"What ever happened to parents kicking their kids out of the house to play ball outside?"
That means parents would actually have to be raising their kids. Shame on you for thinking that having a kid presumes a certain level of responsibility, because irresponsible parents couldn't possibly have anything to do with irresponsible children.
That said, children are individuals with minds of their own. Sometimes they are just unpredictable, scheming, and beyond control. Good parenting makes this type of child unusual, but it can still happen.
On a different note (responding to a different person's assumption), obesity is not caused by a sedentary lifestyle. Obesity is caused by eating too much in relation to a particular lifestyle. A sedentary lifestyle does cause a host of physical problems (muscle loss, join pain, etc), but obesity is, at best, tangential to lifestyle.
Exercise less, eat less, and you don't gain weight. Work out like a bandit, eat excessively, and you still become obese.
"There are already proof of concept viri that work on both linux and windows."
This has been covered ad-infinitum, and is a non-issue. If you can write to an executable file, you can potentially create a virus for the host system. This has always been a big problem for Microsoft based systems because such systems have no file protections. Anything on Microsoft systems can write to any executable file, hence viruses flourished this way.
Microsoft then must have decided that virus writers had to work too hard to destroy Windows based systems, because Microsoft then coupled automatically-executed scripting languages with all its major products.
Linux systems have files with both an owner and access rights. By default, all executables found on non-developer machines are owned by the administrator and are unwriteable by regular users. Hence the difficulty of Linux viruses propagating.
Adding to that, no one has been been brain damaged enough to create a Linux based email program that includes a scripting language that automatically executes attachments. If Microsoft -really- wanted to harm Linux, it would port all its products over to Linux. Nothing destroys security faster than Microsoft. Further yet, no one has been brain damaged enough to write a Linux based email program that sets the execution bit on a downloaded file.
All known supposed "proof of concept" viruses for Linux are nothing of the sort, since they don't work. No one has yet figured out how to make a virus propagate on a typical Linux system without the express permission of the administrator.
The best anyone has been able to do to Linux is to manually exploit buffer overflows in specific server software on specific sites. Linux users will still be safe from viruses for the foreseeable future. It will require ineptitude of Microsoftian proportions to change that.
"Most machines that are used for surfing the web are single user machines and having that users stuff trashed is the same as trashing the whole machine."
On Linux, this can be made mostly a non-issue. If a user's sole account is trashed, delete and recreate the account. Restore user data from backups, and pick up where you left off. The years spent accumulating system software, and general maintenance done on the system over the years, are not wasted.
In a complete Linux user account compromise, I can be back in order in a half hour since the system itself was not compromised. On Windows, it would be the beginning of weeks of hard work getting everything reinstalled, reconfigured, and back in order. This is because on Windows, a user compromise -is- a total system compromise.
Of course, if a Linux user doesn't keep his home directory backed up, he's still screwed. But Linux makes the backup and restore easy.
"Of course I might very well be overlooking something here...."
You are. SUN will not release a fully featured Solaris under anything compatible with any FOSS license, keeping Solaris with any meaningful functions completely proprietary. It will be along the same lines as Microsoft selling a stripped down XP, which does almost nothing, to try to stop the adoption of Linux in poor countries. A few people will but into it, but it will be mostly a flop.
I certainly won't support the godfather of the DMCA (Fanning) in any of his business ventures. His last business venture accelerated the loss of freedoms in America that is rivaled only by the corporate patent land grab.
"If Outlook, Mozilla Mail, and other email clients used encrypted contact lists, that would prevent a lot these worms from propagating."
The email program itself would need to decrypt the list in order to use it. Any 3rd party program which requested email services from the email client (think COM) would need to have an exposed API to call in order to request that service. A virus would only have to call that API to decrypt the list.
If the application is either multi-threaded, or uses multiple processes, then it automatically supports SMP.
On Linux, apps don't have to be specially aware of multiple processors. Linux apps are SMP aware merely by being multi-threaded or multi-processed. Linux will automatically spread them around the processors.
Come back and give us your opinion on this software when your opinion means something: after you've used the software, found it lacking on a professional level, and have something concrete to say about it.
"It's only pro-level when it does A) things better thanPro Tools B) things better than Logic C) things cheaper than both."
By your own (bad) logic, only one, at most, of the tools you mentioned can be considered "professional", as only one can be better than the other, and only one can be cheaper than the other. Moreso, you're saying that if they are both of equal quality and price, then neither is professional grade.
But the same tool doesn't necessarily have to be both better and cheaper. So by your own odd definition, neither of these tools is necessarily professional grade.
"If it works, you are going to have to *really* try to convince me that I should change my mind."
How about actually getting down off your high horse and giving it a try to see if it does what you need? Wow, what a novel f*****g concept. Don't be such an arrogant ass.
If you'd rather spend a ton of money on something that doesn't get you anything more than similar FOSS software, then be my guest. If, after using it, it really stinks compared to the high-dollar stuff, then so be it. At least then there is a foundation for a rational objection.
But don't expect anyone to take you seriously when you've giving an opinion out of your ass on a piece of software that you've never used.
If you drive a bicycle 50 miles to work, one way, and your bicycle requires a complete rebuild three times in each direction, I feel sorry for you.
If someone gives you a free sportscar that fixes itself and gets 100 miles to the gallon, and is always parked at your front door, and you take extra effort to walk around it to find your broken bicycle in the storage shed, and you insist on ignoring the sportscar and using the bicycle just because you're used to it, then you I feel sorry for you because you are dumb.
"Google's growth worries me, the way they seek to be the worlds largest advertising company worries me."
You don't have to worry unless Google starts telling advertisers that they are forbidden from advertising anywhere else if they want their ads to appear on Google.
You don't have to worry unless Google buys the other search engines and then shuts them down.
You don't have to worry unless, after shutting down the other search engines, Google Search only allows you to get Internet search results by using Google Firerodent which you have to buy for 10 times its normal market value.
You don't have to worry unless Google Search, after illegally maintaining its position as the only widely used search engine, keeps changing its data exchange formats to keep anyone else from operating with its services.
Until these things start happening, your concern is misplaced.
I've had DirecWay for 2 years, and this does not satisfy his criteria:
1) No random disconnects. DirecWay fails here. My DW-6000 spontaneously loses its signal even in perfect weather. It happens about 3 times over the course of every couple months.
2) No hours and hours of downtime. DirecWay fails here. When I lose the signal those ~3 times every two monts, it usually lasts about 4-5 hours.
3) Someone to fix the problem. DirecWay is hit and miss here. I used to call tech support. The very first time I did this, they refused to fix their network when I told them that I am running Linux. On all subsequent calls, I pretended to be running Windows. They then fixed their network problems on those 1% of occassions that the Indian on the phone wasn't 100% clueless. The other 99% of the time I just had to wait it out. Now I don't call tech support, but just wait it out. The results are identical.
My connection most recently died five weeks ago. After spending three and a half hours on the phone with "advanced" tech support and not getting the problem resolved, DirecWay sent out an installer twice (I'm still covered by warranty) to fix the problem.
The first visit was two and a half weeks after I reported the outage. He went to the roof, attached a device called Bird Dog to the dish, and said the satellite wasn't transmitting a signal. He left without fixing the problem.
The second visit was a week and a half after that. He came to the house, said the LMB was bad, talked with DirecWay tech support for an hour, and left without fixing the problem. He tried to collect a service fee from me (for not fixing the problem!) because his office said this wasn't covered by warranty. I spent an hour on the phone with DirecWay (from work) getting them to acknowledge that it was covered by warranty.
Now, five weeks after the problem started, I am still without Internet access. DirecWay refuses to transfer the warranty work to a local installer (the other installer is several counties away) without voiding my warranty and making me bear all the costs.
Since I live way out in the country, I have zero other options for broadband. If you have any other options, take them. DirecWay is a last resort, and then only if you have a high threshold for pain.
I'm at a loss as to how your post got modded Insightful, much less all the way to +5.
"Just look at the failure of Lokigames to make a profit..."
Loki would probably have done okay if its founder (Scott Draeker) and his wife hadn't been secretly stealing all the money for personal use.
"...not to mention id's big profile attempt to push Linux by doing a simultaneous Linux/Mac/Windows release of Quake III - sales of Linux Quake III were abysmal."
Quake 3 for Linux was released long after the Windows version. It's likely that most Linux gamers, who typically dual-boot Windows, couldn't wait for the Linux client and bought the Windows version. It's entirely possible that a simultaneous release wouldn't actually have changed the numbers much, but we just don't know because a simultaneous release wasn't done by I.D.
Epic had a great chance to more accurately measure the market for 1st rate Linux games with UT2004, since it -was- simultaneously released for Windows and Linux (for the first time ever), but the chance was missed by not (for what seems like also the first time in history) including a registration card.
My software purchasing decisions are simple:
1) Does a free version exist that works well enough? If so, I won't buy a commercial counterpart. Otherwise continue.
2) Do I consider it interesting enough to write myself, and if so can I get something useful in a reasonable time? If so, I won't buy a commercial counterpart. Otherwise continue.
So far I've always been able to stop at this point, as my needs have been (or will be) fulfilled. Except for high quality games. For that, the decision making process is very simple: does it look fun, and does it run on Linux. Of both of these are yes, then I'll buy it.
3) Does it run on Linux? If not, then I won't buy it and will revisit 1 and/or 2 as appropriate. Otherwise continue.
4) Will I be locked into the vendor, or will my data be difficult to move to another product and my data collection is important enough to want to keep? If either of these is true, I won't buy or use the product and will revisit 1 and/or 2 as appropriate. Otherwise continue.
5) Will the cost of the software and maintenance be more than the cost of doing it by hand or by adapting some other software, which I already have, for the same use? If yes, then I won't buy the software. Otherwise continue.
6) Do I really need it or want it badly enough for other reasons? If no, then I won't buy it.
If I can make it this far in the decision making process, then I'll buy it. So far games and Word Perfect (back in '99 IIRC) have been the only things to satisfy all these criteria. For everything else, Free software has been satisfactory.
This is where your, "but when it comes down to actually buying all of they stuff that they claim to want for Linux, they don't vote with their dollars" falls apart. Most everything I want and need for Linux already exists in Free Software form at a level that meets my needs directly or does so closely enough that the difference doesn't matter.
"I'd be interested to hear why people think Pascal never caught on like C or Java did?"
There were a number of things in my case.
1) The Pascal compiler didn't work, while the C compiler did. My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer. I had access to two compilers: one for Pascal and one for C. I couldn't get the Pascal compiler to work regardless of the effort I expended. The C compiler worked right the first time. At this stage, I had no bias towards either language. It was solely a practical matter of which was easier for me to get working easily.
2) Pascal's rigid constructs were unappealing, while C was freeform. Whether true or false, my understanding of Pascal's structure was that certain things had to be in precise places (similar to COBOL), or it wouldn't work. This struck me as extremely primitive, while C's freeform parser seemed more elegant and friendly.
3) Things like: IF...statements...ENDIF have always bugged me for reasons I can't put my finger on, especially for one-line statements. C's flexible structure was more appealing.
4) Free C documentation in the 80s was plentiful, while Pascal documentation was scarce. The path of least resistance led to C.
I ran the script on my local Apache on a stock Mandrake 9.1.
Konqueror 3.1 crashes every time. Mozilla 1.3 crashes after a few refreshes.
On Windows XP (I don't have Firefox on Linux yet), Firefox 0.9.2 ran for about 10 minutes, stalling for a few seconds here and there, before freezing and eventually dying.
I.E. wouldn't run unattended, instead requiring me to constantly tell it I didn't want to debug the errors, so I couldn't test it as thoroughly.
"If you are looking for something more advanced, have a look at OGRE."
Irrlicht as at least one advantage: what it does just works. The same can't be said for OGRE.
This isn't a commentary on the relative power of the two engines. For the sake of argument, I will stipulate that OGRE is light years more advanced than Irrlicht.
I downloaded Irrlicht and ran the technology demo. It just worked and gave me a good benchmark of what it could do. It's library was precompiled for Linux, so I didn't have to bother with that step just to run the technology demo.
As a 3D neophyte (my biggest accomplishment to date is writing a highly simplistic and basic 3D software renderer for very simple geometric objects), this was impressive. It was a relatively small download, too.
I was able to compile the other examples with a simple make in each directory. It was very easy, something the developer(s) did very well.
I wanted to run the OGRE technology demo, but there was no Linux precompiled binary. Not that big a deal, as I've been developing on Linux since the mid 90's. I grabbed the source and ran "./configure", which terminated by telling me to install DevIL (an imaging library).
So I run off to the DevIL website, and download it. Running its configure script bombs saying that it has a bad interpreter (which every other configure script in the known universe seems to handle just fine).
Then I read through all of its dependencies, got frustrated (this is why I left Slackware all those years ago) and decided that I have more important things to do than fight an endless battle of library hell.
I had tried Crystal Space a couple months ago and ran into similar issues.
Irrlicht is simple to get and is good enough for a wide variety of 3D applications. It will probably improve faster than I do, so it will likely scale to everything I need to do.
"Before that he did poorly in the Microsoft federal monopoly case."
Actually, Boies enjoyed a slam-dunk victory against Microsoft in Microsoft's antitrust case. He won nearly every single argument he made. It was the judge hearing the case, who found Microsoft guilty on most counts, that bungled the case and turned the Boies victory into a resounding loss.
Microsoft lost every legal battle, but won the war on a technicality.
"In every history of Linux I've read including The Cathedral and the Bazaar it's been explained to me that Linux came out of Unix."
That is not what "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" says. It says (paraphrasing of course) that Linux was modeled after the ideas that came from Unix, not that Linux code sprung from Unix code.
Slashdot Mirror
"What ever happened to parents kicking their kids out of the house to play ball outside?"
That means parents would actually have to be raising their kids. Shame on you for thinking that having a kid presumes a certain level of responsibility, because irresponsible parents couldn't possibly have anything to do with irresponsible children.
That said, children are individuals with minds of their own. Sometimes they are just unpredictable, scheming, and beyond control. Good parenting makes this type of child unusual, but it can still happen.
On a different note (responding to a different person's assumption), obesity is not caused by a sedentary lifestyle. Obesity is caused by eating too much in relation to a particular lifestyle. A sedentary lifestyle does cause a host of physical problems (muscle loss, join pain, etc), but obesity is, at best, tangential to lifestyle.
Exercise less, eat less, and you don't gain weight. Work out like a bandit, eat excessively, and you still become obese.
"There are already proof of concept viri that work on both linux and windows."
This has been covered ad-infinitum, and is a non-issue. If you can write to an executable file, you can potentially create a virus for the host system. This has always been a big problem for Microsoft based systems because such systems have no file protections. Anything on Microsoft systems can write to any executable file, hence viruses flourished this way.
Microsoft then must have decided that virus writers had to work too hard to destroy Windows based systems, because Microsoft then coupled automatically-executed scripting languages with all its major products.
Linux systems have files with both an owner and access rights. By default, all executables found on non-developer machines are owned by the administrator and are unwriteable by regular users. Hence the difficulty of Linux viruses propagating.
Adding to that, no one has been been brain damaged enough to create a Linux based email program that includes a scripting language that automatically executes attachments. If Microsoft -really- wanted to harm Linux, it would port all its products over to Linux. Nothing destroys security faster than Microsoft. Further yet, no one has been brain damaged enough to write a Linux based email program that sets the execution bit on a downloaded file.
All known supposed "proof of concept" viruses for Linux are nothing of the sort, since they don't work. No one has yet figured out how to make a virus propagate on a typical Linux system without the express permission of the administrator.
The best anyone has been able to do to Linux is to manually exploit buffer overflows in specific server software on specific sites. Linux users will still be safe from viruses for the foreseeable future. It will require ineptitude of Microsoftian proportions to change that.
"Most machines that are used for surfing the web are single user machines and having that users stuff trashed is the same as trashing the whole machine."
On Linux, this can be made mostly a non-issue. If a user's sole account is trashed, delete and recreate the account. Restore user data from backups, and pick up where you left off. The years spent accumulating system software, and general maintenance done on the system over the years, are not wasted.
In a complete Linux user account compromise, I can be back in order in a half hour since the system itself was not compromised. On Windows, it would be the beginning of weeks of hard work getting everything reinstalled, reconfigured, and back in order. This is because on Windows, a user compromise -is- a total system compromise.
Of course, if a Linux user doesn't keep his home directory backed up, he's still screwed. But Linux makes the backup and restore easy.
"Of course I might very well be overlooking something here...."
You are. SUN will not release a fully featured Solaris under anything compatible with any FOSS license, keeping Solaris with any meaningful functions completely proprietary. It will be along the same lines as Microsoft selling a stripped down XP, which does almost nothing, to try to stop the adoption of Linux in poor countries. A few people will but into it, but it will be mostly a flop.
I certainly won't support the godfather of the DMCA (Fanning) in any of his business ventures. His last business venture accelerated the loss of freedoms in America that is rivaled only by the corporate patent land grab.
"If Outlook, Mozilla Mail, and other email clients used encrypted contact lists, that would prevent a lot these worms from propagating."
The email program itself would need to decrypt the list in order to use it. Any 3rd party program which requested email services from the email client (think COM) would need to have an exposed API to call in order to request that service. A virus would only have to call that API to decrypt the list.
I read exactly what you said. Let me summarize:
1) I have never used this software.
2) My opinion is that this software cannot be called professional grade because of some nebulous preconceptions.
You're right that I shouldn't have flown off the handle, and I apologize for that, but statements like that push all the wrong buttons with me.
If the application is either multi-threaded, or uses multiple processes, then it automatically supports SMP.
On Linux, apps don't have to be specially aware of multiple processors. Linux apps are SMP aware merely by being multi-threaded or multi-processed. Linux will automatically spread them around the processors.
"***I have not used this software***"
Come back and give us your opinion on this software when your opinion means something: after you've used the software, found it lacking on a professional level, and have something concrete to say about it.
"It's only pro-level when it does A) things better thanPro Tools B) things better than Logic C) things cheaper than both."
By your own (bad) logic, only one, at most, of the tools you mentioned can be considered "professional", as only one can be better than the other, and only one can be cheaper than the other. Moreso, you're saying that if they are both of equal quality and price, then neither is professional grade.
But the same tool doesn't necessarily have to be both better and cheaper. So by your own odd definition, neither of these tools is necessarily professional grade.
"If it works, you are going to have to *really* try to convince me that I should change my mind."
How about actually getting down off your high horse and giving it a try to see if it does what you need? Wow, what a novel f*****g concept. Don't be such an arrogant ass.
If you'd rather spend a ton of money on something that doesn't get you anything more than similar FOSS software, then be my guest. If, after using it, it really stinks compared to the high-dollar stuff, then so be it. At least then there is a foundation for a rational objection.
But don't expect anyone to take you seriously when you've giving an opinion out of your ass on a piece of software that you've never used.
If you drive a bicycle 50 miles to work, one way, and your bicycle requires a complete rebuild three times in each direction, I feel sorry for you.
If someone gives you a free sportscar that fixes itself and gets 100 miles to the gallon, and is always parked at your front door, and you take extra effort to walk around it to find your broken bicycle in the storage shed, and you insist on ignoring the sportscar and using the bicycle just because you're used to it, then you I feel sorry for you because you are dumb.
*cough* Ramen *cough*
Which required the user to save the file, set the execute attributes, then explicitly run it.... Yeah, that was a really bad problem.... -rolls eyes-
One look at the faked passport will tell you this guy at 419eater is an amateur. Everyone knows that James Tiberius Kirk is from Iowa, not Maryland.
"Google's growth worries me, the way they seek to be the worlds largest advertising company worries me."
You don't have to worry unless Google starts telling advertisers that they are forbidden from advertising anywhere else if they want their ads to appear on Google.
You don't have to worry unless Google buys the other search engines and then shuts them down.
You don't have to worry unless, after shutting down the other search engines, Google Search only allows you to get Internet search results by using Google Firerodent which you have to buy for 10 times its normal market value.
You don't have to worry unless Google Search, after illegally maintaining its position as the only widely used search engine, keeps changing its data exchange formats to keep anyone else from operating with its services.
Until these things start happening, your concern is misplaced.
"How about satellite?"
I've had DirecWay for 2 years, and this does not satisfy his criteria:
1) No random disconnects. DirecWay fails here. My DW-6000 spontaneously loses its signal even in perfect weather. It happens about 3 times over the course of every couple months.
2) No hours and hours of downtime. DirecWay fails here. When I lose the signal those ~3 times every two monts, it usually lasts about 4-5 hours.
3) Someone to fix the problem. DirecWay is hit and miss here. I used to call tech support. The very first time I did this, they refused to fix their network when I told them that I am running Linux. On all subsequent calls, I pretended to be running Windows. They then fixed their network problems on those 1% of occassions that the Indian on the phone wasn't 100% clueless. The other 99% of the time I just had to wait it out. Now I don't call tech support, but just wait it out. The results are identical.
My connection most recently died five weeks ago. After spending three and a half hours on the phone with "advanced" tech support and not getting the problem resolved, DirecWay sent out an installer twice (I'm still covered by warranty) to fix the problem.
The first visit was two and a half weeks after I reported the outage. He went to the roof, attached a device called Bird Dog to the dish, and said the satellite wasn't transmitting a signal. He left without fixing the problem.
The second visit was a week and a half after that. He came to the house, said the LMB was bad, talked with DirecWay tech support for an hour, and left without fixing the problem. He tried to collect a service fee from me (for not fixing the problem!) because his office said this wasn't covered by warranty. I spent an hour on the phone with DirecWay (from work) getting them to acknowledge that it was covered by warranty.
Now, five weeks after the problem started, I am still without Internet access. DirecWay refuses to transfer the warranty work to a local installer (the other installer is several counties away) without voiding my warranty and making me bear all the costs.
Since I live way out in the country, I have zero other options for broadband. If you have any other options, take them. DirecWay is a last resort, and then only if you have a high threshold for pain.
"Sorry, but endif is from visual basic and is not in pascal. Pascal has begin and end"
It's the same thing.
I'm at a loss as to how your post got modded Insightful, much less all the way to +5.
"Just look at the failure of Lokigames to make a profit..."
Loki would probably have done okay if its founder (Scott Draeker) and his wife hadn't been secretly stealing all the money for personal use.
"...not to mention id's big profile attempt to push Linux by doing a simultaneous Linux/Mac/Windows release of Quake III - sales of Linux Quake III were abysmal."
Quake 3 for Linux was released long after the Windows version. It's likely that most Linux gamers, who typically dual-boot Windows, couldn't wait for the Linux client and bought the Windows version. It's entirely possible that a simultaneous release wouldn't actually have changed the numbers much, but we just don't know because a simultaneous release wasn't done by I.D.
Epic had a great chance to more accurately measure the market for 1st rate Linux games with UT2004, since it -was- simultaneously released for Windows and Linux (for the first time ever), but the chance was missed by not (for what seems like also the first time in history) including a registration card.
My software purchasing decisions are simple:
1) Does a free version exist that works well enough? If so, I won't buy a commercial counterpart. Otherwise continue.
2) Do I consider it interesting enough to write myself, and if so can I get something useful in a reasonable time? If so, I won't buy a commercial counterpart. Otherwise continue.
So far I've always been able to stop at this point, as my needs have been (or will be) fulfilled. Except for high quality games. For that, the decision making process is very simple: does it look fun, and does it run on Linux. Of both of these are yes, then I'll buy it.
3) Does it run on Linux? If not, then I won't buy it and will revisit 1 and/or 2 as appropriate. Otherwise continue.
4) Will I be locked into the vendor, or will my data be difficult to move to another product and my data collection is important enough to want to keep? If either of these is true, I won't buy or use the product and will revisit 1 and/or 2 as appropriate. Otherwise continue.
5) Will the cost of the software and maintenance be more than the cost of doing it by hand or by adapting some other software, which I already have, for the same use? If yes, then I won't buy the software. Otherwise continue.
6) Do I really need it or want it badly enough for other reasons? If no, then I won't buy it.
If I can make it this far in the decision making process, then I'll buy it. So far games and Word Perfect (back in '99 IIRC) have been the only things to satisfy all these criteria. For everything else, Free software has been satisfactory.
This is where your, "but when it comes down to actually buying all of they stuff that they claim to want for Linux, they don't vote with their dollars" falls apart. Most everything I want and need for Linux already exists in Free Software form at a level that meets my needs directly or does so closely enough that the difference doesn't matter.
"I'd be interested to hear why people think Pascal never caught on like C or Java did?"
There were a number of things in my case.
1) The Pascal compiler didn't work, while the C compiler did. My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer. I had access to two compilers: one for Pascal and one for C. I couldn't get the Pascal compiler to work regardless of the effort I expended. The C compiler worked right the first time. At this stage, I had no bias towards either language. It was solely a practical matter of which was easier for me to get working easily.
2) Pascal's rigid constructs were unappealing, while C was freeform. Whether true or false, my understanding of Pascal's structure was that certain things had to be in precise places (similar to COBOL), or it wouldn't work. This struck me as extremely primitive, while C's freeform parser seemed more elegant and friendly.
3) Things like: IF...statements...ENDIF have always bugged me for reasons I can't put my finger on, especially for one-line statements. C's flexible structure was more appealing.
4) Free C documentation in the 80s was plentiful, while Pascal documentation was scarce. The path of least resistance led to C.
I ran the script on my local Apache on a stock Mandrake 9.1.
Konqueror 3.1 crashes every time. Mozilla 1.3 crashes after a few refreshes.
On Windows XP (I don't have Firefox on Linux yet), Firefox 0.9.2 ran for about 10 minutes, stalling for a few seconds here and there, before freezing and eventually dying.
I.E. wouldn't run unattended, instead requiring me to constantly tell it I didn't want to debug the errors, so I couldn't test it as thoroughly.
"...which is much like conslutting for IT guys."
A conslut? Isn't that the new guy in prison?
"...if you forget to nullify references to objects you no longer use, the garbage collector obviously cannot reclaim that memory.."
That's the whole point of the garbage collector:
a = new Class1();
a = new Class2();
The Class1() object will be picked up by the garbage collector and deleted (assuming the garbage collector is not broken).
a = new Class1();
a = null;
a = new Class2();
This defeats the purpose of having a garbage collector.
"People's cat litter boxes smell? Use the correct litter box sand, please." ...or clean the box once in a while.
"Windows XP Starter edition can only run three applications at a time...."
And this is different from WIndows XP Professional...how?
"If you are looking for something more advanced, have a look at OGRE."
Irrlicht as at least one advantage: what it does just works. The same can't be said for OGRE.
This isn't a commentary on the relative power of the two engines. For the sake of argument, I will stipulate that OGRE is light years more advanced than Irrlicht.
I downloaded Irrlicht and ran the technology demo. It just worked and gave me a good benchmark of what it could do. It's library was precompiled for Linux, so I didn't have to bother with that step just to run the technology demo.
As a 3D neophyte (my biggest accomplishment to date is writing a highly simplistic and basic 3D software renderer for very simple geometric objects), this was impressive. It was a relatively small download, too.
I was able to compile the other examples with a simple make in each directory. It was very easy, something the developer(s) did very well.
I wanted to run the OGRE technology demo, but there was no Linux precompiled binary. Not that big a deal, as I've been developing on Linux since the mid 90's. I grabbed the source and ran "./configure", which terminated by telling me to install DevIL (an imaging library).
So I run off to the DevIL website, and download it. Running its configure script bombs saying that it has a bad interpreter (which every other configure script in the known universe seems to handle just fine).
Then I read through all of its dependencies, got frustrated (this is why I left Slackware all those years ago) and decided that I have more important things to do than fight an endless battle of library hell.
I had tried Crystal Space a couple months ago and ran into similar issues.
Irrlicht is simple to get and is good enough for a wide variety of 3D applications. It will probably improve faster than I do, so it will likely scale to everything I need to do.
"Before that he did poorly in the Microsoft federal monopoly case."
Actually, Boies enjoyed a slam-dunk victory against Microsoft in Microsoft's antitrust case. He won nearly every single argument he made. It was the judge hearing the case, who found Microsoft guilty on most counts, that bungled the case and turned the Boies victory into a resounding loss.
Microsoft lost every legal battle, but won the war on a technicality.
"In every history of Linux I've read including The Cathedral and the Bazaar it's been explained to me that Linux came out of Unix."
That is not what "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" says. It says (paraphrasing of course) that Linux was modeled after the ideas that came from Unix, not that Linux code sprung from Unix code.