The code may be available, but the code is proprietary. This means that if I look at it, I can't contribute to Kaffe, GCJ, or Harmony ever. There is no point in looking at the source code; I'll be officially tainted by doing so, and I don't want that.
Exactly, I agree. This government is becoming more and more like a nanny state. People have brains, they should be able to think for themselves and take responsibility for their actions. The government shouldn't have to tell these thinking citizens what to do as if the government were the parents and the citizens were the children.
This is exactly the reason why I will become a Libertarian, among some other important ones. These nanny laws are being passed by both Democrats and Republicans, all under the similar catch phrases such as "for the children's sake" and "saving innocent creatures." Once again, people can think, and people should be able to choose their behavior freely as long as that behavior isn't infringing on the rights of others. Instead of California passing laws banning Internet hunting and all of this other nonsense, they need to combat the budget deficit, fix our schools and transportation system, and start getting out of people's personal lives and hobbies.
Why does there need to be a law for everything? How can the banning of Internet hunting be regulated, anyhow? What is the state going to do; get ISPs to look at the logs of everybody who are signed up at Internet hunting sites? Doesn't California have better and more important things to focus on, such as balancing the budget?
What is so great about the integration between Safari and Dashboard and what's so bad about the integration between Internet Explorer and ActiveX? Why should a web browser be allowed to automatically download and install certain types of programs remotely? These programs could access the Internet, too. I can see a lot of problems with this. Imagine widgets displaying pop-up adertisements, hardcore porn widgets, spyware widgets, you name it... I don't think that these widgets have the power to format hard drives, but the integration of the web broswer and external programs is very troublesome to me. Look no further than Internet Explorer and ActiveX if you want an example.
To say a kind of cleaned-up version of what the parent poster said, operating system and desktop designers and programmers should look very carefully about the features that they are adding to the program before they release it to the public. Security should be a major concern, especially if those programs are directly tied to network connections. Programs connected to the Internet should never be integrated with system functions such as installation; that's how you get Internet Explorer and ActiveX. I expected Apple to have a little more sense in feature consideration and design, but I was disappointed. Hopefully they fix this in Tiger 10.4.1 before this becomes more widespread.
Same thing on my computer. I'm running Firefox 1.0.1 on FreeBSD, and the exact same thing happened. At least Firefox asked what to do with the file before downloading it, but still it is a bit weird.
I guess that you can run away from Windows and all of its problems with ActiveX and Internet Explorer, but you can't hide from all of the problems of Internet security. All this takes is for some clueless Mac users to just say "Yes" when Safari asks does the program want to be downloaded/run, and voila, they get the Macintosh equivalent of spyware. Just as easy as it is in Windows.
This problem needs to be fixed quickly, before spyware widgets start becoming more common on the Mac platform. And users need to be more educated about such dangers such as software automatically downloading themselves. They need to know how to withstand social engineering abuses, and they also need to get into their heads quickly that just because they're away from Windows and Internet Explorer doesn't mean that they're away from crackers and exploiters.
This seems cool, and it reminds me of when Amid Singh ran some ancient Unices on his GBA emulator. Pretty impressive, it can only get better. Makes me a little more interested in shelling out the $149 for a Ninetendo DS; I can see a lot of usefulness in having an ultra-portable *nix system around me at all times. I wonder if there are any small keyboards for the Nintendo DS?
The American comittee on Copyright Reforms is Sen. Orrin Hatch. He was payed $179,000 in 2004 by the RIAA/MPAA.
Now that's just ridiculous. There should be a law in the United States banning corporate donations to politicians. There is no way that the average citizen could compete with these big, evil mega-corps. It's like our politicians are all on the auction block, being sold to the highest bidder.
There were 2 candidates, and one of them (Bush) has much better leadership skills than the other. He doesn't have great leadership skills, but the other guy had absolutely none.
Speaking as an American, that's the problem with the two-party system. The 2004 election is a prime example of that. It was a battle of "the lesser of the two evils" rather than a very good showdown between two great candidates. When people are forced to pick between two things, and neither of the two choices look compelling, there is a saying that states that it's better to go with the known than to go with the unknown. Sad, but true.
This problem needs to be fixed so that way other parties, such as the Libertarians and the Greens could be more active in politics and be more noticible in the public eye. I am researching the Libertarian Party; it seems to match most (but not all) of my viewpoints. I feel if that the Libertarians and Greens were more popular, and if they won a presidential election (or at least grabbed a lot more Congressional spots), then I might finally see real changes in this country.
Without any doubt his opinion holds more weight than yours ever will. I don't have much to say to young idealists or anybody with a inkling of hope left except, submit to your masters, it'll be easier.
Well, what should us young idealists who actually have an inkling of hope left do right now? I'm not going to sit up here and take it, but I'm not of voting age yet. What should I do?
When commenting in this thread, please keep in mind that not all Americans feel that we should be so meddling, and only 51% of Americans were willing to re-elect the current administration.
This isn't even about Bush, per se. This is about corporations bribing the politicians into passing laws that only benefit Corporate America(TM), not looking out in the interest of its own citizens, and wanting to impose the same corporatist ideology on every other country.
Give me a break! The Democrats and the Republicans seemed to get bribed at every turn by the RIAA and the MPAA. The DMCA was passed under the Clinton administration, and I heard that not a single Democrat voted "no" on that bill. The RIAA and MPAA are taking away our freedoms piece-by-piece. No, I don't condone copyright infringement, but why must the *AA pass laws that restrict legal fair use (for example, the DMCA)? The DMCA only benefits the RIAA, MPAA, and Disney, and is a major blow to our rights of fair use. Why should the government tell me what to do with my own DVDs? How come I can't legally rip the contents of my DVD to another medium?
The corporatism here is getting sickening and maddening. Both the Democrats and Republicans have failed at curving this rampant abuse of the government, and most of the citizens seem to be ignorant about all of the rights being taken away. We need to start boycotting the RIAA and MPAA, and never buy a new CD or DVD, purchase online media, download media legally or illegally, visit a movie theater, or do anything else that profits these media cartels until they stop bribing the government. We need to get people to start getting informed about the DMCA and rally average citizens to start writing letters and doing protests against the DMCA and other abuses of our copyright laws.
Copyright and other forms of "intellectual property" is supposed to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." What ever happened to "fair use" and "limited times to authors"? Copyright is life + 95 years now (thanks to Disney), and our fair use rights are being trampled over by the DMCA and some other newly passed laws. We need to restore copyrights to what they used to be. This government has gotten too corporate, and we need to make it work for the PEOPLE!
Alright, If I wanted add two numbers together in C, all I have to type is c = a + b;. In COBOL, I have to type either ADD A TO B GIVING C or COMPUTE C = A + B. In the C version, all I have to do is just add the two numbers together using variable names and the + operator for addition, and assign the return value to variable c. In the first COBOL example, I have to type actual words in order for it to simply add two numbers together, all in capital letters. This insults my intelligence. The second COBOL example is better, but why I need that frivilous COMPUTE statement just to tell the computer to add two numbers together? COBOL is way too verbose for my liking, and it doesn't increase the "readability" of the program, either. It just makes programs take longer to write because of all of the extra words. You can write readable C code.
Aside from verbosity, COBOL has some other major problems. It doesn't support strucutred programming, meaning that GOTO statements are needed. It also lacks recursion and dynamic memory allocation (e.g., C's malloc()), even though I hear that newer versions have fixed some of its problems with structured programming. The only big advantage that COBOL has over C, IMO, is that COBOL is far better suited for handling strings of characters, which is a necessity in business applications (where COBOL is still used). Handling strings in C isn't pretty.
Put it like this, most C users working in Unix (like myself) probably wouldn't touch COBOL with a long pole (you should see the Jargon File's definition for COBOL), and most COBOL programmers working on business applications probably wouldn't use C. C is geared towards systems programming and Unix, while COBOL is geared towards business applications and IBM mainframes. They're two different realms of programming.
Well, if I understand the law correctly, in the United States, you're not allowed to download unauthorized copyrighted material, even if you already own a copy of it. The reason for this is because you are still infringing the copyright of the owners of the material; even though you're not the one redistributing the material, you're not legally allowed to knowingly get a bootlegged version of copyrighted material. However, you are allowed to "rip" the tracks off of the vinyl (I'm using CD terminology here) and place it on another medium, since that is fair use and you're not distributing it to the general public.
There is a solution to get your music legally (in the United States, don't know about other places) without funding the RIAA; just buy used CDs and tapes. Your local library might have some CDs and tapes that you can borrow for a few weeks and listen to. In this scenario, you can get your music legally without giving the RIAA any more cash. Try it before the RIAA bans the resale of music.
Now, this idea isn't effective for the latest music available, but you should be able to get lots of old CDs of many genres and musicians.
That supports huge suburban complexes that couldn't be served by mass transit even if that was a priority. So we [the United States] build more spawl, which means more cars and highways, which means more sprawl, and so on.
By contrast, Europeans find it more natural to tax themselves to build humungous train systems like the French TGV. That particular system doesn't just serve established population centers -- it creates new ones. I'm told that millions of French people now commute to city jobs, living in remote locations that were almost unpopulated before the TGV came.
What's so bad about highways and cars? Yes, I know the pollution argument, but cars are becoming more energy efficient each year, and we're working on finding new, cleaner and more efficient energy sources, so that argument would be a moot point soon. What makes the suburban growth caused by the roads so bad, but make the growth of "new communities" and remote areas caused by the rail system so good? Besides, with how I see history, suburbs weren't created because a new freeway was just built, but because more housing was necessary in the city. Many times I find that suburbs are built without roads or rail to supplement them, so that is what causes the traffic problems.
For more than 50 years, the average american has been brainwashed by car and petroleum companies into believing that their car-centric "life" is the best thing since industrial bakeries have invented sliced bread.
Err, what's so bad about cars? I'm not trolling, but I feel that cars are a very good mode of transportation. With a car, you are able to go anywhere that you want, when you want, and at reasonable speeds. With a well-built freeway system, I could go up to about 65-70 miles per hour. Many Americans don't take public transportation for a few reasons: it doesn't go everywhere that they need to go (in some neighborhoods, there are no bus stops; you'll need to walk two to three miles to catch a bus, if you're lucky), it is slower than a car in many cases (time needed to wait for the bus, all of the bus stops the bus makes, and traffic on the roads), and in some places (especially urban areas), the buses aren't too safe.
The serious downside of the car, though, is that cars require an energy source. The energy source that most of our cars run on is oil. Unfortunately, there is only a finite amount of oil, and the global demand for that oil is growing each year. Look at all of these people with their big Chevy Suburbans and Hummers in the suburbs, for example. Pretty soon, we'll run out of oil, and if we don't find any alternative sources of energy soon, the world wouldn't be too great of a place to live.
I wish that two things would happen, alternate energy sources are further developed, and that public transportation and other modes of transportation are improved. More people would take public transportation if it went everywhere that people needed to go at a relatively decent speed, at a reasonable price, and with safety. Plus, I wish that motorcycles were a bit more popular. They have all of the speed advantages of a car, but also aren't too much bigger than a bicycle and are pretty efficient. Imagine a hybrid gas-electric motorcycle, for example.
I wouldn't call Fortan the worst programming language ever; COBOL takes the cake (all of those long words for everything, geez!). It's actually still used heavily in scientific computing, and even though it started out like something that looks like the monostrities of COBOL and BASIC (such as goto statements everywhere, forced indentation, verbosity, and other stuff), the lastest standards of Fortran look decent and have a lot of features that languages such as C has and looks like it has became a much better language. For example, Fortran now supports dynamic memory allocation, structure (such as if...else statements and looping), recursion, arrays, operator overloading, records, and more. The features of the language aren't bad.
Fortran's niche is in scientific computing and numerical computing, since not too many languages come close. It's not the best language for every application, but it works well for scientists and mathematicians.
Wouldn't the transmission speed have to be C? I mean, C isn't constant across all mediums, but even in quartz and ruby it's significanly faster than 120km/h.
I've always heard that certain languages were faster than others, but I didn't know that the speeds of languages can be measured in kilometers an hour? C must be pretty fast then.
I could see some programming jobs being outsourced to India, especially programming that revolves around the web, but you you really think that all software design will be outsourced? What about the people who develop software to run robotics? What about the people who work on operating systems, 3D engines, software to run jets or military systems or other things like this. While there are less jobs of this type than say web developer, it seems to me that every position that requires and engineer to develop hardware will most likely be complimented by a software group to utilize the hardware. Maybe I am just naive, but it doesn't seem to me that CS majors will be unable to find a position in the future.
I agree with you. The people doing work on OSes, 3D engines, jet/military software, and the like are most likely doing research, either in academia or for a corporation. Look at our operating systems, for example. Unix was founded in Bell Labs, UC Berkeley bought Unix source code licenses and developed BSD over a period of nearly 20 years (1975-1994), Linux was created by a university student, and Mac OS X utilizes source code from BSD and from Mach (a microkernel developed by some researchers at Carnegie Mellon). I think that CS majors who are very passoinate about their studies should always be able to contribute to computer science through research. Maybe all of the programming and web design might be shipped to India, but there would still be a few people here working on OSes, compilers, graphics, and some other stuff.
PC-BSD does fill a niche; a BSD equivalent to something like Mandrake or Ubuntu. I love FreeBSD, but I can't imagine Joe Average being able to do all of the things necessary in order to actually use his shiny new FreeBSD desktop; he'll have to recompile his kernel to support his sound card and other devices, upgrade his ports, learn how to install X, and some other non-newbie friendly stuff.
Enter PC-BSD. PC-BSD is pretty much a hybrid of FreeBSD and KDE. It has a graphical installer, a graphical interface for FreeBSD ports, graphical tools for setup, and uses KDE as a graphical desktop. It would be very nice for those who want to get away from Windows and want to have the security and stability of a BSD, yet still have the usability.
There are just one minor qualm that I have with PC-BSD: the use of the GPL rather than the BSD license for PC-BSD-specific tools. It's nothing to be mad about (I have nothing against the GPL; I use GPL'd software all the time), nor is it anything that would impact PC-BSD's expected user base, but I think that the BSD license is one of the most important parts of the BSD philosophy. Plus, this would also mean that (Free|Open|Net)BSD would probably never import PC-BSD's features, solely because of licensing Then again, KDE is under the GPL, and the BSDs themselves have some GPL'd components (such as gcc) included with it, so it's not a problem for me.
Well, Gnumeric could be possibly ported to Cocoa in Mac OS X because the core portions of Gnumeric are written in C. However, since Gnumeric is a GTK application, it may take some time moving all of the graphical-related stuff to Cocoa.
As for a Java spreadsheet, I haven't seen a FOSS Java spreadsheet, but it is very possible. Maybe somebody could look at the sources for Gnumeric and OpenOffice or xspread as some inspiration
(While they're at it, perhaps a spreadsheet could be written in GNUstep; I'd like to see that since the GNUstep and Cocoa libraries are almost the same, all a developer has to do pretty much is write a GNUstep spreadsheet, compile it for GNUstep and for Cocoa, and it's done. Two birds hit with one stone.)
I care about switching people to open source alternatives mostly because they support open standards. Closed standards are bad for all of us because closed standards only benefit the company producing the products that can interact with the closed standards. Look at Microsoft, for example. One of the reasons why *.doc is so entrenced is because since "everybody" (as in 95% of the population uses it) uses Word, most of them don't even consider the possibility that somebody could be using (gasp) a different word processor, so they just save their documents in Word's native format. Look at the amount of work OpenOffice had to do in order to reverse-engineer the Word format, and OpenOffice still doesn't open Word documents perfectly (although IMO it does a great job for most documents). In many cases, getting perfect formatting with sharing Word documents require having to purchase Word (and sometimes the correct version), which in turn requires that you have a current version of Windows or Mac OS.
Plus, what happens if that company goes away? I don't think that Microsoft is going away anytime soon, but what about the Mac and DOS/Windows users who were using word processors such as MacWrite, WriteNow, AmiPro, and other now-dead word processors? They would need to save their documents in RTF format, or find converters to another popular format, but what if converters were unavailable for some reason? All of those years of documents are now lost in case you want to upgrade/switch, since the specifications of the file formats of those word processors are either closed off in company storage boxes, or worse, lost to history.
If everybody switched to an open document format, such as RTF or the new OpenDocument format that OpenOffice and KOffice seems to be pushing, then we can all be sharing documents throught a vast array of operating systems and platforms. The Windows-using department could give their documents to the *nix-using department, which can give those documents to the Mac-using department, all with no problems. Now, they may be using different applications; the Windows people might be using Word, the *nix people might be using OpenOffice/KOffice/Abiword, and the Mac people might be using Apple Pages, but they would be able to share their documents without any problems.
Now, the hard part is making the OpenDocument format more popular, and Microsoft accepting it.
Err, re-read my post carefully; perhaps you misunderstood some of my points. I was trying to be partisan in that post. Point out one time when I said that Bush or Republicans were fascists. In fact, I said that "this [the trends of the country] didn't start out with Bush"; that was the only time I mentioned Bush in the entire post. I didn't say that Bush used violence (look at my four examples), or that the DMCA was all a Republican idea. I'm just talking about the state of the country and its trends of policies.
Flamebait? Troll? No, the parent post is really serious.
Wikipedia defines fascism as "exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual, uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, engages in corporatism, implements totalitarianism"
So far, over the last so many decades (no, this didn't start out with Bush), I noticed that the country:
is using "patriotism" and buzzwords such as "anti-terrorism" in order to pass restrictive laws (such as the PATRIOT Act)
uses propaganda in order to get the people to comply to such legislation
favors corporations over its citizens (look at the DMCA, the copyright extension acts, our patent laws, etc.)
implements a light form of totalitarianism (in various forms ranging from anti-"violent" video game, anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion laws passed in some locales to the PATRIOT Act)
Not all of the features of fascism are getting implemented, but I do notice that this place seems to be getting more and more like an Orwellian novel every coming year. I'm kind of getting a bit scared here.
That's a much better position than OOo with Java, but is that really the highest priority? Maybe getting the OASIS file formats used a lot more is a bigger priority right now, though.
Agreed; I suppose that weaning the world off of the *.doc format is a bit more important than weaning OpenOffice off Java. OASIS will be adopted in OpenOffice 2, and I hear that it will be used by KOffice, Abiword, and Apple's Pages. If it becomes a popular enough format, it might take over *.doc as becoming the standard document format.
Of course, Microsoft isn't going to give up their precious hold of documents without a fight.
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The code may be available, but the code is proprietary. This means that if I look at it, I can't contribute to Kaffe, GCJ, or Harmony ever. There is no point in looking at the source code; I'll be officially tainted by doing so, and I don't want that.
Exactly, I agree. This government is becoming more and more like a nanny state. People have brains, they should be able to think for themselves and take responsibility for their actions. The government shouldn't have to tell these thinking citizens what to do as if the government were the parents and the citizens were the children.
This is exactly the reason why I will become a Libertarian, among some other important ones. These nanny laws are being passed by both Democrats and Republicans, all under the similar catch phrases such as "for the children's sake" and "saving innocent creatures." Once again, people can think, and people should be able to choose their behavior freely as long as that behavior isn't infringing on the rights of others. Instead of California passing laws banning Internet hunting and all of this other nonsense, they need to combat the budget deficit, fix our schools and transportation system, and start getting out of people's personal lives and hobbies.
Why does there need to be a law for everything? How can the banning of Internet hunting be regulated, anyhow? What is the state going to do; get ISPs to look at the logs of everybody who are signed up at Internet hunting sites? Doesn't California have better and more important things to focus on, such as balancing the budget?
Troll?
What is so great about the integration between Safari and Dashboard and what's so bad about the integration between Internet Explorer and ActiveX? Why should a web browser be allowed to automatically download and install certain types of programs remotely? These programs could access the Internet, too. I can see a lot of problems with this. Imagine widgets displaying pop-up adertisements, hardcore porn widgets, spyware widgets, you name it... I don't think that these widgets have the power to format hard drives, but the integration of the web broswer and external programs is very troublesome to me. Look no further than Internet Explorer and ActiveX if you want an example.
To say a kind of cleaned-up version of what the parent poster said, operating system and desktop designers and programmers should look very carefully about the features that they are adding to the program before they release it to the public. Security should be a major concern, especially if those programs are directly tied to network connections. Programs connected to the Internet should never be integrated with system functions such as installation; that's how you get Internet Explorer and ActiveX. I expected Apple to have a little more sense in feature consideration and design, but I was disappointed. Hopefully they fix this in Tiger 10.4.1 before this becomes more widespread.
Same thing on my computer. I'm running Firefox 1.0.1 on FreeBSD, and the exact same thing happened. At least Firefox asked what to do with the file before downloading it, but still it is a bit weird.
I guess that you can run away from Windows and all of its problems with ActiveX and Internet Explorer, but you can't hide from all of the problems of Internet security. All this takes is for some clueless Mac users to just say "Yes" when Safari asks does the program want to be downloaded/run, and voila, they get the Macintosh equivalent of spyware. Just as easy as it is in Windows.
This problem needs to be fixed quickly, before spyware widgets start becoming more common on the Mac platform. And users need to be more educated about such dangers such as software automatically downloading themselves. They need to know how to withstand social engineering abuses, and they also need to get into their heads quickly that just because they're away from Windows and Internet Explorer doesn't mean that they're away from crackers and exploiters.
This seems cool, and it reminds me of when Amid Singh ran some ancient Unices on his GBA emulator. Pretty impressive, it can only get better. Makes me a little more interested in shelling out the $149 for a Ninetendo DS; I can see a lot of usefulness in having an ultra-portable *nix system around me at all times. I wonder if there are any small keyboards for the Nintendo DS?
Now if only NetBSD does a port....
Now that's just ridiculous. There should be a law in the United States banning corporate donations to politicians. There is no way that the average citizen could compete with these big, evil mega-corps. It's like our politicians are all on the auction block, being sold to the highest bidder.
Speaking as an American, that's the problem with the two-party system. The 2004 election is a prime example of that. It was a battle of "the lesser of the two evils" rather than a very good showdown between two great candidates. When people are forced to pick between two things, and neither of the two choices look compelling, there is a saying that states that it's better to go with the known than to go with the unknown. Sad, but true.
This problem needs to be fixed so that way other parties, such as the Libertarians and the Greens could be more active in politics and be more noticible in the public eye. I am researching the Libertarian Party; it seems to match most (but not all) of my viewpoints. I feel if that the Libertarians and Greens were more popular, and if they won a presidential election (or at least grabbed a lot more Congressional spots), then I might finally see real changes in this country.
Well, what should us young idealists who actually have an inkling of hope left do right now? I'm not going to sit up here and take it, but I'm not of voting age yet. What should I do?
This isn't even about Bush, per se. This is about corporations bribing the politicians into passing laws that only benefit Corporate America(TM), not looking out in the interest of its own citizens, and wanting to impose the same corporatist ideology on every other country.
Give me a break! The Democrats and the Republicans seemed to get bribed at every turn by the RIAA and the MPAA. The DMCA was passed under the Clinton administration, and I heard that not a single Democrat voted "no" on that bill. The RIAA and MPAA are taking away our freedoms piece-by-piece. No, I don't condone copyright infringement, but why must the *AA pass laws that restrict legal fair use (for example, the DMCA)? The DMCA only benefits the RIAA, MPAA, and Disney, and is a major blow to our rights of fair use. Why should the government tell me what to do with my own DVDs? How come I can't legally rip the contents of my DVD to another medium?
The corporatism here is getting sickening and maddening. Both the Democrats and Republicans have failed at curving this rampant abuse of the government, and most of the citizens seem to be ignorant about all of the rights being taken away. We need to start boycotting the RIAA and MPAA, and never buy a new CD or DVD, purchase online media, download media legally or illegally, visit a movie theater, or do anything else that profits these media cartels until they stop bribing the government. We need to get people to start getting informed about the DMCA and rally average citizens to start writing letters and doing protests against the DMCA and other abuses of our copyright laws.
Copyright and other forms of "intellectual property" is supposed to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." What ever happened to "fair use" and "limited times to authors"? Copyright is life + 95 years now (thanks to Disney), and our fair use rights are being trampled over by the DMCA and some other newly passed laws. We need to restore copyrights to what they used to be. This government has gotten too corporate, and we need to make it work for the PEOPLE!
Aside from verbosity, COBOL has some other major problems. It doesn't support strucutred programming, meaning that GOTO statements are needed. It also lacks recursion and dynamic memory allocation (e.g., C's malloc()), even though I hear that newer versions have fixed some of its problems with structured programming. The only big advantage that COBOL has over C, IMO, is that COBOL is far better suited for handling strings of characters, which is a necessity in business applications (where COBOL is still used). Handling strings in C isn't pretty.
Put it like this, most C users working in Unix (like myself) probably wouldn't touch COBOL with a long pole (you should see the Jargon File's definition for COBOL), and most COBOL programmers working on business applications probably wouldn't use C. C is geared towards systems programming and Unix, while COBOL is geared towards business applications and IBM mainframes. They're two different realms of programming.
Well, if I understand the law correctly, in the United States, you're not allowed to download unauthorized copyrighted material, even if you already own a copy of it. The reason for this is because you are still infringing the copyright of the owners of the material; even though you're not the one redistributing the material, you're not legally allowed to knowingly get a bootlegged version of copyrighted material. However, you are allowed to "rip" the tracks off of the vinyl (I'm using CD terminology here) and place it on another medium, since that is fair use and you're not distributing it to the general public.
There is a solution to get your music legally (in the United States, don't know about other places) without funding the RIAA; just buy used CDs and tapes. Your local library might have some CDs and tapes that you can borrow for a few weeks and listen to. In this scenario, you can get your music legally without giving the RIAA any more cash. Try it before the RIAA bans the resale of music.
Now, this idea isn't effective for the latest music available, but you should be able to get lots of old CDs of many genres and musicians.
What's so bad about highways and cars? Yes, I know the pollution argument, but cars are becoming more energy efficient each year, and we're working on finding new, cleaner and more efficient energy sources, so that argument would be a moot point soon. What makes the suburban growth caused by the roads so bad, but make the growth of "new communities" and remote areas caused by the rail system so good? Besides, with how I see history, suburbs weren't created because a new freeway was just built, but because more housing was necessary in the city. Many times I find that suburbs are built without roads or rail to supplement them, so that is what causes the traffic problems.
Err, what's so bad about cars? I'm not trolling, but I feel that cars are a very good mode of transportation. With a car, you are able to go anywhere that you want, when you want, and at reasonable speeds. With a well-built freeway system, I could go up to about 65-70 miles per hour. Many Americans don't take public transportation for a few reasons: it doesn't go everywhere that they need to go (in some neighborhoods, there are no bus stops; you'll need to walk two to three miles to catch a bus, if you're lucky), it is slower than a car in many cases (time needed to wait for the bus, all of the bus stops the bus makes, and traffic on the roads), and in some places (especially urban areas), the buses aren't too safe.
The serious downside of the car, though, is that cars require an energy source. The energy source that most of our cars run on is oil. Unfortunately, there is only a finite amount of oil, and the global demand for that oil is growing each year. Look at all of these people with their big Chevy Suburbans and Hummers in the suburbs, for example. Pretty soon, we'll run out of oil, and if we don't find any alternative sources of energy soon, the world wouldn't be too great of a place to live.
I wish that two things would happen, alternate energy sources are further developed, and that public transportation and other modes of transportation are improved. More people would take public transportation if it went everywhere that people needed to go at a relatively decent speed, at a reasonable price, and with safety. Plus, I wish that motorcycles were a bit more popular. They have all of the speed advantages of a car, but also aren't too much bigger than a bicycle and are pretty efficient. Imagine a hybrid gas-electric motorcycle, for example.
I wouldn't call Fortan the worst programming language ever; COBOL takes the cake (all of those long words for everything, geez!). It's actually still used heavily in scientific computing, and even though it started out like something that looks like the monostrities of COBOL and BASIC (such as goto statements everywhere, forced indentation, verbosity, and other stuff), the lastest standards of Fortran look decent and have a lot of features that languages such as C has and looks like it has became a much better language. For example, Fortran now supports dynamic memory allocation, structure (such as if...else statements and looping), recursion, arrays, operator overloading, records, and more. The features of the language aren't bad.
Fortran's niche is in scientific computing and numerical computing, since not too many languages come close. It's not the best language for every application, but it works well for scientists and mathematicians.
I've always heard that certain languages were faster than others, but I didn't know that the speeds of languages can be measured in kilometers an hour? C must be pretty fast then.
I agree with you. The people doing work on OSes, 3D engines, jet/military software, and the like are most likely doing research, either in academia or for a corporation. Look at our operating systems, for example. Unix was founded in Bell Labs, UC Berkeley bought Unix source code licenses and developed BSD over a period of nearly 20 years (1975-1994), Linux was created by a university student, and Mac OS X utilizes source code from BSD and from Mach (a microkernel developed by some researchers at Carnegie Mellon). I think that CS majors who are very passoinate about their studies should always be able to contribute to computer science through research. Maybe all of the programming and web design might be shipped to India, but there would still be a few people here working on OSes, compilers, graphics, and some other stuff.
PC-BSD does fill a niche; a BSD equivalent to something like Mandrake or Ubuntu. I love FreeBSD, but I can't imagine Joe Average being able to do all of the things necessary in order to actually use his shiny new FreeBSD desktop; he'll have to recompile his kernel to support his sound card and other devices, upgrade his ports, learn how to install X, and some other non-newbie friendly stuff.
Enter PC-BSD. PC-BSD is pretty much a hybrid of FreeBSD and KDE. It has a graphical installer, a graphical interface for FreeBSD ports, graphical tools for setup, and uses KDE as a graphical desktop. It would be very nice for those who want to get away from Windows and want to have the security and stability of a BSD, yet still have the usability.
There are just one minor qualm that I have with PC-BSD: the use of the GPL rather than the BSD license for PC-BSD-specific tools. It's nothing to be mad about (I have nothing against the GPL; I use GPL'd software all the time), nor is it anything that would impact PC-BSD's expected user base, but I think that the BSD license is one of the most important parts of the BSD philosophy. Plus, this would also mean that (Free|Open|Net)BSD would probably never import PC-BSD's features, solely because of licensing Then again, KDE is under the GPL, and the BSDs themselves have some GPL'd components (such as gcc) included with it, so it's not a problem for me.
Well, Gnumeric could be possibly ported to Cocoa in Mac OS X because the core portions of Gnumeric are written in C. However, since Gnumeric is a GTK application, it may take some time moving all of the graphical-related stuff to Cocoa.
As for a Java spreadsheet, I haven't seen a FOSS Java spreadsheet, but it is very possible. Maybe somebody could look at the sources for Gnumeric and OpenOffice or xspread as some inspiration
(While they're at it, perhaps a spreadsheet could be written in GNUstep; I'd like to see that since the GNUstep and Cocoa libraries are almost the same, all a developer has to do pretty much is write a GNUstep spreadsheet, compile it for GNUstep and for Cocoa, and it's done. Two birds hit with one stone.)
Just because a certain tool is used in "The Real World(TM)" a certain way doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best tool for the job.
I care about switching people to open source alternatives mostly because they support open standards. Closed standards are bad for all of us because closed standards only benefit the company producing the products that can interact with the closed standards. Look at Microsoft, for example. One of the reasons why *.doc is so entrenced is because since "everybody" (as in 95% of the population uses it) uses Word, most of them don't even consider the possibility that somebody could be using (gasp) a different word processor, so they just save their documents in Word's native format. Look at the amount of work OpenOffice had to do in order to reverse-engineer the Word format, and OpenOffice still doesn't open Word documents perfectly (although IMO it does a great job for most documents). In many cases, getting perfect formatting with sharing Word documents require having to purchase Word (and sometimes the correct version), which in turn requires that you have a current version of Windows or Mac OS.
Plus, what happens if that company goes away? I don't think that Microsoft is going away anytime soon, but what about the Mac and DOS/Windows users who were using word processors such as MacWrite, WriteNow, AmiPro, and other now-dead word processors? They would need to save their documents in RTF format, or find converters to another popular format, but what if converters were unavailable for some reason? All of those years of documents are now lost in case you want to upgrade/switch, since the specifications of the file formats of those word processors are either closed off in company storage boxes, or worse, lost to history.
If everybody switched to an open document format, such as RTF or the new OpenDocument format that OpenOffice and KOffice seems to be pushing, then we can all be sharing documents throught a vast array of operating systems and platforms. The Windows-using department could give their documents to the *nix-using department, which can give those documents to the Mac-using department, all with no problems. Now, they may be using different applications; the Windows people might be using Word, the *nix people might be using OpenOffice/KOffice/Abiword, and the Mac people might be using Apple Pages, but they would be able to share their documents without any problems.
Now, the hard part is making the OpenDocument format more popular, and Microsoft accepting it.
Err, re-read my post carefully; perhaps you misunderstood some of my points. I was trying to be partisan in that post. Point out one time when I said that Bush or Republicans were fascists. In fact, I said that "this [the trends of the country] didn't start out with Bush"; that was the only time I mentioned Bush in the entire post. I didn't say that Bush used violence (look at my four examples), or that the DMCA was all a Republican idea. I'm just talking about the state of the country and its trends of policies.
Flamebait? Troll? No, the parent post is really serious.
Wikipedia defines fascism as "exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual, uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, engages in corporatism, implements totalitarianism"
So far, over the last so many decades (no, this didn't start out with Bush), I noticed that the country:
Not all of the features of fascism are getting implemented, but I do notice that this place seems to be getting more and more like an Orwellian novel every coming year. I'm kind of getting a bit scared here.
Agreed; I suppose that weaning the world off of the *.doc format is a bit more important than weaning OpenOffice off Java. OASIS will be adopted in OpenOffice 2, and I hear that it will be used by KOffice, Abiword, and Apple's Pages. If it becomes a popular enough format, it might take over *.doc as becoming the standard document format.
Of course, Microsoft isn't going to give up their precious hold of documents without a fight.