If your aim is broader and more demanding group of users I would go with wxWidgets or QT.
Why do you not recommend GTK? And how would you choose between wxWidgets and QT?
FORTRAN? Kill the dinosaur;)
I wish. Unfortunately, this program was begun in the 50's or 60's, and has all that legacy baggage. In fact, the mainframe it was originally written for didn't even have a finished operating system at the time, so they had to finish writing it for the mainframe manufacturer! Over the decades, it's been ported from mainframe to mainframe, to various proprietary UNIXes, to DOS, and finally to Windows.
Also, it's not entirely FORTRAN. In fact, it's mostly "ICETRAN", which is a language that, as far as I know, only exists in-house. We maintain a preprocessor that transforms it into FORTRAN. It also has pieces written in another in-house language called "CDL" (Command Definition Language), which is used to describe the grammar that the program's interpreter uses. CDL gets preprocessed into C. Finally, it's got some standard C (and by "standard" I mean K&R, not ANSI or ISO) that's used to implement things like dynamic memory management for the FORTRAN, and glue the whole thing together. I'm not sure I believe him, but my boss claims that it's got about a million lines of code total.
On the bright side, the UI is more-or-less separate (it talks to the back end via some sort of IPC or IO redirection or something). However, it's a dinosaur too: it's written in some defunct proprietary cross-platform widget toolkit called "WINDEX" that I think was based on MOTIF. We maintain that in-house too now, along with ICETRAN and CDL.
By the way, here's a fun fact: there is no standard way of passing strings between FORTRAN and C. Every compiler does it differently. And yes, I've recently found that out the hard way.
But what if your existing code isn't Java? For example, I'm looking for a toolkit in which to write a new UI for a legacy mostly-FORTRAN program (and trying to decide whether to recommend GTK, QT, or something else).
"We want the government to control every policy on everyone's Internet..."
Here's what the anti-net-neutrality people don't seem to understand: the government already does control it! Unlike the fantasy they seem to want to believe, the ISP industry is not any sort of "free market" with "competition" or anything like that. No, instead it's characterized by an oligopoly of large players (e.g. AT&T and Comcast) which was created by the government through granting of subsidies and easements. At this moment the telcos and cable companies are getting all of the benefits of regulation (i.e., locking out all of their competitors) with none of the drawbacks (i.e., meaningful oversight).
In other words, if you're truly an advocate of the free market, put your money where your mouth is and get rid of all the regulation by ending the easements and demanding repayment of the subsidies. Or alternatively, finish the regulation by supporting net neutrality. Otherwise, STFU because you're either a shill for the fascists who benefit from the status quo, or a complete and utter idiot!
Or, you know, you could just realize that the masculine version is the neuter version, give up the political-correctness bullshit, and get on with your life!
I wonder if the "strategy" was DRM and to adopt uncooperative practices. I guess that didn't turn out so well...
They're still pursuing that strategy, and it remains to be seen how well it turns out. They've lost the using-SCO-as-a-front gambit, but they're still fighting on the bludgeon-ISO-into-making-OOXML-a-standard and kill-OLPC-in-favor-of-Windows-running-stuff fronts.
I would be surprised if most of the cable companies were still relying on their legacy analog channels at the set-top boxes, since the only other explanation I can think of for the frequent horrible compression artifacts on the supposedly analog channels on my box is that they're heavily compressed (but using an inefficient, real-time compressor) at the feed to the cable companies.
Incidentally, I get those same kind of compression artifacts on my cable TV too, and my service is entirely analog -- I don't even have a set-top box, but just screw the coax directly into my 20-year-old "cable-ready" TV. The artifacts, at least in my experience, are being introduced somewhere before the signal gets to my apartment. So, sadly, I think your second explanation is the, or at least a, correct one.
Fractional reserve banking is fraudulent, it is theft, it is a lie. The average labor producer (i.e. consumer) must understand this in order to make themselves wealthy.
You claim to be making yourself wealthy through investing in your own company. That's all well and good, but not for everyone. What method for creating real wealth do you suggest for those who aren't entrepreneurs?
ClamAV, for example, is open source, gets updated as frequently as hourly, and is free as in beer as well as free as in speech. From my own experience, ClamAV actually has a better trap rate than Symantec AV.
I really wish ClamWin interfaced correctly with Windows Security Center, so that it would stop claiming that the antivirus software wasn't found.
Actually, RMS should love them for that choice because it forces software to be open or closed... a developer can't flip-flop as easily. The distros wanting to get the most support don't like it because it pushes out "cheap" developers that don't want to pay where GTK/Gnome lets them write proprietary code and not pay or open the source.
Actually, I think there's two sides of that. I'm a Free Software advocate who is working on a proprietary application (which isn't a good fit for Free Software, as it is a specialized engineering application, it has to be certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, etc.) Currently, about half the UI is written in some old, third-party, cross-platform toolkit that's entirely obsolete and dead (the parent company is out of business). There is desire to eventually re-write the UI, and I'll probably have a pretty big say in the decision of which toolkit to use. I'd like to pick a Free Software one, as otherwise they'd probably pick.NET or MFC -- something Windows-only, at any rate.
Now, the obvious choices would be between GTK and QT. I'd like to use QT, because I hear that it's better from a programmer's point of view. However, the licensing is a double-edged sword: I wouldn't be able to use the GPL version, but with the proprietary license there's the risk that the software would be abandoned, just like the toolkit we have now! I think the LGPL'd GTK would be a good choice because its as close as possible to GPL, but we can still use it. My priority is to pick a toolkit that will be maintained for the long haul, since our application has existed for pretty much the entire history of computers, is likely to continue to exist for a long time, and we want to spend our effort improving the number-crunching capabilities rather than re-writing the UI.
On the other hand, some of the risk of an abandoned commercial QT is mitigated by that "Free QT Foundation" agreement. But I don't know whether it would be wise to rely on that...
As far as being "cheap" goes, that's not an issue: I'd try to convince them to pay for whichever toolkit they picked (unless it was Microsoft's), whether it was a commercial QT license or a donation to GTK.
Do they have a track record of "doing the wrong thing" that they've only deviated from a time or two? Why assume it's going to get much worse now?
Trolltech had a good track record. But Trolltech doesn't own Qt now; Nokia does. And Nokia is an unknown. In the face of such unknowns, the only prudent course of action is to prepare for the worst -- but feel free to hope for the best, too.
From KDE's point of view this changes nothing. Qt will still be GPL as it has been a number of years now and Nokia cannot take that away.
Where it makes a difference is in commercial developers using Qt. GPL'd programs can tick happily away using the GPL'd Qt (which will continue to be developed regardless, but commercial developers could be stuck with abandoned, stagnating code because they can't patch in the GPL'd changes.
Agnosticism is the belief that the existence/non-existence of god(s) is unknowable. It has nothing to do with insufficent evidence. The point to the agnostic is that claims about god(s) are metaphysical, and therefore no amount of evidence will be of any value for determining the truth of the claims.
I consider myself an agnostic, but I disagree. After all, have you proven that it's impossible for evidence about things which we currently consider to be metaphysical to ever be discovered? After all, I'd bet even the most scientific and enlightened people of ages past (up to the 1800s) would consider talk about subatomic particles and quantum physics and whatnot to be metaphysical until you explained it to them and showed that it could be proven by experiment. So who's to say that the sort of metaphysical things we attribute to god(s) couldn't turn out to be physical after all?
Now, that doesn't mean I think it's likely to be true; as a skeptic, I assume it's not by default. But that doesn't mean I'd deny reality if proven wrong.
On the other hand, you could define metaphysical as "things which can't be proven by science" and define gods as "beings who are capable of metaphysical acts," and then your definition of agnosticism would be correct. However, you would then open the possibility that beings like that described in, e.g., the Christian Bible could still be scientifically determined, but would no longer qualify as "gods" under that definition.
But all these mental gymnastics are silly anyway, which is why I just say the existence (or nonexistence) of god(s) is unknown and probably unknowable, but we don't know that.
An atheist is simply someone who does not believe in any gods. An atheist does NOT have to be someone who feels they can prove that no gods exist.
Exactly! They believe (in the affirmative sense) that no gods exist without feeling the need for proof, i.e., they have faith in the non-existence of god(s) in exactly the same way that religious people have faith in the existence of them.
...I think basically ALL USERS are going to want [an optical drive]...
Even if that's true, they don't have to get a (relatively expensive) Apple one, especially if they're not planning on using it often. Besides, it may not be true. For example, I have a Thinkpad X series, which also doesn't come with an optical drive, and the only time I've needed one is when I was at home. In that case, I just removed an optical drive from my desktop, hooked it to the guts of a USB hard drive enclosure, and used it like that. If Lenovo had an equivalent to the "remote disk" software, I wouldn't have even had to do that (well, depending on whether it's bootable or not). In other words, in the year I've owned the Thinkpad I haven't felt the desire to go buy an optical drive for it, and I expect the same would be true if it had been an Air instead.
It's frequently pointed out that the withdrawl symptoms for caffeine addiction are as bad or worse than heroin... but we don't ban that (although I believe in the US it's illegal to give it to under 18s?? Might be wrong about that though).
Illegal to give what to under 18s? Caffeine? No, not in the slightest. Not many kids drink coffee, but you'd have a damn hard time finding any that don't drink (a huge amount of) caffeinated soda.
Once you start looking into these things it's never as clear as 'these drugs are safe' and 'these drugs are bad'.. it's a value judgement (and often a financial one).
Or a racial one. Drugs like marijuana are illegal in the US because people back in the 30's claimed it would cause crazed blacks and Mexicans to rape white women. In particular, William Randolph Hearst's newspapers claimed this, not because Hearst was a racist, but because he had stock in the timber industry and wanted to destroy competition from hemp. But the racial excuse is what actually incited the ban.
So does alcohol! In fact, I'll wager that alcohol ruins many more lives. So, obviously you're a teetotaler too, right? 'Cause if not, then you have no business whatsoever complaining about marijuana -- to do so is simply logically inconsistent.
I don't believe you. Agnostics, maybe, but although I certainly concede that what you are saying is technically possible, my experiece doesn't jibe at all with your statement. As an agnostic...
It depends on your definitions. Personally, I agree with you; however, some people lump atheists (i.e. people who have certain faith in the non-existence of god(s)) and agnostics (i.e., skeptics; people who think that there's not enough information to prove or disprove the existence of god(s)) into the same group and just call them all atheists. If that's what he's talking about, then it could be that the tolerant atheists he mentions are actually agnostic instead.
I suspect that messages will be duplicated. Whereas, before, for example, you had one message with two labels, you'll probably end up with two messages, each with a different label.
Yeah, I wish Gmail would add some kind of "X-Gmail-labels" header so that programs like Thunderbird could support labels properly instead of turning them into folders.
Consoles have the advantage for publishers in the sense that they have much more control over how you use the content, they can extra for any mods or add-ons...
And that is exactly why I, for one, refuse to buy consoles. The most recent one I bought was a Sega Genesis/CD/32x.
No kidding. And by the same token, the game itself ought to be free, too. I can understand paying for a copy and playing online for free (especially if the users run their own servers), or paying a subscription but getting the game for free, but not paying for both.
Yes, I am sorry to interrupt your Bush-bashing "discourse" with the facts.
My "Bush-bashing discourse?" Check again, dipshit -- I'm not the same guy you were blabbering to. You're just making such an ass of yourself that even otherwise-disinterested third parties like myself feel the need to point out how much of a fuck-up you are!
That's the problem with giving people like you a voice...
"Like me?" You don't know anything about me, Mr. I'm-Too-Stupid-To-Check-The-Name-Of-The-Guy-I'm-Replying-To, except for the fact that I think you're a flaming douchebag!
Now, seriously. Are you even even aware that you completely ignored every piece of meaningful content of PopeRatzo's post, and instead flew off the handle over a random meaningless remark? You're acting like you're a spoiled four-year-old who was insulted personally, and that's just stupid. Grow a thicker skin, and stop deluding yourself that you're G. W. Bush! Unless you are Bush, in which case your whining represents whole new orders of magnitude of patheticness...
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The mass media was excluding him from discussion before any votes were cast.
And yet, so many of the other candidates have failed to clear it!
Why do you not recommend GTK? And how would you choose between wxWidgets and QT?
I wish. Unfortunately, this program was begun in the 50's or 60's, and has all that legacy baggage. In fact, the mainframe it was originally written for didn't even have a finished operating system at the time, so they had to finish writing it for the mainframe manufacturer! Over the decades, it's been ported from mainframe to mainframe, to various proprietary UNIXes, to DOS, and finally to Windows.
Also, it's not entirely FORTRAN. In fact, it's mostly "ICETRAN", which is a language that, as far as I know, only exists in-house. We maintain a preprocessor that transforms it into FORTRAN. It also has pieces written in another in-house language called "CDL" (Command Definition Language), which is used to describe the grammar that the program's interpreter uses. CDL gets preprocessed into C. Finally, it's got some standard C (and by "standard" I mean K&R, not ANSI or ISO) that's used to implement things like dynamic memory management for the FORTRAN, and glue the whole thing together. I'm not sure I believe him, but my boss claims that it's got about a million lines of code total.
On the bright side, the UI is more-or-less separate (it talks to the back end via some sort of IPC or IO redirection or something). However, it's a dinosaur too: it's written in some defunct proprietary cross-platform widget toolkit called "WINDEX" that I think was based on MOTIF. We maintain that in-house too now, along with ICETRAN and CDL.
By the way, here's a fun fact: there is no standard way of passing strings between FORTRAN and C. Every compiler does it differently. And yes, I've recently found that out the hard way.
But what if your existing code isn't Java? For example, I'm looking for a toolkit in which to write a new UI for a legacy mostly-FORTRAN program (and trying to decide whether to recommend GTK, QT, or something else).
Here's what the anti-net-neutrality people don't seem to understand: the government already does control it! Unlike the fantasy they seem to want to believe, the ISP industry is not any sort of "free market" with "competition" or anything like that. No, instead it's characterized by an oligopoly of large players (e.g. AT&T and Comcast) which was created by the government through granting of subsidies and easements. At this moment the telcos and cable companies are getting all of the benefits of regulation (i.e., locking out all of their competitors) with none of the drawbacks (i.e., meaningful oversight).
In other words, if you're truly an advocate of the free market, put your money where your mouth is and get rid of all the regulation by ending the easements and demanding repayment of the subsidies. Or alternatively, finish the regulation by supporting net neutrality. Otherwise, STFU because you're either a shill for the fascists who benefit from the status quo, or a complete and utter idiot!
Or, you know, you could just realize that the masculine version is the neuter version, give up the political-correctness bullshit, and get on with your life!
They're still pursuing that strategy, and it remains to be seen how well it turns out. They've lost the using-SCO-as-a-front gambit, but they're still fighting on the bludgeon-ISO-into-making-OOXML-a-standard and kill-OLPC-in-favor-of-Windows-running-stuff fronts.
Incidentally, I get those same kind of compression artifacts on my cable TV too, and my service is entirely analog -- I don't even have a set-top box, but just screw the coax directly into my 20-year-old "cable-ready" TV. The artifacts, at least in my experience, are being introduced somewhere before the signal gets to my apartment. So, sadly, I think your second explanation is the, or at least a, correct one.
You claim to be making yourself wealthy through investing in your own company. That's all well and good, but not for everyone. What method for creating real wealth do you suggest for those who aren't entrepreneurs?
Heh, I think alien abductions are considerably more likely (although still nearly infinitessimal)!
I really wish ClamWin interfaced correctly with Windows Security Center, so that it would stop claiming that the antivirus software wasn't found.
Actually, I think there's two sides of that. I'm a Free Software advocate who is working on a proprietary application (which isn't a good fit for Free Software, as it is a specialized engineering application, it has to be certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, etc.) Currently, about half the UI is written in some old, third-party, cross-platform toolkit that's entirely obsolete and dead (the parent company is out of business). There is desire to eventually re-write the UI, and I'll probably have a pretty big say in the decision of which toolkit to use. I'd like to pick a Free Software one, as otherwise they'd probably pick .NET or MFC -- something Windows-only, at any rate.
Now, the obvious choices would be between GTK and QT. I'd like to use QT, because I hear that it's better from a programmer's point of view. However, the licensing is a double-edged sword: I wouldn't be able to use the GPL version, but with the proprietary license there's the risk that the software would be abandoned, just like the toolkit we have now! I think the LGPL'd GTK would be a good choice because its as close as possible to GPL, but we can still use it. My priority is to pick a toolkit that will be maintained for the long haul, since our application has existed for pretty much the entire history of computers, is likely to continue to exist for a long time, and we want to spend our effort improving the number-crunching capabilities rather than re-writing the UI.
On the other hand, some of the risk of an abandoned commercial QT is mitigated by that "Free QT Foundation" agreement. But I don't know whether it would be wise to rely on that...
As far as being "cheap" goes, that's not an issue: I'd try to convince them to pay for whichever toolkit they picked (unless it was Microsoft's), whether it was a commercial QT license or a donation to GTK.
Trolltech had a good track record. But Trolltech doesn't own Qt now; Nokia does. And Nokia is an unknown. In the face of such unknowns, the only prudent course of action is to prepare for the worst -- but feel free to hope for the best, too.
Where it makes a difference is in commercial developers using Qt. GPL'd programs can tick happily away using the GPL'd Qt (which will continue to be developed regardless, but commercial developers could be stuck with abandoned, stagnating code because they can't patch in the GPL'd changes.
I consider myself an agnostic, but I disagree. After all, have you proven that it's impossible for evidence about things which we currently consider to be metaphysical to ever be discovered? After all, I'd bet even the most scientific and enlightened people of ages past (up to the 1800s) would consider talk about subatomic particles and quantum physics and whatnot to be metaphysical until you explained it to them and showed that it could be proven by experiment. So who's to say that the sort of metaphysical things we attribute to god(s) couldn't turn out to be physical after all?
Now, that doesn't mean I think it's likely to be true; as a skeptic, I assume it's not by default. But that doesn't mean I'd deny reality if proven wrong.
On the other hand, you could define metaphysical as "things which can't be proven by science" and define gods as "beings who are capable of metaphysical acts," and then your definition of agnosticism would be correct. However, you would then open the possibility that beings like that described in, e.g., the Christian Bible could still be scientifically determined, but would no longer qualify as "gods" under that definition.
But all these mental gymnastics are silly anyway, which is why I just say the existence (or nonexistence) of god(s) is unknown and probably unknowable, but we don't know that.
Exactly! They believe (in the affirmative sense) that no gods exist without feeling the need for proof, i.e., they have faith in the non-existence of god(s) in exactly the same way that religious people have faith in the existence of them.
Even if that's true, they don't have to get a (relatively expensive) Apple one, especially if they're not planning on using it often. Besides, it may not be true. For example, I have a Thinkpad X series, which also doesn't come with an optical drive, and the only time I've needed one is when I was at home. In that case, I just removed an optical drive from my desktop, hooked it to the guts of a USB hard drive enclosure, and used it like that. If Lenovo had an equivalent to the "remote disk" software, I wouldn't have even had to do that (well, depending on whether it's bootable or not). In other words, in the year I've owned the Thinkpad I haven't felt the desire to go buy an optical drive for it, and I expect the same would be true if it had been an Air instead.
Illegal to give what to under 18s? Caffeine? No, not in the slightest. Not many kids drink coffee, but you'd have a damn hard time finding any that don't drink (a huge amount of) caffeinated soda.
Or a racial one. Drugs like marijuana are illegal in the US because people back in the 30's claimed it would cause crazed blacks and Mexicans to rape white women. In particular, William Randolph Hearst's newspapers claimed this, not because Hearst was a racist, but because he had stock in the timber industry and wanted to destroy competition from hemp. But the racial excuse is what actually incited the ban.
So does alcohol! In fact, I'll wager that alcohol ruins many more lives. So, obviously you're a teetotaler too, right? 'Cause if not, then you have no business whatsoever complaining about marijuana -- to do so is simply logically inconsistent.
It depends on your definitions. Personally, I agree with you; however, some people lump atheists (i.e. people who have certain faith in the non-existence of god(s)) and agnostics (i.e., skeptics; people who think that there's not enough information to prove or disprove the existence of god(s)) into the same group and just call them all atheists. If that's what he's talking about, then it could be that the tolerant atheists he mentions are actually agnostic instead.
They were thinking "without DRM, how do we force them to listen to the ads?"
(Yes, it's still stupid.)
Yeah, I wish Gmail would add some kind of "X-Gmail-labels" header so that programs like Thunderbird could support labels properly instead of turning them into folders.
I'd bet he could think of one particular angel that'd be suitable...
And that is exactly why I, for one, refuse to buy consoles. The most recent one I bought was a Sega Genesis/CD/32x.
No kidding. And by the same token, the game itself ought to be free, too. I can understand paying for a copy and playing online for free (especially if the users run their own servers), or paying a subscription but getting the game for free, but not paying for both.
My "Bush-bashing discourse?" Check again, dipshit -- I'm not the same guy you were blabbering to. You're just making such an ass of yourself that even otherwise-disinterested third parties like myself feel the need to point out how much of a fuck-up you are!
"Like me?" You don't know anything about me, Mr. I'm-Too-Stupid-To-Check-The-Name-Of-The-Guy-I'm-Replying-To, except for the fact that I think you're a flaming douchebag!
Now, seriously. Are you even even aware that you completely ignored every piece of meaningful content of PopeRatzo's post, and instead flew off the handle over a random meaningless remark? You're acting like you're a spoiled four-year-old who was insulted personally, and that's just stupid. Grow a thicker skin, and stop deluding yourself that you're G. W. Bush! Unless you are Bush, in which case your whining represents whole new orders of magnitude of patheticness...