An article by Katz on how the infospere is filling up with crap, next to this article... it's a sign I tell you.
I was going to write to refute this junk, then I got to the bit about "Why OOP is like communism" and realised that it was a waste of time. He's a crank and a troll.
This is not a surgery robot, it is a waldo. OK, it is a very fancy, very cool waldo with nice features like scaling down movements for precision surgery, and automatically smoothing out shaking hands.
> redifines terms to make article seme sensationalistic
Hm. I still can't get a Redhat or Mandrake CD with kernel 2.4
Point taken that "vapourware" often means "not actually in existence", which is not quite how wired used it - 2.4 kernel was taking shape, albeit incompletely, in full public view. Still, as a programmer I know that no software is certain until it ships.
> the wired article clearly showed that they had nothing better to do but bash people who are working hard on a project....
> were real journalists they would be more responsible
whine whine whine. So because people were working hard means it wasn't delivered later than the expected "fall 1999"? Um, no. Because it's open source means it gets special treatment? Um, no.
I know people who used to work for MS, and put in long hours testing NT2K, only to have thier hard effort recieve a vapourware award for much the same reasons - ie the final release wasn't out yet. Years of work labeled "vapour". I bet you think that's fair, just because it's not Linux.
You know what? When you put something in front of the public, bad press and good press are an inevitable result. Get over it. MS can do it, so can you.
Um, no offence, but the criteria for the vapourware awards are quite simple:
1) Was the product eagerly anticipated during the past year
2) did it fail to appear during that year.
2.4 kernel meets them. Admittedly the original article could have said that a release seemed immmanent at the end of 2000, but it is *not* "talking out of your ass"
. Anyone can write drool-proof code (that's code that is so easy to understand that even a baby can
Really? that's the opposite of what OO experts say. I forget which one said "Anyone can write code that the machine can understand. The trick is to write code that another programmer can understand."
.net and multiple languages
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 3
Perl, Visual Basic and C# can be compiled down to IL.
If I may make myself look smart after other people have corrected my mistakes on other fora:.NET has, at present count over 15 languages that work with it. To be sure, C#, Java and VB are not that different in principle, but languages like Scheme and ML have been integrated as well. This is no mean feat. Legacy code is catered for with COBOL and others. PERL and Python to round up the internet/scripting programmers.
They are so well integrated that an object in one language can be subclassed in another. Early reports are favorable - it remains to be seen if this amount of multi-language integration is a good thing (tm), but it's definitely an experiment to watch.
BTW,.net is thought to be more portable than win32 so it's not inconcievable that MS are contemplating cross-platform as well as cross-language.
MS is allowing third parties to plug in thier own languages, but comercial windows programming language vendors won't exactly be thrilled by the prospect of thier tool being reduced to a plugin for visual studio.
I'm thinking specifically of my favorite toy, Borland Delphi, here - are there any other major Windows programming tool vendors besides Borland any more? Microsoft's genius is that whilst other people may get good at thier game, they are in a postion to change the rules, and periodically they do. This is one of those. No wonder Boland are running for the safety of Linux.
BTW, one of the languages in.net is component-pascal, an OO descendant of Oberon, Modula and Pascal. I have no idea what's really like, or if it's ready to leave the safety of academia yet, but it's a carrot - from a brief glimse it looks nice. Oberon was used to implement an OS, so it can't be that constrictive.
> wouldn't be the first OS to more closely tie the GUI to the kernel.
I shouldn't have to say this here, but CORBA has nothing to do with GUIs, except that it is a necessary service for Gnome's particular architecture.
This article is good news because it allows the ORB to be used in non-gui contexts. I'm not saying that it should be part of the kernel, but it should and can be decoupled from GNOME. Modularity. Reusability. Flexibility. These are all good things.
You are missing the point to a stunning extent. I can't belive that this got voted up.
Natural vs. Artificial is an arbitary distinction. If we had a massive nuclear war, you could argue that it is a product of nature just as we are. But the real point is that it *would kill us all*, people, cows, bengal tigers, redwood trees and the rest. We have a choice here.
> We change our environment to suit are needs
Sometimes. Sometimes we accidentally fuck up our enviroment through ignorance and short-sighted greed. Are you seriously suggesting that the ozone hole was a deliberate change?
Who gives a flying f--- if ozone holes are natural or not. The point is that they harm us in the long term and across the whole planet. We caused them and we can stop. The green view is one that puts *our own long term good* over short-term, local gains.
> I've always argued this point, and I'm glad to see one more argument to back me up.
And how does a new calculation on the duration of ozone holes back up your "argument" that we are a part of nature?
Nate P is 100% right, and 0% original. This conclusion was drawn many years ago by Dr James Lovelock (see Dr. James Lovelock and Dr. Lynn Margulis's Gaea Hypothesis)
If there was life on mars, it would have adapted and radiated to many ecological niches.
Life on earth, even leaving humans aside, has *transformed* the way that the earth looks. Oxygen in the atmosphere. Green-tinted land.
Given that we only have one definite example of life (earth), it is fair to say that it sticks out a million miles away. Therefor, mars is most likely barren, barren, barren.
If there are tetrachromats now, then there have most likely have been a few of them, a low and constant percentage of the female population, throughout history, and indeed through recent human evolution (and perhaps not-so-recent). Who knows, maybe there are colour blind(Dichromat) and tetrachomat chimps.
So in this sense it's not a few colour at all - some people could see it all along.
> But it wouldnt be a "new" color. The color has always been there, we just haven't been able to detect it.
What makes you think that colours are "there" at all? We can 'detect' the wavelength and intenstity of light accurately using our electronic equipment. The concept of seeing a fourth primary colour, is however, new to most of us.
> like scientists discovering neutrons and protons and claiming they were new. Not new, but simply detected.
Not a valid analogy. It's not a discovery of any new colour or kind of light. Just a discovery of new human perceptual ability.
We can measure light intensities and wavelengths with great accuracy. Looking at numbers or even a graph and realising that they represent light, that when seen by the human eye, appears to be a particular shade of green, does not give you the *experience* of green. That's all that 'green' is - an experience. The electomagentic spectrum, leaving aside quantum affects, is continious. Part of it causes us to experience green.
Now the tetrachomat human(or a bird, which are tetrachomats) gets the same light as the rest of us, but *experiences* it in a different, more complex way.
Perhaps I should have said "that - which - we - have - no-concept - and - therefor - no - word" but "new" was shorter.
> An extra photopigment wouldn't invent new colors
Actually it would. The primary colours Red, Green and Blue are artifacts of the standard human pereceptual system. All the exists phyically is intesities and wavelengths. A fourth photopigment impies a fourth primary colour. This means a whole bunch of new secondary colours.
> it would just more of the spectrum perceptible
Correct, it would make more of the spectrum perceptible, in the same way that a normally sighted person has "more of the spectrum perceptible" than, for instance, my father, who couldn't find red golf tees on a green lawn.
> One: If they leave within a year, make them pay for the training.
I've been on a contract with that clause. As an employee, it's not something that I would have asked to put into the contract, but I suppose it's only fair to the employer. In our case it worked on a pro-rata scale, e.g. if you left 6 months after a course, you had to pay back 1/2 the value of the course.
To keep people in the long term, fall back to the basics: Good money, stimulating and satifying work, and a good workplace keep good people.
If you really could be earning 3* salary after this course, then what's to stop you saving up for a few months (or taking out a parent or bank loan, etc), paying for the course yourself, then jumping ship without any help from the PHBs. It would surely be worth your while?
One near-Earth metallic asteroid, known affectionately to astronomers as NEO 3554 Amun, is a mere two kilometers in diameter, but is worth more than all of the platinum metal resources on Earth by several trillion dollars.
So how much would it cost and what would it take to park this thing next to the space station? is it possible to orbit a rocket/sail/whatever big enough to move that thing around up there? Are there better candidate rocks?
If it was parked next to the station, what could we be able to do with it? Would we need an entire factory in orbit before we start?
> Do we have species differentiation going on within the homo sapiens clan?
Given the way that the 20th century has mixed together previously isolated branches of the human race, definitely no. We are becoming more homogenous, not less.
> You can't have a democracy in a country where over 70% of the population isn't well educated.
Stop talking about the USA, I'm tired of thier election already!
> 80% of the population doesn't even know what "The Internet" is
Nor will they until we develop the telcoms infrastructure.
> South Africa is a fool's paradise
It ain't nobody's paradise.
> I suggest you leave.
That may be a good suggestion, but it doesn't answer his question. SA net infrastruction could be better managed, in the interests of all of those in SA. Telkom needs to have thier monopoly removed from them, by force if need be. They don't want to give it up, but there is a lot of pressure from Business fro it to go. It is unlikely to last past 2003.
>England is kief, bru. The money is alot better..
Been there, done that. Money alone doesn't make up for the kak weather, overcrowding, and the brits.
A widget is a graphical thingy. A button is a widget. So is a Text edit box, or a checkbox, a list box, etc. So if you have ever made a gui, most of the things that you threw around were widgets.
Here's the jargon file entry:
widget: n. 1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries...."
2. [poss. evoking `window gadget'] A user interface object in X graphical user interfaces.
> can't believe they've decided to tie things to one window manager in particular
Bzt wrong. They haven't. Get a bit of context already before leaping to conclusions.
Borland has stated several times that Kylix will run and work under both KDE and Gnome, and will be capable of producing apps that run and work under both Gnome and KDE.
Thier bias up to now has, if anything, been the other way; towards KDE. Borland stated that they did not wish to take sides in any way, but came to realise that thier gui code must be based upon an exisiting or new gui toolset. They therefor chose Qt, ie KDE's widget set. Yes, in version 1, GUI apps written in Kylix will use QT. Not Gnome's libs.
As someone who had been avidly waiting for Kylix and readling lots about it, today's news is suprising, both as it shows a swing towards Gnome, and as I fully expected Kylix to be a commerical app.
The other poster may be correct - perhaps just the code for the *IDE* will be GPL'd, with the OP (and later the C++) compilers staying closed source. Either way, Borland is making big concesions to the open-source world.
Slashdot Mirror
An article by Katz on how the infospere is filling up with crap, next to this article... it's a sign I tell you.
I was going to write to refute this junk, then I got to the bit about "Why OOP is like communism" and realised that it was a waste of time. He's a crank and a troll.
Why don't those other lamers read the article?
This is not a surgery robot, it is a waldo. OK, it is a very fancy, very cool waldo with nice features like scaling down movements for precision surgery, and automatically smoothing out shaking hands.
PS: please mod up this message's parent!
> redifines terms to make article seme sensationalistic
....
Hm. I still can't get a Redhat or Mandrake CD with kernel 2.4
Point taken that "vapourware" often means "not actually in existence", which is not quite how wired used it - 2.4 kernel was taking shape, albeit incompletely, in full public view. Still, as a programmer I know that no software is certain until it ships.
> the wired article clearly showed that they had nothing better to do but bash people who are working hard on a project
> were real journalists they would be more responsible
whine whine whine. So because people were working hard means it wasn't delivered later than the expected "fall 1999"? Um, no. Because it's open source means it gets special treatment? Um, no.
I know people who used to work for MS, and put in long hours testing NT2K, only to have thier hard effort recieve a vapourware award for much the same reasons - ie the final release wasn't out yet. Years of work labeled "vapour". I bet you think that's fair, just because it's not Linux.
You know what? When you put something in front of the public, bad press and good press are an inevitable result. Get over it. MS can do it, so can you.
Um, no offence, but the criteria for the vapourware awards are quite simple:
1) Was the product eagerly anticipated during the past year
2) did it fail to appear during that year.
2.4 kernel meets them. Admittedly the original article could have said that a release seemed immmanent at the end of 2000, but it is *not* "talking out of your ass"
You forgot to make it clear that you're joking/trolling. Right? Right???
As opposed to minor fatal flaws?
Really? that's the opposite of what OO experts say. I forget which one said "Anyone can write code that the machine can understand. The trick is to write code that another programmer can understand."
If I may make myself look smart after other people have corrected my mistakes on other fora: .NET has, at present count over 15 languages that work with it. To be sure, C#, Java and VB are not that different in principle, but languages like Scheme and ML have been integrated as well. This is no mean feat. Legacy code is catered for with COBOL and others. PERL and Python to round up the internet/scripting programmers.
They are so well integrated that an object in one language can be subclassed in another. Early reports are favorable - it remains to be seen if this amount of multi-language integration is a good thing (tm), but it's definitely an experiment to watch.
BTW, .net is thought to be more portable than win32 so it's not inconcievable that MS are contemplating cross-platform as well as cross-language.
MS is allowing third parties to plug in thier own languages, but comercial windows programming language vendors won't exactly be thrilled by the prospect of thier tool being reduced to a plugin for visual studio.
I'm thinking specifically of my favorite toy, Borland Delphi, here - are there any other major Windows programming tool vendors besides Borland any more? Microsoft's genius is that whilst other people may get good at thier game, they are in a postion to change the rules, and periodically they do. This is one of those. No wonder Boland are running for the safety of Linux.
BTW, one of the languages in .net is component-pascal, an OO descendant of Oberon, Modula and Pascal. I have no idea what's really like, or if it's ready to leave the safety of academia yet, but it's a carrot - from a brief glimse it looks nice. Oberon was used to implement an OS, so it can't be that constrictive.
Right, and it's a good thing that this hack doesn't do that in any way, shape or form
> wouldn't be the first OS to more closely tie the GUI to the kernel.
I shouldn't have to say this here, but CORBA has nothing to do with GUIs, except that it is a necessary service for Gnome's particular architecture.
This article is good news because it allows the ORB to be used in non-gui contexts. I'm not saying that it should be part of the kernel, but it should and can be decoupled from GNOME. Modularity. Reusability. Flexibility. These are all good things.
You are missing the point to a stunning extent. I can't belive that this got voted up.
Natural vs. Artificial is an arbitary distinction. If we had a massive nuclear war, you could argue that it is a product of nature just as we are. But the real point is that it *would kill us all*, people, cows, bengal tigers, redwood trees and the rest. We have a choice here.
> We change our environment to suit are needs
Sometimes. Sometimes we accidentally fuck up our enviroment through ignorance and short-sighted greed. Are you seriously suggesting that the ozone hole was a deliberate change?
Who gives a flying f--- if ozone holes are natural or not. The point is that they harm us in the long term and across the whole planet. We caused them and we can stop. The green view is one that puts *our own long term good* over short-term, local gains.
> I've always argued this point, and I'm glad to see one more argument to back me up.
And how does a new calculation on the duration of ozone holes back up your "argument" that we are a part of nature?
>> "They thought Galileo was wrong the first time, too," Levin said.
You do realise that statements like that are a classic hallmark of a crank.
And by the way, "they" thought that lots of cranks and crazy people were wrong too, and rightly so.
The ratio of Crank-noticed-as-being-wrong to misunderstod genius is about 10 000 to 1.
Nate P is 100% right, and 0% original. This conclusion was drawn many years ago by Dr James Lovelock (see Dr. James Lovelock and Dr. Lynn Margulis's Gaea Hypothesis)
If there was life on mars, it would have adapted and radiated to many ecological niches.
Life on earth, even leaving humans aside, has *transformed* the way that the earth looks. Oxygen in the atmosphere. Green-tinted land.
Given that we only have one definite example of life (earth), it is fair to say that it sticks out a million miles away. Therefor, mars is most likely barren, barren, barren.
> But it wouldnt be a "new" color
Ooops, my first responsie is incomplete.
If there are tetrachromats now, then there have most likely have been a few of them, a low and constant percentage of the female population, throughout history, and indeed through recent human evolution (and perhaps not-so-recent). Who knows, maybe there are colour blind(Dichromat) and tetrachomat chimps.
So in this sense it's not a few colour at all - some people could see it all along.
> Maybe you should whip out your calculator before you post.
:)
Er, what's so bad apout asking? Oh, well, at least you answered even if you did whine about it.
So, the mission will be called "Mohammed", 'cos the mountain isn't going to come to us
> But it wouldnt be a "new" color. The color has always been there, we just haven't been able to detect it.
What makes you think that colours are "there" at all? We can 'detect' the wavelength and intenstity of light accurately using our electronic equipment. The concept of seeing a fourth primary colour, is however, new to most of us.
> like scientists discovering neutrons and protons and claiming they were new. Not new, but simply detected.
Not a valid analogy. It's not a discovery of any new colour or kind of light. Just a discovery of new human perceptual ability.
We can measure light intensities and wavelengths with great accuracy. Looking at numbers or even a graph and realising that they represent light, that when seen by the human eye, appears to be a particular shade of green, does not give you the *experience* of green. That's all that 'green' is - an experience. The electomagentic spectrum, leaving aside quantum affects, is continious. Part of it causes us to experience green.
Now the tetrachomat human(or a bird, which are tetrachomats) gets the same light as the rest of us, but *experiences* it in a different, more complex way.
Perhaps I should have said "that - which - we - have - no-concept - and - therefor - no - word" but "new" was shorter.
> An extra photopigment wouldn't invent new colors
Actually it would. The primary colours Red, Green and Blue are artifacts of the standard human pereceptual system. All the exists phyically is intesities and wavelengths. A fourth photopigment impies a fourth primary colour. This means a whole bunch of new secondary colours.
> it would just more of the spectrum perceptible
Correct, it would make more of the spectrum perceptible, in the same way that a normally sighted person has "more of the spectrum perceptible" than, for instance, my father, who couldn't find red golf tees on a green lawn.
> One: If they leave within a year, make them pay for the training.
I've been on a contract with that clause. As an employee, it's not something that I would have asked to put into the contract, but I suppose it's only fair to the employer. In our case it worked on a pro-rata scale, e.g. if you left 6 months after a course, you had to pay back 1/2 the value of the course.
To keep people in the long term, fall back to the basics: Good money, stimulating and satifying work, and a good workplace keep good people.
If you really could be earning 3* salary after this course, then what's to stop you saving up for a few months (or taking out a parent or bank loan, etc), paying for the course yourself, then jumping ship without any help from the PHBs. It would surely be worth your while?
So how much would it cost and what would it take to park this thing next to the space station? is it possible to orbit a rocket/sail/whatever big enough to move that thing around up there? Are there better candidate rocks?
If it was parked next to the station, what could we be able to do with it? Would we need an entire factory in orbit before we start?
> sleazy (gnet2.ath.cx has the exact same TLD as another website whose URL contains the word "goat";
cx is a country TLD. Why should you call the whole of Christmas Island sleasy because of one goat who lives there?
> Do we have species differentiation going on within the homo sapiens clan?
Given the way that the 20th century has mixed together previously isolated branches of the human race, definitely no. We are becoming more homogenous, not less.
> You can't have a democracy in a country where over 70% of the population isn't well educated.
Stop talking about the USA, I'm tired of thier election already!
> 80% of the population doesn't even know what "The Internet" is
Nor will they until we develop the telcoms infrastructure.
> South Africa is a fool's paradise
It ain't nobody's paradise.
> I suggest you leave.
That may be a good suggestion, but it doesn't answer his question. SA net infrastruction could be better managed, in the interests of all of those in SA. Telkom needs to have thier monopoly removed from them, by force if need be. They don't want to give it up, but there is a lot of pressure from Business fro it to go. It is unlikely to last past 2003.
>England is kief, bru. The money is alot better..
Been there, done that. Money alone doesn't make up for the kak weather, overcrowding, and the brits.
> the ignorance and arogance of this crap monopoly is lagging the country web development behind
> So when is Someone going to jack up South Africa?
This will change shortly after Telkom loses it's molopoly in 2003. IMHO this should have happened already.
This is oftopic, but anyway.
A widget is a graphical thingy. A button is a widget. So is a Text edit box, or a checkbox, a list box, etc. So if you have ever made a gui, most of the things that you threw around were widgets.
Here's the jargon file entry:
widget: n. 1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries...."
2. [poss. evoking `window gadget'] A user interface object in X graphical user interfaces.
> can't believe they've decided to tie things to one window manager in particular
Bzt wrong. They haven't. Get a bit of context already before leaping to conclusions.
Borland has stated several times that Kylix will run and work under both KDE and Gnome, and will be capable of producing apps that run and work under both Gnome and KDE.
Thier bias up to now has, if anything, been the other way; towards KDE. Borland stated that they did not wish to take sides in any way, but came to realise that thier gui code must be based upon an exisiting or new gui toolset. They therefor chose Qt, ie KDE's widget set. Yes, in version 1, GUI apps written in Kylix will use QT. Not Gnome's libs.
As someone who had been avidly waiting for Kylix and readling lots about it, today's news is suprising, both as it shows a swing towards Gnome, and as I fully expected Kylix to be a commerical app.
The other poster may be correct - perhaps just the code for the *IDE* will be GPL'd, with the OP (and later the C++) compilers staying closed source. Either way, Borland is making big concesions to the open-source world.