GTK+ (as an analogous example) uses preprocessing macros. Even the lowly #include statement is not a part of the C language. Maybe the language used to write GTK+ is not C!
they use non-standard C++ extensions to accomplish their purposes
You have been misinformed. Qt uses completely standard C++, with only minimal use of templates to keep the less-compliant compilers happy.
BEFORE you fire off a retort about signals and slots not being standard, I suggest you learn a little bit about them. The "signal", "slot" and "emit" tokens are MACROS! Last time I checked, macros were part of the C++ standard. You can indeed compile any Qt program with any standard C++ compiler. If these were new unstandard keywords, then you would not be able to do so.
However, you would not be able to link these object models. That's what MOC is for. It generates the missing code needed to link. For example, the statement "emit mouseover()" compiles to a call to the mouseover() function. MOC generates the implementation for this function.
The Qt signal/slot paradigm is accomplished by three simple macros and a code generator. That's it. If you don't like MOC (which by the way, is a fully standard C++ program), you are free to write your own raw signal/slot code by hand.
I now know why you're in academia instead of business. Why should I spend tens of millions of dollars for Trolltech, only to instantly eliminate their its sole source of revenue?
Compare how much revenue LGPL GTK+ has earned in the last year...
It's something I seriously thought about. But one thing is stopping me. Getting that second workstation is the problem. I could humble myself and use one the old i486 systems in the lab, but I'm not sure Win2K would even run on them.
maybe you should first learn how to configure and use Windows and then voice opinions.
Well maybe if it came with a freaking handbook I could! If Windows is so damned easy and the pinnacle of usability, then why isn't it blazingly obvious how to use it?
Now what's more important, your hairline or 20 from your co-workers?
Being able to do the work I am assigned is the most important. As a developer, a correlation between your workstation and target platform is important. When the project is system software it becomes almost mandatory.
As my boss, an OSX guy, told me, "Let the small minded executives choose small minded operating systems. At least you get to use high minded operating systems at home!"
Someone take OSNews out of their misery!
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Review
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· Score: 1
I'm starting to get really sick of OSNews reviews. We know that no OS is perfect, but do we really need two full pages of a two page article to dwell on the imperfections? Even the dumbass comments are more insightful than the reviews!
Re:What kind of crack are they smoking?
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Review
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· Score: 1
Yup. Why would you think it would be any different from Linux?
Re:And this is modded up because?
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Review
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· Score: 2, Funny
That's the one thing about BSD users that we Linux users will never be able to tolerate. The snobbish attitude.
You're absolutely right! Debian users are never snobbish towards users of RPM. Gentoo users don't brag about emerge. Redhat users never speak in condescending tones about Slackware's init scripts. Nope, you're all one big happy family!
I've been using FreeBSD/KDE at work as a desktop for about two years now. Now I'm being forced to use Windows 2000 to get my work done. I've never really used Windows extensively except as a cheap ass program launcher for games. Now after three workdays of using as a work environment I've lost three millimeters of hairline. I'm absolutely dumbfounded that people put up with Windows in the business workplace.
Windows is fast? XFree86 is slow? Hah! On the very same dual boot machine, FreeBSD with "bloated" XFree86 topped with a "bloated" KDE runs rings around a minimal Win2K desktop. Equivalent applications (Mozilla, OpenOffice) launch faster under FreeBSD. I can drag around windows with no lag. Minimizing a window under Win2K takes about two seconds to redraw the screen. Huh?
Free trade is when an unemployed American computer scientist can go to India to get a job. Guess what? It's impossible for Americans to get work visas in India. Why? Because they are protectionist.
When my company decided to "offshore" much of its development to a newly created division in India, we laid off a lot of H1Bs and resident Indian workers. To be "nice", we offered them their same jobs in India. But not one was hired. Why? The interviewer felt that they had been "tainted" by working in the US. Most of the interviews lasted less than five minutes. But one caucasion WAS hired...to be a US/India Liaison.
The problem might not be the SATA support, but support for the particular chipset. One of the disadvantages of the PC architecture is that often the only information you have about a device is its name. You can't query an anonymous ATA card to see if it supports SATA, you have to query it for its name and look it up in a list. Odds are, once someone gets around to placing the information about your Highpoint card in a header file, it will all work with no further tweakage.
Linux is not a true monolithic kernel. You have separate and distinct drivers and modules. So you do have small independent pieces of software doing one thing well. It doesn't fit the UNIX philosophy perfectly, but then nothing really does.
Bingo. KWord is a frame based word processor, while MSWord/OO.org are page based word processors. Converting the content between the two is fairly trivial, but converting the formatting is a bitch.
A good analogy is HTML. People convert to and from HTML from within MSWord and think nothing of it. But almost all formatting is lost, as anyone who spends more than two seconds comparing the results can see.
My thoughts exactly. I started compiling when I came home from work. The next morning it wasn't finished. But it was when I got home that evening. So it took between sixteen to twenty four hours. Hardly a "quick" compile.
I don't know if the minimal speed improvements I;ve noticed for an optimized build versus the default i386 package are worth it.
Despite the obvious benefits to TeX, it will never be adopted by mainstream document producers for equally obvious reasons. WYSIWYG is more important than extreme flexibility and raw power. Whether this is a good or bad thing is for the philosophers to debate until the end of time.
for example, if Indian IT companies do such bad work, why are over half of Carnegie Mellon's highest-rated programming companies Indian?
CMM does not rate a company on its programming skills or quality, but on its development process. It's a very different thing. My company is trying to get to CMM level 3, and the process is a nightmare. The people in charge are not developers, software engineers or in any way technical. They're paper pushers and meeting schedulers. We flunked a preliminary audit because t's weren't crossed and i's weren't dotted.
Process is important, but like anything that is good, too much is fattening. Too little process and you flounder in ignorance and miscommunications. Too much and you flounder in the paperwork. The purpose of a process to get things done, and not to be an end in itself. CMM only cares about the process.
Indian software engineers are top notch. Their programming skills are excellent. They also have a more keen sense of the bureaucratic corporate culture than most US programmers, which explains the abundance of CMM Level 5 companies in India.
Sometimes the courts are wrong. Shocking but true. While the courts have the ultimate authority in interpreting the law, they are completely silent as to whether the law is good.
No contract term is "draconian" if both parties enter into it willingly and without duress, regardless of the monopoly status of the parties. Was Microsoft "dumping" Windows with extreme discounts to Microsoft-exclusive OEM's? If so it would be problematic, but the courts didn't address this. Did Microsoft refuse to negotiate with OEM's who used other operating systems? Again, that would be a problem, but the issue wasn't brought up. The court ruled in essence "no exclusive contracts", without considering the discounts offered or the avenues for renegotiation.
If Microsoft had a standard contract offered to all OEM's under "take it or leave it" terms, then that would have been an abuse of their monopoly status. But the courts didn't address this (or if they did, the media didn't report it).
Since Dell was/is one of Microsoft's largest customers, it had the clout to renegotiate its distribution contract. All they had to do was say "boo" and Microsoft would have jumped.
What you got are hundreds of businesses with Microsoft site licenses that don't need Dells pre-installed with Windows licenses. Simple as that. My company uses Windows 2000 Pro, but the Dells we get come with Windows XP Home. The first thing IT does is to wipe the harddrives upon receipt.
These businesses aren't going to be running Linux, and Dell knows it.
I thought that I read somewhere that Microsoft will not allow you to distrubute windows if you distrubute another non-microsoft OS as an option.
Yeah, you read it hear. Now you know better than the believe the crap you read on Slashdot.
Every OEM contract is different. While there may be one or two out there that prohibit shipping Windows if even one unit happens to be non-Windows, they're more of evidence pointing to stupid OEM's rather than Microsoft scheming. I greatly suspect that the "standard" OEM contract with Microsoft is of the form "huge discounts if you're exclusively Windows, but lesser discounts that are still significantly cheaper than retail if you're not." Contracts of this nature are a dime-a-dozen, and completely ethical.
Microsoft is in business to make money. If Dell told Micrsoft to take their contract and shove it, Bill Gates would be grovelling at Michael Dell's feet the next morning. Microsoft is not so stupid as to throw away tens of thousands of unit sales just to spite the dozen or so they lost.
Slashdot Mirror
GTK+ (as an analogous example) uses preprocessing macros. Even the lowly #include statement is not a part of the C language. Maybe the language used to write GTK+ is not C!
Since I just ordered the book, I guess I'll find out in 8 to 10 days! I hope it's not the 30 day evaluation edition.
they use non-standard C++ extensions to accomplish their purposes
You have been misinformed. Qt uses completely standard C++, with only minimal use of templates to keep the less-compliant compilers happy.
BEFORE you fire off a retort about signals and slots not being standard, I suggest you learn a little bit about them. The "signal", "slot" and "emit" tokens are MACROS! Last time I checked, macros were part of the C++ standard. You can indeed compile any Qt program with any standard C++ compiler. If these were new unstandard keywords, then you would not be able to do so.
However, you would not be able to link these object models. That's what MOC is for. It generates the missing code needed to link. For example, the statement "emit mouseover()" compiles to a call to the mouseover() function. MOC generates the implementation for this function.
The Qt signal/slot paradigm is accomplished by three simple macros and a code generator. That's it. If you don't like MOC (which by the way, is a fully standard C++ program), you are free to write your own raw signal/slot code by hand.
I now know why you're in academia instead of business. Why should I spend tens of millions of dollars for Trolltech, only to instantly eliminate their its sole source of revenue?
Compare how much revenue LGPL GTK+ has earned in the last year...
Take a look here. Though they no longer support it, or provide easy links to it, it is still available.
Heck no! What's there to feel guilty about?
But once, however, I was caught trying out Lindows while wearing a FreeBSD tee-shirt...
It's something I seriously thought about. But one thing is stopping me. Getting that second workstation is the problem. I could humble myself and use one the old i486 systems in the lab, but I'm not sure Win2K would even run on them.
maybe you should first learn how to configure and use Windows and then voice opinions.
Well maybe if it came with a freaking handbook I could! If Windows is so damned easy and the pinnacle of usability, then why isn't it blazingly obvious how to use it?
Now what's more important, your hairline or 20 from your co-workers?
Being able to do the work I am assigned is the most important. As a developer, a correlation between your workstation and target platform is important. When the project is system software it becomes almost mandatory.
As my boss, an OSX guy, told me, "Let the small minded executives choose small minded operating systems. At least you get to use high minded operating systems at home!"
I'm starting to get really sick of OSNews reviews. We know that no OS is perfect, but do we really need two full pages of a two page article to dwell on the imperfections? Even the dumbass comments are more insightful than the reviews!
Yup. Why would you think it would be any different from Linux?
That's the one thing about BSD users that we Linux users will never be able to tolerate. The snobbish attitude.
You're absolutely right! Debian users are never snobbish towards users of RPM. Gentoo users don't brag about emerge. Redhat users never speak in condescending tones about Slackware's init scripts. Nope, you're all one big happy family!
I've been using FreeBSD/KDE at work as a desktop for about two years now. Now I'm being forced to use Windows 2000 to get my work done. I've never really used Windows extensively except as a cheap ass program launcher for games. Now after three workdays of using as a work environment I've lost three millimeters of hairline. I'm absolutely dumbfounded that people put up with Windows in the business workplace.
Windows is fast? XFree86 is slow? Hah! On the very same dual boot machine, FreeBSD with "bloated" XFree86 topped with a "bloated" KDE runs rings around a minimal Win2K desktop. Equivalent applications (Mozilla, OpenOffice) launch faster under FreeBSD. I can drag around windows with no lag. Minimizing a window under Win2K takes about two seconds to redraw the screen. Huh?
I guess mediocrity rules.
Free trade is when an unemployed American computer scientist can go to India to get a job. Guess what? It's impossible for Americans to get work visas in India. Why? Because they are protectionist.
When my company decided to "offshore" much of its development to a newly created division in India, we laid off a lot of H1Bs and resident Indian workers. To be "nice", we offered them their same jobs in India. But not one was hired. Why? The interviewer felt that they had been "tainted" by working in the US. Most of the interviews lasted less than five minutes. But one caucasion WAS hired...to be a US/India Liaison.
The problem might not be the SATA support, but support for the particular chipset. One of the disadvantages of the PC architecture is that often the only information you have about a device is its name. You can't query an anonymous ATA card to see if it supports SATA, you have to query it for its name and look it up in a list. Odds are, once someone gets around to placing the information about your Highpoint card in a header file, it will all work with no further tweakage.
Linux is not a true monolithic kernel. You have separate and distinct drivers and modules. So you do have small independent pieces of software doing one thing well. It doesn't fit the UNIX philosophy perfectly, but then nothing really does.
Bingo. KWord is a frame based word processor, while MSWord/OO.org are page based word processors. Converting the content between the two is fairly trivial, but converting the formatting is a bitch.
A good analogy is HTML. People convert to and from HTML from within MSWord and think nothing of it. But almost all formatting is lost, as anyone who spends more than two seconds comparing the results can see.
My thoughts exactly. I started compiling when I came home from work. The next morning it wasn't finished. But it was when I got home that evening. So it took between sixteen to twenty four hours. Hardly a "quick" compile.
I don't know if the minimal speed improvements I;ve noticed for an optimized build versus the default i386 package are worth it.
Despite the obvious benefits to TeX, it will never be adopted by mainstream document producers for equally obvious reasons. WYSIWYG is more important than extreme flexibility and raw power. Whether this is a good or bad thing is for the philosophers to debate until the end of time.
for example, if Indian IT companies do such bad work, why are over half of Carnegie Mellon's highest-rated programming companies Indian?
CMM does not rate a company on its programming skills or quality, but on its development process. It's a very different thing. My company is trying to get to CMM level 3, and the process is a nightmare. The people in charge are not developers, software engineers or in any way technical. They're paper pushers and meeting schedulers. We flunked a preliminary audit because t's weren't crossed and i's weren't dotted.
Process is important, but like anything that is good, too much is fattening. Too little process and you flounder in ignorance and miscommunications. Too much and you flounder in the paperwork. The purpose of a process to get things done, and not to be an end in itself. CMM only cares about the process.
Indian software engineers are top notch. Their programming skills are excellent. They also have a more keen sense of the bureaucratic corporate culture than most US programmers, which explains the abundance of CMM Level 5 companies in India.
Sometimes the courts are wrong. Shocking but true. While the courts have the ultimate authority in interpreting the law, they are completely silent as to whether the law is good.
No contract term is "draconian" if both parties enter into it willingly and without duress, regardless of the monopoly status of the parties. Was Microsoft "dumping" Windows with extreme discounts to Microsoft-exclusive OEM's? If so it would be problematic, but the courts didn't address this. Did Microsoft refuse to negotiate with OEM's who used other operating systems? Again, that would be a problem, but the issue wasn't brought up. The court ruled in essence "no exclusive contracts", without considering the discounts offered or the avenues for renegotiation.
If Microsoft had a standard contract offered to all OEM's under "take it or leave it" terms, then that would have been an abuse of their monopoly status. But the courts didn't address this (or if they did, the media didn't report it).
Since Dell was/is one of Microsoft's largest customers, it had the clout to renegotiate its distribution contract. All they had to do was say "boo" and Microsoft would have jumped.
I was replying to the post that postulated that it wasn't. AC's are getting dumber every day...
What you got are hundreds of businesses with Microsoft site licenses that don't need Dells pre-installed with Windows licenses. Simple as that. My company uses Windows 2000 Pro, but the Dells we get come with Windows XP Home. The first thing IT does is to wipe the harddrives upon receipt.
These businesses aren't going to be running Linux, and Dell knows it.
I thought that I read somewhere that Microsoft will not allow you to distrubute windows if you distrubute another non-microsoft OS as an option.
Yeah, you read it hear. Now you know better than the believe the crap you read on Slashdot.
Every OEM contract is different. While there may be one or two out there that prohibit shipping Windows if even one unit happens to be non-Windows, they're more of evidence pointing to stupid OEM's rather than Microsoft scheming. I greatly suspect that the "standard" OEM contract with Microsoft is of the form "huge discounts if you're exclusively Windows, but lesser discounts that are still significantly cheaper than retail if you're not." Contracts of this nature are a dime-a-dozen, and completely ethical.
Microsoft is in business to make money. If Dell told Micrsoft to take their contract and shove it, Bill Gates would be grovelling at Michael Dell's feet the next morning. Microsoft is not so stupid as to throw away tens of thousands of unit sales just to spite the dozen or so they lost.
Put another way, 50% of the voting body is interested in movies about relationships as opposed to epic cinema
Then what about Frodo's relationship with Sam?