Please, MERCY, stop putting pressure on the KDE developers so that they turn KDE into a Windoze kind of sh*tty UI, just in order to please the newbs. The problem now is that KDE is too much like Windows. I've been a KDE user since 1.x (and am typing this in KDE 3.3.0), and even I can admit that KDE suffers from largely the same UI problems that plague many Microsoft apps.
Specifically:
1) Lots of toolbars full of lots of cryptic, hard-to-decipher icons. It was the UI-disaster called MS Office that made this style of app popular. Most KDE apps copy this style. Konqueror is laid out like Internet Explorer (> 10 icons in toolbar), instead of like Firefox or Safari (~5 icons in the toolbar).
2) Ultra-long menus and context menus. It's Microsoft and Windows that popularized the 20-item context menu, which KDE faithfully copies.
3) Multiple places to configure functionality of application. KDE's settings menu copies this nicely, though it's not as bad as what Microsoft does with Visual Studio (which puts configuration both under the File menu and the Tools menu).
I know what he has said, but with regards to (1), I don't buy it. If he actually believed that Bush was reserved enough to get power from Congress to go to war in Iraq, then not use it, he's a dumbass. I don't believe he is a dumbass. Rather, I believe he voted for the war in Iraq to go along with public opinion, which was strongly in support of it. He also refused to say anything against the war during the primaries, considering Dean's and Clark's numerous comments about it.
I'm voting Kerry, but his position on the war is less than admirable.
I really like most of the libertarian party's platforms, but I've got three beefs:
1) Their economic perspective is a bit outmoded. Many libertarians want to get rid of things like anti-trust laws. Meanwhile, modern economists say that government regulation is required to counteract inherent deficiencies in the capitalistic model. Their beliefs about environmental regulation also ignore certain economic principles. To tell the truth, all three parties have problems in this area. The libertarians are pretty close, but they also seem so ideological that it'd be hard to move them further in the right direction. I see more promise in this area from fiscally conservative democrats.
2) To them, freedom is the first principle. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I don't think freedom is all it's cracked up to be. It should be valued very highly, of course, but it shouldn't override every other princple. This, of course, ties back to their problems with economics. Fundementally, government should take away just enough freedom ensure the preservation of rights. That's exactly what it does when it says you can't kill someone else. Well, I think our society has evolved to the point where food and shelter should be fundemental rights, and that letting someone starve is just as bad as shooting them in the head. We can afford it --- economic growth is exponental, while minimum required consumption is fixed. I'm willing to trade some economic prosperity to ensure that protection. Of course, social security and welfare are far bigger than necessary to ensure protection from starvation and exposure, although they haven't fixed those problems either.
3) They have no hope of ever getting elected. They seem content to push radical and unpopular views (probably out of fear of diluting their ideology), at the cost of never making a blip on the minds of people. The simple truth is, most voters will never even heard of mister Badnarik. Yes, this is the "throwing your vote away" argument, but in our system, a vote for Badnarik *is*, if not a wasted vote, at least an undesirable one. The probability of your candidate getting elected plays a role in his overall desireability. It has been proven time and time again that people are generally risk-averse: they will choose a less risky path for moderate gain, than take a large risk for large gain. The only case in which it makes sense for a given voter to vote third-party is if he considers each candidate in the first two parties to be equally undesireable (which means he takes little risk in voting for the third party). Of course, most people, unless their priorities are very narrow, don't consider Bush and Kerry to be equally undesirable.
Kerry does say he supports the war in Iraq. He did say he would have gone to Iraq anyway, just with international support. That doesn't change the fact that he supported what is ultimately an interventionist war against a country that was no threat to us.
With regards to #2, an uncaught out-of-bounds exception (resulting in a *controlled* applicaton crash) is a hell of a lot better than somebody inserting arbitrary code into your app. An app that crashes all the time because of out-of-bounds errors still sucks, but at least it isn't a security hole.
You're right about OpenWatcom --- the Linux port is not done yet. TenDRA's documentation is out of date --- it is actively developed on all supported platforms, the last release was about six months ago.
As for other compilers, there is: LCC, TinyC, Compaq C (only for Alpha), CodeWarrior, PGI CC, Comeau, IBM's XLC (only for PowerPC), and a number of others.
Why ever not? Do you really think that so many vendors would bother creating a compiler for a dead language? My point is that the relative number of C++ compilers to Fortran compilers has little to do with the activity levels of the language communities, but the relative difficulty of implementing C++ as compared to Fortran.
Intel C++, GCC, TenDRA, OpenWatcom, and Portland Group C++. Sure, only two of those are commercial, but is it news that Linux has less commercial software than some other OSs?
Borland's focus is their IDE, not their compiiler. They give their compiler away for free, if you check their website. BC++ isn't a very good compiler, but people put up with it for the nice development tools.
I don't think it does anything of the sort. First, there are more than two C++ compilers for Linux. There are over a dozen C compilers, and several C++ compilers (ICC, GCC, OpenWatcom, Tendra). Second, the reason for the dearth of C++ compilers is because C++ is an ugly language that is nearly impossible to implement correctly. Only one front-end, EDG's (which is used by ICC and Comeau) can claim to be fully conformat to ISO C++ 98, and only two others, GCC's and Visual C++'s, can claim to be mostly conformant.
You might be right about Fortran not being dead, but you can't reach that conclusion from the facts you presented.
How is this any different than what many people do --- which is to work at companies who are awarded contracts based on the lowest bidder. This is just on a smaller scale, that's all. Do you honestly believe that the planes you ride on were built in any other way than by the lowest bidder? We put our safety in the hands of the lowest bidder every day, and so far, it hasn't killed us.
Personally, I think this hospital is welcome to do as it pleases. If this ends up impacting safety, than people won't choose the hospital. If it doesn't, people will choose it for the cost savings. Give people a choice --- isn't that the Slashdot motto?
In a language without pointers, array-bounds checks impose a 1-3% performance hit. This is because advanced optimizers can usually remove most of the array-bounds checks. In practice, safe natively compiled languages (Ocaml, Lisp) can get within 10% - 20% the performance of C. 10% - 20% for the sake of security is a trade-off I'm willing to make. Obviously, the current C recommendation of "learn to write secure code in a language that encourages you not to" isn't working, because buffer-overflow vulnerabilities are rampant. It's time to throw that idea out the window.
1) The name is terrible. We've got/usr,/srv,/mnt,/lib, etc, and then you add/media? It's also not very descriptive --- is it removable media or multimedia?
2) What's wrong with using subdirectories under/mnt? It's been common practice for years, and in my opinion that supercedes the tradition of using/mnt as a temporary mount-point.
3) If/mnt is for temporary mounts, and/media is for removable media, where do things like windows drivers, ipods, and samba shares go? Is a remote samba share a piece of removable media? So you end up having subdirectories under/mnt anyway, for stuff like/mnt/win, which means you split your mountpoints into seperate directories. ie: Your windows driver is/mnt/win, but your cdrom is/media/cdrom.
For the record, I hate/srv too. The FHS people should stop making up new top-level directories --- the ones we have are just fine as it is.
Why else would they always put the link in the most useless part of the text? To keep me on my toes? The link does not point to 1,500 six-megapixel pics, so the link text should not be "1,500 six-megapixel pics." The link text should be the "rip the 5GB CF Card out of it."
That's not the point. My point is that the majority of Americans do not have a college education, so our poor K-12 education relative to other countries is more of a factor than our excellent university system.
This is an interesting post. How do you justify the statement "because we haven't been working very hard to keep it?"? I'm not saying hard work in terms of sheer amounts of numbers put in. I'm talking about working to distance ourselves from everyone else. Everyone works long hours. Those Indian coders probably work 60 hour weeks. Hell, I work 60-70 hour weeks. quite often. If all we do is work long hours doing the same thing they are doing, we shouldn't expect to keep ahead of them. We have to do things they can't do. I'm thinking about pushing to make work in cutting-edge fields like b iotechnology more profitable, so our workers can continue to spend their efforts somewhere Indian workers simply don't have the capital to.
We cannot keep ahead of everyone else if all we want to do is the same job we have been doing. You cannot freeze the clock, everyone else will keep surging ahead, and we have to change or be overtaken. Fortunately, economics is on our side. It takes money to make money, and we have more than anyone else. As long as China and India are third-world economies, they cannot afford to engage in the kind of capital-intensive businesses we can. They cannot afford to educate their workers as much as we can. If their economies do improve to the point where they can afford to do this, they will no longer be so cheap to hire, will they?
Those who oppose globalization are fooling themselves. We do not control the world. Somebody, somewhere, will figure out how to utilize the educated, but needy of capital populations of places like China and India. If it's not us, it will be somebody else, and they can use it to overtake us anyway.
That's a retarded argument. By your logic, an apples-to-apples comparison would be British programmers vs German programmers, with the Americans having to invent quantum mechanics first. After all, you can't have ICs without quantum mechanics. Of course, then it'd be the British programmers vs the German programmers, with the Germans having to invent Calculus first. After all, you can't have quantum mechanics without Calculus. Then it'd be British programmers vs Arab programmers, with the British having to invent Algebra first. Can't have Calculus without Algebra, right? And of course, then it'd be Arab programmers vs Indian programmers, with the Arabs having to invent numerals first, because you can't have Algebra without numerals!
So have your fair apples-to-apples comparison. Indian programmers will start at inventing ICs, and American programmeres can start at inventing numerals!
Right. Teenagers watch three hours of TV a day because they are worried about outsourcing. They get the lowest test-scores of any developed nation on international exams, because they are worried about Indians taking their job. Right you are...
Yes, Americans work their asses off. No doubt about that. But peasent farmers in Vietnam work their asses off too. Working your ass off does not make you rich. Working your ass of does not keep you the richest and most powerful country in the world. Working your ass off does not keep you ahead of the rest of the world, it just let's you keep pace. To keep ahead, you don't just have to produce, you have to innovate. You don't just have to perfect your existing industries, you have to invent new ones. If staying ahead of everyone else is something we want to do, we have to educate our people not to be good workers, but to be cutting-edge innovators.
I foo-bar'ed the statistics. My numbers (from the 2000 census) are exclusive. Ie: the 15% with a bacholers degree does not count those with higher than a bacholers degree. In all, 24% (as of 200) of Americans had a college education.
The actual report is here if you're interested.
In any case, that still means that that 3 out of 4 Americans do not have a college education, which means the criticisms about our K-12 system are valid.
wants to come over here to go to Harvard or Yale or MIT or Oxford or Stanford or even our high schools
Where is "here?" If "here" is the place that contains MIT, Harvard, and Yale, then "here" is the US. Whose high-schools are "our" high schools? "The West" is a concept, not a place. You can't say "here in the Western world." He was definitely referring to the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, MERCY, stop putting pressure on the KDE developers so that they turn KDE into a Windoze kind of sh*tty UI, just in order to please the newbs.
The problem now is that KDE is too much like Windows. I've been a KDE user since 1.x (and am typing this in KDE 3.3.0), and even I can admit that KDE suffers from largely the same UI problems that plague many Microsoft apps.
Specifically:
1) Lots of toolbars full of lots of cryptic, hard-to-decipher icons. It was the UI-disaster called MS Office that made this style of app popular. Most KDE apps copy this style. Konqueror is laid out like Internet Explorer (> 10 icons in toolbar), instead of like Firefox or Safari (~5 icons in the toolbar).
2) Ultra-long menus and context menus. It's Microsoft and Windows that popularized the 20-item context menu, which KDE faithfully copies.
3) Multiple places to configure functionality of application. KDE's settings menu copies this nicely, though it's not as bad as what Microsoft does with Visual Studio (which puts configuration both under the File menu and the Tools menu).
Xft uses XRender to draw fonts, and GTK+ uses Xft. But so does Qt, and it's hardware-accelerated in several drivers.
I know what he has said, but with regards to (1), I don't buy it. If he actually believed that Bush was reserved enough to get power from Congress to go to war in Iraq, then not use it, he's a dumbass. I don't believe he is a dumbass. Rather, I believe he voted for the war in Iraq to go along with public opinion, which was strongly in support of it. He also refused to say anything against the war during the primaries, considering Dean's and Clark's numerous comments about it.
I'm voting Kerry, but his position on the war is less than admirable.
I really like most of the libertarian party's platforms, but I've got three beefs:
1) Their economic perspective is a bit outmoded. Many libertarians want to get rid of things like anti-trust laws. Meanwhile, modern economists say that government regulation is required to counteract inherent deficiencies in the capitalistic model. Their beliefs about environmental regulation also ignore certain economic principles. To tell the truth, all three parties have problems in this area. The libertarians are pretty close, but they also seem so ideological that it'd be hard to move them further in the right direction. I see more promise in this area from fiscally conservative democrats.
2) To them, freedom is the first principle. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I don't think freedom is all it's cracked up to be. It should be valued very highly, of course, but it shouldn't override every other princple. This, of course, ties back to their problems with economics. Fundementally, government should take away just enough freedom ensure the preservation of rights. That's exactly what it does when it says you can't kill someone else. Well, I think our society has evolved to the point where food and shelter should be fundemental rights, and that letting someone starve is just as bad as shooting them in the head. We can afford it --- economic growth is exponental, while minimum required consumption is fixed. I'm willing to trade some economic prosperity to ensure that protection. Of course, social security and welfare are far bigger than necessary to ensure protection from starvation and exposure, although they haven't fixed those problems either.
3) They have no hope of ever getting elected. They seem content to push radical and unpopular views (probably out of fear of diluting their ideology), at the cost of never making a blip on the minds of people. The simple truth is, most voters will never even heard of mister Badnarik. Yes, this is the "throwing your vote away" argument, but in our system, a vote for Badnarik *is*, if not a wasted vote, at least an undesirable one. The probability of your candidate getting elected plays a role in his overall desireability. It has been proven time and time again that people are generally risk-averse: they will choose a less risky path for moderate gain, than take a large risk for large gain. The only case in which it makes sense for a given voter to vote third-party is if he considers each candidate in the first two parties to be equally undesireable (which means he takes little risk in voting for the third party). Of course, most people, unless their priorities are very narrow, don't consider Bush and Kerry to be equally undesirable.
Kerry does say he supports the war in Iraq. He did say he would have gone to Iraq anyway, just with international support. That doesn't change the fact that he supported what is ultimately an interventionist war against a country that was no threat to us.
Dude, it's called art. Sometimes, you just have to put form over function.
With regards to #2, an uncaught out-of-bounds exception (resulting in a *controlled* applicaton crash) is a hell of a lot better than somebody inserting arbitrary code into your app. An app that crashes all the time because of out-of-bounds errors still sucks, but at least it isn't a security hole.
You're right about OpenWatcom --- the Linux port is not done yet. TenDRA's documentation is out of date --- it is actively developed on all supported platforms, the last release was about six months ago.
As for other compilers, there is: LCC, TinyC, Compaq C (only for Alpha), CodeWarrior, PGI CC, Comeau, IBM's XLC (only for PowerPC), and a number of others.
Why ever not? Do you really think that so many vendors would bother creating a compiler for a dead language?
My point is that the relative number of C++ compilers to Fortran compilers has little to do with the activity levels of the language communities, but the relative difficulty of implementing C++ as compared to Fortran.
On Linux, you've got:
Intel C++, GCC, TenDRA, OpenWatcom, and Portland Group C++. Sure, only two of those are commercial, but is it news that Linux has less commercial software than some other OSs?
Borland's focus is their IDE, not their compiiler. They give their compiler away for free, if you check their website. BC++ isn't a very good compiler, but people put up with it for the nice development tools.
I don't think it does anything of the sort. First, there are more than two C++ compilers for Linux. There are over a dozen C compilers, and several C++ compilers (ICC, GCC, OpenWatcom, Tendra). Second, the reason for the dearth of C++ compilers is because C++ is an ugly language that is nearly impossible to implement correctly. Only one front-end, EDG's (which is used by ICC and Comeau) can claim to be fully conformat to ISO C++ 98, and only two others, GCC's and Visual C++'s, can claim to be mostly conformant.
You might be right about Fortran not being dead, but you can't reach that conclusion from the facts you presented.
How is this any different than what many people do --- which is to work at companies who are awarded contracts based on the lowest bidder. This is just on a smaller scale, that's all. Do you honestly believe that the planes you ride on were built in any other way than by the lowest bidder? We put our safety in the hands of the lowest bidder every day, and so far, it hasn't killed us.
Personally, I think this hospital is welcome to do as it pleases. If this ends up impacting safety, than people won't choose the hospital. If it doesn't, people will choose it for the cost savings. Give people a choice --- isn't that the Slashdot motto?
In a language without pointers, array-bounds checks impose a 1-3% performance hit. This is because advanced optimizers can usually remove most of the array-bounds checks. In practice, safe natively compiled languages (Ocaml, Lisp) can get within 10% - 20% the performance of C. 10% - 20% for the sake of security is a trade-off I'm willing to make. Obviously, the current C recommendation of "learn to write secure code in a language that encourages you not to" isn't working, because buffer-overflow vulnerabilities are rampant. It's time to throw that idea out the window.
Media player doesn't play DVDs out of box. You have to install a DVD plug-in.
My rationale for hating media:
/usr, /srv, /mnt, /lib, etc, and then you add /media? It's also not very descriptive --- is it removable media or multimedia?
/mnt? It's been common practice for years, and in my opinion that supercedes the tradition of using /mnt as a temporary mount-point.
/mnt is for temporary mounts, and /media is for removable media, where do things like windows drivers, ipods, and samba shares go? Is a remote samba share a piece of removable media? So you end up having subdirectories under /mnt anyway, for stuff like /mnt/win, which means you split your mountpoints into seperate directories. ie: Your windows driver is /mnt/win, but your cdrom is /media/cdrom.
/srv too. The FHS people should stop making up new top-level directories --- the ones we have are just fine as it is.
1) The name is terrible. We've got
2) What's wrong with using subdirectories under
3) If
For the record, I hate
Last I checked, Windows doesn't play DVDs out of the box. Or Divx's, for that matter. Yet, people somehow manage to do both...
The FHS is responsible for /media, which is even more useless than /opt. Yay Slackware for not shipping that useless wart.
Why else would they always put the link in the most useless part of the text? To keep me on my toes? The link does not point to 1,500 six-megapixel pics, so the link text should not be "1,500 six-megapixel pics." The link text should be the "rip the 5GB CF Card out of it."
That's not the point. My point is that the majority of Americans do not have a college education, so our poor K-12 education relative to other countries is more of a factor than our excellent university system.
This is an interesting post. How do you justify the statement "because we haven't been working very hard to keep it?"?
I'm not saying hard work in terms of sheer amounts of numbers put in. I'm talking about working to distance ourselves from everyone else. Everyone works long hours. Those Indian coders probably work 60 hour weeks. Hell, I work 60-70 hour weeks. quite often. If all we do is work long hours doing the same thing they are doing, we shouldn't expect to keep ahead of them. We have to do things they can't do. I'm thinking about pushing to make work in cutting-edge fields like b iotechnology more profitable, so our workers can continue to spend their efforts somewhere Indian workers simply don't have the capital to.
We cannot keep ahead of everyone else if all we want to do is the same job we have been doing. You cannot freeze the clock, everyone else will keep surging ahead, and we have to change or be overtaken. Fortunately, economics is on our side. It takes money to make money, and we have more than anyone else. As long as China and India are third-world economies, they cannot afford to engage in the kind of capital-intensive businesses we can. They cannot afford to educate their workers as much as we can. If their economies do improve to the point where they can afford to do this, they will no longer be so cheap to hire, will they?
Those who oppose globalization are fooling themselves. We do not control the world. Somebody, somewhere, will figure out how to utilize the educated, but needy of capital populations of places like China and India. If it's not us, it will be somebody else, and they can use it to overtake us anyway.
That's a retarded argument. By your logic, an apples-to-apples comparison would be British programmers vs German programmers, with the Americans having to invent quantum mechanics first. After all, you can't have ICs without quantum mechanics. Of course, then it'd be the British programmers vs the German programmers, with the Germans having to invent Calculus first. After all, you can't have quantum mechanics without Calculus. Then it'd be British programmers vs Arab programmers, with the British having to invent Algebra first. Can't have Calculus without Algebra, right? And of course, then it'd be Arab programmers vs Indian programmers, with the Arabs having to invent numerals first, because you can't have Algebra without numerals!
So have your fair apples-to-apples comparison. Indian programmers will start at inventing ICs, and American programmeres can start at inventing numerals!
Right. Teenagers watch three hours of TV a day because they are worried about outsourcing. They get the lowest test-scores of any developed nation on international exams, because they are worried about Indians taking their job. Right you are...
Yes, Americans work their asses off. No doubt about that. But peasent farmers in Vietnam work their asses off too. Working your ass off does not make you rich. Working your ass of does not keep you the richest and most powerful country in the world. Working your ass off does not keep you ahead of the rest of the world, it just let's you keep pace. To keep ahead, you don't just have to produce, you have to innovate. You don't just have to perfect your existing industries, you have to invent new ones. If staying ahead of everyone else is something we want to do, we have to educate our people not to be good workers, but to be cutting-edge innovators.
I foo-bar'ed the statistics. My numbers (from the 2000 census) are exclusive. Ie: the 15% with a bacholers degree does not count those with higher than a bacholers degree. In all, 24% (as of 200) of Americans had a college education.
The actual report is here if you're interested.
In any case, that still means that that 3 out of 4 Americans do not have a college education, which means the criticisms about our K-12 system are valid.
wants to come over here to go to Harvard or Yale or MIT or Oxford or Stanford or even our high schools
Where is "here?" If "here" is the place that contains MIT, Harvard, and Yale, then "here" is the US. Whose high-schools are "our" high schools? "The West" is a concept, not a place. You can't say "here in the Western world." He was definitely referring to the US.