Agreed. DWM is a 2000 lines of elegant art for programmers. It also has exactly the behavior the questioner is asking for. One changes the workspace on each screen separately, and it is easy to move applications between screens.
Although I prefer DWM for myself, I rarely recommend it to others. Perhaps that is a bit snobbish, but I just think most people are unable to appreciate it properly.
I work almost exclusively at coffee shops, but not that I like coffee or anything.
When I take a break in an office, I spent a few minutes reading slashdot and feel slightly refreshed.
But in the coffe shop, I spend a few minutes talking to some hot girl studying. And then I feel really refresehed.
And I work more. I'm much more willing to think "Yeah, lets go back to the coffee shop for anouther couple hours" as oppose to "lets go work in our slightly dark offices again"
In fact, I'm pretty sure if I ever own my own company, I'll just give the employees starbucks cards, cell phones, and laptops. Screw this whole office or cubical bullshit.
Heaven forbid I corrected somone who was factually incorrect. Just imagine if people who were wrong started being corrected. We would get a more informed slashdot community, and people might start checking basic facts before posting. Good thing I was moderated as flamebait before I caused real damage.
Trith writes: The thing that makes Java WORA is the fact that the API goes with the language and the runtime enviroment. C# will be providing two of the three, the Runtime and the language.
You are misinformed.
.NET Common Language Infrastructure includes the.NET Framework Class Library. They have names like system.net and system.io whatever, so it feels a lot like Java's libraries.
For a company so evil, at least they're extending a hand, but according to some this is viewed as MS looking to stir up troubles in the open source community.
Extend a hand? What do you think this is, diplomacy? Microsoft is doing what is in their best interest, and right now that is making use.net gains wide acceptable. If people view it as a Microsoft only solution, it won't gain that. Having it run on BSD will make people more secure in writing for.net because it isn't just a windows thing anymore.
It is sort of analogous to front page extentions. Sure, Microsoft ported their frontpage extentsions to Unix. Was it altruism? No! It was neccisary to gain acceptance.
So don't tell me "a company so evil" or "they're extending a hand" - Microsoft is not trying to be your best friend. They are not an a x-girlfriend after a difficult break up. Microsoft is another self-interested pragmatist and if it suits them they will port their software, but it is totaly unrealated to "extending a hand" or being "less evil".
What does this have to do with.NET; I assumed there would be some kind of intermediate code base or something. But all I see is an open platform.
I suggest that "c" is functioning as the intermediate language. Following me on this one.
When is.Net bytecode going to get compiled down for applications? Such large applications are suppose to be converted to native during the install. When are these BSD packages convered to native? Well, one can do it when one installs a program (one could also grab a pre-compiled binary for one's specific system if available, but one doesn't have to).
What does distributing in the source code gain? The ability to check for security problems and to compile down to one's specific systems. What does distributing in the byte code get? The ability to check for security (by having a logical sandbox) and compile down to one's specific system.
So I suggest the use of.net's bytecode is really rather analogous to the free software communities' use of source code. So in practice, this set of highly portable software depending on parts of FreeBSD as a "runtime" is a system that is offering many of the same benfits as the.net platform.
Miguel de Icaza, the oreillynet article, and the register are talking about the.net development enviroment and c# language. This includes the.net common libraries and runtime for the p-code.
The slashdot editors and some posters have confused this with the Hailstorm services (passport, the storing of information, etc.).
Ignoring the issue of Hailstorm, lets consider the arguments for cloning.Net:
A common bytecode for all languages allows all languages to call each other without overhead (thats right, none of the problems of ORBit, Bonobo, XPCOM, etc.)
Will allow Linux to be a drop in replacement for Microsoft servers. Wow...
Managed execution is the future. Garbage collection is nice, sandboxing of untrusted code is nice, etc. A common managed execution enviroment has huge benifits, and we don't have anything close to this. Best open source has now is one managed execution enviroment for Perl, one for Python, twelve for Java, one for PHP, etc.
The open source community doesn't have the resources the develop something like this from scratch. Just copying the design of Microsoft is a lot easier (like we did for our office suits). But suppose we could - what would we get? A solution incompatable with the dominate solution. Yeah, that is really a compelling reason to re-invent everything.
If we balk at the idea of cloning it, we will be guilty of a major NIH complex. (NIH = not invented here).
Lastly, a lot of poster are suggesting Microsoft will just change the standard and break our open source version. Two things in response. First, Microsoft is in the process of making.net an open standard (remember we aren't talking about hailstorm, just c#, the runtime, and libraries). Second, imagine if Sun tried to substantaly change Java (which is not an open standard like.net will be). Nobody would use Sun's new version because it would break compatiblity with HP and IBM's cloned Java implementations that make up a lot of the market. Microsoft would have the same problem if the open source.Net versions ever got reasonable market share.
The idea of "blocking a newsgroup" is appealing only to people with a flawed understanding of how the usenet works. @Home's action will only increase copyright violations.
Newsgroups are not like organizations that can be shutdown. They are not meeting spot that can be closed. A newsgroup is a higher level classification of subject than the normal subject line. That is it.
So "blocking a newsgroup" shouldn't be thought of as "shutting a newsgroup down", but rather removing a classification people can identify messages as. Making it so people can't indicate their post of "dog.jpg" is illegal bestiality by posting it to "alt.binaries.pictures.bestiality" means people looking for dog pictures for school in "alt.binaries.pictures" will end up downloading it.
So what does @homes latest actions do? It makes it so people who want to respect copyright laws won't know that a picture from "alt.binaries.erotic.pictures" violates Hustler's copyright. So now porn websites that get their content from the usenet are more likely to accidentally violate Hustler's copyright!
For all those puzzled by Slashdot's new fascination with anime, for all those curious why CmdrTaco has posted less than 50 articles here since April 15th while an editor like Timothy has posted over 230, let me explain.
http://www.animefu.com/
Top users at animefu:
CmdrTaco (194)
Cacophanus (80)
Battousai (73)
Kayos (64)
kurt (52)
That would be 194 reviews written my CmdrTaco - reviews I might point out that are far longer than the quick Slashdot summaries he writes.
Our fearless Slashdot leader, the only person in the position to address the increasing cynicism, to deal with the degeneration of dicussion, and to tweak the increasingly counterproductive moderation system, has reduced Slashdot to his second priority.
Slashdot is still an amazing place... but here is to the old days of Slashdot, and perhaps to some future Slashdot innovations.
(And please, no jokes about CmdrTaco hedging himself in case he is the victim of VA Linux reductions)
especially if it would return the site to the kind of discussions it had a couple years ago.
This new face of Slashdot is in part the product of the moderation system reducing posting to a game of collecting karma. I've noticed myself drifted towards posting "cute" karma grabbing things instead of communicating what I believe to be important, and I suspect I am not alone.
This post seems on topic enough to me, as both it and the article relate to the direction and nature of Slashdot. But some moderator might disagree and nuke my karma. It would be safer for me to have trolled Cmdrtaco about his name being an omen for his future career or ESR over his inability to avoid boasting during his brief LNUX wealth. The Karma system encourages the behavior it rewards, and it rewards these subtitle superficial trolls. Thoughtful tangents are suppressed so they won't be "offtopic", opinions are radicalized so they will be "insightful", and conclusions are exaggerated so "informative".
This karma system has so well trained us what to post even in the face of dramatic news like this article suggesting LNUX is fucked, most comments are cheese-ball jokes and trolls attacking Linux, Slashdot, or VA Linux. Sad.
You missed some of the older violations of history, like the "Richard III". King Richard is portrayed as an evil hunchback ruler who will do anything to serve his ambitions. That isn't true.
So rant against whoever wrote that too, ok? I think his name was "Shakespeare" or something...
I had always believed that the Great Question was simply a standard addition problem ...Life, The Universe, And Everything.
Why, might I ask, do you assume Deep Thought would have interpreted "," as "+"? The comma operator suggests it will use the last one in the list. Thus Everything = 42, which, at least to me, is just as confusing.
Ben
Marketing mindset a little strong.
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 1
from faq: A: Project JXTA is currently using Issuezilla to track bugs. Issuezilla is an open source bug tracking system developed and used by Mozilla. You use Issuezilla to browse or modify existing bugs, or enter new bugs.
Sun rename bugzilla to issuezilla for there own use?!! Some image management committee got a little out of control. (Refer customers to Bugzilla? That might imply we have a lot of bugs!).
And then the page's "developer highlight" on Bill Joy. What the hell?! Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager. His presentation doesn't drill down into any developer issues - it is a highlevel buzzword laden overview. They get a real developer on screen to get the least bit techy.
Strange word usage like this comes across too much like marketing for my tastes.
For those of you interested in arcologies, I check out the Arcologies egroup discussion. The practicality, benifits and implications of archologies are discussed and argued. Check them out at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arcology/
Here is the description of Arcologies from the groups front page:
"Arcology is Paolo Soleri's concept of cities which embody the fusion of architecture with ecology. The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy, time and human resources. An arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Arcology eliminates the automobile from inside the city and reserves it for use outside the city. Walking would be the main form of transportation inside an arcology. The miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources. Arcology would rely as much as possible on the sun, the wind and other renewable energy so as to reduce pollution and dependence on fossil fuels. Arcology needs less energy per capita thus making recycling and the use of solar energy more feasible than in present cities."
And now we have another example of technical overconfidence. Fission power may well turn out to be useful in many ways, but it will not be solve the thrird world and california's energy problems. It will also be dangerous.
Traditional nuclear power comes from fission, the breaking apart of atoms. It isn't anything new. Nobody is talking about fusion, the combining of atoms.
Fission power is what fuels the hydrogen bomb, and we are proposing that we put fission reactors in everyone's home?
Well, except you nobody is talking about fusion. The hydrogen bomb is fussion based, NOT FISSION. It combines hydrogen atoms together - it fuses them. The older atomic bombs America dropped in World War I were fission.
I suppose to be technical there is fission in a hydrogen bomb used to set off the fusion reaction, but it isn't the main source of the explosive power. That is the fusion.
So the artical is talking about the same reaction used in current power plants, just scaled down.
> Due to security reasons we do not allow nor > do we have a feature to delete Passport >accounts. Rest assured that if you do not access >your account within 12 months our system will >automatically delete your account
> In the mean time, we look forward to reading
> your incoming emails for the next year, good
> day!
Why so cynical? They certainly need to keep the details of accounts around for about 12 months so they can investigate impersonation charges. After all, if they want the service to become used, it must be trusted. It is not hard to believe it was just to much hassle to setup an achival system for deleted accounts - slashcode is much simpler and they didn't want to mess with adding the ability to delete accounts.
But oddly, you don't compain about not being able to delete your slashdot account. So just do what you would do to end your slashdot account: change your password to 12 random characters.
One of the biggest problems with massively multi-player games is the cheaters - those who write scripts and such that build up their characters while they sleep. This is a real problem now, and game companies have to keep constant vigil against those that would ruin the game with their exploits.
You are incorrect, it will improve the games.
Let me suggest a game to consider: Go (frequently described as the chess of Asia).
Any serious go player can beat every computer at Go. There are online go servers, but hacking the clients wouldn't do a damn thing. There is no way a computer can help you.
In every game there is a limit beyond which scripting hacks wouldn't help - Go has a very close limit. But consider a Red Alert 2 type game (assume the client portion contains only the interface). One could hack in improved automatic patrols. Improve the "attack what" in multi-unit battles. Write a basic scouting algorithm one could at the very beginning. But computers can't handle master strategy - no computer player in such games ever stands a chance against a good human opponent. The computer can only help you with the "little thought required" tasks that free you from micromanaging.
Now consider that minimization of micromanagement has been a goal of newer real time strategy games. It focuses the game on higher strategy. Reducing micromanagement rocks. Thus by extension, the GPLing of the client side of games furthering a reduction in micromanaging, also rocks.
I always enjoy coding with Rasterman's libraries. They are not done the Proper Way(tm) - they are better.
Everyone has been told massive amounts of global variables are poor style. Everyone except Rasterman. Current color? Current drawing surface? Font to use? Dithering? All globals. It makes his code clear and efficient, and just as important, it eliminates all of those normally unused paramaters from functions that make code ugly and interfaces difficult to remember.
So what if a lot would have to change to make his code thread safe. He prefers to use one thread for graphics stuff anyway, and he doesn't make sacrifices people who don't.
What I am trying to say, is that we have general coding rules. Like no globals, because stuff like thread safety is lost and have different people design different parts becomes error prone. But he knows he doesn't care about thread safety, and he is the only person writing the library, so he violates the general rule. And his libraries are better for it. Evas is no exception.
French sued over Echelon, meanwhile the Americans government is still playing dumb
Granted, but the DGSE, French secret service, has established listening posts in the Dordogne and overseas territories territories. Sure the French government admits to other government's spy network, but to be impressive they must admit to their own spy network.
And now Australia...
Admitly, Australia does appear to be on a higher horse than most others. They participate in Echelon, but without the automatic request program (the "dictionary program") rightfully claiming the program allows America and the UK to abuse it for industrial espionage. And now this dvd stuff is also credit to them.
America, like all countries, has its room room for improvement. They can learn from aspects of other countries, like perhaps the "DVD perspective" aspect of Australia - but America doesn't "suck".
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. DWM is a 2000 lines of elegant art for programmers. It also has exactly the behavior the questioner is asking for. One changes the workspace on each screen separately, and it is easy to move applications between screens.
Although I prefer DWM for myself, I rarely recommend it to others. Perhaps that is a bit snobbish, but I just think most people are unable to appreciate it properly.
I work almost exclusively at coffee shops, but not that I like coffee or anything.
When I take a break in an office, I spent a few minutes reading slashdot and feel slightly refreshed.
But in the coffe shop, I spend a few minutes talking to some hot girl studying. And then I feel really refresehed.
And I work more. I'm much more willing to think "Yeah, lets go back to the coffee shop for anouther couple hours" as oppose to "lets go work in our slightly dark offices again"
In fact, I'm pretty sure if I ever own my own company, I'll just give the employees starbucks cards, cell phones, and laptops. Screw this whole office or cubical bullshit.
Ben
WTF!!! That gets moderated as flamebait!
Heaven forbid I corrected somone who was factually incorrect. Just imagine if people who were wrong started being corrected. We would get a more informed slashdot community, and people might start checking basic facts before posting. Good thing I was moderated as flamebait before I caused real damage.
Ben
Trith writes: The thing that makes Java WORA is the fact that the API goes with the language and the runtime enviroment. C# will be providing two of the three, the Runtime and the language.
.NET Common Language Infrastructure includes the .NET Framework Class Library. They have names like system.net and system.io whatever, so it feels a lot like Java's libraries.
You are misinformed.
Ben
For a company so evil, at least they're extending a hand, but according to some this is viewed as MS looking to stir up troubles in the open source community.
.net gains wide acceptable. If people view it as a Microsoft only solution, it won't gain that. Having it run on BSD will make people more secure in writing for .net because it isn't just a windows thing anymore.
Extend a hand? What do you think this is, diplomacy? Microsoft is doing what is in their best interest, and right now that is making use
It is sort of analogous to front page extentions. Sure, Microsoft ported their frontpage extentsions to Unix. Was it altruism? No! It was neccisary to gain acceptance.
So don't tell me "a company so evil" or "they're extending a hand" - Microsoft is not trying to be your best friend. They are not an a x-girlfriend after a difficult break up. Microsoft is another self-interested pragmatist and if it suits them they will port their software, but it is totaly unrealated to "extending a hand" or being "less evil".
Ben
What does this have to do with .NET; I assumed there would be some kind of intermediate code base or something. But all I see is an open platform.
.Net bytecode going to get compiled down for applications? Such large applications are suppose to be converted to native during the install. When are these BSD packages convered to native? Well, one can do it when one installs a program (one could also grab a pre-compiled binary for one's specific system if available, but one doesn't have to).
.net's bytecode is really rather analogous to the free software communities' use of source code. So in practice, this set of highly portable software depending on parts of FreeBSD as a "runtime" is a system that is offering many of the same benfits as the .net platform.
I suggest that "c" is functioning as the intermediate language. Following me on this one.
When is
What does distributing in the source code gain? The ability to check for security problems and to compile down to one's specific systems. What does distributing in the byte code get? The ability to check for security (by having a logical sandbox) and compile down to one's specific system.
So I suggest the use of
I suspect Timothy was meaning some simular.
Ben
Miguel de Icaza, the oreillynet article, and the register are talking about the
The slashdot editors and some posters have confused this with the Hailstorm services (passport, the storing of information, etc.).
Ignoring the issue of Hailstorm, lets consider the arguments for cloning
- A common bytecode for all languages allows all languages to call each other without overhead (thats right, none of the problems of ORBit, Bonobo, XPCOM, etc.)
- Will allow Linux to be a drop in replacement for Microsoft servers. Wow...
- Managed execution is the future. Garbage collection is nice, sandboxing of untrusted code is nice, etc. A common managed execution enviroment has huge benifits, and we don't have anything close to this. Best open source has now is one managed execution enviroment for Perl, one for Python, twelve for Java, one for PHP, etc.
The open source community doesn't have the resources the develop something like this from scratch. Just copying the design of Microsoft is a lot easier (like we did for our office suits). But suppose we could - what would we get? A solution incompatable with the dominate solution. Yeah, that is really a compelling reason to re-invent everything.If we balk at the idea of cloning it, we will be guilty of a major NIH complex. (NIH = not invented here).
Lastly, a lot of poster are suggesting Microsoft will just change the standard and break our open source version. Two things in response. First, Microsoft is in the process of making
So lets start cloning already.
Ben
The idea of "blocking a newsgroup" is appealing only to people with a flawed understanding of how the usenet works. @Home's action will only increase copyright violations.
Newsgroups are not like organizations that can be shutdown. They are not meeting spot that can be closed. A newsgroup is a higher level classification of subject than the normal subject line. That is it.
So "blocking a newsgroup" shouldn't be thought of as "shutting a newsgroup down", but rather removing a classification people can identify messages as. Making it so people can't indicate their post of "dog.jpg" is illegal bestiality by posting it to "alt.binaries.pictures.bestiality" means people looking for dog pictures for school in "alt.binaries.pictures" will end up downloading it.
So what does @homes latest actions do? It makes it so people who want to respect copyright laws won't know that a picture from "alt.binaries.erotic.pictures" violates Hustler's copyright. So now porn websites that get their content from the usenet are more likely to accidentally violate Hustler's copyright!
Ben
For all those puzzled by Slashdot's new fascination with anime, for all those curious why CmdrTaco has posted less than 50 articles here since April 15th while an editor like Timothy has posted over 230, let me explain.
http://www.animefu.com/
Top users at animefu:
CmdrTaco (194)
Cacophanus (80)
Battousai (73)
Kayos (64)
kurt (52)
That would be 194 reviews written my CmdrTaco - reviews I might point out that are far longer than the quick Slashdot summaries he writes.
Our fearless Slashdot leader, the only person in the position to address the increasing cynicism, to deal with the degeneration of dicussion, and to tweak the increasingly counterproductive moderation system, has reduced Slashdot to his second priority.
Slashdot is still an amazing place... but here is to the old days of Slashdot, and perhaps to some future Slashdot innovations.
(And please, no jokes about CmdrTaco hedging himself in case he is the victim of VA Linux reductions)
Ben
especially if it would return the site to the kind of discussions it had a couple years ago.
This new face of Slashdot is in part the product of the moderation system reducing posting to a game of collecting karma. I've noticed myself drifted towards posting "cute" karma grabbing things instead of communicating what I believe to be important, and I suspect I am not alone.
This post seems on topic enough to me, as both it and the article relate to the direction and nature of Slashdot. But some moderator might disagree and nuke my karma. It would be safer for me to have trolled Cmdrtaco about his name being an omen for his future career or ESR over his inability to avoid boasting during his brief LNUX wealth. The Karma system encourages the behavior it rewards, and it rewards these subtitle superficial trolls. Thoughtful tangents are suppressed so they won't be "offtopic", opinions are radicalized so they will be "insightful", and conclusions are exaggerated so "informative".
This karma system has so well trained us what to post even in the face of dramatic news like this article suggesting LNUX is fucked, most comments are cheese-ball jokes and trolls attacking Linux, Slashdot, or VA Linux. Sad.
Ben
You missed some of the older violations of history, like the "Richard III". King Richard is portrayed as an evil hunchback ruler who will do anything to serve his ambitions. That isn't true.
So rant against whoever wrote that too, ok? I think his name was "Shakespeare" or something...
Ben
I had always believed that the Great Question was simply a standard addition problem
...Life, The Universe, And Everything.
Why, might I ask, do you assume Deep Thought would have interpreted "," as "+"? The comma operator suggests it will use the last one in the list. Thus Everything = 42, which, at least to me, is just as confusing.
Ben
from faq:
A: Project JXTA is currently using Issuezilla to track bugs. Issuezilla is an open source bug tracking system developed and used by Mozilla. You use Issuezilla to browse or modify existing bugs, or enter new bugs.
Sun rename bugzilla to issuezilla for there own use?!! Some image management committee got a little out of control. (Refer customers to Bugzilla? That might imply we have a lot of bugs!).
And then the page's "developer highlight" on Bill Joy. What the hell?! Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager. His presentation doesn't drill down into any developer issues - it is a highlevel buzzword laden overview. They get a real developer on screen to get the least bit techy.
Strange word usage like this comes across too much like marketing for my tastes.
Ben
For those of you interested in arcologies, I check out the Arcologies egroup discussion. The practicality, benifits and implications of archologies are discussed and argued. Check them out at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arcology/
Here is the description of Arcologies from the groups front page:
"Arcology is Paolo Soleri's concept of cities which embody the fusion of architecture with ecology. The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy, time and human resources. An arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Arcology eliminates the automobile from inside the city and reserves it for use outside the city. Walking would be the main form of transportation inside an arcology. The miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources. Arcology would rely as much as possible on the sun, the wind and other renewable energy so as to reduce pollution and dependence on fossil fuels. Arcology needs less energy per capita thus making recycling and the use of solar energy more feasible than in present cities."
And now we have another example of technical overconfidence. Fission power may well turn out to be useful in many ways, but it will not be solve the thrird world and california's energy problems. It will also be dangerous.
Traditional nuclear power comes from fission, the breaking apart of atoms. It isn't anything new. Nobody is talking about fusion, the combining of atoms.
Fission power is what fuels the hydrogen bomb, and we are proposing that we put fission reactors in everyone's home?
Well, except you nobody is talking about fusion. The hydrogen bomb is fussion based, NOT FISSION. It combines hydrogen atoms together - it fuses them. The older atomic bombs America dropped in World War I were fission.
I suppose to be technical there is fission in a hydrogen bomb used to set off the fusion reaction, but it isn't the main source of the explosive power. That is the fusion.
So the artical is talking about the same reaction used in current power plants, just scaled down.
Ben
> Due to security reasons we do not allow nor
> do we have a feature to delete Passport
>accounts. Rest assured that if you do not access
>your account within 12 months our system will
>automatically delete your account
> In the mean time, we look forward to reading
> your incoming emails for the next year, good
> day!
Why so cynical? They certainly need to keep the details of accounts around for about 12 months so they can investigate impersonation charges. After all, if they want the service to become used, it must be trusted. It is not hard to believe it was just to much hassle to setup an achival system for deleted accounts - slashcode is much simpler and they didn't want to mess with adding the ability to delete accounts.
But oddly, you don't compain about not being able to delete your slashdot account. So just do what you would do to end your slashdot account: change your password to 12 random characters.
One of the biggest problems with massively multi-player games is the cheaters - those who write scripts and such that build up their characters while they sleep. This is a real problem now, and game companies have to keep constant vigil against those that would ruin the game with their exploits.
You are incorrect, it will improve the games.
Let me suggest a game to consider: Go (frequently described as the chess of Asia).
Any serious go player can beat every computer at Go. There are online go servers, but hacking the clients wouldn't do a damn thing. There is no way a computer can help you.
In every game there is a limit beyond which scripting hacks wouldn't help - Go has a very close limit. But consider a Red Alert 2 type game (assume the client portion contains only the interface). One could hack in improved automatic patrols. Improve the "attack what" in multi-unit battles. Write a basic scouting algorithm one could at the very beginning. But computers can't handle master strategy - no computer player in such games ever stands a chance against a good human opponent. The computer can only help you with the "little thought required" tasks that free you from micromanaging.
Now consider that minimization of micromanagement has been a goal of newer real time strategy games. It focuses the game on higher strategy. Reducing micromanagement rocks. Thus by extension, the GPLing of the client side of games furthering a reduction in micromanaging, also rocks.
I always enjoy coding with Rasterman's libraries. They are not done the Proper Way(tm) - they are better.
Everyone has been told massive amounts of global variables are poor style. Everyone except Rasterman. Current color? Current drawing surface? Font to use? Dithering? All globals. It makes his code clear and efficient, and just as important, it eliminates all of those normally unused paramaters from functions that make code ugly and interfaces difficult to remember.
So what if a lot would have to change to make his code thread safe. He prefers to use one thread for graphics stuff anyway, and he doesn't make sacrifices people who don't.
What I am trying to say, is that we have general coding rules. Like no globals, because stuff like thread safety is lost and have different people design different parts becomes error prone. But he knows he doesn't care about thread safety, and he is the only person writing the library, so he violates the general rule. And his libraries are better for it. Evas is no exception.
-Ben
Don't go thinking your country is backwards.
French sued over Echelon, meanwhile the Americans government is still playing dumb
Granted, but the DGSE, French secret service, has established listening posts in the Dordogne and overseas territories territories. Sure the French government admits to other government's spy network, but to be impressive they must admit to their own spy network.
And now Australia...
Admitly, Australia does appear to be on a higher horse than most others. They participate in Echelon, but without the automatic request program (the "dictionary program") rightfully claiming the program allows America and the UK to abuse it for industrial espionage. And now this dvd stuff is also credit to them.
America, like all countries, has its room room for improvement. They can learn from aspects of other countries, like perhaps the "DVD perspective" aspect of Australia - but America doesn't "suck".