There's nothing wrong with having hundreds of forks...
The more I think about this, the more I confuse myself. While I agree that having choice is definitely a very important thing, having too many choices is probably very problematic. It simply makes standardizing an impossible task. So, you end up with some programs that work perfectly with one fork, and not so spectacularly with others.
On the other hand, having one single implementation usually locks the end user with the features that the developers feel are important. And no.. not everyone can and want to hack someone else's C code just to add just another feature, so the argument "patches are welcome" doesn't apply to 99% of end users.
This, IMHO, is the major setback to most opensource projects. For GNU/Linux to really fly, we have to make things easier for the end user. Which means giving them less decisions to make (but not necessarily less choice). It's a tough issue, and a delicate balance has to be struck before we see major leaps for GNU/Linux on the desktop.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how such a balance might be achieved. I'm just happy that the kernel development doesn't suffer from the same problem.
I guess there are a lot of execs out there that think if you don't offer music in one way or another, then you must be doomed.
The problem with most execs is that they can't come up with anything original, so they follow in others' footsteps. What happened to innovation?
What's worse, it seems that the whole internet has become a venue to distribute music (and pr0n, of course). In my eyes, this has put this great tool (the internet) at a new low. It's like buying the latest and greatest graphics card just to browse the web; or buying Playboy just for the articles.
IMHO, this is just a fad. It will go away when the next big thing emerges.
While the 3 laws of robotics are mentioned plenty of times and of course the movie is named after an Asimov story nowhere do they give credit to Isaac Asimov.
I just finished reading the book a couple of weeks ago. Other than the name and the the 3 laws of robotics (which they simplified a lot, at least in the trailer), the movie doesn't seem to have anything to do with the book.
I'm slightly disappointed, but I hope it will still be a good movie.
This could be interesting, assuming of course it is legal.
Someone in the US can set up a website where they offer to buy iTunes music (for 99 cents) for people located outside the US, and selling it to them (for $1, say). Is there anything illegal with this?
Seems like W. Russell Jones is trying to apply 1900-era economics to a collaborative, abstract, not-truly-market-driven, positive-feedback context.
Very true. He's trying to confuse the issue by implying that monetary compensation is the only thing driving software development. This is not too different from SCO's allegations.
The way I think about it is: OSS is not free. Many people have paid their time and energy to get it where it is now.
In Gnome, there's no obvious way to rename a file at all.
That's the whole point.
Tell me. Out of the last 100 times you clicked on an icon, how many times was your intention to rename the file, and not execute an application associated with it?
"But, you will *NEVER* find an Arab chanting anti-Palestinian slogans."
You, like others who replied, seemed to have missed my point. What I meant by anti-Palestinian in the quote above is statements, by Arabs, that deny Palestinians the right to a homeland in Palestine. There aren't any. But, there are Jews who don't believe Israel has the right to that land (not until the real Messiah comes).
In 1970, Jordan shot thousands of Palestinians. Not a slogan in sight.
That was a political move against the PLO and Yasser Arafat, who decided to overthrow King Hussein. Nothing anti-Palestinian there. PLO does *NOT* represent all Palestinians.
The reason Israelis and Jews are allowed to protest is because it is a fundamental democratic right which Jews and Israelis hold sacred. The fact that people like you use that against them (comments about Rabbis protesting etc) shows a clear misunderstanding of Middle East Politics or a deliberate anti-Israel/anti-Jewish slant.
This is a touchy subject, and I always try to debate it in a civil manner, and keep my mind open. I do understand Middle East politics (being a Palestinian, with a Jordanian passport), and I'm not anti-Jewish. In fact I do have many Jewish friends whom I consider close. I'm anti-Israeli though, and for the obvious reasons. I admire Israel for one thing only: democracy, although Arab Israelis are openly considered second-class citizens. But, it also has its share of corruption, that is of a magnitude comparable to its neighbours. Think of Sharon's latest scandal, illegal settlements, unnecessary expanding of settlements, Yigal Amir, etc. The only difference is that leaders don't last long enough for it to be called dictatorship, due to democracy.
Indeed you will be hard pressed to even find left-wing or anti-Government protest in most of the Arab Middle East as this usually results in a heavy knock on the door in the middle of the night.
Again, I wasn't talking about Arab governments in my original post. Corruption there abounds. But, things are changing. Many Arabic countries are going through lots of reform where opposition parties are allowed and welcome (Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan & Egypt to a smaller extent), and the new generation understands the need for democracy.
I believe that Israelis can live peacefully with their neighbours, and wish for it, given the contol over two things: Hamas and right-wing Israeli settlers.
Well, it's nice to know that there aren't any Arabs who hate Jews. I'll sleep a lot better now that I know such an authority as yourself has declared the Arab world free of any such sentiments.
Actually, there is a lot of truth in the first statement I quoted. Arabs in general tend to try to differentiate between Judaism as a religion (which Islam believes in, and calls for its respect), and Zionism as a political movement to replace Palestinians by Jews. There are many Arabic Jews (a minority, yes, but a lot of them nevertheless), and they are not treated any differently from other Arabs.
But, it's Israel who is trying to smear down the difference between Judaism and Zionism, and for a simple reason: this gives them the "right" (being promised that land by God, being the chosen people, etc) to occupy more land, and commit more atrocities against the "gentiles" currently living in the Holy Land. And there are many Jews who realize this, and refuse to live in Israel or support it. I have been to many a demonstration where Rabbis would chant anti-Israel slogan along side Arabs, protesting Israeli aggression against Palestinians and occupation of Arab land. But, you will *NEVER* find an Arab chanting anti-Palestinian slogans.
Somehow, this point is more readily realized in Europe and most of the world than in the United States.
The fact that I can write code like I do above is a "bad thing".
So don't.
As much as I love the "unless" command, it's bad code.
I would argue that unless() isn't THAT bad, but if you think it's bad, don't use it.
As much as I assign mutually exclusive variables to @dir and $dir, it should not be done, especially when $dir and $dir[0] contain two wildy different items.
I'm sorry, but the author of this article is missing the forest for the trees. Without knowing his background, I would tend to think that he doesn't have too much experience in writing large pieces of software and maintaining them for a long period of time.
As a piece of software gets more and more useful, more people start to use it. And hence, more bug fixes and suggestions start to trickle in. Initially, those could be easy to fix, without any side effects, but at some point fixing one bug can introduce a myriad of other problems. The larger the code base is, and the longer the code has been in "production", the harder this becomes. Then, it becomes apparent to the coders that had they chosen a different design strategy, things could be easily fixed. When enough of those revelations happen, and when it becomes extremely frustrating to follow the numerous bugs resulting from a small fix somewhere else, the time becomes ripe for a re-write. And, if the re-write is done properly, then everything will fall nicely into place. A case in point is Perl5, which was a complete re-write from scratch, but kept backward compatibility with Perl4, and greatly enhanced upon it.
Also, the argument of "good enough" is a very weak one. I guess whether a tool is "good enough" depends on your intended application. Horses were "good enough" for most people to travel around with, before automobiles. Pen and paper were "good enough" for most people to calculate with, before computers. And the list never ends. But somebody, somewhere, always wants/needs more.
If humans had been content with "good enough", then we'd still be in the dark ages.
Since SCO seem so desperate trying to exaggerate their claims, I would tend to think that the actual number is between 61-65, else they would have said 'exceeds 65 pages'.
"One wonders why these literal rocket scientists didn't just get a software programmable Linux or PalmOS based wrist-computer and hack together a Mars-time display application into it?"
Seems like Microsoft is paying attention to the Linux way of doing things.
I'm happy for that. This will make Windows more secure, which will relieve many people out there.
Also, another way to look at it is that this will force Linux developers to come up with even better ideas and techniques to try and stay one step ahead. Competition is a Good Thing (tm).
... 3 dimensional computer desktops are not going to be taking over the world anytime soon.
I agree. While the demo is very cool, I'm more concerned about how response time will be when I have several xterms, a few Emacs', Opera, Evolution, and a number of other windows open. Even if the response time was acceptable, there is no real gain from adopting a 3D desktop, UNLESS we can somehow replace the mouse as the pointing device (Tom Cruise in The Minority Report comes to mind).
It is hard enough teaching people to use the mouse correctly in two dimesions.
I haven't researched this, but my gut feeling is that it might be easier to teach people to navigate in three dimensions than in two since all the experience humans have is in a 3 dimensional world, and they will be able to intuitively leverage that experience. Again, using the mouse as the pointing device in this case might not be the best choice. But, my limited imagination can't come up with any better alternatives.
Makes me think though...wasn't it always implied that computers would save peoples time? Has that assumption yet proved that it is indeed true? I'm not so sure it has...
Try designing a multi-million transistor chip using pen and paper, and you'll know the answer.
When there is enough software for machines to be good at any skills and draw from that expertise, then what genious? Who is going to care if they use brute force methods to play chess, vacuum clean your carpet, be good pets, or become governors of California?
I certainly won't care. And I mentioned in my post that I believe that those techniques are valid and extremely valuable. My point was that this does NOT make machines "intelligent" as I can probably trick my carpet cleaner into an infinite loop by using super glue on a bit of bread crumbs.
My point, which apparently wasn't as obvious as I intended it to be, is that a computer beating a human at chess means nothing. All it means is that we have enough CPU power to search decision trees faster. The "age of the machines" is still very far away.
... proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived.
And it is still very far away IMHO.
Chess playing programs take advantage of higher CPU speeds, smart tree-traversal routines and other heuristics to explore as many possiblities as they can in a given amount of time, before deciding what the next best move is. Now, I'm not dismissing this as wrong or useless. In fact such techniques are extremely useful in a variety of applications. Call them anything you like, but please don't call them "Intelligent". They are more of a brute force approach where each possible move is checked and the best one is chosen, (although I agree that they do give the impression of intelligent behaviour).
To me, "intelligence" is the ability to adapt to new, unknown environments, and to come up with novel ideas that are outside of a given repertoire. Games of Complete Information like chess do not qualify as test beds for AI. Ask X3D Fritz to calculate the area of the unit circle, and you'll know what I mean. The only reason chess has become such a standard for judging AI is that early AI researchers at MIT made it a goal to write a chess-playing program that can beat humans (for an interesting history of those days, check out "Hackers" by Steven Levy).
There is definitely lots of real research in AI going on. This is just not one of them.
You don't stop feeding a dog just because it's old, do you? (Conclusion: comparing a CPU to a dog doesn't work.)
Who said anything about feeding? And how does that render the comparison (in the context of life cycles) wrong? Everything is relative. An 11-year old dog is old. 11-year old hardware is old. 11-year old humans are young. That was the comparison.
One of the aspects that makes Linux powerful is running on everything from watches to enterprise-level servers. I'm sorry that you can only perceive its usefulness on the desktop.
Since you're getting personal, I will too.
I'm sorry that you don't seem to perceive the difference between the subject matter (XFree86) and the linux kernel. I never said linux should only run on desktops, and am well aware of its strength in being able to run on a huge number of platforms.
The point I'm trying to make is that the biggest platform of all, the end-user desktop, needs special care. We can (and SHOULD) support all hardware, but we shouldn't let this hold back linux on the desktop. What I'm saying is that there should be an uberly cool windowing system, that is significantly better than XFree86, that can use today's hardware to their maximum capabilities, if we want linux on the desktop to take off. Older hardware can still use XFree86 or Qtopia or whatever else they need. IMHO of course.
Effectively, these people believe that their claim to these new territories is founded purely and simply in the lack of laws preventing it.
In this same spirit, I hereby claim ownership of all oxygen gas molecules (known chemically as O2) in the atmosphere of Earth and any other celestial object.
In order for you to continue using O2 in your daily lives, you have to purchase a $699 license. An invoice will be sent to you.
Slashdot Mirror
The more I think about this, the more I confuse myself. While I agree that having choice is definitely a very important thing, having too many choices is probably very problematic. It simply makes standardizing an impossible task. So, you end up with some programs that work perfectly with one fork, and not so spectacularly with others.
On the other hand, having one single implementation usually locks the end user with the features that the developers feel are important. And no .. not everyone can and want to hack someone else's C code just to add just another feature, so the argument "patches are welcome" doesn't apply to 99% of end users.
This, IMHO, is the major setback to most opensource projects. For GNU/Linux to really fly, we have to make things easier for the end user. Which means giving them less decisions to make (but not necessarily less choice). It's a tough issue, and a delicate balance has to be struck before we see major leaps for GNU/Linux on the desktop.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how such a balance might be achieved. I'm just happy that the kernel development doesn't suffer from the same problem.
The problem with most execs is that they can't come up with anything original, so they follow in others' footsteps. What happened to innovation?
What's worse, it seems that the whole internet has become a venue to distribute music (and pr0n, of course). In my eyes, this has put this great tool (the internet) at a new low. It's like buying the latest and greatest graphics card just to browse the web; or buying Playboy just for the articles.
IMHO, this is just a fad. It will go away when the next big thing emerges.
I just finished reading the book a couple of weeks ago. Other than the name and the the 3 laws of robotics (which they simplified a lot, at least in the trailer), the movie doesn't seem to have anything to do with the book.
I'm slightly disappointed, but I hope it will still be a good movie.
... Clippy!
Someone in the US can set up a website where they offer to buy iTunes music (for 99 cents) for people located outside the US, and selling it to them (for $1, say). Is there anything illegal with this?
Needless to say, IANAL.
Looks like they're big Britney Spears fans!
Very true. He's trying to confuse the issue by implying that monetary compensation is the only thing driving software development. This is not too different from SCO's allegations.
The way I think about it is: OSS is not free. Many people have paid their time and energy to get it where it is now.
And what did MARKETING say?
That's the whole point.
Tell me. Out of the last 100 times you clicked on an icon, how many times was your intention to rename the file, and not execute an application associated with it?
Why would you want to do that if you can give it a hundred-dollar LCD? I don't see how a flexible panel helps there.
You, like others who replied, seemed to have missed my point. What I meant by anti-Palestinian in the quote above is statements, by Arabs, that deny Palestinians the right to a homeland in Palestine. There aren't any. But, there are Jews who don't believe Israel has the right to that land (not until the real Messiah comes).
In 1970, Jordan shot thousands of Palestinians. Not a slogan in sight.
That was a political move against the PLO and Yasser Arafat, who decided to overthrow King Hussein. Nothing anti-Palestinian there. PLO does *NOT* represent all Palestinians.
The reason Israelis and Jews are allowed to protest is because it is a fundamental democratic right which Jews and Israelis hold sacred. The fact that people like you use that against them (comments about Rabbis protesting etc) shows a clear misunderstanding of Middle East Politics or a deliberate anti-Israel/anti-Jewish slant.
This is a touchy subject, and I always try to debate it in a civil manner, and keep my mind open. I do understand Middle East politics (being a Palestinian, with a Jordanian passport), and I'm not anti-Jewish. In fact I do have many Jewish friends whom I consider close. I'm anti-Israeli though, and for the obvious reasons. I admire Israel for one thing only: democracy, although Arab Israelis are openly considered second-class citizens. But, it also has its share of corruption, that is of a magnitude comparable to its neighbours. Think of Sharon's latest scandal, illegal settlements, unnecessary expanding of settlements, Yigal Amir, etc. The only difference is that leaders don't last long enough for it to be called dictatorship, due to democracy.
Indeed you will be hard pressed to even find left-wing or anti-Government protest in most of the Arab Middle East as this usually results in a heavy knock on the door in the middle of the night.
Again, I wasn't talking about Arab governments in my original post. Corruption there abounds. But, things are changing. Many Arabic countries are going through lots of reform where opposition parties are allowed and welcome (Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan & Egypt to a smaller extent), and the new generation understands the need for democracy.
I believe that Israelis can live peacefully with their neighbours, and wish for it, given the contol over two things: Hamas and right-wing Israeli settlers.
Well, it's nice to know that there aren't any Arabs who hate Jews. I'll sleep a lot better now that I know such an authority as yourself has declared the Arab world free of any such sentiments.
Actually, there is a lot of truth in the first statement I quoted. Arabs in general tend to try to differentiate between Judaism as a religion (which Islam believes in, and calls for its respect), and Zionism as a political movement to replace Palestinians by Jews. There are many Arabic Jews (a minority, yes, but a lot of them nevertheless), and they are not treated any differently from other Arabs.
But, it's Israel who is trying to smear down the difference between Judaism and Zionism, and for a simple reason: this gives them the "right" (being promised that land by God, being the chosen people, etc) to occupy more land, and commit more atrocities against the "gentiles" currently living in the Holy Land. And there are many Jews who realize this, and refuse to live in Israel or support it. I have been to many a demonstration where Rabbis would chant anti-Israel slogan along side Arabs, protesting Israeli aggression against Palestinians and occupation of Arab land. But, you will *NEVER* find an Arab chanting anti-Palestinian slogans.
Somehow, this point is more readily realized in Europe and most of the world than in the United States.
So don't.
As much as I love the "unless" command, it's bad code.
I would argue that unless() isn't THAT bad, but if you think it's bad, don't use it.
As much as I assign mutually exclusive variables to @dir and $dir, it should not be done, especially when $dir and $dir[0] contain two wildy different items.
So don't.
Don't blame the language. Blame the programmer.
As a piece of software gets more and more useful, more people start to use it. And hence, more bug fixes and suggestions start to trickle in. Initially, those could be easy to fix, without any side effects, but at some point fixing one bug can introduce a myriad of other problems. The larger the code base is, and the longer the code has been in "production", the harder this becomes. Then, it becomes apparent to the coders that had they chosen a different design strategy, things could be easily fixed. When enough of those revelations happen, and when it becomes extremely frustrating to follow the numerous bugs resulting from a small fix somewhere else, the time becomes ripe for a re-write. And, if the re-write is done properly, then everything will fall nicely into place. A case in point is Perl5, which was a complete re-write from scratch, but kept backward compatibility with Perl4, and greatly enhanced upon it.
Also, the argument of "good enough" is a very weak one. I guess whether a tool is "good enough" depends on your intended application. Horses were "good enough" for most people to travel around with, before automobiles. Pen and paper were "good enough" for most people to calculate with, before computers. And the list never ends. But somebody, somewhere, always wants/needs more.
If humans had been content with "good enough", then we'd still be in the dark ages.
Since SCO seem so desperate trying to exaggerate their claims, I would tend to think that the actual number is between 61-65, else they would have said 'exceeds 65 pages'.
Small fonts are readable via a magnifying glass, so that won't be an issue. Now if IBM were using MS Symbol fonts, then SCO would be in real trouble!
They're afraid of a SCO lawsuit!
-In 1901, to celebrate the new millennium, ...
-The inventor of the machine-man said it could keep up that pace for an almost unlimited time.
-In the small of the back is a small metal tube about one-half inch in diameter ..
I'm happy for that. This will make Windows more secure, which will relieve many people out there.
Also, another way to look at it is that this will force Linux developers to come up with even better ideas and techniques to try and stay one step ahead. Competition is a Good Thing (tm).
I agree. While the demo is very cool, I'm more concerned about how response time will be when I have several xterms, a few Emacs', Opera, Evolution, and a number of other windows open. Even if the response time was acceptable, there is no real gain from adopting a 3D desktop, UNLESS we can somehow replace the mouse as the pointing device (Tom Cruise in The Minority Report comes to mind).
It is hard enough teaching people to use the mouse correctly in two dimesions.
I haven't researched this, but my gut feeling is that it might be easier to teach people to navigate in three dimensions than in two since all the experience humans have is in a 3 dimensional world, and they will be able to intuitively leverage that experience. Again, using the mouse as the pointing device in this case might not be the best choice. But, my limited imagination can't come up with any better alternatives.
Try designing a multi-million transistor chip using pen and paper, and you'll know the answer.
I certainly won't care. And I mentioned in my post that I believe that those techniques are valid and extremely valuable. My point was that this does NOT make machines "intelligent" as I can probably trick my carpet cleaner into an infinite loop by using super glue on a bit of bread crumbs.
My point, which apparently wasn't as obvious as I intended it to be, is that a computer beating a human at chess means nothing. All it means is that we have enough CPU power to search decision trees faster. The "age of the machines" is still very far away.
Chess playing programs take advantage of higher CPU speeds, smart tree-traversal routines and other heuristics to explore as many possiblities as they can in a given amount of time, before deciding what the next best move is. Now, I'm not dismissing this as wrong or useless. In fact such techniques are extremely useful in a variety of applications. Call them anything you like, but please don't call them "Intelligent". They are more of a brute force approach where each possible move is checked and the best one is chosen, (although I agree that they do give the impression of intelligent behaviour).
To me, "intelligence" is the ability to adapt to new, unknown environments, and to come up with novel ideas that are outside of a given repertoire. Games of Complete Information like chess do not qualify as test beds for AI. Ask X3D Fritz to calculate the area of the unit circle, and you'll know what I mean. The only reason chess has become such a standard for judging AI is that early AI researchers at MIT made it a goal to write a chess-playing program that can beat humans (for an interesting history of those days, check out "Hackers" by Steven Levy).
There is definitely lots of real research in AI going on. This is just not one of them.
Who said anything about feeding? And how does that render the comparison (in the context of life cycles) wrong? Everything is relative. An 11-year old dog is old. 11-year old hardware is old. 11-year old humans are young. That was the comparison.
One of the aspects that makes Linux powerful is running on everything from watches to enterprise-level servers. I'm sorry that you can only perceive its usefulness on the desktop.
Since you're getting personal, I will too.
I'm sorry that you don't seem to perceive the difference between the subject matter (XFree86) and the linux kernel. I never said linux should only run on desktops, and am well aware of its strength in being able to run on a huge number of platforms.
The point I'm trying to make is that the biggest platform of all, the end-user desktop, needs special care. We can (and SHOULD ) support all hardware, but we shouldn't let this hold back linux on the desktop. What I'm saying is that there should be an uberly cool windowing system, that is significantly better than XFree86, that can use today's hardware to their maximum capabilities, if we want linux on the desktop to take off. Older hardware can still use XFree86 or Qtopia or whatever else they need. IMHO of course.
In this same spirit, I hereby claim ownership of all oxygen gas molecules (known chemically as O2) in the atmosphere of Earth and any other celestial object.
In order for you to continue using O2 in your daily lives, you have to purchase a $699 license. An invoice will be sent to you.