Your article appears to be the same idle and wrong speculation that this article is debunking.
The Internet is not an operating system, and thank God it isn't, because it's slow and unreliable. (Insert joke about Windows here.) All the features you mention are on the outskirts of.NET - though of course everyone, especially Microsoft, hypes them up because they're so buzzword-compliant.
.NET is mostly a new runtime; that part is at least correct. But it runs on ordinary computers. Not some hypothetical "computer" that is the Internet, an actual computer that you own. Microsoft in fact realizes that people want to run applications on their own computer, something which tech journalists haven't understood since the whole "Network Computer" ordeal.
Now that this parent article has explained what.NET really is without the journalistic, hype-able crap, I believe I wouldn't mind if (to pick a prominent example) future versions of GNOME use.NET. It wouldn't use the crap like Passport authentication. It would use the useful parts.
But why is everyone else focusing on the marginal "Web Services" part of it and partying like it's 1996?
Re:Real advantage?
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
(I didn't make this, but I find it highly amusing. Yes, Brainfuck is an actual language, and this is an actual package that makes it compile to.NET.)
Can I use BrainFuck.Net to write webservices?
No. Well, probably not.
Does BrainFuck.Net use the controversial Microsoft Passport system for authentication?
No. The Brainfuck language has only 8 commands, and none of them are related to authenticating remote network users.
So why do you need a database of billions of web pages to do that? You only need to hook a spellcheck program up to a word list, not the entirety of the Internet.
Watch out. Just by bringing that up, you're likely to get an inane response by Mentifex about how you should feed the webpages into his "mind" written in Visual Basic^W^W JavaScript, which of course is the most important AI development of the year 2001^W 2002, the Year When AI Is Reborn, despite the fact that it is nothing but a lookup table.
"Officials at CBS' station in Pittsburgh, KDKA, said they accidentally created the delay when they used the machine during halftime to squeeze in extra advertising worth thousands of dollars." (my emphasis)
Don't worry. That's because the base 13 thing is a load of crap made up by people who read that part of "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" and managed to miss the point entirely.
Even though it too was created by Microsoft, RTF is a fairly decent format, and it IS well-supported. How many people have a Word viewer built into their e-mail client? It's not in Outlook (thankfully). Word opens RTF as if it were a normal.doc file, which is out of character for Microsoft - you'd think it'd complain and scare people into locking themselves into the Word format.
What would you replace the string of 0s with? A special pattern of bits meaning, say, "this is a string of thirty-two zeros"? But then since that bit pattern is shorter, it would be even more likely to come up. And you wouldn't want it decompressing into zeros, so you'd need to mark it with another bit pattern meaning "this is not, in fact, a string of thirty-two zeros" every time it appeared. And what do you do with the bit pattern you used to mark it? Et cetera.
What if you decided to add the byte location of this string of zeros to the beginning of the file, instead? The number of bytes required to express the location would, on average, be the same as the number of bytes in the string of zeros.
Because of the mathematical reasons posted higher in the thread, the average compression ratio would come out to 1:1. Take this as a given: there is no such thing as a lossless compression algorithm whose average ratio is greater than 1:1. Many of them, however, achieve that average by marking an uncompressible file with one byte, so that the vast majority of random files get one byte longer, but the files people actually want to compress get shorter.
Does the Windows version of AbiWord support TrueType fonts instead of its own special ones? Does it print without dropping random letters and making you look like you can't spell?
"Troll"? Someone doesn't like to hear the truth. All of those responses contain mini-rants by RMS, in exactly his style. Even the one not by RMS is a typical RMS rant.
If your boss sends you a Word document and recieves back an e-mail telling him that his software habits are supporting the Microsoft monopoly which oppresses people in Kenya and Brazil (for those who didn't read the article, I'm not making that part up) it won't exactly give him a positive impression of you.
Nothing reads PDF correctly all of the time either.
Having just finished college applications, which use PDFs everywhere, I can tell you that a few PDFs opened fine in gv, several opened in xpdf (which has a crappy interface) but not gv, one looked wrong in xpdf and opened fine in gv, and then there was Carnegie Mellon whose entire system was this horrible kludge around PDF Forms (the file would load as you scrolled, and you could only save the form by submitting it and loading the entries again using a separate format called AcroExch. When the server went down the night before the application was due, there was not even a way to look at your application.) PDF Forms do not open in any Free tool whatsoever, and hardly work right in Acrobat on Windows either.
Now, even though I assume this is just wishful thinking, consider what the effects of that would be.
The virus would spread around, of course, and then the news would be announced that there is "another massive virus". (Of course they wouldn't say "Word virus" or "Outlook virus" or "Microsoft virus", just "virus".) The reporters would say, "This virus turns all your documents into a strange file format called (spooky voice or scare quotes go here)RTF. RTF files look the same as the Microsoft Word files, but they aren't really the the same! You may LOSE DATA by using this format!"
Virus-scanner companies would hype about the "RTF virus" and convince everyone to buy their latest version.
The next time you tried to convince someone to send documents in RTF, they'd look at you funny and say "You don't mean that virus format, do you?"
I've seen this picture before. It isn't in any language; they're defining the characters as they go along. The characters are chosen to be distinguishable even with lots of noise.
They start with O = 0 and X = 1 to express binary numbers, and then use those to define digit characters. They go on to define other things with those digits.
You can say it all you want, but it's still bullshit. There is nothing inherent to open source which makes it harder to install.
Any reasonably-complete open-source software has binary installation packages (RPMs and debs), which are often easier to install than Windows programs. Compilation of these packages is typically only done by people who want fine-grained control over their system, and who have the time and knowledge to do so. If the program "requires" you to compile it, it's a good sign that the package is meant for developers, not end users.
Slashdot Mirror
Your article appears to be the same idle and wrong speculation that this article is debunking.
.NET - though of course everyone, especially Microsoft, hypes them up because they're so buzzword-compliant.
.NET really is without the journalistic, hype-able crap, I believe I wouldn't mind if (to pick a prominent example) future versions of GNOME use .NET. It wouldn't use the crap like Passport authentication. It would use the useful parts.
The Internet is not an operating system, and thank God it isn't, because it's slow and unreliable. (Insert joke about Windows here.) All the features you mention are on the outskirts of
.NET is mostly a new runtime; that part is at least correct. But it runs on ordinary computers. Not some hypothetical "computer" that is the Internet, an actual computer that you own. Microsoft in fact realizes that people want to run applications on their own computer, something which tech journalists haven't understood since the whole "Network Computer" ordeal.
Now that this parent article has explained what
But why is everyone else focusing on the marginal "Web Services" part of it and partying like it's 1996?
Or you can use Brainfuck.NET :)
.NET.)
(I didn't make this, but I find it highly amusing. Yes, Brainfuck is an actual language, and this is an actual package that makes it compile to
Can I use BrainFuck.Net to write webservices?
No. Well, probably not.
Does BrainFuck.Net use the controversial Microsoft Passport system for authentication?
No. The Brainfuck language has only 8 commands, and none of them are related to authenticating remote network users.
So why do you need a database of billions of web pages to do that? You only need to hook a spellcheck program up to a word list, not the entirety of the Internet.
I'm sure the world will be eternally grateful when you release your GPLed code which only works when it's hooked up to Google's database.
Watch out. Just by bringing that up, you're likely to get an inane response by Mentifex about how you should feed the webpages into his "mind" written in Visual Basic^W^W JavaScript, which of course is the most important AI development of the year 2001^W 2002, the Year When AI Is Reborn, despite the fact that it is nothing but a lookup table.
Though, hopefully, this post will prevent it.
This would be a spoiler, if there was anything to spoil.
If you've seen the end of FF7, you've seen the end of FF the movie. I swear they just took that video and re-rendered it at a higher resolution.
*snicker*
This quote is priceless.
"Officials at CBS' station in Pittsburgh, KDKA, said they accidentally created the delay when they used the machine during halftime to squeeze in extra advertising worth thousands of dollars." (my emphasis)
You'll notice that Slashdot's logo used to be really big...
Don't worry. That's because the base 13 thing is a load of crap made up by people who read that part of "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" and managed to miss the point entirely.
Please enlighten me - what does a processor feature have to do with disk space?
Even though it too was created by Microsoft, RTF is a fairly decent format, and it IS well-supported. How many people have a Word viewer built into their e-mail client? It's not in Outlook (thankfully). Word opens RTF as if it were a normal .doc file, which is out of character for Microsoft - you'd think it'd complain and scare people into locking themselves into the Word format.
Nope.
What would you replace the string of 0s with? A special pattern of bits meaning, say, "this is a string of thirty-two zeros"? But then since that bit pattern is shorter, it would be even more likely to come up. And you wouldn't want it decompressing into zeros, so you'd need to mark it with another bit pattern meaning "this is not, in fact, a string of thirty-two zeros" every time it appeared. And what do you do with the bit pattern you used to mark it? Et cetera.
What if you decided to add the byte location of this string of zeros to the beginning of the file, instead? The number of bytes required to express the location would, on average, be the same as the number of bytes in the string of zeros.
Because of the mathematical reasons posted higher in the thread, the average compression ratio would come out to 1:1. Take this as a given: there is no such thing as a lossless compression algorithm whose average ratio is greater than 1:1. Many of them, however, achieve that average by marking an uncompressible file with one byte, so that the vast majority of random files get one byte longer, but the files people actually want to compress get shorter.
Allow me to vent a bit about AbiWord.
Does the Windows version of AbiWord support TrueType fonts instead of its own special ones? Does it print without dropping random letters and making you look like you can't spell?
That's far too many steps.
Any program at all that has printing support can print to a PostScript file. Just choose "Print to File", and then use ps2pdf on the resulting file.
Wordpad saves as RTF or Word 6.0, so most people would have no idea you were sending them a file from Wordpad.
"Troll"? Someone doesn't like to hear the truth. All of those responses contain mini-rants by RMS, in exactly his style. Even the one not by RMS is a typical RMS rant.
If your boss sends you a Word document and recieves back an e-mail telling him that his software habits are supporting the Microsoft monopoly which oppresses people in Kenya and Brazil (for those who didn't read the article, I'm not making that part up) it won't exactly give him a positive impression of you.
Nothing reads PDF correctly all of the time either.
Having just finished college applications, which use PDFs everywhere, I can tell you that a few PDFs opened fine in gv, several opened in xpdf (which has a crappy interface) but not gv, one looked wrong in xpdf and opened fine in gv, and then there was Carnegie Mellon whose entire system was this horrible kludge around PDF Forms (the file would load as you scrolled, and you could only save the form by submitting it and loading the entries again using a separate format called AcroExch. When the server went down the night before the application was due, there was not even a way to look at your application.) PDF Forms do not open in any Free tool whatsoever, and hardly work right in Acrobat on Windows either.
Now, even though I assume this is just wishful thinking, consider what the effects of that would be.
The virus would spread around, of course, and then the news would be announced that there is "another massive virus". (Of course they wouldn't say "Word virus" or "Outlook virus" or "Microsoft virus", just "virus".) The reporters would say, "This virus turns all your documents into a strange file format called (spooky voice or scare quotes go here) RTF. RTF files look the same as the Microsoft Word files, but they aren't really the the same! You may LOSE DATA by using this format!"
Virus-scanner companies would hype about the "RTF virus" and convince everyone to buy their latest version.
The next time you tried to convince someone to send documents in RTF, they'd look at you funny and say "You don't mean that virus format, do you?"
With a name like that, it's no wonder it's not getting accepted anywhere.
I've seen this picture before. It isn't in any language; they're defining the characters as they go along. The characters are chosen to be distinguishable even with lots of noise.
They start with O = 0 and X = 1 to express binary numbers, and then use those to define digit characters. They go on to define other things with those digits.
You can say it all you want, but it's still bullshit. There is nothing inherent to open source which makes it harder to install.
Any reasonably-complete open-source software has binary installation packages (RPMs and debs), which are often easier to install than Windows programs. Compilation of these packages is typically only done by people who want fine-grained control over their system, and who have the time and knowledge to do so. If the program "requires" you to compile it, it's a good sign that the package is meant for developers, not end users.
But there's the irony. LimeWire is open source!
The thing is that the binary that they distribute for Windows is not the same thing you'd get from compiling the source...
That "explorer.exe" is part of ClickTillUWin, in fact.
Some people I know have a hard time clicking 'accept' on the license agreement. Those folks won't go to the trouble to d/l and compile a OSS program.
That's a red herring. Just because a program is open source, that doesn't mean the end user has to compile it.