"windows can share a bunch data among different programs, in linux each program needs its own copy of the data (this is just my naieve view of things, i'm not a linux hacker)."
Nope, that's not how it works. Programs using shared libraries all use the same library code in memory, just as in Windows. Integration has nothing to do with this. However, if NineNine's X server is misconfigured, or if he doesn't have accelerated support for his card, then X will be slower.
"mono is self hosting. meaning you can use it's own compiler to compile its self"
Yes, but somehow the *initial* Mono compiler had to be compiled, and to get that far MS's own C# compiler had to be used as a bootstrap compiler. After that initial compile, Mono no longer needs the MS compiler, but it had to be there originally to bootstrap.
"I'm not sure why so many man months were spent trying to hook into.NET. Couldn't we have spent more time refining the applications, utilities, and system code that we already have rather than wasting time extending the Microsoft monopoly?"
Alternative C# compilers have the potential to undermine rather than extend the MS monopoly, simply because they are an alternative source for a C# platform.
The real trick would be getting C# programmers in the habit of targeting just the ECMA standard rather than the standard + MS lock-in extensions.
Since Mono is written in C#, it needs a C# compiler in order to be compiled, while Portable.NET is written in C, so it just needs a C compiler, like gcc, to be compiled. If Portable.NET gets good enough, maybe it could be used to bootstrap Mono instead of the Microsoft C# compiler.
I started off with Java and perl and had to go back and learn so many fundamental, lower-level aspects of programming and computers in general. I think it's tougher to do it this way rather than starting off with something like C or Assembly.
Actually, you probably did things in the right order. Learning is often iterative. Sometimes you have to first learn the rough general picture and then fill in the details and more advanced stuff later, which is more or less what you did.
Re:Maybe it's just me...
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 2
"But I don't get excited when I hear that yet another company is using Linux. Why don't I get excited? Well, I guess it's because I'm assuming that it's all related to the companies bottom line"
Isn't that how it's supposed to be? Doesn't it say more about Linux when people employ it because it's useful to them rather than because they have an attachment to it?
Re:Give Me a Break
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"This article has nothing to do with the MPAA campaigning for content restrictions. It's all well and good that the movie studios have discovered Linux and have built FilmGimp, but again, what does this have to do with Open Source?"
If Hollywood is using Open Source, that means that the MPAA can't push for content restrictions that affect Open Source without compromising the tools (and money flow) of the Hollywood folks that the MPAA is supposed to represent. That constrains what the MPAA can lobby for.
"Kde and Windows XP have a professional, clean, consistent look."
Win2k would probably be considered more "professional" in the eyes of the masses than XP. Many have complained that the latter's default look is a bit Fisher-Pricey. (I thought the look was okay, though.)
"The article talks of their problems last spring and how the community banded together to solve them. But the glitches are more an annoyance, [Ana Acevedo, who heads one of the government's document-processing units] said, than a hassle."
In other words, Microsoft software is terrible and GNU/Linux software is great.
No, in other words, the transition to Linux has not been without its share of problems.
"Overall, a very good and balanced article."
So it's a good article and balanced because it's pro-GNU/Linux and anti-MS.
No, it's a good and balanced article because it discussed the problems involved in the switch, such as the one mentioned above and the one that took three months to fix. That is hardly a facile pro-Linux/anti-MS bias.
"The unfortunate thing is that they have actually been getting better in stability and security in their products. If they continue to improve their products to a point where they are actually half-decent, the only upperhand we'll still have is that opensource software is free as in beer."
"Free as in beer" still won't be the only advantage that Open Source has.
First, "free as in speech" has its uses, too. Even non-developers benefit from having lots of programmers' eyeballs available to find bugs, backdoors. There is also the advantage of not having EULAs that have things like "phone-home" clauses buried in the legalese, or having to keep track of just how many legal copies one has.
Second, most Open Source products have the advanage of not coming from vendors that one wouldn't or shouldn't buy a used car from. MS, by contrast, has had such a record of dishonesty, i.e. the misleading error message that Win3.1 betas showed when installed on DR-DOS, astroturfing, Halloween Documents, the short-lived Mac-to-PC switch ad, that they are not a vendor that should be trusted with anything critical. How can one tell if an MS Service Pack or hot fix actually does what Microsoft says it does? How can one be sure that a habitual deceiver isn't lying? Actually, here, the "free as in speech" thing ties back into the trust issue. With Open Source, one can audit the code if one is truly paranoid. Trust isn't as necessary. With MS closed-source stuff, one has to take MS at its word that it is kosher.
"XFree86 is a nightmare to configure. While Redhat does all kinds of fancy stuff to autodetect your video card/monitor, I tried Debian a few days ago and gasped at how little has changed in configuring XFree86 since 7 years ago."
You realize that there is a bit of a contradiction in what you just wrote. First you note how "Redhat does all kinds of fancy stuff to autodetect your video card/monitor," then express surprise at "how little has changed in configuring XFree86 since 7 years ago." Obviously, what Red Hat has done has shown how *much* has changed since 7 years ago. If hardcore distros like Debian and Slack are "behind the times," that is a reflection on the distros, not the state of the art.
"Where is the evidence that Larry talks about? It's there if I care to look, but surely that's all in history?"
My guess is that the evidence that Larry Wall is referring to assorted evidence of the historicity of the New Testament (NT), such as having a lot of early manuscripts, or archaeological evidence showing that certain people mentioned in the NT actually existed, etc. If you really want to look, there are several books on the topic.
And yes, it is "all in history," but it's still evidence, for good or for bad.
"If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice"
I'm not being pedantic. "Cannot see" can mean "cannot prove" or "cannot experience" or "cannot find evidence for".
"I know of no mathematical formula or scientific experimant that _proves_ the exisitance of God - so He truly is 'un-seeable'"
This is *exactly* why I questioned what was meant by "cannot see." I can't prove that Napoleon existed on the basis of a formula or scientific experiment either, yet I'd be chided by historians for presuming that Napoleon didn't exist on that basis. Sometimes math and experiment are the wrong tools for "seeing" or finding things.
I'd be a little careful about that statement. I'm sure that you believe that atoms exist, even though you cannot see them. Of course, it is absolutely silly to say that because you believe atoms exist that you should also believe that God exists. However, you might wish to reexamine what you really mean when you say "cannot see."
I would suggest two criteria for deciding whether a file format is really open:
1) The file format should be completely documented
2) There should be at least two different applications from two different suppliers that can both read and write the format.
Criteria #2 would smoke out file formats that are badly documented, such as the MS Word file format, which vendors *still* have to reverse-engineer to get some semblance of real-life compatibility, even though a spec for the format exists.
was that Softman never ran the Adobe software he was selling, and never consented to the click-thru license. That meant that the EULA never had a chance to be in force, so the transaction between Softman and Adobe defaulted to being under copyright law.
Actually, Muslims in Turkey were opposed to the teaching of evolution, and one of the reasons Kennewick Man, a Caucasoid skeleton found on the coast of Maine, caused such an uproar is that its presence conflicted with some of the local Native American creation stories. Fundamentalist Christians are merely the most vocal, in the U.S. at least.
Also, it is not so much true that "all religions believe in creationism." For religions where the historicity of the beliefs is considered important, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, evolution as an theory of origin is a direct challenge. For religions where the truth of the myth is not considered important so much as what the myth teaches, such as Buddhism, evolution is not so much an issue.
Well, part of the reason the idea of a billion-year old Earth came about was that explanations of how the geological record fit with a young (7,000-10,000 year old) earth became increasingly clumsy and klugy, like trying to fit 80 pounds of lard in a five-pound can. So a very literal 7-day creationism, which, from the info from the Genesis geneologies would require an earth about 7,000-10,000 year old, wouldn't stand up.
A 7-day creationism that allows for a creation "day" to be longer than 24 hours has a better chance, but one would still have to account for things like dinosaurs, which don't quite fit even in a stretched-out biblical creation timeline. Also, while the Hebrew word for "day," yom,can refer to a period longer that 24 hours, it is questionable whether an ancient Hebrew reading Genesis would have naturally read "yom" as some long time period, rather than the default interpretation of "yom" as a regular old day.
Offhand, I'd say that 7-day creationism doesn't quite square with the current evidence.
Yes, that's it! It's ALL the RIAA's fault! They MADE you download the software, and held a gun to your head to click that "Install" button. Then they theatened to asault your families if you didn't "share"* as many MP3s as you could!
Oh, please. You absolutely missed the point. The article basically said that Napster's impact was minimal, that it wasn't the big money drain the RIAA made it out to be. Compared to the combined effects of the recession and the dubious creative output of the labels, Napster was a love tap, not a sucker punch.
Maybe Apple might consider helping the Cocoa port of GTK+. That would cover a number of applications currently used with X, such as the GIMP, while avoiding the "kluge" of using X. I can't see how GTK+-Cocoa would be much different from Carbon or Qt for Mac OS X.
That said, I doubt Apple would actively help out. It would be an expenditure of time and resources used to help port what for Apple would be a miniscule number of apps. Most GTK+ apps are either part of a desktop like GNOME--which Apple doesn't need since it has a desktop--or are little utilities that already have counterparts on the Mac, such as assorted file managers (OS X already has Finder), text editors, background changers, or mp3 players. The main biggie worth porting is the GIMP, whose Mac counterparts aren't all that cheap. (The cheapest one that seems to have a feature set comparable to the GIMP costs about $100.)
Apple will probably neither interfere nor actively help XDarwin or ports of Unix apps to the Mac. Not worth enough in Apple's eyes to the bottom line, I'm sure.
"Just FYI, Macworld ownd Maccentral and thus anything coming out of Maccentral will be a parrot of what's coming out of Macworld."
Except that I read both reviews, and the MacCentral one is different from the one from MacWorld. The MacCentral review even points out problems with iChat and Word.
Slashdot Mirror
"windows can share a bunch data among different programs, in linux each program needs its own copy of the data (this is just my naieve view of things, i'm not a linux hacker)."
Nope, that's not how it works. Programs using shared libraries all use the same library code in memory, just as in Windows. Integration has nothing to do with this. However, if NineNine's X server is misconfigured, or if he doesn't have accelerated support for his card, then X will be slower.
"mono is self hosting. meaning you can use it's own compiler to compile its self"
Yes, but somehow the *initial* Mono compiler had to be compiled, and to get that far MS's own C# compiler had to be used as a bootstrap compiler. After that initial compile, Mono no longer needs the MS compiler, but it had to be there originally to bootstrap.
"I'm not sure why so many man months were spent trying to hook into .NET. Couldn't we have spent more time refining the applications, utilities, and system code that we already have rather than wasting time extending the Microsoft monopoly?"
Alternative C# compilers have the potential to undermine rather than extend the MS monopoly, simply because they are an alternative source for a C# platform.
The real trick would be getting C# programmers in the habit of targeting just the ECMA standard rather than the standard + MS lock-in extensions.
Since Mono is written in C#, it needs a C# compiler in order to be compiled, while Portable.NET is written in C, so it just needs a C compiler, like gcc, to be compiled. If Portable.NET gets good enough, maybe it could be used to bootstrap Mono instead of the Microsoft C# compiler.
The business that makes Opera might not want to be bought. Can't buy without a seller.
"But I don't get excited when I hear that yet another company is using Linux. Why don't I get excited? Well, I guess it's because I'm assuming that it's all related to the companies bottom line"
Isn't that how it's supposed to be? Doesn't it say more about Linux when people employ it because it's useful to them rather than because they have an attachment to it?
"This article has nothing to do with the MPAA campaigning for content restrictions. It's all well and good that the movie studios have discovered Linux and have built FilmGimp, but again, what does this have to do with Open Source?"
If Hollywood is using Open Source, that means that the MPAA can't push for content restrictions that affect Open Source without compromising the tools (and money flow) of the Hollywood folks that the MPAA is supposed to represent. That constrains what the MPAA can lobby for.
"Kde and Windows XP have a professional, clean, consistent look."
Win2k would probably be considered more "professional" in the eyes of the masses than XP. Many have complained that the latter's default look is a bit Fisher-Pricey. (I thought the look was okay, though.)
No, in other words, the transition to Linux has not been without its share of problems.
No, it's a good and balanced article because it discussed the problems involved in the switch, such as the one mentioned above and the one that took three months to fix. That is hardly a facile pro-Linux/anti-MS bias.
"Free as in beer" still won't be the only advantage that Open Source has.
First, "free as in speech" has its uses, too. Even non-developers benefit from having lots of programmers' eyeballs available to find bugs, backdoors. There is also the advantage of not having EULAs that have things like "phone-home" clauses buried in the legalese, or having to keep track of just how many legal copies one has.
Second, most Open Source products have the advanage of not coming from vendors that one wouldn't or shouldn't buy a used car from. MS, by contrast, has had such a record of dishonesty, i.e. the misleading error message that Win3.1 betas showed when installed on DR-DOS, astroturfing, Halloween Documents, the short-lived Mac-to-PC switch ad, that they are not a vendor that should be trusted with anything critical. How can one tell if an MS Service Pack or hot fix actually does what Microsoft says it does? How can one be sure that a habitual deceiver isn't lying? Actually, here, the "free as in speech" thing ties back into the trust issue. With Open Source, one can audit the code if one is truly paranoid. Trust isn't as necessary. With MS closed-source stuff, one has to take MS at its word that it is kosher.
"XFree86 is a nightmare to configure. While Redhat does all kinds of fancy stuff to autodetect your video card/monitor, I tried Debian a few days ago and gasped at how little has changed in configuring XFree86 since 7 years ago."
You realize that there is a bit of a contradiction in what you just wrote. First you note how "Redhat does all kinds of fancy stuff to autodetect your video card/monitor," then express surprise at "how little has changed in configuring XFree86 since 7 years ago." Obviously, what Red Hat has done has shown how *much* has changed since 7 years ago. If hardcore distros like Debian and Slack are "behind the times," that is a reflection on the distros, not the state of the art.
And then read the reviews of that review here and here
"The difference is between the 'Scientific Method' characterized by experiment and measurement, and the 'Investigative Method'"
Yes, that was my point.
"Where is the evidence that Larry talks about? It's there if I care to look, but surely that's all in history?"
My guess is that the evidence that Larry Wall is referring to assorted evidence of the historicity of the New Testament (NT), such as having a lot of early manuscripts, or archaeological evidence showing that certain people mentioned in the NT actually existed, etc. If you really want to look, there are several books on the topic.
And yes, it is "all in history," but it's still evidence, for good or for bad.
"If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice"
Fair enough.
"Stop being pendantic and splitting hairs."
I'm not being pedantic. "Cannot see" can mean "cannot prove" or "cannot experience" or "cannot find evidence for".
"I know of no mathematical formula or scientific experimant that _proves_ the exisitance of God - so He truly is 'un-seeable'"
This is *exactly* why I questioned what was meant by "cannot see." I can't prove that Napoleon existed on the basis of a formula or scientific experiment either, yet I'd be chided by historians for presuming that Napoleon didn't exist on that basis. Sometimes math and experiment are the wrong tools for "seeing" or finding things.
"I cannot believe in something I cannot see"
I'd be a little careful about that statement. I'm sure that you believe that atoms exist, even though you cannot see them. Of course, it is absolutely silly to say that because you believe atoms exist that you should also believe that God exists. However, you might wish to reexamine what you really mean when you say "cannot see."
I would suggest two criteria for deciding whether a file format is really open:
1) The file format should be completely documented
2) There should be at least two different applications from two different suppliers that can both read and write the format.
Criteria #2 would smoke out file formats that are badly documented, such as the MS Word file format, which vendors *still* have to reverse-engineer to get some semblance of real-life compatibility, even though a spec for the format exists.
was that Softman never ran the Adobe software he was selling, and never consented to the click-thru license. That meant that the EULA never had a chance to be in force, so the transaction between Softman and Adobe defaulted to being under copyright law.
Um, the guy you responded to was *joking*. Take a look at what the guy you responded to was responding to.
Actually, Muslims in Turkey were opposed to the teaching of evolution, and one of the reasons Kennewick Man, a Caucasoid skeleton found on the coast of Maine, caused such an uproar is that its presence conflicted with some of the local Native American creation stories. Fundamentalist Christians are merely the most vocal, in the U.S. at least.
Also, it is not so much true that "all religions believe in creationism." For religions where the historicity of the beliefs is considered important, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, evolution as an theory of origin is a direct challenge. For religions where the truth of the myth is not considered important so much as what the myth teaches, such as Buddhism, evolution is not so much an issue.
Well, part of the reason the idea of a billion-year old Earth came about was that explanations of how the geological record fit with a young (7,000-10,000 year old) earth became increasingly clumsy and klugy, like trying to fit 80 pounds of lard in a five-pound can. So a very literal 7-day creationism, which, from the info from the Genesis geneologies would require an earth about 7,000-10,000 year old, wouldn't stand up.
,can refer to a period longer that 24 hours, it is questionable whether an ancient Hebrew reading Genesis would have naturally read "yom" as some long time period, rather than the default interpretation of "yom" as a regular old day.
A 7-day creationism that allows for a creation "day" to be longer than 24 hours has a better chance, but one would still have to account for things like dinosaurs, which don't quite fit even in a stretched-out biblical creation timeline. Also, while the Hebrew word for "day," yom
Offhand, I'd say that 7-day creationism doesn't quite square with the current evidence.
Maybe Apple might consider helping the Cocoa port of GTK+. That would cover a number of applications currently used with X, such as the GIMP, while avoiding the "kluge" of using X. I can't see how GTK+-Cocoa would be much different from Carbon or Qt for Mac OS X.
That said, I doubt Apple would actively help out. It would be an expenditure of time and resources used to help port what for Apple would be a miniscule number of apps. Most GTK+ apps are either part of a desktop like GNOME--which Apple doesn't need since it has a desktop--or are little utilities that already have counterparts on the Mac, such as assorted file managers (OS X already has Finder), text editors, background changers, or mp3 players. The main biggie worth porting is the GIMP, whose Mac counterparts aren't all that cheap. (The cheapest one that seems to have a feature set comparable to the GIMP costs about $100.)
Apple will probably neither interfere nor actively help XDarwin or ports of Unix apps to the Mac. Not worth enough in Apple's eyes to the bottom line, I'm sure.
"Just FYI, Macworld ownd Maccentral and thus anything coming out of Maccentral will be a parrot of what's coming out of Macworld."
Except that I read both reviews, and the MacCentral one is different from the one from MacWorld. The MacCentral review even points out problems with iChat and Word.