Not in the least bit true. My wife is a prolific reader (a novel every couple of days since she was a child) and her spelling is awful. She has particular difficulty with double letters and apostrophes.
On Mac OS X and Linux, it doesn't take an administrator's password to install software for personal use. On Mac OS X you can drag and drop wherever you want it; on Linux you can build it yourself or convince your package manager to install it into ~ instead of/usr.
If you want the software to be available to more than one user, *then* you need an administrator's password.
Is there a reason this doesn't work on Windows Vista?
It strikes me that the open-source community is, by and large, an "every man for himself" environment. People create software that helps them solve the problems they have; they fix issues in that software that affect their usage of it. To a certain extent the highly organized, high-participation projects can alleviate that, but even there, if there's a dearth of volunteers for a particular task, what're the chances it'll actually get done?
That's not to say that all accessibility enhancements must be made by the disabled; there are of course a few charitable developers out there who'd be willing to take on these tasks for the greater good, and there are the friends and relatives of the disabled, who are in some sense "closer to the front line"... Realistically (or perhaps cynically) though, unless capable open-source developers are suffering without it, or unless someone sits down and pays for the development of it, the accessibility of open-source software is always going to be a low priority.
Don't like it? Do something about it yourself, or create a charitable foundation to pay for other people to. Such is capitalism, and such is human nature.
When you need a comment, it's usually a sign that the code is not clear enough. There are very few cases where the code can't be rewritten in such a way that a) the code is better, and b) the comment is unnecessary.
Most of the cases where that's impossible are commenting things that should not happen. Those comments are valuable.
Comments that discuss the design are generally better served by separate design documentation in a human-readable format, with diagrams.
I have to say, I personally wouldn't replace Mac OS X with Linux. On the rare occasions where a piece of Linux software really is the best tool for the job (eg. GIMP, Ethereal) it's usually easy enough to get it up and running under Apple's X11. For me, running Linux would be no advantage.
I'm not running my Mac as a server, though. If I were buying a Mac Mini to be a server, I'd be seriously considering running Gentoo on it. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with Mac OS X client as a server OS, but I do think that Gentoo is easier to administer and keep up-to-date.
My final thought is, that there's always a place for the idealist in this world. Sure, they'll be ridiculed (read the comments here, and many other stories on Slashdot), but face it -- your beloved Linux wouldn't exist if it weren't for the idealism of a few people. The sorts of people who would run Linux on a Mac Mini now are the sorts of people who are contributing patches to, or making donations to, your favorite open-source software projects. They're the ones who are ensuring that in three or four years' time when the Mac Mini can't run Mac OS X Ocelot acceptably, that you can install Linux flawlessly and get another few years use out of the machine. Why they do those things doesn't really matter. "Because I can" is as good a reason as any.
that provides a combo-box style dropdown suggesting things you might like to search for, as you type. Seems kinda neat, though I'm not sure how helpful it'd be...
I had to use a (late) beta of the 2004.3 release recently to get Gentoo installed onto some only recently-released hardware. 2004.2 didn't play nicely either with the SATA controller or the on-board ethernet.
For those out their too timid to try a beta install CD, this might well be eagerly-awaited news.
I was on the team that won the judge's prize, and whilst you can read our report at the link above, I have to say that for us, the key was the human, not the hardware or the program.
The tracks we did well one were the ones that we were able to hand-drive accurately; the ones we did badly on were the ones where there were simply too many hard turns to make that feasible.
Despite having a whole university lab full of computers we could have hijacked to run our program on, we only used a single computer for the actual optimizing.
Also note that although our automatic optimizer was written in Dylan, the visualizer/racing game program was C++.
If I were going to be controversial I would say that it all just goes to show that humans are better than computers and imperative languages are better than functional ones;)
Slashdot Mirror
Not in the least bit true. My wife is a prolific reader (a novel every couple of days since she was a child) and her spelling is awful. She has particular difficulty with double letters and apostrophes.
On Mac OS X and Linux, it doesn't take an administrator's password to install software for personal use. On Mac OS X you can drag and drop wherever you want it; on Linux you can build it yourself or convince your package manager to install it into ~ instead of /usr.
If you want the software to be available to more than one user, *then* you need an administrator's password.
Is there a reason this doesn't work on Windows Vista?
It strikes me that the open-source community is, by and large, an "every man for himself" environment. People create software that helps them solve the problems they have; they fix issues in that software that affect their usage of it. To a certain extent the highly organized, high-participation projects can alleviate that, but even there, if there's a dearth of volunteers for a particular task, what're the chances it'll actually get done?
That's not to say that all accessibility enhancements must be made by the disabled; there are of course a few charitable developers out there who'd be willing to take on these tasks for the greater good, and there are the friends and relatives of the disabled, who are in some sense "closer to the front line"... Realistically (or perhaps cynically) though, unless capable open-source developers are suffering without it, or unless someone sits down and pays for the development of it, the accessibility of open-source software is always going to be a low priority.
Don't like it? Do something about it yourself, or create a charitable foundation to pay for other people to. Such is capitalism, and such is human nature.
When you need a comment, it's usually a sign that the code is not clear enough. There are very few cases where the code can't be rewritten in such a way that a) the code is better, and b) the comment is unnecessary.
Most of the cases where that's impossible are commenting things that should not happen. Those comments are valuable.
Comments that discuss the design are generally better served by separate design documentation in a human-readable format, with diagrams.
I have to say, I personally wouldn't replace Mac OS X with Linux. On the rare occasions where a piece of Linux software really is the best tool for the job (eg. GIMP, Ethereal) it's usually easy enough to get it up and running under Apple's X11. For me, running Linux would be no advantage.
I'm not running my Mac as a server, though. If I were buying a Mac Mini to be a server, I'd be seriously considering running Gentoo on it. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with Mac OS X client as a server OS, but I do think that Gentoo is easier to administer and keep up-to-date.
My final thought is, that there's always a place for the idealist in this world. Sure, they'll be ridiculed (read the comments here, and many other stories on Slashdot), but face it -- your beloved Linux wouldn't exist if it weren't for the idealism of a few people. The sorts of people who would run Linux on a Mac Mini now are the sorts of people who are contributing patches to, or making donations to, your favorite open-source software projects. They're the ones who are ensuring that in three or four years' time when the Mac Mini can't run Mac OS X Ocelot acceptably, that you can install Linux flawlessly and get another few years use out of the machine. Why they do those things doesn't really matter. "Because I can" is as good a reason as any.
Well, I get no pictures either, but the link at the top of grugnog.com or whatever it was called goes here:
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=1
that provides a combo-box style dropdown suggesting things you might like to search for, as you type. Seems kinda neat, though I'm not sure how helpful it'd be...
Is this news, or has it been around for a while?
I had to use a (late) beta of the 2004.3 release recently to get Gentoo installed onto some only recently-released hardware. 2004.2 didn't play nicely either with the SATA controller or the on-board ethernet.
For those out their too timid to try a beta install CD, this might well be eagerly-awaited news.
I was on the team that won the judge's prize, and whilst you can read our report at the link above, I have to say that for us, the key was the human, not the hardware or the program.
;)
The tracks we did well one were the ones that we were able to hand-drive accurately; the ones we did badly on were the ones where there were simply too many hard turns to make that feasible.
Despite having a whole university lab full of computers we could have hijacked to run our program on, we only used a single computer for the actual optimizing.
Also note that although our automatic optimizer was written in Dylan, the visualizer/racing game program was C++.
If I were going to be controversial I would say that it all just goes to show that humans are better than computers and imperative languages are better than functional ones
How about a program that compiles and runs in seven different languages?
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/poly/polyglot.txt
Or a program that prints its own source code?
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
Or just a whole collection of weird programming-related stuff?
http://www.catseye.mb.ca/
(OK, so I'm way too late to the party and nobody's going to read this, but hey :)