GPL with the BSDL, when both code ends up in the same file.
### I've never understood the "whitespace" thing... don't you guys indent your code anyway????
I don't indent code, my editor indents code according to the block markers. If a language doesn't provide block markers, the editor can no longer do the task and its up to me, annoying and error prone.
### Why do those people love repeat themselves so much?
Its not repetition, it is the structure of the code. The indention is the thing that serves no purpose and should be completly removed and left to the editor (just like other 'prettifying' such as syntax highlighting). Python does it the wrong way around, it takes the look of the code and interprets it as structure. Look however is very easily destroyed, a simple copy&paste destroys Python code and if you don't have a good editor, it is extremely hard to recover the code after such an operation and even with a good editor its still extremely easy to let an error slip in. Refactoring a pretty tiny piece of Python code belongs to the worst coding experiences I ever had, since what would have taken minutes in a block language with block markers, resulted in hours of try&error in Python.
To make a long story short: Keeping a single '{' and a '}' in the right place is trivial, keeping hundreds of ' ' in the right space and at the right length can get insanely hard, if you miss even a single one of them your code breaks, sometimes without even given any kind of obvious error (beside other reasons, thanks to brain-dead automatic variable declaration on assignment, a problem sadly shared by way to many other scripting languages).
### That if you want to do that you should be using another tool because the GIMP is not a paint/drawing program.
Which is of course complete bullshit. GIMP is doing a great job to for drawing images, much better then any free software alternative, it just is lacking in a few areas for absolutely no good reason, creating doing proper line-, circle-, rect-drawing tools isn't exactly a very hard thing, even MSPaint has them.
Re:System-dependent HIGs dictate application behav
on
The GIMP UI Redesign
·
· Score: 1
### HIGs differ on different platforms
Yep, and when the application can't adopt, its a problem of the app.
### not gimp, which adopts the suggested SDI convention for the platform
Gimp doesn't adopt, it simply does its own thing, which seems to be CSDI, which the Gnome HID of course also does not recommend and also Gimp isn't a Gnome up to begin with, to this day it doesn't use a single gnome lib.
Because its completly irrelevant, the problem is within the Gimp (or well, GTKs lack for MDI support), not the OS.
### Multiple windows do have uses
Yes, but they are also extremely annoying for *simple* tasks, trying to find dialog boxes that hide behind images windows simply isn't fun, a single-window mode (a real one, not Xnest hacks) would fix that instantly. This complaint has been around since as long as the Gimp, its really nothing new.
### Not so in GIMP, maybe it's there somewhere hidden, but after years of usage I still haven't found it.
In Gimp you draw shapes by doing a selection and then either filling or Edit->Stroke'in it. And you draw lines by holding shift while using the pen or other tools.
The trouble is that even with this knowledge you still can't draw proper lines and proper circles, lines will get messed up as soon as you start to use transparency, since then the extra click required to position the starting point draws to the image and with circles you simply get a mess that isn't a proper Breshalm circle, since there is to much information loss when stroking a selection.
When it comes to simple shape drawing basically every program does better then Gimp, everything from MSPaint to a early copy of DeluxPaint (and nope, boolean operations don't replace proper drawing algorithms).
The main issue with Gimp is simply that you can't have one window for everything, you always need half a dozens of windows, even if you are just editing a single image, that simply annoys. Dockable dialogs helped to limit the problem, but you are still left with at least three floating windows.
Re:Why even have static key bindings?
on
The GIMP UI Redesign
·
· Score: 4, Informative
GTK and Gimp can do this for a long long time, you have to unlock it in the Gimp preferences (Interface->Use dynamic keyboard shortcuts), but once done you simply hover over a menu item, press the combo you like to assign to it and you are done with binding that item to the given shortcut, by far the easiest way to configure keyboard bindings I have ever seen anywhere.
Switching to QT would be plain stupid. What however would be nice is the decoupling of the image manipulation functionality from the UI, so that not only different UIs would be easily doable, but most important of all, a no-UI mode would be possible. Currently is quite a a PITA to use Gimp on the command line, it somewhat works, but is far from being as easy to use at it should be and also not all of Gimps functions are accessible via scripting.
And before somebody mentions ImageMagick, yep, that works, but it doesn't provide the same filters as Gimp, so its often very complicated or impossible to automate a task that you just performed in Gimp manually.
Companies want to deliver a product, often in time, if they would have gone the "Open Source Way", it would have taken months or even years till their Xorg fix made it out to each and every distro and of course getting all the user to install such a fix would take an eternity again. Not very practical if you want to sell a product.
I think it comes right from the BSD License itself:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Nowhere does the BSD license allow you to remove the BSD license from the code, in fact it states the exact opposite. Which of course is kind of a mess, since your modifications to a BSD covered file might be covered under a different license, thus effectively covering the whole file under that different license and making the BSD license kind of useless, but you still have to keep it in.
How to write the config settings themselves down is really a secondary issue, the important part is to have all the documentation, default values, types and stuff in a machine readable form (i.e. not just man-page or a comment in the config file itself) so that you can validate the config files after or even while editing. GConf already does that (/etc/gconf/schemas/) so its an already partly solved problem, except that there still a lot of tools around that have their own at hoc format, which is kind of part of the crux, Gnome and KDE do their GUI stuff, but a lot of their improvements have a hard time to get used by non-GUI apps that could still profit from them.
The main issue with 'flat text config' is simply that it isn't a well defined format, every app has its own little format, some might even look the same, but behave differently. So its impossible to build a editor that handles them all properly.
The config file (which really isn't meant to be user editable) gets more complex, the process editing it however become much easier, since a proper editor doesn't just show "name = value", but can also show the documentation, possible values, validate your input and all that stuff. Automating stuff also becomes a "cfgtool --set name value thing and not a horror of grep/sed/ed hacks.
We definitively shouldn't bury the command line, but on the other side we shouldn't just let it stay the way it currently is forever. Currently there is a huge gap between the command line and the GUI, the most you can do in terms of interaction between the two might be copy&paste of a file name, but thats basically it. What I would like to see is some more monad/msh or XMLTerm'ish stuff where you don't just deal with lines of text, but have proper objects that you can move around between command line and other applications freely. It might also nice to have more elaborate output then just text, i.e. thumbnails and stuff. And most importantly the GUI simply should work better together with the command line, for every thing that I can do with the GUI, I want a way to access that with the command line and visa verse.
KDE and Gnome do a lot of things for usability, but some usability quirks have their root deep down in the kernel (awkward handling of CD/DVD, lack of stable ABI for kernel modules, userspace-fs could need some additions, kernel features that need a kernel recompile instead of just a module, etc.) or Xorg (hot-pluging of input devices isn't supported, no real graphical configuration tool, way to easy to get a non working configurations, etc.) and can't be fixed elsewhere no matter how much wrapper magic you throw at them. Lack of a real widespread distribution portable package format would be another major issue.
### Again, the impression I get from the article is that the new draft is less restrictive than the current law, no?
No, its only less restrictive then what the crazy politicians wants, but its more restrictive then the current law, since it tries to also ban "violence dominated" games instead of just "violence glorifying" onces (what exactly those terms mean in terms of games I have no idea).
### Anyway, the Heise article states that the current draft of the law will only forbid advertising and selling to children. Is that not true?
That might be true, I haven't actually looked at the current draft. The point however is that we are *already* banning games. We have mandatory age ratings and even stricter bans (no advertisement, no public sales). All the child protection is *already* in place. So any change isn't adding any child protection at all, its just meant to go one step closer to completly outlawing anything that some politicians might not like, even if it already has a mandatory 'age 18' today.
### Does it say anything about banning the sale or development of the games completely?
No, but thats the plan of some politicians and has been for quite a while.
### Do you have any examples of games rated as "glorifying violence" by the PBjM?
I think one of the trigger events that causes this mess was that CounterStrike got a 'age 16' rating instead of getting banned after a school shooting (which didn't have anything to do with CounterStrike and everything with legal real world weapons training, but thats a different story) like some politicians wanted. Of course the politicians never had a clue about the game and still don't have, while the rating organizations hat a very in depth look at the game and the surrounding culture. So politicians just want to force the organizations to apply stricter measures against their will.
### or advertising targeted at children.
Yep, but as mentioned advertising has a *very* broad definition, aka. every mentioning of the game in a positive context. So they not only ban the game, but also ban any talk about it in public gaming press. I am all for mandatory rating and stopping sales to minors, but stopping the press from reporting about a game is flat out censorship.
The thing is that "violence glorifying" games are already banned. Both BPjM and USK are there and doing exactly that and have been doing so for quite some years, in the case of the BPjM decades. This new draft seems try to ban "violence dominated" games as well (whatever that would be, since it kind of applies to almost all games), which basically means that some politicians, who have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, want to overrule the decisions made by both the BPjM and the USK on what games are appropriate for what age. This is really doing nothing to protect the children, they already are perfectly fine protected by the current rules. This is just crazy politicians that want to ban games they don't understand (i.e. CounterStrike is for them the game where you shot schoolgirls and they can't figure out why that got an 'age 16' rating).
The censoring is done by the publishers/developers themselves not some government organization, if stuff looks stupid, they simply did a bad job. Censorship done right can actually be pretty cool at times, the robots in Prototector are for example way cooler then the simple Rambo look-a-likes in Contra.
Slashdot Mirror
### I literally have not had to deal this supposedly tricky whitespace in years.
You don't do copy paste? You never insert a "if foo:" above a already existing piece of code? As soon as you have to move a already existing piece of code a block deeper the lack of block markers gets a huge annoyance, since its just as easy to mess up.
Beside, you are doing the classic pro-whitespace mistake, the arguments always go like this:
Q: Why whitespace?
A: So people are forced to indent properly and make pretty code.
Q: But whitespace is a pain, causes trouble, etc.?
A: Use a proper editor!
Q: But if I use a proper editor it will indent my code automatically anyway, I don't need the language to force me!
A: Hm..
When you are already using something else like Notepad, it simply doesn't make sense to have whitespace blocks. If everybody would use Notepad I could see a reason behind it, but people just don't.
How can one properly dual license and still comply with #2? If I just slap GPL and BSDL into a file it looks horribly broken, since BSDL grands you some freedoms that the GPL doesn't and different licenses might end up applying to different portions of the code. Have I mark each line with a license? What if I modify a BSDL licensed line of code and insert my own one under GPL?
### The problem here is that Theo and others seem to not understand that their license is one that allows relicensing.
Where does the BSDL give you the right to relicense? I know that BSDL code is considered by many to be free to take and use however they want, but that is not what the license actually says or at least not how I understand it. To quote from the license:
| Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
That sounds to me very much like BSDL code is meant to stay under BSDL, you are allowed to change it, but not to change the license itself.
Now, my understanding of the BSDL might be wrong, but I don't see how one can properly mix the GPL with the BSDL, when both code ends up in the same file.
### I've never understood the "whitespace" thing... don't you guys indent your code anyway????
I don't indent code, my editor indents code according to the block markers. If a language doesn't provide block markers, the editor can no longer do the task and its up to me, annoying and error prone.
### Why do those people love repeat themselves so much?
Its not repetition, it is the structure of the code. The indention is the thing that serves no purpose and should be completly removed and left to the editor (just like other 'prettifying' such as syntax highlighting). Python does it the wrong way around, it takes the look of the code and interprets it as structure. Look however is very easily destroyed, a simple copy&paste destroys Python code and if you don't have a good editor, it is extremely hard to recover the code after such an operation and even with a good editor its still extremely easy to let an error slip in. Refactoring a pretty tiny piece of Python code belongs to the worst coding experiences I ever had, since what would have taken minutes in a block language with block markers, resulted in hours of try&error in Python.
To make a long story short: Keeping a single '{' and a '}' in the right place is trivial, keeping hundreds of ' ' in the right space and at the right length can get insanely hard, if you miss even a single one of them your code breaks, sometimes without even given any kind of obvious error (beside other reasons, thanks to brain-dead automatic variable declaration on assignment, a problem sadly shared by way to many other scripting languages).
### That if you want to do that you should be using another tool because the GIMP is not a paint/drawing program.
Which is of course complete bullshit. GIMP is doing a great job to for drawing images, much better then any free software alternative, it just is lacking in a few areas for absolutely no good reason, creating doing proper line-, circle-, rect-drawing tools isn't exactly a very hard thing, even MSPaint has them.
### HIGs differ on different platforms
Yep, and when the application can't adopt, its a problem of the app.
### not gimp, which adopts the suggested SDI convention for the platform
Gimp doesn't adopt, it simply does its own thing, which seems to be CSDI, which the Gnome HID of course also does not recommend and also Gimp isn't a Gnome up to begin with, to this day it doesn't use a single gnome lib.
### You still didn't specify your OS
Because its completly irrelevant, the problem is within the Gimp (or well, GTKs lack for MDI support), not the OS.
### Multiple windows do have uses
Yes, but they are also extremely annoying for *simple* tasks, trying to find dialog boxes that hide behind images windows simply isn't fun, a single-window mode (a real one, not Xnest hacks) would fix that instantly. This complaint has been around since as long as the Gimp, its really nothing new.
### Not so in GIMP, maybe it's there somewhere hidden, but after years of usage I still haven't found it.
In Gimp you draw shapes by doing a selection and then either filling or Edit->Stroke'in it. And you draw lines by holding shift while using the pen or other tools.
The trouble is that even with this knowledge you still can't draw proper lines and proper circles, lines will get messed up as soon as you start to use transparency, since then the extra click required to position the starting point draws to the image and with circles you simply get a mess that isn't a proper Breshalm circle, since there is to much information loss when stroking a selection.
When it comes to simple shape drawing basically every program does better then Gimp, everything from MSPaint to a early copy of DeluxPaint (and nope, boolean operations don't replace proper drawing algorithms).
Thats a ugly workaround, not a solution.
The main issue with Gimp is simply that you can't have one window for everything, you always need half a dozens of windows, even if you are just editing a single image, that simply annoys. Dockable dialogs helped to limit the problem, but you are still left with at least three floating windows.
GTK and Gimp can do this for a long long time, you have to unlock it in the Gimp preferences (Interface->Use dynamic keyboard shortcuts), but once done you simply hover over a menu item, press the combo you like to assign to it and you are done with binding that item to the given shortcut, by far the easiest way to configure keyboard bindings I have ever seen anywhere.
Switching to QT would be plain stupid. What however would be nice is the decoupling of the image manipulation functionality from the UI, so that not only different UIs would be easily doable, but most important of all, a no-UI mode would be possible. Currently is quite a a PITA to use Gimp on the command line, it somewhat works, but is far from being as easy to use at it should be and also not all of Gimps functions are accessible via scripting.
And before somebody mentions ImageMagick, yep, that works, but it doesn't provide the same filters as Gimp, so its often very complicated or impossible to automate a task that you just performed in Gimp manually.
### With this in mind, do you really imagine that AO rated games will be heralded for thier "clever design" and "stunning game play"?
Last time I looked that is exactly what happened with Fahrenheit and GTA:SA.
Companies want to deliver a product, often in time, if they would have gone the "Open Source Way", it would have taken months or even years till their Xorg fix made it out to each and every distro and of course getting all the user to install such a fix would take an eternity again. Not very practical if you want to sell a product.
### I don't see any problem at all with requiring that the ESRB give details about what it objects to in games to those that request it.
I don't see one either, but this should be limited to *after* the game is being released, not before.
How to write the config settings themselves down is really a secondary issue, the important part is to have all the documentation, default values, types and stuff in a machine readable form (i.e. not just man-page or a comment in the config file itself) so that you can validate the config files after or even while editing. GConf already does that (/etc/gconf/schemas/) so its an already partly solved problem, except that there still a lot of tools around that have their own at hoc format, which is kind of part of the crux, Gnome and KDE do their GUI stuff, but a lot of their improvements have a hard time to get used by non-GUI apps that could still profit from them.
The main issue with 'flat text config' is simply that it isn't a well defined format, every app has its own little format, some might even look the same, but behave differently. So its impossible to build a editor that handles them all properly.
The config file (which really isn't meant to be user editable) gets more complex, the process editing it however become much easier, since a proper editor doesn't just show "name = value", but can also show the documentation, possible values, validate your input and all that stuff. Automating stuff also becomes a "cfgtool --set name value thing and not a horror of grep/sed/ed hacks.
We definitively shouldn't bury the command line, but on the other side we shouldn't just let it stay the way it currently is forever. Currently there is a huge gap between the command line and the GUI, the most you can do in terms of interaction between the two might be copy&paste of a file name, but thats basically it. What I would like to see is some more monad/msh or XMLTerm'ish stuff where you don't just deal with lines of text, but have proper objects that you can move around between command line and other applications freely. It might also nice to have more elaborate output then just text, i.e. thumbnails and stuff. And most importantly the GUI simply should work better together with the command line, for every thing that I can do with the GUI, I want a way to access that with the command line and visa verse.
KDE and Gnome do a lot of things for usability, but some usability quirks have their root deep down in the kernel (awkward handling of CD/DVD, lack of stable ABI for kernel modules, userspace-fs could need some additions, kernel features that need a kernel recompile instead of just a module, etc.) or Xorg (hot-pluging of input devices isn't supported, no real graphical configuration tool, way to easy to get a non working configurations, etc.) and can't be fixed elsewhere no matter how much wrapper magic you throw at them. Lack of a real widespread distribution portable package format would be another major issue.
### Again, the impression I get from the article is that the new draft is less restrictive than the current law, no?
No, its only less restrictive then what the crazy politicians wants, but its more restrictive then the current law, since it tries to also ban "violence dominated" games instead of just "violence glorifying" onces (what exactly those terms mean in terms of games I have no idea).
### Anyway, the Heise article states that the current draft of the law will only forbid advertising and selling to children. Is that not true?
That might be true, I haven't actually looked at the current draft. The point however is that we are *already* banning games. We have mandatory age ratings and even stricter bans (no advertisement, no public sales). All the child protection is *already* in place. So any change isn't adding any child protection at all, its just meant to go one step closer to completly outlawing anything that some politicians might not like, even if it already has a mandatory 'age 18' today.
### Does it say anything about banning the sale or development of the games completely?
No, but thats the plan of some politicians and has been for quite a while.
### Do you have any examples of games rated as "glorifying violence" by the PBjM?
Wikipedia has a nice list: Verbotenes oder indiziertes Medium
I think one of the trigger events that causes this mess was that CounterStrike got a 'age 16' rating instead of getting banned after a school shooting (which didn't have anything to do with CounterStrike and everything with legal real world weapons training, but thats a different story) like some politicians wanted. Of course the politicians never had a clue about the game and still don't have, while the rating organizations hat a very in depth look at the game and the surrounding culture. So politicians just want to force the organizations to apply stricter measures against their will.
### or advertising targeted at children.
Yep, but as mentioned advertising has a *very* broad definition, aka. every mentioning of the game in a positive context. So they not only ban the game, but also ban any talk about it in public gaming press. I am all for mandatory rating and stopping sales to minors, but stopping the press from reporting about a game is flat out censorship.
The thing is that "violence glorifying" games are already banned. Both BPjM and USK are there and doing exactly that and have been doing so for quite some years, in the case of the BPjM decades. This new draft seems try to ban "violence dominated" games as well (whatever that would be, since it kind of applies to almost all games), which basically means that some politicians, who have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, want to overrule the decisions made by both the BPjM and the USK on what games are appropriate for what age. This is really doing nothing to protect the children, they already are perfectly fine protected by the current rules. This is just crazy politicians that want to ban games they don't understand (i.e. CounterStrike is for them the game where you shot schoolgirls and they can't figure out why that got an 'age 16' rating).
The censoring is done by the publishers/developers themselves not some government organization, if stuff looks stupid, they simply did a bad job. Censorship done right can actually be pretty cool at times, the robots in Prototector are for example way cooler then the simple Rambo look-a-likes in Contra.