Our Bill of Rights has been violated numerous times, but at least we have one. Britain's consitution isn't even written and (since it's older) has been violated many more time; yet it's still kept them more free than any of their neighbors or many of their former colonies (I mean you, Canada).
Plus you begin with "sadly", but you're not sad. You and all of your Eurosuck friends are fucking ecstatic when you see us fall down - it allows you to change the subject when your own lack of liberty is brought up.
In closing, I'm not sure what country you're writing from, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that if you could wake up tomorrow as a New York cabbie or a motel proprietor in rural Iowa, you'd sell out your own goddamn grandmother to do it.
That's right you anti-American American Eurosuck fanboys! Your favorite socialist superstate is now cracking down on Free Speech, which they can officially do since they have No Bill of Rights. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it next time you do your clever "America Land of the Free" in scare quotes routine. Where's that fatass Michael Moore to save you now?
Oh yeah, and fuck Jacky the Worm for not going to Reagan's funeral.
Perhaps someone can explain to me the slight or not-so-slight bias against the French in the US I keep hearing about
1. Your language is different[1].
2. Your popular press is as prejudiced against us as ours is against you[2].
3. French foreign policy has a long history of getting in the way of American - I don't just mean the recent stuff either; it goes back at least as far as de Gaulle refusing to endorse the Normandy invasion.
4. American tourists who come back feeling that the French have been rude to them[3].
5. Slightly different economic models, and the feeling on each side that the other's is insane.
6. Historical attraction of American women to foreign men.
7. Blue-assed baboon syndrome: it's easy to hate the losing side in any important struggle.
8. Inheritance from British anti-Americanism.
9. Instinctive dislike of anything that reeks of "high culture".
[1] Easier to dislike people you don't understand.
[2] e.g. frequent use of "cowboy" as an insult. or adulation of Michael Moore coupled with the lack of similarly hyper-harsh criticism of Chirac.
[3] Usually they only go to Paris. Which is a bit like going to New York and then forming judgements about Iowa, New Hampshire and Mississippi based on that.
Thats why VB has the classification as a "Bondange and Discipline Language" like Pascal had before it.
And that's why VB is less abstract than Lisp or ML etc. Abstraction means how many 1's and 0's you can model with a given length of code - we'll call that number n. With a lower-order function, where you can take values as arguments and return values as results, n is a function of the number of valid arguments.
With higher-order functions, where you can take functions as arguments and/or return functions as results, n is a function of the number of functions that can be taken or returned times the number of valid arguments for them.
In other words, you can model a much greater number of 1's and 0's with a language like Lisp: it is more abstract.
I'm not trying to sound like an ass, but I will say this bluntly: the abstraction of a programming language doesn't have a single thing to do with syntax. None whatsoever!
VB is nothing but style and bondage and discipline (B&D). On a side note B&D doesn't affect abstraction either.
Right. So how do I write first-order functions in VB then?
At some point at VM, be it JVM, Parrot, Mono/CLR runtime will become pervasive and become the de facto meta language, with specific developer-level langs simply being syntactic sugar.
More likely, we'll see Stupid Language Wars replaced by Stupid VM wars.
One thing that has always bothered me is the lack of standards for basic syntax.
You can have my parentheses when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
For example does anyone really lose flexibility if we say statements are delimited by ';'?
When explaining a point it's often useful to provide a simple, concrete example people can relate to before discussing an abstraction. While the example may or may not have been necessary, I don't think it reduced the credibility of my post.
As I said, sorry for using your post as an example, since it really wasn't one.
The first is the development effort in the front end. We had to create all our Flash widgets nearly from scratch because those that were included were not flexible enough. This was a fairly large job. An open library of flexible, easy to use widgets for Flash would make this less of an impact.
A robust SVG implementation plus a good widget set for it should be at the top of OSS development priorities somewhere just behind a free Java.
Trying not to sound to troll-ish, but why was the Christian group the only group to say nay to this?
"Christian Democrats" and variants thereon is a common party name in Europe. It may have meant something like 50 years ago, but now it's basically just a synonym for "center-right".
This is often the kicker. To take a trivial example, consider my wife's computer, which I'd like to migrate to Linux for a whole raft of reasons (the biggest being that it requires more administration effort than the other four computers in my house, which all run Linux). But I can't migrate her easily, because of Quicken, PrintMaster and some of the kids' games. There are Linux equivalents, more or less, but she doesn't want to learn them.
If the subject is large-scale corporate or government migrations, your experience trying to browbeat your wife/grandmother/"Aunt Tille"/parents into using Linux is hardly relevant. Even bringing it up diminishes your credibility.
I apologize to swillden for using his post as an example, since it's not really what I'm talking about: it's not zealotry and other of his posts make clear that he does know what he's talking about. But in the future, people, let's try to avoid things like: "I put Gentoo an KDE on my grandmother's computer and she deons't even know the difference!"
It sounds as if they're going from a Wintel fat-client/server architecture to a Lintel fat-client/server architecture. Whether or not you agree with me that this is a dubious decision, consider that deploying a true multiuser operating system in effectively single-user mode is a lot like deploying chainsaws to a bunch of chimpanzees.
In my experience *nix's strengths become apparent when you use it as it was meant to be used: a lot of terminals plus maybe a few high-powered standalone workstations. For many standalone machines it's no less of a headache than Windows and in some ways more of one.
I know, I know, thin-clients never took off, yadda-yadda. But I maintain that the biggest part of why they haven't is that deploying Office this way is prohibitively expensive. If you're moving to OO.o, it starts to look a lot better.
(One nice thing about a Linux thin-client setup is that legacy Windows machines can act as terminals with Cygwin/X, allowing Windows and Linux apps as to be deployed in parallel.)
We made a version of COM, called XPCOM, a fundamental piece of every component of every part of the software. We took COM all the way down to the lowest levels of the system, and I think that XPCOM is a fantastic useful tool. We had great and important places to use it, but we used it too deeply, we allowed it to influence our memory model across the board, and there continue to be costs associated with that which I don't think we need to be paying.
I've been saying this for years, and people tend to think that I'm damning COM unconditionally, and I'm not. COM is very important to us, and it's a foundation of our scriptability layer, and scriptability is fundamental to how our application works. But I don't think every object should be a COM object. We are finally moving away from using COM for everything,
Object lesson: beware of integrating Microsoft technology too deeply.
if you can configure the user interface any way you "damn well please",
Please excuse the hyperbole of the original post. What we're talking about here is not infinite extensibility, but rather a single, common, and well-understood option.
It means more costly support (which is always an expense for a software company), and more frustrated users.
Or you could just hide common and popular options and produce frustrated users without the additional step.
Now, I'm well aware that you're advanced enough that what I've said above doesn't apply to you. I'm also well aware that there are very few linux users to which the above applies. But eventually there will be,
You still miss my point about power users. I do not mean the hacker set that now makes up Linux users. I mean people who are not technically sophisticated, but who have intermediate-to-advanced knowledge of a given application stack based on experience with it. They may hack together fairly complex apps in Excel/Word macros, or put together nontrivial Access reports and queries on their own. Do not ask them to hack the registry or edit a config file (they often do it anyways, to all of our chagrin) but they generally have a good grasp of hierarchical file-systems.
Do you know who I'm talking about? Does the Open Source movement in general? Linux-on-the-enterprise-desktop is seriously fucked if not.
Since you seem to be a tech-support guy, I'm sure you hate these people. They do after all cause most of your hassles by overestimating their knowledge. But they make your company run. In general making their lives easier is more important than making your life easier. Infinite Emacs-style configurability is not a good idea; but Classic Mac-style absolute lockdown is also a Big Lose, maybe even more so.
Using the "browse filesystem" feature requires right-clicking and making a selection from a drop-down menu. Using spatial view, by contrast, requires only a double-click. In other words, there is under the current situation a small penalty attached to browser view that becomes non-trivial when compounded over multiple instances.
Why is it such a big goddamn problem to add a "browser-view-by-default" menu item to fscking Nautilus? What is the major malfunction of people like you such that you're so goddamn opposed to making it trivial for users to do things the way they damn well please?
The Gnome team seems to forget that in between "newbies" and "31337 h4x0rz" is a large middle ground of "power users" who may not be up to programming and shit, but who understand the behavior of the apps they use in fairly sophisticated ways.
Windows does not win because it bends over backwards for newbies. (Apple does, and it loses). Windows wins because it aggressively cultivates power users. These are the people who shut off spatial view as soon as they booted up Win95. They are also the people who drive purchasing decisions.
(Not a troll, seriously: they're both mind-bendingly hideous, oversimplified hacks that just happen to be ubiquitous because they make life easier for a lot of people.)
But the comments on OSNews are just as lame as on slashdot but there's no moderation system (outside of removing offensive messages)
And "offensive" means disagreeing with "the staff". Last night I made the mistake of pointing out that a gui and an operating system are not the same thing. That post is gone.
And so many of the editorials are just troll-bait
I've toyed with the idea of following Eugenia's example and preceeding every one of my trolls with "Our take:".
The arguments he makes for simultaneously calling PPC open and IBM keeping control are precisely the arguments Sun makes for not opening up Java (and are subsequently criticized by IBM).
I suppose it's true, but then again hardware's a different kettle of fish than software. Software takes very little capital outlay to produce whereas creating even a sub-shitty microprocessor takes a big chunk of change. This means that the benefits of openness accrue much more to software, and restrictions on it are felt much closer to the bone.
Speaking of which, SPARC is an open spec as well, but that hasn't helped its adoption much.
I don't feel like I should have to pay a bunch of cash to some a-hole in Oregon or wherever just so I can use my own goddamn computer that I paid my own goddamn good money for.
I have no particular ill-will towards Microsoft. I'm just not gonna give them a goddamn penny. (Nor are most people; most people I know just pirate XP).
That's one reason. The other is that I feel boxed in on modern Windows systems. You can't do shit. I used to get the same feelings from Macs, which is why I used DOS back in the day.
Having worked in tech support I can see the value of desktop lockdown; but it should be a possibility, not the only way.
IMO I think the traditional "for profit" software business model just doesn't work for GNU/Linux distros.
That's a rather sweeping statement. Time will tell. So far Red Hat's doing pretty well at it. Moreover, there's more to the Linux distro business than just selling shrinkwrap vs. support. IBM, Novell and Sun, for example, are using their distros as loss-leaders (or break-even leaders, whatever) to drive sales of stuff like hardware, server software, and consulting.
What I'd like to see is Gentoo move into the "pay for phone support" business. Got a question you need answered now? Pay us $75USD and we'll help.
Phone support for home users is a proven loser in nearly all cases. Enterprise support often requires more than phone work. Plus Gentoo's core audience is a bunch of do-it-yourselfer fanatics, so I can't imagine much cash in selling support to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Our Bill of Rights has been violated numerous times, but at least we have one. Britain's consitution isn't even written and (since it's older) has been violated many more time; yet it's still kept them more free than any of their neighbors or many of their former colonies (I mean you, Canada).
Plus you begin with "sadly", but you're not sad. You and all of your Eurosuck friends are fucking ecstatic when you see us fall down - it allows you to change the subject when your own lack of liberty is brought up.
In closing, I'm not sure what country you're writing from, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that if you could wake up tomorrow as a New York cabbie or a motel proprietor in rural Iowa, you'd sell out your own goddamn grandmother to do it.
That's right you anti-American American Eurosuck fanboys! Your favorite socialist superstate is now cracking down on Free Speech, which they can officially do since they have No Bill of Rights. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it next time you do your clever "America Land of the Free" in scare quotes routine. Where's that fatass Michael Moore to save you now?
Oh yeah, and fuck Jacky the Worm for not going to Reagan's funeral.
Perhaps someone can explain to me the slight or not-so-slight bias against the French in the US I keep hearing about
1. Your language is different[1].
2. Your popular press is as prejudiced against us as ours is against you[2].
3. French foreign policy has a long history of getting in the way of American - I don't just mean the recent stuff either; it goes back at least as far as de Gaulle refusing to endorse the Normandy invasion.
4. American tourists who come back feeling that the French have been rude to them[3].
5. Slightly different economic models, and the feeling on each side that the other's is insane.
6. Historical attraction of American women to foreign men.
7. Blue-assed baboon syndrome: it's easy to hate the losing side in any important struggle.
8. Inheritance from British anti-Americanism.
9. Instinctive dislike of anything that reeks of "high culture".
[1] Easier to dislike people you don't understand.
[2] e.g. frequent use of "cowboy" as an insult. or adulation of Michael Moore coupled with the lack of similarly hyper-harsh criticism of Chirac.
[3] Usually they only go to Paris. Which is a bit like going to New York and then forming judgements about Iowa, New Hampshire and Mississippi based on that.
Thats why VB has the classification as a "Bondange and Discipline Language" like Pascal had before it.
And that's why VB is less abstract than Lisp or ML etc. Abstraction means how many 1's and 0's you can model with a given length of code - we'll call that number n. With a lower-order function, where you can take values as arguments and return values as results, n is a function of the number of valid arguments.
With higher-order functions, where you can take functions as arguments and/or return functions as results, n is a function of the number of functions that can be taken or returned times the number of valid arguments for them.
In other words, you can model a much greater number of 1's and 0's with a language like Lisp: it is more abstract.
I'm not trying to sound like an ass, but I will say this bluntly: the abstraction of a programming language doesn't have a single thing to do with syntax. None whatsoever!
VB is nothing but style and bondage and discipline (B&D). On a side note B&D doesn't affect abstraction either.
Right. So how do I write first-order functions in VB then?
At some point at VM, be it JVM, Parrot, Mono/CLR runtime will become pervasive and become the de facto meta language, with specific developer-level langs simply being syntactic sugar.
More likely, we'll see Stupid Language Wars replaced by Stupid VM wars.
One thing that has always bothered me is the lack of standards for basic syntax.
You can have my parentheses when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
For example does anyone really lose flexibility if we say statements are delimited by ';'?
Fuck you.
We need an OSS clone of Flex functionality. It is insanely great.
When explaining a point it's often useful to provide a simple, concrete example people can relate to before discussing an abstraction. While the example may or may not have been necessary, I don't think it reduced the credibility of my post.
As I said, sorry for using your post as an example, since it really wasn't one.
The first is the development effort in the front end. We had to create all our Flash widgets nearly from scratch because those that were included were not flexible enough. This was a fairly large job. An open library of flexible, easy to use widgets for Flash would make this less of an impact. A robust SVG implementation plus a good widget set for it should be at the top of OSS development priorities somewhere just behind a free Java.
Trying not to sound to troll-ish, but why was the Christian group the only group to say nay to this?
"Christian Democrats" and variants thereon is a common party name in Europe. It may have meant something like 50 years ago, but now it's basically just a synonym for "center-right".
This is often the kicker. To take a trivial example, consider my wife's computer, which I'd like to migrate to Linux for a whole raft of reasons (the biggest being that it requires more administration effort than the other four computers in my house, which all run Linux). But I can't migrate her easily, because of Quicken, PrintMaster and some of the kids' games. There are Linux equivalents, more or less, but she doesn't want to learn them.
If the subject is large-scale corporate or government migrations, your experience trying to browbeat your wife/grandmother/"Aunt Tille"/parents into using Linux is hardly relevant. Even bringing it up diminishes your credibility.
I apologize to swillden for using his post as an example, since it's not really what I'm talking about: it's not zealotry and other of his posts make clear that he does know what he's talking about. But in the future, people, let's try to avoid things like: "I put Gentoo an KDE on my grandmother's computer and she deons't even know the difference!"
Part of it is cultural problems: "I don' wanna give up my PC! I wanna hardware upgrade!"
Part of it is big initial outlay and headache vs. many medium-sized outlays and headache.
Part of it is IT guys who've been trained on nothing but client-server.
Part of it is lingering bad taste from initial overhype by firms like Sun and Oracle.
Part of it is the perceived lack of available tools to set it up easily.
Part of it, as I said, is that neither the architecture nor the licensing of Windows and its apps make it easy or cheap to do.
It sounds as if they're going from a Wintel fat-client/server architecture to a Lintel fat-client/server architecture. Whether or not you agree with me that this is a dubious decision, consider that deploying a true multiuser operating system in effectively single-user mode is a lot like deploying chainsaws to a bunch of chimpanzees.
In my experience *nix's strengths become apparent when you use it as it was meant to be used: a lot of terminals plus maybe a few high-powered standalone workstations. For many standalone machines it's no less of a headache than Windows and in some ways more of one.
I know, I know, thin-clients never took off, yadda-yadda. But I maintain that the biggest part of why they haven't is that deploying Office this way is prohibitively expensive. If you're moving to OO.o, it starts to look a lot better.
(One nice thing about a Linux thin-client setup is that legacy Windows machines can act as terminals with Cygwin/X, allowing Windows and Linux apps as to be deployed in parallel.)
We made a version of COM, called XPCOM, a fundamental piece of every component of every part of the software. We took COM all the way down to the lowest levels of the system, and I think that XPCOM is a fantastic useful tool. We had great and important places to use it, but we used it too deeply, we allowed it to influence our memory model across the board, and there continue to be costs associated with that which I don't think we need to be paying.
I've been saying this for years, and people tend to think that I'm damning COM unconditionally, and I'm not. COM is very important to us, and it's a foundation of our scriptability layer, and scriptability is fundamental to how our application works. But I don't think every object should be a COM object. We are finally moving away from using COM for everything,
Object lesson: beware of integrating Microsoft technology too deeply.
Indeed, that Radoslaw Sokol dude has made OSS a huge disfavour.
Trolls can't help themselves. Editors can. (Unless the editor is a troll, which one Ought to Suppose Never Ever Would tranSpire.)
And it's not so much about disfavors to open source as about running a good vs. cruddy news site.
if you can configure the user interface any way you "damn well please",
Please excuse the hyperbole of the original post. What we're talking about here is not infinite extensibility, but rather a single, common, and well-understood option.
It means more costly support (which is always an expense for a software company), and more frustrated users.
Or you could just hide common and popular options and produce frustrated users without the additional step.
Now, I'm well aware that you're advanced enough that what I've said above doesn't apply to you. I'm also well aware that there are very few linux users to which the above applies. But eventually there will be,
You still miss my point about power users. I do not mean the hacker set that now makes up Linux users. I mean people who are not technically sophisticated, but who have intermediate-to-advanced knowledge of a given application stack based on experience with it. They may hack together fairly complex apps in Excel/Word macros, or put together nontrivial Access reports and queries on their own. Do not ask them to hack the registry or edit a config file (they often do it anyways, to all of our chagrin) but they generally have a good grasp of hierarchical file-systems.
Do you know who I'm talking about? Does the Open Source movement in general? Linux-on-the-enterprise-desktop is seriously fucked if not.
Since you seem to be a tech-support guy, I'm sure you hate these people. They do after all cause most of your hassles by overestimating their knowledge. But they make your company run. In general making their lives easier is more important than making your life easier. Infinite Emacs-style configurability is not a good idea; but Classic Mac-style absolute lockdown is also a Big Lose, maybe even more so.
No.
Using the "browse filesystem" feature requires right-clicking and making a selection from a drop-down menu. Using spatial view, by contrast, requires only a double-click. In other words, there is under the current situation a small penalty attached to browser view that becomes non-trivial when compounded over multiple instances.
Why is it such a big goddamn problem to add a "browser-view-by-default" menu item to fscking Nautilus? What is the major malfunction of people like you such that you're so goddamn opposed to making it trivial for users to do things the way they damn well please?
The Gnome team seems to forget that in between "newbies" and "31337 h4x0rz" is a large middle ground of "power users" who may not be up to programming and shit, but who understand the behavior of the apps they use in fairly sophisticated ways.
Windows does not win because it bends over backwards for newbies. (Apple does, and it loses). Windows wins because it aggressively cultivates power users. These are the people who shut off spatial view as soon as they booted up Win95. They are also the people who drive purchasing decisions.
Do not fuck with them.
Please stop posting every top-level troll that gets sent your way from OSNews.com.
Thanks.
PHP is a mess of a language. It really is.
PHP: Free Software's answer to Visual Basic.
(Not a troll, seriously: they're both mind-bendingly hideous, oversimplified hacks that just happen to be ubiquitous because they make life easier for a lot of people.)
But the comments on OSNews are just as lame as on slashdot but there's no moderation system (outside of removing offensive messages)
And "offensive" means disagreeing with "the staff". Last night I made the mistake of pointing out that a gui and an operating system are not the same thing. That post is gone.
And so many of the editorials are just troll-bait
I've toyed with the idea of following Eugenia's example and preceeding every one of my trolls with "Our take:".
and not really thought out.
Or in anything approaching English.
At this rate, Linux could soon face major challenges by the upcoming hobby/community OSes. There's Syllable, OpenBeOS, SkyOS, ReactOS and MenuetOS
Ppppppp!!! Eeeehhh hoooo ha! Whoo-HAHAHAHAHAHA! Ho-ho-ho *chuckle* Heeeeeeee HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
hold on, let's try that again:
At this rate, Linux could soon face major challenges by the upcoming hobby/community OSes. There's Syllable, OpenBeOS, SkyOS, ReactOS and MenuetOS
BWAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!! Heeee!!!! Oooh! Ahahahahaha-hahahahahahahaha-haha HAHAHAHA!!!
Eugenia, you suck.
Seriously, the article does highlight the need for a user-friendly, suckass machine-friendly distro, but these people are so lame it's precious.
The arguments he makes for simultaneously calling PPC open and IBM keeping control are precisely the arguments Sun makes for not opening up Java (and are subsequently criticized by IBM).
I suppose it's true, but then again hardware's a different kettle of fish than software. Software takes very little capital outlay to produce whereas creating even a sub-shitty microprocessor takes a big chunk of change. This means that the benefits of openness accrue much more to software, and restrictions on it are felt much closer to the bone.
Speaking of which, SPARC is an open spec as well, but that hasn't helped its adoption much.
In Classical Greek:
'onoma' = 'name'
'nomos' = 'law'
In compounds the second 'o' in 'onoma' shifts to a 'y': 'anti' + 'onom-' = 'antonym'.
Hence:
'autonomically' = 'auto-' ('oneself') + 'nomo-' ('law') = "self-regulatingly"
I don't feel like I should have to pay a bunch of cash to some a-hole in Oregon or wherever just so I can use my own goddamn computer that I paid my own goddamn good money for.
I have no particular ill-will towards Microsoft. I'm just not gonna give them a goddamn penny. (Nor are most people; most people I know just pirate XP).
That's one reason. The other is that I feel boxed in on modern Windows systems. You can't do shit. I used to get the same feelings from Macs, which is why I used DOS back in the day.
Having worked in tech support I can see the value of desktop lockdown; but it should be a possibility, not the only way.
IMO I think the traditional "for profit" software business model just doesn't work for GNU/Linux distros.
That's a rather sweeping statement. Time will tell. So far Red Hat's doing pretty well at it. Moreover, there's more to the Linux distro business than just selling shrinkwrap vs. support. IBM, Novell and Sun, for example, are using their distros as loss-leaders (or break-even leaders, whatever) to drive sales of stuff like hardware, server software, and consulting.
What I'd like to see is Gentoo move into the "pay for phone support" business. Got a question you need answered now? Pay us $75USD and we'll help.
Phone support for home users is a proven loser in nearly all cases. Enterprise support often requires more than phone work. Plus Gentoo's core audience is a bunch of do-it-yourselfer fanatics, so I can't imagine much cash in selling support to them.