Though Cobind Desktop only uses XFce and not the more popular KDE, it's entire design is based on a clutter free workspace.
That should be:
Because Cobind Desktop only uses XFce and not the more popular KDE, it's entire design is based on a clutter free workspace.
Among the different desktops, KDE has to be the most cluttered ("featureful"), by design and by choice. Some people like that, I suppose, but XFCE is a reaction against that kind of approach to building desktop environments.
You describe a "race to the bottom"? Farmers can't be 10-20% less effective and keep soil quality up because of competition from other farmers?
What competition? Farming is heavily subsidized in the US and Europe. That's the main reason US farmers can use high-yield, intensive methods and still compete internationally. And it's a big problem for developing nations, whose agricultural methods actually would be internationally competitive if only they were allowed to compete on a level playing field.
Why would the cost increase? Can you back this up?
Sure. As an example, just look at gasoline prices, the cost of pollution control on your vehicle, fees for disposing of oil and old tires, etc. All those costs have gone up. Farmers face the same increases in many more areas.
All industrial areas gets cheaper over time.
No, they don't. Production methods may get more efficient and certain products may get cheaper, but the cost of most non-renewable resources, labor, and pollution all tend to go up over the long term.
Agriculture would become cheaper and more efficient if there were successful efforts to reduce its dependence on energy, fertilizer, mechanization, and high-tech seed production. But, so far, things seem to be generally heading in the other direction--the agricultural industry can make no money with efficient farming practices, and the farmers are subsidized and constrained in what they can do anyway.
Also, since modern farming has been done for decades now, if there was some effect destroying the soil we should know about it, yes?
I wasn't even referring to that. But, yes, modern farming methods often are destroying the soil: soil erosion and salt have been, and continue to be, huge problems.
This has to do with QT development -- ie, you can't develop proprietary internal apps with the free Qt version.
If that is true, then Qt is not covered by the GPL--the GPL clearly gives you the right to do whatever you want with GPL'ed software internally. The right to use software internally and not distribute it is a fundamental right of users according to RMS. Anything that imposes such a restriction above and beyond the GPL is not covered by the GPL anymore.
It costs nothing to develop business applications qith the QT toolkit. The only requirement is that if you use the $0.00 license(GPL) the app must be GPL. It really isn't much to ask.
Yes, it is "too much to ask" when there are good LGPL'ed alternatives.
The fact that Novell is going to use QT is very telling. Novell is a software corporation whose existence past, present and future relies on selling software.
Yes: it tells you that their business model is obsolete and they still just don't get it.
Novell is not afraid of having to pay a very reasonable licensing cost for commercial development and neither are most other software companies. They already pay licensing for MS Visual DEs, Borland DEs and probably many others. Paying for a QT license is a minor cost of doing business and it will not deter any serious software house.
No, it won't deter any 20th century style software house. But those software houses are going to be in deep trouble. The times when you could spend money on tools and libraries like there was no tomorrow are over.
It will deter 21st century style commercial software developers--consultants who develop custom software, research labs developing the next generation of software, companies with razor-sharp margins, etc.
You can do object oriented and event oriented programming in c fine.
Sure, you can. The problem is that there are so many ways of doing it.
Besides C is much more portable and there is a C++ interface for GTK to.
Object-oriented code in C is not "portable"; more precisely, it isn't interoperable: everybody does it differently. C++ standardizes an object model. Gtk+ can get away with it because it's so big and important, so people put in the work to hook up its object model to other languages (as in Gtkmm).
But neither the situation with Gtk+ or with Qt is particularly good. Gtk+'s object model is homebrew and laborious to deal with, and Qt's is too C++ specific. On balance, I think Gtk+ just wins because of its license.
That's Apple's secret: Apple picks a lot of things for you. They don't always make the best choices, but they usually make workable choices, and even when their choices are technically bad (as they are from time to time), at least they still make them look good.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is all about choice (within well-defined, money-making parameters): you get zillions of audio and video CODECs, lots of configuration options for the UI, preference panels with sub-panels until your eyes glaze over, dozens of classes that all do the same thing, and let's not forget an ever expanding list of third-party utilities and add-ons to make up for the choices Microsoft didn't give you and the problems Microsoft created while creating all that choice. Microsoft isn't kidding when they are saying that they are giving you choices.
UNIX, like Apple, traditionally has made choices and stuck by them. For example, the UNIX folks at Bell Labs understood that the use of "tab" in Makefiles probably was a mistake, but it wasn't a big enough mistake to create another "make" utility (at least not for a couple of decades). And, yes, the file system may not be the ideal IPC or database mechanism, but it worked well enough and provided a good, simple answer.
Linux has inherited some of the UNIX simplicity and philosophy, although, sadly, there has been a lot of uncertainty and waffling come into it, mostly from people who are trying to turn Linux into Windows.
Mexico, much of South America, and much of Africa are seeing more and more land cleared for farms because they do not have modern food production. The US and other high-yield countries can continue sending food to these countries, or we can give them the means to use their own farmland to produce more food of their own.
Well, and why do you think they don't have modern food production methods? Do you think they don't know how to?
No, it's because they can't afford to. US agriculture is energy intensive, consumes lots of non-renewable raw materials, and generates lots of pollution. If a country is willing and able to pay that price, it's not surprising that they can get enormous yields per acre. But third world nations don't have the money to engage in that kind of agriculture. The US can only afford to do it because its agricultural sector is subsidized, both explicitly and implicitly by piggybacking on other infrastructure.
It's not as much a question of "modern" vs. "outdated", it's a question of how much you are willing to spend and accept in other costs in order to increase yields. And as the costs of non-renewable resources and pollution keep increasing, there is a good chance that it is US-style agriculture that will start failing.
Re:What do you think the surface is like?
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
If some earth carried bacteria were to survive, where would it survive? Possibly in some sheltered nook, or tucked under a rock when we went to scoop something. In that case the resources and/or space for the organism to work with is so small that I would say calling it exponential might be a mistake, can you really call two generations before maxing out resources "exponential" growth?
I seriously doubt it would "max out" after two generations. You have an entire planet to colonize, slow growth rates, and at most a handful of initial organisms. There is a lot more room on Mars than for 24 bacteria.
Maybe this generation doesn't, but past generations have been able to build things.
Those past generations didn't have stock markets, quarterly earning reports, activist courts, or consumerism. They did, however, have monarchs, potentates, dictators, and popes who could foist such undertakings on their underlings without answering to anyone.
I'm not sure whether what we have is an improvement, but no matter whether it is or not, it seems like the time for these kinds of megaprojects is over.
Yes, terraforming Mars is clearly the solution to all our problems.
After all, if you have exceeded the credit limit on one credit card, it's not that your spending habits are out of line with your income, it's that you need another one, right?
Folks, if we can't live well and sustainably on a planet as nice as Earth, adding Mars into the mix won't help.
but sending scientists and a lab is well worth the exta expenditure (and risk)
Sending a single manned mission would easily cost between 100 and 1000 times of what an unmanned mission costs. I venture to say that we get a lot more data out of 100+ robotic probes than out of a single manned mission.
Furthermore, if we wanted to send a general-purpose chemical lab, we could do so on a robotic mission. That is something to be considered. But there is no need to send people: they are useless and expensive.
Re:What happens when life IS found
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I will love to see the ramifications to the worlds religions when life is actually found. The fall-out will be grand. With some luck it will put into proper perspective all the in-fighting that has been caused by 'holy wars' over the centuries.
If the discovery of a universe that is about a dozen billion light years large and a dozen billion years old, of 60ft cold-blooded monsters with banana-sized teeth, of nuclear fusion, of evolution, and of all that didn't change religion, the discovery of bacterial life on Mars won't either. In fact, most people will probably neither know or care about it.
Exponential growth is a best-case situation. In a harsh environment, bacteria replicate very slowly.
Whether they divide once every century or once ever 20 minutes, their growth is still exponential. Biological systems only stop growing exponentially once there is serious competition for resources or space.
1. Do stuff. 2. Find problems and bugs. 3. Hope somebody out there at random fixes it. 4. Wait some more. 5. Hopefully still make profit.
You got points 3. and 4. wrong: if you need it, you don't wait, you fix it yourself and return the fixes.
Commercial vendors are in a drive toward standaridzation, and working to turn computer software, and the support needed to administer it, into a commodity.
Yes, and nothing about what I said contradicts that. If you outsource your support and administration, then the company you outsource it to becomes the participant in the OSS projects. That's actually the most common form of OSS usage, where companies like RedHat, SuSE, etc. get paid for easy-to-install (but still OSS) solutions, but they sponsor projects to fix specific bugs and add specific enhancements that many of their customers want. If anything, OSS works better in that kind of world than something like Microsoft.
The notion of treating your business computers like 'information appliances,' meanwhile, has vaporized.
No matter how you handle the low-level maintenance of your software, and no matter whether you go with commercial or OSS, for many businesses, that is suicide anyway. Business software encodes how businesses run; it basically is the business. You can treat it like an "information appliance" about as much as you can treat the CEO like an "information appliance".
That seems an odd position to take, given that it's the Republican FCC commissioner that keeps pushing for the legalization of competition in communications, and fighting off the courts when they try to turn it back.
Republicans say they are for individual rights, states rights, free markets, free enterprise, and competition. But saying and doing are two different things.
In fact, "individual rights" is just a code word for pushing a Christian right agenda; when people try to assert their individual rights (abortion, sex, nudity, gay rights, etc.), Republicans want to restrict things and punish. With the Republicans, you get individual rights, as long as you are a good, conforming Christian and spend a lot of money.
"States rights" is a codeword for shifting federal taxes to the states, which makes it easy to claim to have lowered federal taxes; when states try to actually assert their "states rights" (drugs, gay marriage, etc.), the Republicans are up in arms.
And "free enterprise" to Republicans means getting in bed with big businesses; efficient and responsive community operated utilities don't fit into that concept (after all, they don't make big campaign contributions to federal politicians).
Democrats have their own set of misleading codewords, but, on balance, I still think the kind of deception and word games the Republicans play are still more harmful.
Disclosures are defensive: they protect you against subsequent patents on some technology you are already using.
Patents are always offensive: you get them in order to be able to threaten to sue someone. And if you use bogus patents as bargaining chips in negotiations when someone else makes a legitimate patent claim against you, that is just as sleazy as if you try to assert a bogus patent directly.
But it isn't Apple's invention: plenty of music players have used these interfaves before iPod, and even if they hadn't, these kinds of hierarchical menus are standard tools on consumer devices.
Apple's dirty little secret is that they are the cloners from Cupertino: it is Apple that again and again has tken other people's ideas and products and sold them as their own. Nothing wrong with that in principle--their products are often nice--but they shouldn't pretend it's their invention, and they certainly shouldn't patent it.
1. Do stuff 2. Report plenty of bugs, RFEs to MS for free 3. Pay annual licensing fees to MS 3a. Hope that Microsoft won't screw you by making changes to their s/w that help their bottom line but hurt you 4. Hope enough money is left over from your core business
With OSS s/w, this becomes
1. Do stuff 2. Report plenty of bugs, RFEs to OSS project (occasionally fix/implement one) for free 3. Make profit from your core business
In both cases, you do free work for other people, but with OSS, all the free work is aggregated and you don't pay for it over and over again. With MS, you end up paying for the same piece of software and for the volunteer work of others and yourself not just once, but over and over again. Furthermore, with MS and other commercial s/w vendors, you constantly run the risk that they will screw you by discontinuing or changing products you depend on, and you have no recourse.
The business case for OSS is easy to make: OSS greatly reduces risks and cost of ownership. OSS isn't without any costs, but it is cheaper on balance.
Note that OSS is a business model and money saver for the actual end users, comapnies whose business is not the creation of the OSS itself, but something else. Founding a s/w company that creates OSS and makes money from it is, as you yourself observe, a long shot and only works rarely. And that's OK.
And for the rest of the world? Oh wait, sorry, Smalltalkers are gods among programmers. So foolish of me to think of myself before the Smalltalkers.
Oh, please, spare us the cynicism. Smalltalk syntax is pretty straightforward. Yes, you, too, could learn it in a couple of hours, which is more than can be said for Java or C/C++ syntax. Does everything have to come down to braces and semicolons nowadays?
If you are looking for a Smalltalk-like language for scripting applications without the Smalltalk GUI, check out GNU Smalltalk. It's a pretty faithful implementation of Smalltalk, and it even has a JIT.
But when the manual starts out with closures, it's clear that somebody is getting too cute. This is a language for "l33t haxxors", of the old MIT AI Lab persuasion.
No, they are just following the Smalltalk tradition. Smalltalk is a language that people generally find easy to learn. The use of blocks in Smalltalk just makes things consistent and simple, and it lets you write your own control structures.
Check out "instance specific dispatch". Now that's designed to totally confuse maintainers.
That's object-oriented junk; you get the same stuff in any OOL. If the language doesn't have built-in support, it becomes a "pattern" (and sells lots of books).
If Microsoft had put its weight behind Dylan, instead of C#, then I think Java would have been in serious trouble.
No way. Whether Dylan is or is not better in an absolute sense, C# is the biggest increment over Java the industry is willing to swallow, just like Java was the biggest increment over C++ the industry was willing to swallow. You can't introduce too many new things in a new programming language or people won't go for it.
If history is any indicator, the portable music player market could forget having a user interface even remotely similar to Apple's in any shape, form or fashion. If they did, Apple would unleash the lawyers and sue them into oblivion.
Apple tried "unleashing the lawyers" before (over their desktop UI) and they failed in court. Ultimately, they didn't invent either the desktop UI or the iPod UI and if they cause enough trouble, they will lose.
The US Patent Office has issued many questionable patents where prior art existed, and the excuse so far has been the patent was written to obfuscate, or was confusing, so they didn't pick up on it.
The USPTO doesn't make that kind of excuses. They have, in the past, issued patents for clearly written applications with prior art, and they will continue to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
That should be:
Among the different desktops, KDE has to be the most cluttered ("featureful"), by design and by choice. Some people like that, I suppose, but XFCE is a reaction against that kind of approach to building desktop environments.
You describe a "race to the bottom"? Farmers can't be 10-20% less effective and keep soil quality up because of competition from other farmers?
What competition? Farming is heavily subsidized in the US and Europe. That's the main reason US farmers can use high-yield, intensive methods and still compete internationally. And it's a big problem for developing nations, whose agricultural methods actually would be internationally competitive if only they were allowed to compete on a level playing field.
Why would the cost increase? Can you back this up?
Sure. As an example, just look at gasoline prices, the cost of pollution control on your vehicle, fees for disposing of oil and old tires, etc. All those costs have gone up. Farmers face the same increases in many more areas.
All industrial areas gets cheaper over time.
No, they don't. Production methods may get more efficient and certain products may get cheaper, but the cost of most non-renewable resources, labor, and pollution all tend to go up over the long term.
Agriculture would become cheaper and more efficient if there were successful efforts to reduce its dependence on energy, fertilizer, mechanization, and high-tech seed production. But, so far, things seem to be generally heading in the other direction--the agricultural industry can make no money with efficient farming practices, and the farmers are subsidized and constrained in what they can do anyway.
Also, since modern farming has been done for decades now, if there was some effect destroying the soil we should know about it, yes?
I wasn't even referring to that. But, yes, modern farming methods often are destroying the soil: soil erosion and salt have been, and continue to be, huge problems.
This has to do with QT development -- ie, you can't develop proprietary internal apps with the free Qt version.
If that is true, then Qt is not covered by the GPL--the GPL clearly gives you the right to do whatever you want with GPL'ed software internally. The right to use software internally and not distribute it is a fundamental right of users according to RMS. Anything that imposes such a restriction above and beyond the GPL is not covered by the GPL anymore.
It costs nothing to develop business applications qith the QT toolkit. The only requirement is that if you use the $0.00 license(GPL) the app must be GPL. It really isn't much to ask.
Yes, it is "too much to ask" when there are good LGPL'ed alternatives.
The fact that Novell is going to use QT is very telling. Novell is a software corporation whose existence past, present and future relies on selling software.
Yes: it tells you that their business model is obsolete and they still just don't get it.
Novell is not afraid of having to pay a very reasonable licensing cost for commercial development and neither are most other software companies. They already pay licensing for MS Visual DEs, Borland DEs and probably many others. Paying for a QT license is a minor cost of doing business and it will not deter any serious software house.
No, it won't deter any 20th century style software house. But those software houses are going to be in deep trouble. The times when you could spend money on tools and libraries like there was no tomorrow are over.
It will deter 21st century style commercial software developers--consultants who develop custom software, research labs developing the next generation of software, companies with razor-sharp margins, etc.
You can do object oriented and event oriented programming in c fine.
Sure, you can. The problem is that there are so many ways of doing it.
Besides C is much more portable and there is a C++ interface for GTK to.
Object-oriented code in C is not "portable"; more precisely, it isn't interoperable: everybody does it differently. C++ standardizes an object model. Gtk+ can get away with it because it's so big and important, so people put in the work to hook up its object model to other languages (as in Gtkmm).
But neither the situation with Gtk+ or with Qt is particularly good. Gtk+'s object model is homebrew and laborious to deal with, and Qt's is too C++ specific. On balance, I think Gtk+ just wins because of its license.
That's Apple's secret: Apple picks a lot of things for you. They don't always make the best choices, but they usually make workable choices, and even when their choices are technically bad (as they are from time to time), at least they still make them look good.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is all about choice (within well-defined, money-making parameters): you get zillions of audio and video CODECs, lots of configuration options for the UI, preference panels with sub-panels until your eyes glaze over, dozens of classes that all do the same thing, and let's not forget an ever expanding list of third-party utilities and add-ons to make up for the choices Microsoft didn't give you and the problems Microsoft created while creating all that choice. Microsoft isn't kidding when they are saying that they are giving you choices.
UNIX, like Apple, traditionally has made choices and stuck by them. For example, the UNIX folks at Bell Labs understood that the use of "tab" in Makefiles probably was a mistake, but it wasn't a big enough mistake to create another "make" utility (at least not for a couple of decades). And, yes, the file system may not be the ideal IPC or database mechanism, but it worked well enough and provided a good, simple answer.
Linux has inherited some of the UNIX simplicity and philosophy, although, sadly, there has been a lot of uncertainty and waffling come into it, mostly from people who are trying to turn Linux into Windows.
Mexico, much of South America, and much of Africa are seeing more and more land cleared for farms because they do not have modern food production. The US and other high-yield countries can continue sending food to these countries, or we can give them the means to use their own farmland to produce more food of their own.
Well, and why do you think they don't have modern food production methods? Do you think they don't know how to?
No, it's because they can't afford to. US agriculture is energy intensive, consumes lots of non-renewable raw materials, and generates lots of pollution. If a country is willing and able to pay that price, it's not surprising that they can get enormous yields per acre. But third world nations don't have the money to engage in that kind of agriculture. The US can only afford to do it because its agricultural sector is subsidized, both explicitly and implicitly by piggybacking on other infrastructure.
It's not as much a question of "modern" vs. "outdated", it's a question of how much you are willing to spend and accept in other costs in order to increase yields. And as the costs of non-renewable resources and pollution keep increasing, there is a good chance that it is US-style agriculture that will start failing.
If some earth carried bacteria were to survive, where would it survive? Possibly in some sheltered nook, or tucked under a rock when we went to scoop something. In that case the resources and/or space for the organism to work with is so small that I would say calling it exponential might be a mistake, can you really call two generations before maxing out resources "exponential" growth?
I seriously doubt it would "max out" after two generations. You have an entire planet to colonize, slow growth rates, and at most a handful of initial organisms. There is a lot more room on Mars than for 24 bacteria.
Maybe this generation doesn't, but past generations have been able to build things.
Those past generations didn't have stock markets, quarterly earning reports, activist courts, or consumerism. They did, however, have monarchs, potentates, dictators, and popes who could foist such undertakings on their underlings without answering to anyone.
I'm not sure whether what we have is an improvement, but no matter whether it is or not, it seems like the time for these kinds of megaprojects is over.
Yes, terraforming Mars is clearly the solution to all our problems.
After all, if you have exceeded the credit limit on one credit card, it's not that your spending habits are out of line with your income, it's that you need another one, right?
Folks, if we can't live well and sustainably on a planet as nice as Earth, adding Mars into the mix won't help.
but sending scientists and a lab is well worth the exta expenditure (and risk)
Sending a single manned mission would easily cost between 100 and 1000 times of what an unmanned mission costs. I venture to say that we get a lot more data out of 100+ robotic probes than out of a single manned mission.
Furthermore, if we wanted to send a general-purpose chemical lab, we could do so on a robotic mission. That is something to be considered. But there is no need to send people: they are useless and expensive.
I will love to see the ramifications to the worlds religions when life is actually found. The fall-out will be grand. With some luck it will put into proper perspective all the in-fighting that has been caused by 'holy wars' over the centuries.
If the discovery of a universe that is about a dozen billion light years large and a dozen billion years old, of 60ft cold-blooded monsters with banana-sized teeth, of nuclear fusion, of evolution, and of all that didn't change religion, the discovery of bacterial life on Mars won't either. In fact, most people will probably neither know or care about it.
Exponential growth is a best-case situation. In a harsh environment, bacteria replicate very slowly.
Whether they divide once every century or once ever 20 minutes, their growth is still exponential. Biological systems only stop growing exponentially once there is serious competition for resources or space.
With OSS the model is.
1. Do stuff.
2. Find problems and bugs.
3. Hope somebody out there at random fixes it.
4. Wait some more.
5. Hopefully still make profit.
You got points 3. and 4. wrong: if you need it, you don't wait, you fix it yourself and return the fixes.
Commercial vendors are in a drive toward standaridzation, and working to turn computer software, and the support needed to administer it, into a commodity.
Yes, and nothing about what I said contradicts that. If you outsource your support and administration, then the company you outsource it to becomes the participant in the OSS projects. That's actually the most common form of OSS usage, where companies like RedHat, SuSE, etc. get paid for easy-to-install (but still OSS) solutions, but they sponsor projects to fix specific bugs and add specific enhancements that many of their customers want. If anything, OSS works better in that kind of world than something like Microsoft.
The notion of treating your business computers like 'information appliances,' meanwhile, has vaporized.
No matter how you handle the low-level maintenance of your software, and no matter whether you go with commercial or OSS, for many businesses, that is suicide anyway. Business software encodes how businesses run; it basically is the business.
You can treat it like an "information appliance" about as much as you can treat the CEO like an "information appliance".
That seems an odd position to take, given that it's the Republican FCC commissioner that keeps pushing for the legalization of competition in communications, and fighting off the courts when they try to turn it back.
Republicans say they are for individual rights, states rights, free markets, free enterprise, and competition. But saying and doing are two different things.
In fact, "individual rights" is just a code word for pushing a Christian right agenda; when people try to assert their individual rights (abortion, sex, nudity, gay rights, etc.), Republicans want to restrict things and punish. With the Republicans, you get individual rights, as long as you are a good, conforming Christian and spend a lot of money.
"States rights" is a codeword for shifting federal taxes to the states, which makes it easy to claim to have lowered federal taxes; when states try to actually assert their "states rights" (drugs, gay marriage, etc.), the Republicans are up in arms.
And "free enterprise" to Republicans means getting in bed with big businesses; efficient and responsive community operated utilities don't fit into that concept (after all, they don't make big campaign contributions to federal politicians).
Democrats have their own set of misleading codewords, but, on balance, I still think the kind of deception and word games the Republicans play are still more harmful.
Disclosures are defensive: they protect you against subsequent patents on some technology you are already using.
Patents are always offensive: you get them in order to be able to threaten to sue someone. And if you use bogus patents as bargaining chips in negotiations when someone else makes a legitimate patent claim against you, that is just as sleazy as if you try to assert a bogus patent directly.
But it isn't Apple's invention: plenty of music players have used these interfaves before iPod, and even if they hadn't, these kinds of hierarchical menus are standard tools on consumer devices.
Apple's dirty little secret is that they are the cloners from Cupertino: it is Apple that again and again has tken other people's ideas and products and sold them as their own. Nothing wrong with that in principle--their products are often nice--but they shouldn't pretend it's their invention, and they certainly shouldn't patent it.
The current business model using Windows is:
1. Do stuff
2. Report plenty of bugs, RFEs to MS for free
3. Pay annual licensing fees to MS
3a. Hope that Microsoft won't screw you by making changes to their s/w that help their bottom line but hurt you
4. Hope enough money is left over from your core business
With OSS s/w, this becomes
1. Do stuff
2. Report plenty of bugs, RFEs to OSS project (occasionally fix/implement one) for free
3. Make profit from your core business
In both cases, you do free work for other people, but with OSS, all the free work is aggregated and you don't pay for it over and over again. With MS, you end up paying for the same piece of software and for the volunteer work of others and yourself not just once, but over and over again. Furthermore, with MS and other commercial s/w vendors, you constantly run the risk that they will screw you by discontinuing or changing products you depend on, and you have no recourse.
The business case for OSS is easy to make: OSS greatly reduces risks and cost of ownership. OSS isn't without any costs, but it is cheaper on balance.
Note that OSS is a business model and money saver for the actual end users, comapnies whose business is not the creation of the OSS itself, but something else. Founding a s/w company that creates OSS and makes money from it is, as you yourself observe, a long shot and only works rarely. And that's OK.
And for the rest of the world? Oh wait, sorry, Smalltalkers are gods among programmers. So foolish of me to think of myself before the Smalltalkers.
Oh, please, spare us the cynicism. Smalltalk syntax is pretty straightforward. Yes, you, too, could learn it in a couple of hours, which is more than can be said for Java or C/C++ syntax. Does everything have to come down to braces and semicolons nowadays?
If you are looking for a Smalltalk-like language for scripting applications without the Smalltalk GUI, check out GNU Smalltalk. It's a pretty faithful implementation of Smalltalk, and it even has a JIT.
But when the manual starts out with closures, it's clear that somebody is getting too cute. This is a language for "l33t haxxors", of the old MIT AI Lab persuasion.
No, they are just following the Smalltalk tradition. Smalltalk is a language that people generally find easy to learn. The use of blocks in Smalltalk just makes things consistent and simple, and it lets you write your own control structures.
Check out "instance specific dispatch". Now that's designed to totally confuse maintainers.
That's object-oriented junk; you get the same stuff in any OOL. If the language doesn't have built-in support, it becomes a "pattern" (and sells lots of books).
If Microsoft had put its weight behind Dylan, instead of C#, then I think Java would have been in serious trouble.
No way. Whether Dylan is or is not better in an absolute sense, C# is the biggest increment over Java the industry is willing to swallow, just like Java was the biggest increment over C++ the industry was willing to swallow. You can't introduce too many new things in a new programming language or people won't go for it.
That's pretty standard Smalltalk stuff. C/C++/Java syntax isn't any simpler--you just have gotten more used to it.
If history is any indicator, the portable music player market could forget having a user interface even remotely similar to Apple's in any shape, form or fashion. If they did, Apple would unleash the lawyers and sue them into oblivion.
Apple tried "unleashing the lawyers" before (over their desktop UI) and they failed in court. Ultimately, they didn't invent either the desktop UI or the iPod UI and if they cause enough trouble, they will lose.
The US Patent Office has issued many questionable patents where prior art existed, and the excuse so far has been the patent was written to obfuscate, or was confusing, so they didn't pick up on it.
The USPTO doesn't make that kind of excuses. They have, in the past, issued patents for clearly written applications with prior art, and they will continue to do so.