Amnesty International calls the Shah's secret police the Worst in the World.
Amnesty International also compares Guantanamo Bay to concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag and Pol Pot's regime. AI's reputation as an objective obversor is not only tarnished, it's in shreds.
The 'terrorists' are simply drawing people's attention to their cause.
And what is their cause? A global Islamic state. Or at the least a pan-Islamic state with superpower status. It's an utterly ridiculous goal, but they believe it. Short of our conversion to their particular sect of Islam and their twisted social norms, they will continue to use terrorism against us as long as they are able.
The terrorism isn't about economics, imperialism, capitalism or anything else the left like to apologize to the terrorists for. The Al Qaeda brand of terrorism is simply about xenophobia.
I thought it was because the IRA hotheads had all gotten themselves killed. The Iraqi insurgents are having to import Saudi suicide bombers, because they don't have any of their own left. But Ireland didn't have anywhere to recruit new blood from and it was taking to long for their babies to grow into teenagers to keep the level of violence high.
Iraq will be worse than Iran; I imagine even you are realizing it now.
The differences between the two are so vast I'm amazed you're trying to compare them. The people of Iraq are overwhelmingly in favor of the US and democracry. The insurgents are a minute fraction of the popularce, and would be totally ineffective without their import of Saudi teenagers. While the Iraqi people may be in disagreement as to how soon the US should leave after freeing them from a dictator that made the Shah look like a kindergartner, they are as whole grateful for the intervention.
1) A text screen is a type: the type is "text". Stuff like sed and sort don't care about any type other than that.
2) Sometimes you have to do some discovery on your text stream manipulation, but how is that less work than parsing XML or marshalling objects?
3) Monad could be interesting when it gets here, but the fact is that it's not here. Don't couch your arguments in terms of Microsoft vaporware, that way leads to perdition! In the meantime I don't want to write complete application or fullblown script just do something I can pipe together on the command line in a couple of minutes.
4) Isn't a stream of objects conceptually identical to a stream of text? It's still a stream and thus is grist for pipes and filters.
5) Sometimes you have streams of typeless data and you have no choice but to deal with it. If you've never seen it it's because you've never been out in the real world. Pointy clicky GUIs aren't going to cut it.
I work on some medical imaging software. There's no way in hell we could get by without pipes and filters operating on data streaming through the system. Did you think all image files sprung fully formed from Athena's brow? When we have a final image we can treat it as an object and *pipe* it elsewhere, but until then, nothing else works. Ditto for hundreds of other applications. Consider radar. Do you think you could process incoming radar signals without pipes and filters? Do you think the electromagnetic spectrum will be accommodating in your desire for universal strongly typed objects? I don't think so.
I'd just figure some people would grow up sooner or later.
Oh we do indeed grow up. Unfortunately Slashdot has an unending supply of new posters straight out of kindergarten who have no problems at all firmly believing in the rightness of double standards and the logic of conflicting axioms.
If they were primarily men, you know that Truman and Eisenhower would have been blamed for the massive unemployment in the computing field. I'm out of work, blame the administration! Smash a vacumn tube, save a job!
Bingo. Just because something can be done doesn't mean that it's moral. The science behind it is irrelevant.
Think of all the people who are against genetically altered crops and irradiated foods. Which side do you think they are on with regards to stem cell research? This is one example out of hundreds where people will make science a devil on one issue while making it a savior on another. Science itself is fairly neutral with regards to politics.
The disagreements over stem cell research and abortion has nothing to do with science. Scientifically, we have a distinct instance of specie homo sapiens at the instant of conception. But that's not the issue. The real question is when does that instance of specie homo sapiens obtain the legal right to life? At that moment of some months afterwards? That's an issue that's belongs to the realm of philosophy, with a lengthy detour into linguistics while we argue over the definitions of "life", "person", "viable", etc.
As someone elsewhere already said, this would also open the doors for counter lawsuits against their wacky claims. Someone who lost millions investing how their astrologer told them to could sue them for damages.
But athiest and agnostics will not be held to the same standard? Do we hold you responsible for the acts of the officially athiest communist states?
All belief systems have their fringe fanatics, even yours. If we're going to hold individuals responsible for the acts of other individuals, then you're going to be in as much danger from Enlightenment's Guillotine as anyone else.
1) Don't confuse eye candy with usability. A corrolary is don't confuse trendy with usability. OSX has a lot of eye candy, but it's usability really isn't all that stunning if you look at it objectively.
2) Don't make the unwashed newbie your core audience. Newbie friendly isn't synonymous with usability. Everyone grows up, and no one stays a newbie forever. It's hard to believe, but it's true. You don't want to frighten away the newbie, but neither do you want to force him to abandon your desktop in disgust once he graduates to an intermediate or advanced user.
5) Don't dump legacy functionality. Just because you don't use the network connectivity of X11 doesn't mean no one else does either. If you haven't noticed, "the network" is getting bigger and more heterogenous every day. If I can't use your desktop over the network, it's going to suck.
4) I don't use Linux, so don't make a Linux-only desktop. Most of you developers know this, but unfortunately there's enough of you that don't to make things a real pain in the butt.
The concept that `everything is an untyped byte stream with no separation of control and data and no introspection' (or `everything is a file as UNIX people like to say') is a horrendous model.
No, it's a GREAT model! It's just not suitable for everything. "Pipes and Filters" is one of the basic software architectural design patterns. For repetitive manipultion of data (you know, the core purpose of computers), nothing beats it. If you only have to do a task once at the moment, then the standard GUI way (componentized or otherwise) may be more efficient. But if you need to do that same action hundreds of thousands of times, command line pipes and filters is going to be a heck of a lot easier, if you get to start with a text stream.
And there's no reason you can't componentize a pipe or a filter.
C++ has no runtime type information, and no introspection, so these things have to be hacked on to the top.
Actually, C++ has both of these. But unfortunately they're not as elegant as in some other languages, and their use tends to throttle performance down to the level of those other languages. But they're there if you need them.
But stop and think what you need them for. Primarily it's to eliminate coupling. But can you get buy with merely loose coupling instead? Do you REALLY need absolutely anonymous components that you can snap in anywhere?
The use of a sensible API eliminates the need for zero coupling. No, it won't give you an A+ in your OOD class, but it's perfectly suitable for the real world. Besides, you're going to end up with coupling anyway, even if its via querying the component for its methods. So you might as well be open and honest about it, and code in some dependencies that you know about, instead of waiting for the implicit but hidden dependencies to bite you on the butt when you least expect it.
p.s. I have nothing against Objective-C, rtti, introspection, reflection, or any of that. I just take offense at C++ being treated like a horrible evil thing.
And I know people who have so many icons on their Windows desktop that they OVERLAP! That's doesn't make it right, though, only that it demonstrates there isn't an easier or better way for the average person.
I started on the "desktop" with OS/2 Warp. Personally I love the "desktop as your home directory" concept, but it takes someone willing to spend a second or two keeping stuff organized instead of dumping every and all to the desktop.
I'll leave them as an excercise to the reader. The user doesn't want icons on the desktop, the user wants quick and easy access to their stuff. If you want to get rid of icons on the desktop, figure out how to enable the user to access their stuff easier and faster than icons on the desktop.
When 99.97% of a OEM's computers sold some with Windows, what's so extreme about Gates? Getting paid for that 0.03% may make him slimy, but it doesn't make him extremist.
OTOH I think people take things that Richard Stallman says, that software should be free, and try to equate that with "they want to steal stuff."
That's not to hard to understand. If you really take his philosophy to heart, then you have to view any warez trading is merely "moral civil disobedience."
The biggest difference between the Free Software and Open Source communities is that the first says "your software that you produce must be free", while the latter says "my software that I produce must be free."
Some of these warezmongers are indeed that stupid. Hell, I bet MOST of them are that stupid.
I have a "friend" who is a warezmonger. He tried to give me a copy of XP, but I told him I didn't use it. He tried to give me a copy of MSOffice and I have him the same answer. Ditto for Photoshop, Acrobat, and several other applications. Ditto for several hundred games.
Finally, just as he was about to dismiss me as hopelessly moral, he offered me a copy of Redhat. I told him to go away, because I used Slackware at the time.
Wrong. The term "steam beer" is historical and refers to a particulary style of beer brewed in San Fransisco during the last century. But when Anchor Brewing applied for the trademark, they were the only ones still using that term commercially. So the trademark was granted. Then a few tiny years later we get the craft beer boom (which Anchor kicked off, btw) and no one else is allowed to use the term, even if they make the same style of beer.
Yes, I know all this. I just don't know what makes (for example) Firefox the Open Source browser fundamentally different from Firefox the Free Software browser? When Richard Stallman screams that GNU software is Free Software and not Open Source Software, is he just being stupid?
...if the opportunity exists to develop proprietary features for Linux that would "differentiate" their product and help them justify selling their flavor for more, and drive sales of their product over their competitors, they will.
You need to read the parent article. That's exactly what ESR was talking about. For twenty years the GPL was promoted because that was the great fears. But it turned out that those fears were unfounded. Sure, a company could do that, but the difficulty of maintaining a fork and losing interoperability would put it at a disadvantage.
Freedom isn't about a big stick you use to make sure people make the correct choices you want them to make. Freedom is about THROWING AWAY that stick! So what if someone misbehaves? If it's not affecting you, a free society says that it's none of your business!
For example, most software that is considered free in the Stallman sense still cannot be turned into nonfree, proprietary software.
Nonsense! Where do you guys come up with this crap?
"Free as in the Stallman sense" includes every Free Software license listed on the FSF's Free Software license page. That includes stuff that can be forked off into a proprietary branch. What you are referring to instead is "copyleft", which is a subset of Free Software.
p.s. Even with the unrestricted BSD and MIT licenses, you can't turn the software into nonfree software. You have to fork off your own copy first. The orginal is still as free as it ever was.
Slashdot Mirror
Aaargh! You mentioned Opera! Don't do that!
You did it again! Stop, stop!
I'm currently using Safari and Konquerer...
I can't believe this! You've managed to mention three non-Firefox browsers in your post! I don't think we're even on the same page.
Amnesty International calls the Shah's secret police the Worst in the World.
Amnesty International also compares Guantanamo Bay to concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag and Pol Pot's regime. AI's reputation as an objective obversor is not only tarnished, it's in shreds.
The 'terrorists' are simply drawing people's attention to their cause.
And what is their cause? A global Islamic state. Or at the least a pan-Islamic state with superpower status. It's an utterly ridiculous goal, but they believe it. Short of our conversion to their particular sect of Islam and their twisted social norms, they will continue to use terrorism against us as long as they are able.
The terrorism isn't about economics, imperialism, capitalism or anything else the left like to apologize to the terrorists for. The Al Qaeda brand of terrorism is simply about xenophobia.
I thought it was because the IRA hotheads had all gotten themselves killed. The Iraqi insurgents are having to import Saudi suicide bombers, because they don't have any of their own left. But Ireland didn't have anywhere to recruit new blood from and it was taking to long for their babies to grow into teenagers to keep the level of violence high.
Iraq will be worse than Iran; I imagine even you are realizing it now.
The differences between the two are so vast I'm amazed you're trying to compare them. The people of Iraq are overwhelmingly in favor of the US and democracry. The insurgents are a minute fraction of the popularce, and would be totally ineffective without their import of Saudi teenagers. While the Iraqi people may be in disagreement as to how soon the US should leave after freeing them from a dictator that made the Shah look like a kindergartner, they are as whole grateful for the intervention.
1) A text screen is a type: the type is "text". Stuff like sed and sort don't care about any type other than that.
2) Sometimes you have to do some discovery on your text stream manipulation, but how is that less work than parsing XML or marshalling objects?
3) Monad could be interesting when it gets here, but the fact is that it's not here. Don't couch your arguments in terms of Microsoft vaporware, that way leads to perdition! In the meantime I don't want to write complete application or fullblown script just do something I can pipe together on the command line in a couple of minutes.
4) Isn't a stream of objects conceptually identical to a stream of text? It's still a stream and thus is grist for pipes and filters.
5) Sometimes you have streams of typeless data and you have no choice but to deal with it. If you've never seen it it's because you've never been out in the real world. Pointy clicky GUIs aren't going to cut it.
I work on some medical imaging software. There's no way in hell we could get by without pipes and filters operating on data streaming through the system. Did you think all image files sprung fully formed from Athena's brow? When we have a final image we can treat it as an object and *pipe* it elsewhere, but until then, nothing else works. Ditto for hundreds of other applications. Consider radar. Do you think you could process incoming radar signals without pipes and filters? Do you think the electromagnetic spectrum will be accommodating in your desire for universal strongly typed objects? I don't think so.
I'd just figure some people would grow up sooner or later.
Oh we do indeed grow up. Unfortunately Slashdot has an unending supply of new posters straight out of kindergarten who have no problems at all firmly believing in the rightness of double standards and the logic of conflicting axioms.
If they were primarily men, you know that Truman and Eisenhower would have been blamed for the massive unemployment in the computing field. I'm out of work, blame the administration! Smash a vacumn tube, save a job!
I hate to break the news, but western style oil panting on canvas is just as difficult to do on a computer as eastern ink painting.
Bingo. Just because something can be done doesn't mean that it's moral. The science behind it is irrelevant.
Think of all the people who are against genetically altered crops and irradiated foods. Which side do you think they are on with regards to stem cell research? This is one example out of hundreds where people will make science a devil on one issue while making it a savior on another. Science itself is fairly neutral with regards to politics.
The disagreements over stem cell research and abortion has nothing to do with science. Scientifically, we have a distinct instance of specie homo sapiens at the instant of conception. But that's not the issue. The real question is when does that instance of specie homo sapiens obtain the legal right to life? At that moment of some months afterwards? That's an issue that's belongs to the realm of philosophy, with a lengthy detour into linguistics while we argue over the definitions of "life", "person", "viable", etc.
As someone elsewhere already said, this would also open the doors for counter lawsuits against their wacky claims. Someone who lost millions investing how their astrologer told them to could sue them for damages.
But athiest and agnostics will not be held to the same standard? Do we hold you responsible for the acts of the officially athiest communist states?
All belief systems have their fringe fanatics, even yours. If we're going to hold individuals responsible for the acts of other individuals, then you're going to be in as much danger from Enlightenment's Guillotine as anyone else.
My input requirements:
1) Don't confuse eye candy with usability. A corrolary is don't confuse trendy with usability. OSX has a lot of eye candy, but it's usability really isn't all that stunning if you look at it objectively.
2) Don't make the unwashed newbie your core audience. Newbie friendly isn't synonymous with usability. Everyone grows up, and no one stays a newbie forever. It's hard to believe, but it's true. You don't want to frighten away the newbie, but neither do you want to force him to abandon your desktop in disgust once he graduates to an intermediate or advanced user.
5) Don't dump legacy functionality. Just because you don't use the network connectivity of X11 doesn't mean no one else does either. If you haven't noticed, "the network" is getting bigger and more heterogenous every day. If I can't use your desktop over the network, it's going to suck.
4) I don't use Linux, so don't make a Linux-only desktop. Most of you developers know this, but unfortunately there's enough of you that don't to make things a real pain in the butt.
The concept that `everything is an untyped byte stream with no separation of control and data and no introspection' (or `everything is a file as UNIX people like to say') is a horrendous model.
No, it's a GREAT model! It's just not suitable for everything. "Pipes and Filters" is one of the basic software architectural design patterns. For repetitive manipultion of data (you know, the core purpose of computers), nothing beats it. If you only have to do a task once at the moment, then the standard GUI way (componentized or otherwise) may be more efficient. But if you need to do that same action hundreds of thousands of times, command line pipes and filters is going to be a heck of a lot easier, if you get to start with a text stream.
And there's no reason you can't componentize a pipe or a filter.
C++ has no runtime type information, and no introspection, so these things have to be hacked on to the top.
Actually, C++ has both of these. But unfortunately they're not as elegant as in some other languages, and their use tends to throttle performance down to the level of those other languages. But they're there if you need them.
But stop and think what you need them for. Primarily it's to eliminate coupling. But can you get buy with merely loose coupling instead? Do you REALLY need absolutely anonymous components that you can snap in anywhere?
The use of a sensible API eliminates the need for zero coupling. No, it won't give you an A+ in your OOD class, but it's perfectly suitable for the real world. Besides, you're going to end up with coupling anyway, even if its via querying the component for its methods. So you might as well be open and honest about it, and code in some dependencies that you know about, instead of waiting for the implicit but hidden dependencies to bite you on the butt when you least expect it.
p.s. I have nothing against Objective-C, rtti, introspection, reflection, or any of that. I just take offense at C++ being treated like a horrible evil thing.
And I know people who have so many icons on their Windows desktop that they OVERLAP! That's doesn't make it right, though, only that it demonstrates there isn't an easier or better way for the average person.
I started on the "desktop" with OS/2 Warp. Personally I love the "desktop as your home directory" concept, but it takes someone willing to spend a second or two keeping stuff organized instead of dumping every and all to the desktop.
I'll leave them as an excercise to the reader. The user doesn't want icons on the desktop, the user wants quick and easy access to their stuff. If you want to get rid of icons on the desktop, figure out how to enable the user to access their stuff easier and faster than icons on the desktop.
When 99.97% of a OEM's computers sold some with Windows, what's so extreme about Gates? Getting paid for that 0.03% may make him slimy, but it doesn't make him extremist.
Did Northrop pay up? I would be stunned and amazed if they did.
OTOH I think people take things that Richard Stallman says, that software should be free, and try to equate that with "they want to steal stuff."
That's not to hard to understand. If you really take his philosophy to heart, then you have to view any warez trading is merely "moral civil disobedience."
The biggest difference between the Free Software and Open Source communities is that the first says "your software that you produce must be free", while the latter says "my software that I produce must be free."
Some of these warezmongers are indeed that stupid. Hell, I bet MOST of them are that stupid.
I have a "friend" who is a warezmonger. He tried to give me a copy of XP, but I told him I didn't use it. He tried to give me a copy of MSOffice and I have him the same answer. Ditto for Photoshop, Acrobat, and several other applications. Ditto for several hundred games.
Finally, just as he was about to dismiss me as hopelessly moral, he offered me a copy of Redhat. I told him to go away, because I used Slackware at the time.
"I can get you that too!"
Wrong. The term "steam beer" is historical and refers to a particulary style of beer brewed in San Fransisco during the last century. But when Anchor Brewing applied for the trademark, they were the only ones still using that term commercially. So the trademark was granted. Then a few tiny years later we get the craft beer boom (which Anchor kicked off, btw) and no one else is allowed to use the term, even if they make the same style of beer.
But it's not in the business of computers or software, so Microsoft can't do anything.
Yes, I know all this. I just don't know what makes (for example) Firefox the Open Source browser fundamentally different from Firefox the Free Software browser? When Richard Stallman screams that GNU software is Free Software and not Open Source Software, is he just being stupid?
BSD is failing because its been massively differentiated
...but why doesn't the same apply to Linux?
So you're saying BSD is failing because it isn't using the GPL...
The Linux desktop is failing because its been fragmented
Make up your mind, you can't have it both ways.
...if the opportunity exists to develop proprietary features for Linux that would "differentiate" their product and help them justify selling their flavor for more, and drive sales of their product over their competitors, they will.
You need to read the parent article. That's exactly what ESR was talking about. For twenty years the GPL was promoted because that was the great fears. But it turned out that those fears were unfounded. Sure, a company could do that, but the difficulty of maintaining a fork and losing interoperability would put it at a disadvantage.
Freedom isn't about a big stick you use to make sure people make the correct choices you want them to make. Freedom is about THROWING AWAY that stick! So what if someone misbehaves? If it's not affecting you, a free society says that it's none of your business!
For example, most software that is considered free in the Stallman sense still cannot be turned into nonfree, proprietary software.
Nonsense! Where do you guys come up with this crap?
"Free as in the Stallman sense" includes every Free Software license listed on the FSF's Free Software license page. That includes stuff that can be forked off into a proprietary branch. What you are referring to instead is "copyleft", which is a subset of Free Software.
p.s. Even with the unrestricted BSD and MIT licenses, you can't turn the software into nonfree software. You have to fork off your own copy first. The orginal is still as free as it ever was.