Actually, we covered it in my INtro to Psych class this semester.
Permissive parenting - bad, kids are underachievers, have low self-esteems, antisocial, drug users, etc.
AUthoritarian parenting (like the 50s) - still bad. Kids grow up with serious problems with authority. Kids split off, one group becomes criminals, the other group will conform for awhile and then during their midlife crisis completely uproot themselves and start fresh. All will have low self-worth and so forth.
So how do you win?
Um, read Oliver's post?;)
Personally, I think my wife and I are on the riht track. My daughter spent 4 hours rebelling aainst cleaning her room tonight, a typical 20-minute cleaning job. In the process she missed a movie and storytime. She was pretty upset about it and whined a bit about "I can't sleep because I didn't read a story", but it didn't take her long to figure it out. She's starting to come around.:)
Her brother, in contrast, cleaned his room immediately and was done in 10 minutes. He got to watch the movie and had storytime before bed. He also got to play with both his parents a little bit along the way. He's 1 1/2 years younger than his sister. The 1-year old (almost 2) helped pick up a bit too.:)
I hate to be the one to point this out, but gaming started going downhill about when Lemmings came out.
not that Lemmings was a sucky game, it was pretty cool, but in many ways even Lemmings was still a step down. Once upon a time you had to provide imagination to the game the same way you have to when you read a book. Those days are over.
If anyone's looking for a good puzzle game now, check out Vexed.:)
You're all wrong. This isn't about NDAs, trade secrets, sources, blogging or journalism. This is wabout stupid little machines with pictures of fruit with one and only one bite taken out of them and look at that! Perfect teeth were used to take that bit! Can you believe that? I guess it's not that hard to believe when you consider that it's just a picture of an apple, not a real apple, and even then it's not even a picture of an apple, more like a picture of some wavy lines that are arranged to resemble the shape of an apple with one bite out of it.
Centration is a problem experienced by young kids, 2-6, where they are incapable of seeing the world from any point of view except they're own. The kid eats, sleeps, and so forth, so naturally the kid thinks your car (for example) eats when you put gas in it, sleeps when you park it at night, and so forth. It's the reason your kid will hit another kid, and then cry when he gets a time-out or whatever, he's incapable of seeing that he did wrong, he only sees what you're doing to him (the time-out).
We just covered it in my Intro to Psychology class.
Disclaimer: I've been a Microsoft-hater since the early 90s.
If you've been paying attention:) (which I haven't), Microsoft is in an interesting stage of development. They're losing their centration problem. So they're about to enter the concrete operational stage. They've probably got about another decade or so before they'll have completely grown up.
Meanwhile, much of the public face of open source software still has it's centration problem and therefore egocentrism.
He had a good point, every single EULA you read, no matter *who* it comes from, says something to that effect. He didn't specifically troll Linux, either, he trolled RedHat and SuSE, which he also mentions are the ones they see being deployed in large (read: competitive) deployments.
Consider it something of a complement, he's accepting RedHat and SuSE as peers. And he had a good point.
When you get right to it, if they said "This product is supposed to do [this]" and it doesn't, they'll get sued and it'll likely be a frivolous lawsuit. The action we want taken on this matter shouldn't come from Microsoft, we need the FTC looking at software.
Ok, you've definitely pointed out that the situation is more complicated than either my simplification or the GP that I replied to. (Was it you? Too lazy to look right now)
the US only imports 18% of its oil from the middle east.
Only? That's enough to seriously effect inflation. It only takes 3-5% marketshare to start a price war with the others, and the middle east has 18%? That's a *lot* in the grand scheme of things.
He approached my uncle back in 2000 or so, said he wanted my uncle to build him a bomb. So my uncle said "Give me the plutonium and we'll see." So he took their plutonium, and in turn gave them a shoddy bomb base form used pinball machine parts.
So yeah, Saddam hadn't yet figured out he'd been lied to and his subordinates were engaged in CYA politics trying to keep themselves and their families from disappearing in the night.
And my uncle? He disappeared soon after that, him and his car, and this kid he likes to hang out with. Nobody's seen or heard from them since.
Has it occured to anybody yet that Bush might not achieve cheap oil, but he might prevent inflation of oil prices? When we say Bush is there for oil, we seem to be assuming he's trying to bring gas prices down to under $1/gallon again or somesuch. Maybe he's trying to prevent gas prices from skyrocketing us into bankruptcy, and what we're seeing now isn't even a scratch on the surface of what's coming next?
In fact...prices seem to still be going up....
What's the slope on that? Compare it to what we have *after* Iraq's been successfully subdued and their oil export program is back in service...
Seriously folks, if that was the case, wouldn't you expect the OIL prices to go DOWN?
NOt until the country was stable again, anyway, and at least partially rebuilt. Since neither of those things have yet happened, it's too early to use this sort of 'fact' to dismiss Bush's motivation.
Here's a real question. How much oil could we get from Iraq when they were under UN sanctions? Iirc, France got most of the oil that came out of the OIl for Food program Saddam abused. How could we get the UN to lift the sanctions on Iraq (so we could buy oil from them)? One of two ways:
1. If Saddam were a compliant dictator, he wouldn't be a dictator. So lifting the sanctions peacefully while Saddam was in there was unlikely.
2. Invade them and replace their government. No matter how angry the UN got at us, they'd still have to realize they can't visit the sins of Saddam's regime on the new government, no matter how bad we fuck it up. So the sanctions will be removed (or rather, rendered obsolete), and, Bush's Words, he'll have "secured American interests in the country".
I said "YOu got a magic wand that'll turn all of our current coal, gas, and oil generators into something else?". And you said what? Basically "Yes, for coal, but oil is blahblahblah*smallamountofpowergenerators*".
I can go with that. Doesn't actually change my point, which is that you can't just overnight change everything to suit your vision of the world. Incremental change is what's needed. You can defeat me point by point (which you haven't because it's not a fight;) ), but the bottom line is that incremental change is what's going to work, and it's counterproductive (very counterproductive) to go around suggesting we could just fix all our problems in a few minutes "if everybody would just [do this or that or the other thing]".
Why is it counterproductive? Because everytime some greenie comes along and says "Look, I wave my magic wand and we have wonderful power generation and all you have to do to get there is drive a shoebox for 5 years" those people driving their hummers (who happen to have the money that controls the change we're discussing) just roll their eyes. You want this change to happen you need to be taken seriously by the people with money that make it happen.
That was my point, there's very little point going rounds over anything else I said.;)
(and to answer your question about "flamebait mods", no, I don't, I post at base 2 for a reason)
I am confused. I didn't know there were any restrictions on applications written in JAVA, except the need for a JVM...
You're still stuck with the underlying libraries. You do have choices, and they aren't good (not for GUI anyway, but Java's used mostly on the server the way I hear it). I'll admit I don't know a whole lot about Java, just that it can be tricky to get java programs running from time to time (Sun *won* this part of the antitrust case, mind you).
Well technically QT was started in 1991. However, it didn't really have the feature set people wanted until QT2.2 was released in 2000. But I will give QT some credit on a good API. However, I still disagree about Windows GUI being crap (No I don't own stock in MSFT).
I don't like the Windows GUI at all, period. I find it mind-dumbing. I think that when I use Windows I become ADD, seriously. Heh. As far as the API itself goes, I dont' have a lot of experience with it, but what I've seen has been pretty convoluted. I went into MFC long enough to figure out that I didn't like it. I dropped Windows soon after that anyway, so the question of whether I'd like MFC after going further into it is moot: there's no reason I would do such a thing.
I don't believe all software should be free.
I agree that not all software should be Free as in Beer, you know. But I do think it should come with source code and you should have certain rights associated with it.:) In my perfect world, software patents would exist and only apply to the binary, copyright would only apply to the source code, and to get a patent you'd have to give up the source code. I think that would in and of itself solve 99% of the Free/Proprietary discussion to everyone's satisfaction. It may not look like it would from here, but I feel confident that if implemented, everything would turn out fine and we'd all look at each other and say "Why did we ever start that mess in the first place?"
Widgets and smaller routines can use BSD or Public Domain.
I have a pretty strong feeling that libraries should have non-restrictive licenses. I don't like GPL libraries, but I'll use them. Qt is so beautiful in Linux that I'm looking forward to learning all about it. If the API is all it's cut out to be, I may never look back. But i'm happy using GPL libraries, even if any library I ever write will be more permissive. I also think libraries should come with source code and so forth. It's an integral part of your program during execution, why would you have such a large part of your own program in a blackbox? You're still responsible for bugs that are caused by the library! So, yeah, we may not see eye to eye on all of this.
The thing you might want to keep in mind, and I was saying this to someone else actually. Many of us that write Free Software don't give a shit about commercial viability. I really don't care if the development model makes money or not. I don't define Right and Wrong in terms of how much money it generates for the economy, and I don't really give a shit if thousands of programmers have to find new jobs because they can't make money with their software in a freer IT world. I think, after some pretty thorough analysis, that that's not ever going to happen. I mean, if all software was suddenly open source, I don't think we'd see thousands of programmers go unemployed. Quite the contrary, I think it would be a great boon to our economy! (We could go into it, but I really don't feel like it, sorry) So when people come to Linux and say "There's no standard GUI widget set, it's a legal minefield, we can't do it" all I can say is "every other platform is a legal minefield and there are plenty of good widget sets. maybe not great, but there's plenty of good software that uses them, so think about it."
When a commercial company sees the tradeoffs as worth it, great! Come along and play with us. When they don't, we both lose. Too bad, but it's because of choices we have both made and I'm not about to unmake mine. Neither do I expect them to unmake theirs.
Now I'm off on a tangent.
Oh yeah, you wanna see a hairy API? The first widget set I ever worked with was for AmigaDOS 1.3. *THAT* was frickin' hairy!
You made a number of good points that I don't think I need to respond to, except for a couple that you missed.:)
While its true that the Windows GUI is not cross platformed, it was never designed to be! However, it is mature and that is something that can not be said of any GUI on Linux.
YOu're making a few logical errors here. I never said the winAPI was designed to be cross-platform. Quite the contrary, I said it was shit, and the good libraries you can use that are better than the winAPI *are* cross-platform. I intentionally didn't mention Java because it's *not* without restrictions.
Anyway, you also say the winAPI is mature and you can't say that about any GUI on Linux. Quite the contrary, both Qt and wxWidgets are mature. wxWidgets has been in continuous development since, what, 1992?
Another point you're seeming to ignore is that Windows has had steady third-party desktop development support for almost its entire lifetime. Unix, and specifically Linux, has not. You mention that "nobody gave a shit about Unix until Linux made it affordable", but you forget that Unix was deployed on machines that costed thousands/millions of dollars. Never was a serious desktop Unix released until Linux came along, and by then Microsoft had sealed their monopoly and already taken all the third-party developers.
All things considered, it looks like the GUI libraries we have in Linux are well-advanced considering the length of time the platform has been in existence. Just like you can't expect a 10-year-old to be able to perform brain surgery, I'll let you finish the sentence.
QT is last on my list of recomendations. Save your money and use wxWindows. It is free, open-sourced, and has absolutely no restrictions
I don't see the difference. I realize for many developers, GPL is too restrictive. I like it, though. I don't have a problem using Qt now that it'll be GPL on Windows as well. The reason I used wxWidgets instead of Qt was because wxWidgets was Free on Windows. If it costed money, I'd now be saving up to by Qt. Seriously. I'm going to move my desktop development to Qt as soon as I see the other necessary libraries (pyQt and pyKDE) supporting the GPL Qt in Windows. Were I to have time, I might try to help with those efforts.
When you get right down to it, I don't like using KDE and developing applications that depend on GTK, no matter how nice wxWidgets is.
Indeed, you missed the fundamental point I was trying to make. You villified the previous poster, comparing him to Timothy McVeigh. You may as well have accused him of being a mass murderer because he has beliefs inline with McVeighs. The point I made was that beliefs don't make someone a mass murderer, actions do.
OH yeah, another post I responded to half and forgot about the other half. Forgive me.
Even if the vehicle gets only 25 MPG when burning fuel, if it runs 80% of its mileage on grid power the effective mileage would be a whopping 125 MPG. The extra grid power could come from nukes, wind, solar... it wouldn't matter, as long as it wasn't coal or gas.
YOu got a magic wand that'll turn all of our current coal, gas, and oil generators into something else? Does it really work or is it more of a phallus symbol? I love these "Oh, we can just do this everything will be wonderful". Great, now gimme my fucking flower, ok?
If it was really that simple, why isn't it done? Answer: it's not that simple. Our economy would crash right now if we all suddenly stopped driving our cars and walked to work. Really, it would. Millions of people would go unemployed. Seriously. Do you have any idea how much damage it would do?
And then what? Of the power sources you're offering, let's see, nukes, wind, and solar. Nuke power (while I'm all over it, really, I am) is still relatively unstable. I'd rate it right at the level of stability of Windows XP. Seriously, that's where I'd put it. Hell, right now one malfunction in XP probably causes more damage than another Chernobyl-type disaster would. Seriously. But it's still not production-level because the waste problem hasn't been well-solved. Of course, that' sa chicken and egg situation, but because of that particular chicken and that particular egg, it now costs more money to build a nuke plant in the US in terms of assumed laibility than it costs to wage a major world war! (Hint hint, anybody wondering why we have a war-mongering president when we thought we were electing an energy president?)
Then wind. While there are some very nice designs, some excellent prototypes, and even some small-scale deployments that have worked well, wind still isn't up to production-level. Last I heard, we were looking at another 10-20 years worth of advancement for that.
Solar failed already. It's not environmentally friendly, it's as simple as that. The only way I know of for it to become environmentally friendly is if we ran it through photosynthesis and used the plant matter instead of trying to get solar rays directly. In any case, have you ever looked at the process it takes to build solar cells? There's a reason they all come from China, you know...
"Want to move away from oil" isn't the problem. We all want to. Ask anybody on the street "If I had a better way for you to get around car that didn't require gas, would you do it?" Most would probably say "Yes, if I can be as free as I can with a car" or something to that affect. no, want is definitely not the issue here, there's plenty of desire the world over.
And there's no magic wand gonna solve this problem, sorry.
Most vehicles reach peak fuel efficiency at the speed where they can just barely stay in top gear.
Uh, no, that's just where they use the least amount of fuel and still go fast. You could as truthfully say most fuels reach peak fuel efficiency right before you turn the ignition key to the "start" position.
There are these neat curves that show how much power a gasoline-powered IC engine produces are various engine speeds. oN these graphs, when you see them, you'll see fuel input rises arithmetically (it's a freakin' axis), meanwhile power rises and falls as a curve not completely unlike a sine curve (but not completely like a sine curve either). Peak efficiency is reached at the top of that curve, and varies from engine to engine.
So, if you've followed along this far, you should be able to state something like this:
Peak efficiency is reached at the maximum amount of power output with the minimum amount of fuel. Hopefully someone'll chime in with something in the form of f(x) = your ass.
You think just the same way that Timothy McVeigh used to on Usenet. I thought he was a dangerous nut before he murdered close to 300 people in his attempt to do exactly what you suggest. Try a google search and look for his posts on Usenet.
He also thinks the same way that Thomas Jefferson used to, and Thomas Payne in those weird papers of his. I thought they were all dangerous before they dumped thousands of pounds worth of tea in the sea and then went to war against the government that kept them safe.
How about Freedom Power Plants? I'll bet if Bush proposed nucular power but instead called it Freedom Power he'd have funding out the ass for it.
How about Freedom Shuttle? Or the Freedom Aerospace Agency? Or the Freedom Revenue Service? Or the Central Freedom Agency? I'm out of control! Freedom Bureau of Castigators, Freedom in the Alligators, Freedom from the Wilderness, Freedom in the Wilderness, Protected Free Reserves of Dumb Species! Somebody stop me! Freedom--
Haha, forgot to respond to another part of your post.
The simple, undeniable fact is that nuclear radiation has the potential to be more dangerous than other alternatives, by magnitudes.
Oh no, not the radiation! Fear it! You wouldn't want to up like the Fantastic Four, would you?
Seriously, radiation by itself is "Mostly Harmless". Yeah it can hurt you, and lots of radiation can kill you. But it's not radiation that makes nuclear power dangerous. Quite the contrary, it's radiation that makes it possible.
What's dangerous is the fallout. The other heavy metals that come out of the reaction. They're dangerous because of the radiation, that is true. My point is that exposure to radiation is generally not dangerous, you experience it everyday in fact. What's dangerous is constant exposure to radiation. That's a danger that nuclear reactors have dealt with.
Why is Chernobyl such a horrendous accident? Among many reasons, also because the Soviets just buried the thing and left it alone. So all that fallout is right there underneath the ground. The use that land, now, they would have to dig up *all* the dirt, and then either process it to get out the nuclear isotopes or just ship all the dirt off at once. If the only danger was a huge burst of radiation, then it woudl just be sad that the accident killed so many people right away. Because then the could have rebuilt it, improved it, and moved on. Nope, it's the fallout that turned Chernobyl into such a big disaster. (not saying it wouldn't have still been a big disaster, just that it'll now take 900 years for the planet to recover, with or without our intervention, whereas without the fallout we would have already recovered)
So, yeah, quit scaring us with radiation. Radiation is a property of the materials that makes them potentially dangerous, but is not inherently dangerous. Here's a quick quiz. How many ways can you think of that radiation is used every day to save lives? Actively, that is, not passively.
(I'll get the easy ones out of the way for you: cancer: radiation therapy; thyroid disease: radiation therapy; x-rays: more passive than active, but they do give us the internal pictures we wouldn't otherwise have)
The notion that were in foreseeable danger of running out fuel is nothing but a lazy "scare tactic".
Denial, plain and simple. We are in foreseeable danger of running out of fuel. Let's critically think this, ok?
1. We now know (possibly we've always known) that oil supplies are finite.
2. We have watched numerous wells dry up (as well as some dry up then turn around and produce more than ever).
3. We can foresee the dangers to an oil-based economy of running out of fuel.
So, we know that we can run out, and we know that doing so in our economy as-is is dangerous. We don't know when it will happen, but it is foreseeable that it will happen.
So what do the geologists say? Those are the guys who are supposed to know about oil, right? What do they say? Some say we're going to run out within 10 years, some say we have a century or more. Anybody predicting 500 years? Are there *any* geologists saying we have an infinitely-renewable source of oil?
So, what's your plan for when we run out? Do you intend that we should just run clean out of oil and *then* figure out what to do? That's what I'm getting from reading your post.
I'm getting a chuckle out of your debate with that fanboy. But here goes.:)
All I've been discussing is an unencumbered widget API so that applications can code to a standard target. This is a very specific area and that's all I am talking about here. We don't need any libraries other than those required to interface with the OS, basically we need to be launched, we need fopen() and friends, malloc() and friends, and we need a graphics API that supports windows and controls.
If that's all you need, why not wxWidgets? You can link to it statically and you're safe, as far as I know. I know the LGPL has some crap about providing object files in case the user wants to recompile underlying libraries, but that's been an obsolete method for quite awhile now. It's not necessary. If someone asks for them, you just say "If you're asking, that menas you're running on a supported platform and it's not my problem" and you ask your lawyer how it's legal that way.:)
As far as I know, linking to wxWidgets doesn't immediately incur the problems you associate with the LGPL because GTK because a system library at that point. Maybe it will anyway, I'm not completely certain, but that's provided as one of the selling points of wx anyway.
I am agitating for a standard, with-the-OS, and so always-there-to-use, widget capability. Windows has this. The Mac has this. Linux does not have this. I would like Linux to have this.
Man oh man does this irritate me. You can expect Qt or GTK+, but that's it. You can usually expect both at the same time (neither KDE nor GNOME satisfies everybody at the same time). Yeah, this little issue frustrates me too. Furthermore, I just can't stand targetting GTK. I've been targetting wxWidgets instead (using wxPython anyway, so I'm the Linux version of a VB hack). I'm *so* happy Qt is going to be GPL on Windows now. (I only write open source stuff, so this is obviously not an issue for me)
As far as what Qt accomplishes, you're still safe, so far as I know, except you have to buy a Qt license to use Qt in your application. Could get expensive, but numerous folks have reported "I think our TCO was lower with Qt!". So there's at least a high level of satisfaction fo rpeople that use it.:)
I don't personally think it's unreasonable for a free platform to require someone to pay in order to distribute non-free software of their own making for that platform. Call it what you want, I don't see how it's unreasonable. The point of the platform, unlike Windows, was never to make anybody money. The point was always freedom (except in the case of the kernel itself, but you'll find the point still had nothing to do with making money for anyone). regardless of what that other guy said, if you (or any other developer) isn't willing to deal with what we've built and the for-pay alternatives that get you onto this platform aren't good enough for you, then too bad for both of us. And I think we're better off accepting those consequences, because you can't come much closer than you have (for reasons you've said you have but haven't detailed, which is fine, they're probably confidential), and we have no obligation to come any closer than we have.
The thing you and yours need to be asking yourself is, "Is it a real possibility that I'll have to accept these terms someday? Can I hold out for better terms? Can I afford to?" If the answer is "yes", then there's not even any reason for us to try to make a deal. If the answer is "no", then you're not in the bargaining position you might think you're in.
The Windows GUI API has no restrictions on it at all.
One thing the Windows GUI API has in common with all GPL/LGPL/LMAO licensed software is that it comes with NO WARRANTY EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
Additionally, if there is a bug anywhere in the Windows GUI API, that bug is in your software, and there ain't jack shit you can do about it. You're screwed. Completely and totally. What do you tell your customer? "OH gee, that bug is Microsoft's fault for building a shitty library." Right.
Contrasted with numerous open source libraries that you can do all sorts of wonderfulness with, you can fix the bug in the library!
Hm. And if GTK isn't your flavor, or Qt, you have several others to choose from. wxWidgets gives you all the creamy goodness of a BSD-style license, and the (blech) GTK interface in Linux. How do you get around any so-called limits in the LGPL for Linux? Simple, you're depending on wxWidgets, which uses native widget sets on each platform. So you're not confined by the LGPL in any way.
There are several toolkits available that do just that. Now, how many are there for Windows? What range of license possibilities are there?
Last time I checked there was only one, for th eopen source programmer, that is. Buy (that's right, buy) a license for Visual Studio, or only write C programs because otherwise you just don't have enough stuff to link, and you don't have the permissions you need to distribute dependent libraries. Or you could buy (that's right, buy) a Delphi license (or another of Borland's point-and-click languages), but then you can't even keep to the terms of your GPL license when you distribute! Because you can't provide source for libraries that aren't reasonably expected system libraries (the winAPI stuff is, but borland's wrappers *aren't*). What else is there? I'm sure I missed quite a few.
Hm, there's Qt, which requires you to buy a license. There's wxWidgets, which doesn't. There's FLTK, which doesn't (and is another one available under Linux). MOzilla provides a complete RAD environment, not necessarily point-and-click but what could be faster than jsut writing an xml file?
come to think of it, most of the really good shit is cross-platform and open source. I suspect the real reason people still use Microsoft's crappy libraries is inertia.
Methinks you're missing a few facts that would seriously affect your post had you known them.
Qt is the only major system library that does not allow commercial development without paying someone.
As far as I know, and I just can't imagine the GPL having such a loophole in it, if you write a commercial GPL application with Qt, you don't have to pay a license fee to them. Period. You got Qt under the GPL, and it would violate all of the rights the GPL guarantees you if you couldn't write a program that used Qt-GPL and distribute it. The only time you have to deal with paying for the damn library is when you want to use any other license other than the GPL.
The question isn't even whether it's "right" or "wrong" to pay Troll Tech, it's simply that vendors that try to put together commercial offerings out of Linux don't want to depend on a little company completely beyond their control.
One of the big things about the original Qt/GPL deal was that if TrollTech disappears or tries to take their library back, then the last open source version immediately becomes BSD-type licensed, so it gets freer than dirt. Depending on TrollTech isn't a big issue. Pay their license if you need to, fine. Don't pay their license and use the GPL, and there's *nothing* they can do that will hurt you.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we covered it in my INtro to Psych class this semester.
Permissive parenting - bad, kids are underachievers, have low self-esteems, antisocial, drug users, etc.
AUthoritarian parenting (like the 50s) - still bad. Kids grow up with serious problems with authority. Kids split off, one group becomes criminals, the other group will conform for awhile and then during their midlife crisis completely uproot themselves and start fresh. All will have low self-worth and so forth.
So how do you win?
Um, read Oliver's post? ;)
Personally, I think my wife and I are on the riht track. My daughter spent 4 hours rebelling aainst cleaning her room tonight, a typical 20-minute cleaning job. In the process she missed a movie and storytime. She was pretty upset about it and whined a bit about "I can't sleep because I didn't read a story", but it didn't take her long to figure it out. She's starting to come around. :)
Her brother, in contrast, cleaned his room immediately and was done in 10 minutes. He got to watch the movie and had storytime before bed. He also got to play with both his parents a little bit along the way. He's 1 1/2 years younger than his sister. The 1-year old (almost 2) helped pick up a bit too. :)
I hate to be the one to point this out, but gaming started going downhill about when Lemmings came out.
:)
not that Lemmings was a sucky game, it was pretty cool, but in many ways even Lemmings was still a step down. Once upon a time you had to provide imagination to the game the same way you have to when you read a book. Those days are over.
If anyone's looking for a good puzzle game now, check out Vexed.
You're all wrong. This isn't about NDAs, trade secrets, sources, blogging or journalism. This is wabout stupid little machines with pictures of fruit with one and only one bite taken out of them and look at that! Perfect teeth were used to take that bit! Can you believe that? I guess it's not that hard to believe when you consider that it's just a picture of an apple, not a real apple, and even then it's not even a picture of an apple, more like a picture of some wavy lines that are arranged to resemble the shape of an apple with one bite out of it.
Centration is a problem experienced by young kids, 2-6, where they are incapable of seeing the world from any point of view except they're own. The kid eats, sleeps, and so forth, so naturally the kid thinks your car (for example) eats when you put gas in it, sleeps when you park it at night, and so forth. It's the reason your kid will hit another kid, and then cry when he gets a time-out or whatever, he's incapable of seeing that he did wrong, he only sees what you're doing to him (the time-out).
We just covered it in my Intro to Psychology class.
Here's an article on the subject.
Disclaimer: I've been a Microsoft-hater since the early 90s.
If you've been paying attention :) (which I haven't), Microsoft is in an interesting stage of development. They're losing their centration problem. So they're about to enter the concrete operational stage. They've probably got about another decade or so before they'll have completely grown up.
Meanwhile, much of the public face of open source software still has it's centration problem and therefore egocentrism.
He had a good point, every single EULA you read, no matter *who* it comes from, says something to that effect. He didn't specifically troll Linux, either, he trolled RedHat and SuSE, which he also mentions are the ones they see being deployed in large (read: competitive) deployments.
Consider it something of a complement, he's accepting RedHat and SuSE as peers. And he had a good point.
When you get right to it, if they said "This product is supposed to do [this]" and it doesn't, they'll get sued and it'll likely be a frivolous lawsuit. The action we want taken on this matter shouldn't come from Microsoft, we need the FTC looking at software.
Do we want to encourage future states to do the same thing?
Of course! If we stop them, then Bush's Plan for World Domination falls on its feet.
Ok, you've definitely pointed out that the situation is more complicated than either my simplification or the GP that I replied to. (Was it you? Too lazy to look right now)
the US only imports 18% of its oil from the middle east.
Only? That's enough to seriously effect inflation. It only takes 3-5% marketshare to start a price war with the others, and the middle east has 18%? That's a *lot* in the grand scheme of things.
Saddam was obviously lied to internally. :)
He approached my uncle back in 2000 or so, said he wanted my uncle to build him a bomb. So my uncle said "Give me the plutonium and we'll see." So he took their plutonium, and in turn gave them a shoddy bomb base form used pinball machine parts.
So yeah, Saddam hadn't yet figured out he'd been lied to and his subordinates were engaged in CYA politics trying to keep themselves and their families from disappearing in the night.
And my uncle? He disappeared soon after that, him and his car, and this kid he likes to hang out with. Nobody's seen or heard from them since.
Has it occured to anybody yet that Bush might not achieve cheap oil, but he might prevent inflation of oil prices? When we say Bush is there for oil, we seem to be assuming he's trying to bring gas prices down to under $1/gallon again or somesuch. Maybe he's trying to prevent gas prices from skyrocketing us into bankruptcy, and what we're seeing now isn't even a scratch on the surface of what's coming next?
In fact...prices seem to still be going up....
What's the slope on that? Compare it to what we have *after* Iraq's been successfully subdued and their oil export program is back in service...
Seriously folks, if that was the case, wouldn't you expect the OIL prices to go DOWN?
NOt until the country was stable again, anyway, and at least partially rebuilt. Since neither of those things have yet happened, it's too early to use this sort of 'fact' to dismiss Bush's motivation.
Here's a real question. How much oil could we get from Iraq when they were under UN sanctions? Iirc, France got most of the oil that came out of the OIl for Food program Saddam abused. How could we get the UN to lift the sanctions on Iraq (so we could buy oil from them)? One of two ways:
1. If Saddam were a compliant dictator, he wouldn't be a dictator. So lifting the sanctions peacefully while Saddam was in there was unlikely.
2. Invade them and replace their government. No matter how angry the UN got at us, they'd still have to realize they can't visit the sins of Saddam's regime on the new government, no matter how bad we fuck it up. So the sanctions will be removed (or rather, rendered obsolete), and, Bush's Words, he'll have "secured American interests in the country".
I said "YOu got a magic wand that'll turn all of our current coal, gas, and oil generators into something else?". And you said what? Basically "Yes, for coal, but oil is blahblahblah*smallamountofpowergenerators*".
I can go with that. Doesn't actually change my point, which is that you can't just overnight change everything to suit your vision of the world. Incremental change is what's needed. You can defeat me point by point (which you haven't because it's not a fight ;) ), but the bottom line is that incremental change is what's going to work, and it's counterproductive (very counterproductive) to go around suggesting we could just fix all our problems in a few minutes "if everybody would just [do this or that or the other thing]".
Why is it counterproductive? Because everytime some greenie comes along and says "Look, I wave my magic wand and we have wonderful power generation and all you have to do to get there is drive a shoebox for 5 years" those people driving their hummers (who happen to have the money that controls the change we're discussing) just roll their eyes. You want this change to happen you need to be taken seriously by the people with money that make it happen.
That was my point, there's very little point going rounds over anything else I said. ;)
(and to answer your question about "flamebait mods", no, I don't, I post at base 2 for a reason)
I am confused. I didn't know there were any restrictions on applications written in JAVA, except the need for a JVM...
You're still stuck with the underlying libraries. You do have choices, and they aren't good (not for GUI anyway, but Java's used mostly on the server the way I hear it). I'll admit I don't know a whole lot about Java, just that it can be tricky to get java programs running from time to time (Sun *won* this part of the antitrust case, mind you).
Well technically QT was started in 1991. However, it didn't really have the feature set people wanted until QT2.2 was released in 2000. But I will give QT some credit on a good API. However, I still disagree about Windows GUI being crap (No I don't own stock in MSFT).
I don't like the Windows GUI at all, period. I find it mind-dumbing. I think that when I use Windows I become ADD, seriously. Heh. As far as the API itself goes, I dont' have a lot of experience with it, but what I've seen has been pretty convoluted. I went into MFC long enough to figure out that I didn't like it. I dropped Windows soon after that anyway, so the question of whether I'd like MFC after going further into it is moot: there's no reason I would do such a thing.
I don't believe all software should be free.
I agree that not all software should be Free as in Beer, you know. But I do think it should come with source code and you should have certain rights associated with it. :) In my perfect world, software patents would exist and only apply to the binary, copyright would only apply to the source code, and to get a patent you'd have to give up the source code. I think that would in and of itself solve 99% of the Free/Proprietary discussion to everyone's satisfaction. It may not look like it would from here, but I feel confident that if implemented, everything would turn out fine and we'd all look at each other and say "Why did we ever start that mess in the first place?"
Widgets and smaller routines can use BSD or Public Domain.
I have a pretty strong feeling that libraries should have non-restrictive licenses. I don't like GPL libraries, but I'll use them. Qt is so beautiful in Linux that I'm looking forward to learning all about it. If the API is all it's cut out to be, I may never look back. But i'm happy using GPL libraries, even if any library I ever write will be more permissive. I also think libraries should come with source code and so forth. It's an integral part of your program during execution, why would you have such a large part of your own program in a blackbox? You're still responsible for bugs that are caused by the library! So, yeah, we may not see eye to eye on all of this.
The thing you might want to keep in mind, and I was saying this to someone else actually. Many of us that write Free Software don't give a shit about commercial viability. I really don't care if the development model makes money or not. I don't define Right and Wrong in terms of how much money it generates for the economy, and I don't really give a shit if thousands of programmers have to find new jobs because they can't make money with their software in a freer IT world. I think, after some pretty thorough analysis, that that's not ever going to happen. I mean, if all software was suddenly open source, I don't think we'd see thousands of programmers go unemployed. Quite the contrary, I think it would be a great boon to our economy! (We could go into it, but I really don't feel like it, sorry) So when people come to Linux and say "There's no standard GUI widget set, it's a legal minefield, we can't do it" all I can say is "every other platform is a legal minefield and there are plenty of good widget sets. maybe not great, but there's plenty of good software that uses them, so think about it."
When a commercial company sees the tradeoffs as worth it, great! Come along and play with us. When they don't, we both lose. Too bad, but it's because of choices we have both made and I'm not about to unmake mine. Neither do I expect them to unmake theirs.
Now I'm off on a tangent.
Oh yeah, you wanna see a hairy API? The first widget set I ever worked with was for AmigaDOS 1.3. *THAT* was frickin' hairy!
You made a number of good points that I don't think I need to respond to, except for a couple that you missed. :)
While its true that the Windows GUI is not cross platformed, it was never designed to be! However, it is mature and that is something that can not be said of any GUI on Linux.
YOu're making a few logical errors here. I never said the winAPI was designed to be cross-platform. Quite the contrary, I said it was shit, and the good libraries you can use that are better than the winAPI *are* cross-platform. I intentionally didn't mention Java because it's *not* without restrictions.
Anyway, you also say the winAPI is mature and you can't say that about any GUI on Linux. Quite the contrary, both Qt and wxWidgets are mature. wxWidgets has been in continuous development since, what, 1992?
Another point you're seeming to ignore is that Windows has had steady third-party desktop development support for almost its entire lifetime. Unix, and specifically Linux, has not. You mention that "nobody gave a shit about Unix until Linux made it affordable", but you forget that Unix was deployed on machines that costed thousands/millions of dollars. Never was a serious desktop Unix released until Linux came along, and by then Microsoft had sealed their monopoly and already taken all the third-party developers.
All things considered, it looks like the GUI libraries we have in Linux are well-advanced considering the length of time the platform has been in existence. Just like you can't expect a 10-year-old to be able to perform brain surgery, I'll let you finish the sentence.
QT is last on my list of recomendations. Save your money and use wxWindows. It is free, open-sourced, and has absolutely no restrictions
I don't see the difference. I realize for many developers, GPL is too restrictive. I like it, though. I don't have a problem using Qt now that it'll be GPL on Windows as well. The reason I used wxWidgets instead of Qt was because wxWidgets was Free on Windows. If it costed money, I'd now be saving up to by Qt. Seriously. I'm going to move my desktop development to Qt as soon as I see the other necessary libraries (pyQt and pyKDE) supporting the GPL Qt in Windows. Were I to have time, I might try to help with those efforts.
When you get right down to it, I don't like using KDE and developing applications that depend on GTK, no matter how nice wxWidgets is.
Indeed, you missed the fundamental point I was trying to make. You villified the previous poster, comparing him to Timothy McVeigh. You may as well have accused him of being a mass murderer because he has beliefs inline with McVeighs. The point I made was that beliefs don't make someone a mass murderer, actions do.
I suggest that you owe the OP an apology.
OH yeah, another post I responded to half and forgot about the other half. Forgive me.
Even if the vehicle gets only 25 MPG when burning fuel, if it runs 80% of its mileage on grid power the effective mileage would be a whopping 125 MPG. The extra grid power could come from nukes, wind, solar... it wouldn't matter, as long as it wasn't coal or gas.
YOu got a magic wand that'll turn all of our current coal, gas, and oil generators into something else? Does it really work or is it more of a phallus symbol? I love these "Oh, we can just do this everything will be wonderful". Great, now gimme my fucking flower, ok?
If it was really that simple, why isn't it done? Answer: it's not that simple. Our economy would crash right now if we all suddenly stopped driving our cars and walked to work. Really, it would. Millions of people would go unemployed. Seriously. Do you have any idea how much damage it would do?
And then what? Of the power sources you're offering, let's see, nukes, wind, and solar. Nuke power (while I'm all over it, really, I am) is still relatively unstable. I'd rate it right at the level of stability of Windows XP. Seriously, that's where I'd put it. Hell, right now one malfunction in XP probably causes more damage than another Chernobyl-type disaster would. Seriously. But it's still not production-level because the waste problem hasn't been well-solved. Of course, that' sa chicken and egg situation, but because of that particular chicken and that particular egg, it now costs more money to build a nuke plant in the US in terms of assumed laibility than it costs to wage a major world war! (Hint hint, anybody wondering why we have a war-mongering president when we thought we were electing an energy president?)
Then wind. While there are some very nice designs, some excellent prototypes, and even some small-scale deployments that have worked well, wind still isn't up to production-level. Last I heard, we were looking at another 10-20 years worth of advancement for that.
Solar failed already. It's not environmentally friendly, it's as simple as that. The only way I know of for it to become environmentally friendly is if we ran it through photosynthesis and used the plant matter instead of trying to get solar rays directly. In any case, have you ever looked at the process it takes to build solar cells? There's a reason they all come from China, you know...
"Want to move away from oil" isn't the problem. We all want to. Ask anybody on the street "If I had a better way for you to get around car that didn't require gas, would you do it?" Most would probably say "Yes, if I can be as free as I can with a car" or something to that affect. no, want is definitely not the issue here, there's plenty of desire the world over.
And there's no magic wand gonna solve this problem, sorry.
Most vehicles reach peak fuel efficiency at the speed where they can just barely stay in top gear.
Uh, no, that's just where they use the least amount of fuel and still go fast. You could as truthfully say most fuels reach peak fuel efficiency right before you turn the ignition key to the "start" position.
There are these neat curves that show how much power a gasoline-powered IC engine produces are various engine speeds. oN these graphs, when you see them, you'll see fuel input rises arithmetically (it's a freakin' axis), meanwhile power rises and falls as a curve not completely unlike a sine curve (but not completely like a sine curve either). Peak efficiency is reached at the top of that curve, and varies from engine to engine.
So, if you've followed along this far, you should be able to state something like this:
Peak efficiency is reached at the maximum amount of power output with the minimum amount of fuel. Hopefully someone'll chime in with something in the form of f(x) = your ass.
You think just the same way that Timothy McVeigh used to on Usenet. I thought he was a dangerous nut before he murdered close to 300 people in his attempt to do exactly what you suggest. Try a google search and look for his posts on Usenet.
He also thinks the same way that Thomas Jefferson used to, and Thomas Payne in those weird papers of his. I thought they were all dangerous before they dumped thousands of pounds worth of tea in the sea and then went to war against the government that kept them safe.
Jesus, what is this world coming to?
We call those Freedom Plants thankyouverymuch.
How about Freedom Power Plants? I'll bet if Bush proposed nucular power but instead called it Freedom Power he'd have funding out the ass for it.
How about Freedom Shuttle? Or the Freedom Aerospace Agency? Or the Freedom Revenue Service? Or the Central Freedom Agency? I'm out of control! Freedom Bureau of Castigators, Freedom in the Alligators, Freedom from the Wilderness, Freedom in the Wilderness, Protected Free Reserves of Dumb Species! Somebody stop me! Freedom--
NO CARRIER
Haha, forgot to respond to another part of your post.
The simple, undeniable fact is that nuclear radiation has the potential to be more dangerous than other alternatives, by magnitudes.
Oh no, not the radiation! Fear it! You wouldn't want to up like the Fantastic Four, would you?
Seriously, radiation by itself is "Mostly Harmless". Yeah it can hurt you, and lots of radiation can kill you. But it's not radiation that makes nuclear power dangerous. Quite the contrary, it's radiation that makes it possible.
What's dangerous is the fallout. The other heavy metals that come out of the reaction. They're dangerous because of the radiation, that is true. My point is that exposure to radiation is generally not dangerous, you experience it everyday in fact. What's dangerous is constant exposure to radiation. That's a danger that nuclear reactors have dealt with.
Why is Chernobyl such a horrendous accident? Among many reasons, also because the Soviets just buried the thing and left it alone. So all that fallout is right there underneath the ground. The use that land, now, they would have to dig up *all* the dirt, and then either process it to get out the nuclear isotopes or just ship all the dirt off at once. If the only danger was a huge burst of radiation, then it woudl just be sad that the accident killed so many people right away. Because then the could have rebuilt it, improved it, and moved on. Nope, it's the fallout that turned Chernobyl into such a big disaster. (not saying it wouldn't have still been a big disaster, just that it'll now take 900 years for the planet to recover, with or without our intervention, whereas without the fallout we would have already recovered)
So, yeah, quit scaring us with radiation. Radiation is a property of the materials that makes them potentially dangerous, but is not inherently dangerous. Here's a quick quiz. How many ways can you think of that radiation is used every day to save lives? Actively, that is, not passively.
(I'll get the easy ones out of the way for you: cancer: radiation therapy; thyroid disease: radiation therapy; x-rays: more passive than active, but they do give us the internal pictures we wouldn't otherwise have)
The notion that were in foreseeable danger of running out fuel is nothing but a lazy "scare tactic".
Denial, plain and simple. We are in foreseeable danger of running out of fuel. Let's critically think this, ok?
1. We now know (possibly we've always known) that oil supplies are finite.
2. We have watched numerous wells dry up (as well as some dry up then turn around and produce more than ever).
3. We can foresee the dangers to an oil-based economy of running out of fuel.
So, we know that we can run out, and we know that doing so in our economy as-is is dangerous. We don't know when it will happen, but it is foreseeable that it will happen.
So what do the geologists say? Those are the guys who are supposed to know about oil, right? What do they say? Some say we're going to run out within 10 years, some say we have a century or more. Anybody predicting 500 years? Are there *any* geologists saying we have an infinitely-renewable source of oil?
So, what's your plan for when we run out? Do you intend that we should just run clean out of oil and *then* figure out what to do? That's what I'm getting from reading your post.
ou just want a hyphen, not a forward slash
There is no forward slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I'm getting a chuckle out of your debate with that fanboy. But here goes. :)
All I've been discussing is an unencumbered widget API so that applications can code to a standard target. This is a very specific area and that's all I am talking about here. We don't need any libraries other than those required to interface with the OS, basically we need to be launched, we need fopen() and friends, malloc() and friends, and we need a graphics API that supports windows and controls.
If that's all you need, why not wxWidgets? You can link to it statically and you're safe, as far as I know. I know the LGPL has some crap about providing object files in case the user wants to recompile underlying libraries, but that's been an obsolete method for quite awhile now. It's not necessary. If someone asks for them, you just say "If you're asking, that menas you're running on a supported platform and it's not my problem" and you ask your lawyer how it's legal that way. :)
As far as I know, linking to wxWidgets doesn't immediately incur the problems you associate with the LGPL because GTK because a system library at that point. Maybe it will anyway, I'm not completely certain, but that's provided as one of the selling points of wx anyway.
I am agitating for a standard, with-the-OS, and so always-there-to-use, widget capability. Windows has this. The Mac has this. Linux does not have this. I would like Linux to have this.
Man oh man does this irritate me. You can expect Qt or GTK+, but that's it. You can usually expect both at the same time (neither KDE nor GNOME satisfies everybody at the same time). Yeah, this little issue frustrates me too. Furthermore, I just can't stand targetting GTK. I've been targetting wxWidgets instead (using wxPython anyway, so I'm the Linux version of a VB hack). I'm *so* happy Qt is going to be GPL on Windows now. (I only write open source stuff, so this is obviously not an issue for me)
As far as what Qt accomplishes, you're still safe, so far as I know, except you have to buy a Qt license to use Qt in your application. Could get expensive, but numerous folks have reported "I think our TCO was lower with Qt!". So there's at least a high level of satisfaction fo rpeople that use it. :)
I don't personally think it's unreasonable for a free platform to require someone to pay in order to distribute non-free software of their own making for that platform. Call it what you want, I don't see how it's unreasonable. The point of the platform, unlike Windows, was never to make anybody money. The point was always freedom (except in the case of the kernel itself, but you'll find the point still had nothing to do with making money for anyone). regardless of what that other guy said, if you (or any other developer) isn't willing to deal with what we've built and the for-pay alternatives that get you onto this platform aren't good enough for you, then too bad for both of us. And I think we're better off accepting those consequences, because you can't come much closer than you have (for reasons you've said you have but haven't detailed, which is fine, they're probably confidential), and we have no obligation to come any closer than we have.
The thing you and yours need to be asking yourself is, "Is it a real possibility that I'll have to accept these terms someday? Can I hold out for better terms? Can I afford to?" If the answer is "yes", then there's not even any reason for us to try to make a deal. If the answer is "no", then you're not in the bargaining position you might think you're in.
OK, I'll bite.
The Windows GUI API has no restrictions on it at all.
One thing the Windows GUI API has in common with all GPL/LGPL/LMAO licensed software is that it comes with NO WARRANTY EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
Additionally, if there is a bug anywhere in the Windows GUI API, that bug is in your software, and there ain't jack shit you can do about it. You're screwed. Completely and totally. What do you tell your customer? "OH gee, that bug is Microsoft's fault for building a shitty library." Right.
Contrasted with numerous open source libraries that you can do all sorts of wonderfulness with, you can fix the bug in the library!
Hm. And if GTK isn't your flavor, or Qt, you have several others to choose from. wxWidgets gives you all the creamy goodness of a BSD-style license, and the (blech) GTK interface in Linux. How do you get around any so-called limits in the LGPL for Linux? Simple, you're depending on wxWidgets, which uses native widget sets on each platform. So you're not confined by the LGPL in any way.
There are several toolkits available that do just that. Now, how many are there for Windows? What range of license possibilities are there?
Last time I checked there was only one, for th eopen source programmer, that is. Buy (that's right, buy) a license for Visual Studio, or only write C programs because otherwise you just don't have enough stuff to link, and you don't have the permissions you need to distribute dependent libraries. Or you could buy (that's right, buy) a Delphi license (or another of Borland's point-and-click languages), but then you can't even keep to the terms of your GPL license when you distribute! Because you can't provide source for libraries that aren't reasonably expected system libraries (the winAPI stuff is, but borland's wrappers *aren't*). What else is there? I'm sure I missed quite a few.
Hm, there's Qt, which requires you to buy a license. There's wxWidgets, which doesn't. There's FLTK, which doesn't (and is another one available under Linux). MOzilla provides a complete RAD environment, not necessarily point-and-click but what could be faster than jsut writing an xml file?
come to think of it, most of the really good shit is cross-platform and open source. I suspect the real reason people still use Microsoft's crappy libraries is inertia.
Methinks you're missing a few facts that would seriously affect your post had you known them.
Qt is the only major system library that does not allow commercial development without paying someone.
As far as I know, and I just can't imagine the GPL having such a loophole in it, if you write a commercial GPL application with Qt, you don't have to pay a license fee to them. Period. You got Qt under the GPL, and it would violate all of the rights the GPL guarantees you if you couldn't write a program that used Qt-GPL and distribute it. The only time you have to deal with paying for the damn library is when you want to use any other license other than the GPL.
The question isn't even whether it's "right" or "wrong" to pay Troll Tech, it's simply that vendors that try to put together commercial offerings out of Linux don't want to depend on a little company completely beyond their control.
One of the big things about the original Qt/GPL deal was that if TrollTech disappears or tries to take their library back, then the last open source version immediately becomes BSD-type licensed, so it gets freer than dirt. Depending on TrollTech isn't a big issue. Pay their license if you need to, fine. Don't pay their license and use the GPL, and there's *nothing* they can do that will hurt you.