Here's why: 1) NIMBY - If Z is a feature or program I don't use, not only do I not care about it, I don't care about whether or not it can interact properly with programs I do care about.
2) Windows-ism - Many projects now try to replicate the functions of Windows apps. But the clones and work-alikes they produce are not only imperfect, programmers also can't take the same shortcuts that the Windows developers do.
3) Real Programmers - If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing, and if you make it easy for programmers to write for a platform, especially new ones, they will only produce crap that you somehow have to deal with. Compare this with MS's "Developers developer developers" motto, or Apple's excellent dev tools.
4) Esoterism - The command line is better than graphics. Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant. It's okay for GUI tools and programs to just be front-ends for their command-line equivalents, even if it puts unnecessary limits on the graphical version.
5) Arrogance - (related to 1) There is only one right way to do things, one language, one library, one kernel, one package, one work-flow set-up. If you do it any other way, you're wrong; if you suggest that another way is good, I must shoot you down and insult you because you implicitly threaten the validity of my worldview; if you say that there can be more than one solution to a problem, you are really saying that your solution is right and mine is wrong.
I once listened in on a conversation by some digital typographers about their work set-ups, and unlike linux-heads they were genuinely interested in the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of solving the same problem, instead of arguing over whether which was best.
I don't think they should be allowed to publish them without permission.
It's a bit of a slippery-slope conundrum, but my opinion remains that legal protection of privacy wrt photographs, etc ought to be a great deal stronger.
The Greeks were perfectly fine immortalizing themselves as strangely misshapen people with red skin, I don't see why we couldn't get used to requiring public-space photography published without consent of the depicted to have blurred faces.
Remember: the more information people have, the more they can screw you with it. Does your face appear on the sidelines in Stage 13? I guess your boss knows you weren't sick after all. Has a voyeur circulated nude photos of you taking a shower to his friends on the internet? Good luck getting a job with an employer who googles your address, and forget about a security clearance. Does your Facebook profile or a craiglist posting out you as a homosexual? Suddenly your prospective boss decides you don't have the qualifications he's looking for. Etc.
For one thing, they get to not listen to annoying "Just a dollar a day" commercials on TV. They don't have to read depressing news stories about what's happening in other countries, or if they do (and this is probably the key) they get to feel good about themselves for doing something about it.
This is a bit off-topic, but my friends and I decided that the Tour should declare that the race is so hard that no one can win, and disqualify anyone who looks to be doing too well. They did that last year during the race (including Rasmussen, KlÃden, and Kaschechkin, who were kicked for being suspected of maybe having the opportunity to dope, during the off-season). They did it the year before, too, mostly before the start of the race, on the evidence of a list of names in some doctor's lab. Including, perhaps not surprisingly, most of the elite field of the previous year.
If I were a cyclist, I'd plan on coming in tenth or so, and end up with the crown once everyone else got kicked out for being too good.
No, there need to be stronger privacy laws all around. However, Google is doing privacy advocates a service by doing it so publicly, and on such a large scale, that it may raise enough awareness to change minds.
No, Islamic law as practiced in Iran only forbids non-coerced apostasy from people (and, I think, only from men) who have asserted faith in Islam as adults. There may be lesser penalties for causing a child to convert, but given that execution is punishment demanded by the holy texts for Muslims, the law in Iran is rather lenient compared to those on adultery and lasciviousness.
The problem is not with foreign aid per se, but with ham-handed or otherwise poorly thought out aid. Welfare checks are bad. Watershed management is good. Infrastructure construction is good. Training (which the Gates Foundation does a lot of) is very good. Agricultural efficiency research is good. Potable water is good.
Working through governments is usually bad, since they are often corrupt and prefer big showy projects to the things that are more necessary. On the other hand, government will remain corrupt until honest civil servants can make a decent living.
In summary, the whole question of whether foreign aid is good or bad is a lot more complex than more people, including apparently Mr. Stallman, realize.
The whole idea of not investing in industries you find objectionable is completely bogus. If you don't want to support firms or industries that pollute, or exploit children, or whatever, don't buy stock at an IPO or when new shares are issued. But once the stock is on the market, the funds you spend on shares don't go to the companies coffers, they just go to another investor. By owning shares (and voting and going to shareholder meetings) you can only make a positive difference in the operations of the company. In fact, when you earn a dividend, you're taking money away from the company that they could have used to do something evil instead!
Don't think of buying stock as an endorsement of wickedness, think of it as one small part of a hostile takeover for the better.
I've dealt with both hippies and professionals, and let me tell you, I'd much rather deal with professionals. You might think that a lot of the 'professionals' are pompous jerks who don't know what they're doing or what they're talking about, but hippies are about fifty times worse, and pay you with carrot juice.
Stallman is desperate for attention because he is increasingly irrelevant. He is, like Eric Raymond, one of the annoying, un-charismatic, self-appointed leaders of dubious talent[1] that were in charge in the early days because at the time, there was no one else to do it. But, as time went on, the Free Software community decided it didn't like people like Stallman or Raymond telling them the way things have to be all the time.
Stallman has given up on trying to beat Linus. A year later, GPL v3 remains unadopted by a vast majority of copyleft projects, with Linux being the most prominent. Saying anything negative about Linus or Linux will just cause his support to drop further, so instead he goes back to the man his followers love to hate: Bill Gates.
To a certain extent, some of that criticism is justified, but Gates has also had a positive effect on the economics of computers. IBM, Dell, and others get credit for the emergence of the low-cost PC in the 1980s, but it's important to remember that the existence of the clones would be irrelevant if not for the possibility of running the same software (DOS) on them. There would be a sea of PC-compatibles, but each of them would still have their own proprietary operating systems bundled with them, and much less incentive to switch to a free alternative.
I read Stallman's FA, and on the whole I have to say it was whiny, provincial, poorly-written, and full of the sort of the cheap-shots I've come to expect from people like Stallman. He's gotten so caught up in hating Bill Gates, Microsoft, and a copyright-based economy that he can't the positive side to any of it. If the Gates Foundation eliminated malaria or AIDS, you can bet Stallman would be complaining about them driving a native African species to extinction.
[1]: Here is a list (incomplete) of people who have spearheaded their own Unix-like kernels: Ken & Dennis, Bill Joy & CSRG, Andrew Tanenbaum, Linus Torvalds. See who's missing?
Stallman gets a lot of credit for free software work, but most of the best work on GNU projects has historically been done by fork groups that got folded back into GNU once people realized how much better they were: XEmacs, EGCS, etc. Libc is an exception that outlived its fork, but Stallman wasn't in charge of that one.
Commercial information sources can't cop out if they're wrong about something. Information wants to be free, so their business model must rest on keeping their reputation strong. Therefore they have a deep financial incentive to get it right, and if they make a mistake, clean it up quickly and apologize.
The NYT, for example, prints apologetic correction notices in each day's paper. If a WikiMedia project contains a factual accuracy, it gets fixed silently, and you have to go digging (usually pretty deeply as many of any given page's edits are stylistic and grammatical changes, rather than alterations of content).
In fact, sometimes, the record of the edit itself is erased, so a person who accessed the page when it was wrong is left wondering whether he actually saw that (for example) Almaty is the capital of Kazakhstan, or if he just misread the article.
Add to this the ethos of removing statements which are true but not backed up with an inline citation, and you have a system where, given any two versions of a wikipedia article from different days, you can't tell which emendations are accurate and which aren't.
Well, for one thing, it's possible to write a compiler to the Objective-C specification.
In all seriousness, though, all your C code will compile under Objective-C. Not "all of it" in the C++ sense, but actually all of it. The only way it might cause problems is if you use 'id', 'YES', 'NO', or 'BOOL' differently from how the language uses them. I believe, but cannot be certain, that 'self' and 'super' are only in-scope in Objective-C class and method code.
Objective-C has a fast, flexible runtime and very elegant libraries. It's possible to build fairly sophisticated applications without actually having to subclass any of the framework classes, and spending a bit of time in Interface Builder.
The framework concept is also an advantage: instead of having hundreds of smaller libraries to worry about dependencies, each framework is like a library of libraries, and they usually contain several historical versions of the code. This means that first of all, you don't need something like autoconf to figure out whether or not the necessary components are installed, since the runtime will not only figure it out, but you can tell it to prefer a specific version too. Additionally, since much less code is public-facing, it's easier to make big changes to the code without having to worry about flag days.
That said, there are really only two such sets of frameworks available, Apple's Cocoa and GNUStep. If you're certain that the necessary frameworks and run-time are available on your target platform, it's actually a great choice. If not, then it's probably not worth your while to bundle the frameworks and run-time along with your app. However, I think Safari and iTunes for Windows use ported versions of the Cocoa frameworks, so your potential install base may be larger than you think.
Yes, it's more like this: Alice has accounts at a Bank. One of the accounts involves credit, so the Bank reports to the Credit Agency. Eve steals Alice's SSN and opens a credit account with Discover. Eve doesn't pay off the account, Discover reports it to the Creditagency, and tries to collect from Alice. Alice tries to get a loan from the Bank for a new car, the Bank gets a report from the Creditagency and refuses the loan. Discover finds out it was the victim of fraud, but instead of pursuing the fraudster, continues to hound Alice. The Creditagency and the Bank both know that Alice's credit data is tainted, but they refuse to change it. Alice, in order not to be ruined, has to spend a ton of money on legal fees to get her life back. Meanwhile, Eve gets away, and Discover just writes the money off as a loss and moves on. My point stands: Alice did nothing wrong. The lender was defrauded, but chose to pursue the law-abiding citizen rather than the criminal because, ironically, she was the easier target.
(Not to pick on Discover, but they happened to begin with D.)
Or, it could be a security invulnerability in Safari. Think about it: if everyone set up their websites so the latest Windows patches and a free anti-virus program would automatically download to the desktop and run the next time IE was opened, we could take down all the botnets and malware!
But seriously, what you say is all true, but there's so much outdated cruft in the code that it's nearly gotten to the point it may be better to start over from scratch, or at the very least remove a substantial portion of the code.
I don't know much about X myself, but I think it would probably benefit from a major rehaul. Push as much stuff as possible to the semi-exterior, and allow the main X process to load or unload plugins for various situations as needed. In other words, do it sort of like IOKit does device drivers for darwin, or the way most Unices handles different filesystems as a 'specific case' of vfs.
For example, cut and paste. X ought to start with an abstract cut and paste layer, and then figure out what it will need to connect the central abstraction with the applications. Mac OS X has pboard, KDE has its thing, GNOME has its thing, Windows has its own thing. So if, for example, I have X open on my Mac and I copy something in Safari and want to paste it into KOffice, KOffice will ask kde, kde will ask X, X will ask pboard, and then once it gets the text from pboard it will send it back the other way. There would need to be a mechanism for X to say that it needed to be notified whenever the status of any of the other cut/paste mechanisms changed, but if you built in the possibility of doing that it would be implemented quickly.
Okay, ready to learn Objective-C? Class names normally begin with capital letters and instances of classes begin with lowercase, just like Java. You call a procedure from an object with the syntax [object function:argument], similar to lisp. If there are multiple arguments, it looks like [object function:argument arg2Name:argument2 arg3Name:argument3]. You declare classes as follows: @interface : {
float aFloat;
NSString *string; } - (NSString * ) string; - (void) setString:(NSString *)newString; - (NSString *) theFloat; - (void) setFloat:(float)value; + (NSArray *) someArray; @end/* of @interface */
Obj-C objects are always pointers. Methods (functions) that begin with a '-' are instance methods; they would be called by an instance of the object (i.e. [instance method]. Those beginning with a '+' are class methods; they are called with [Class method]. Use #import instead of #include. #import always checks to make sure it doesn't include a file twice, so you don't need to bother with #ifndef's. Here's an implementation file @implementation {/* private variables go here */ }
- (id) init {
if (self=[super init])
{
string = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"This is a string.";
} returm self; }
You can see that, as in Java, variables are in-scope within member functions. The method alloc is implemented in the ObjC base class, NSObject, and allocates memory for the instance. It will always be followed up with an init method of some kind. The keyword 'id' is a macro for any instance of NSObject or any of its subclasses. The variable 'self' refers to the current object. The variable 'super' refers to the current object, interpreted as it it were its parent class. Since every object but NSObject begins with self=[super init], only NSObject needs to know precisely how the Objective-C runtime is implemented. Not shown here is how flags are handled, which is usually of the form [object shouldDoSomething], which then returns YES or NO. To set behavior, it's [object shouldDoSomething:YES]. In Objective-C, NSStrings are denoted like C strings, but with an @ before the open quote marks: @"This is an NSString." [object description] will return an NSString that tells you something about object, usually for classes within the core frameworks it is a text representation of the data. The null pointer as an object is called nil. nil, or indeed any object, will accept any method call and fail silently, so make sure you properly alloc and init your objects, and double-check that they actually respond to the methods you send them. Write to the console with NSLog(NSString*). There. Now you know Objective-C. How the fuck hard was that? NB: I wrote this off the top of my head, and it's been a while, so there are probably a ton of bugs in it. But, you get the idea.
I think what you mean to say is to allow someone else to get in the game early and work up to high levels, and then buy his account off of him so you don't have to waste your time killing squirrels or whatever.
In fact, it is. Well, not Detroit, but Japanese, Korean, and European car mfrs are opening plants in the USA (mostly the South) faster than the Big Three close them.
The problem is not the USA, not really. The problem is the culture of entitlement that the automotive cartel fostered in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. They could charge whatever they wanted for cars, since they were about the only game in town (back then, if you wanted an import, it was a Rolls or a Ferrari, and at that point you don't care about price anyway). They made up for this by giving obscene benefits packages for employees, and in the 70s when Japanese imports started to outdo in price and efficiency, they stupidly agreed to even more boneheaded benefits packages for people who got laid off.
If they had the balls to say to the UAW, "You know what? From now on, you're getting fair wages for the work you do for us and only current employees get benefits," they wouldn't be so hard up. But there's too much of a culture of failure among management, and the UAW would throw a hissy-fit strike if they tried it.
It really boils down to the need for nationalized healthcare. If we had that, this whole problem wouldn't exist.
I've been saying this for years. Identity theft, like intellectual property theft, doesn't actually occur. What happens is financial-services fraud, to take advantage of my name and fiscal responsibility to get cash. At no point does anything that properly belongs to me ever get taken, or even leveraged. What gets leveraged are things like Social Security Number (property of the US government) and Credit Rating/Credit Score (property of the various agencies that compile them). I don't get tricked into anything, the bank gets tricked.
The problem is, if you call it 'fraud' then the defrauded entity is on the hook, and that entity gives and lends tons of money to politicians, lawyers, and judges. If you call it 'identity theft,' then it seems more reasonable to blame the person whose name was forged, but (and this is important so it's gonna be in all caps) THE PERSON WHOSE ID IS STOLEN IS NOT THE VICTIM. The bank is, and the whole process from start to finish ought to be the bank's problem.
If we had more strict laws on consumer data protection, this shit wouldn't happen.
I'll one up you, I actually use a hybrid early D&D/AD&D 1e system (I also ditched a bunch of rules just to reduce book-keeping). The main thing I like about the original D&D is rules is that they were way, way, way less stat-focused. +1 bonuses started at 13 and maxed out with +3 at 18. No clerics starting out with three times as many spells, no monstrous dwarf fighters with 40hp at fourth level, and consequently no need for the ridiculously elaborate character-rolling rules to make sure everyone gets a couple of decent stats. If you're a fighter with 13 strength, that's not so bad, you're only two points of damage per blow behind someone with an 18 (as opposed to being six points behind someone with 18/00).
What I don't think WotC has figured, and I know TSR never figured it out, is that less is usually more when it comes to gameplay. Having tables to roll up monsters and treasure is great for days when you don't feel like doing a lot of planning, but when it comes to moment of tension like combat or disarming traps, more die rolls and table look-ups mean less excitement and fun.
I agree: differential calculus was the last non-obvious thing mathematicians came up with.
What's more, there are prizes for things like that. The reward for coming up with new abstract ideas is a whole mess of money and junkets from award-granting institutions. Clay Mathematics Institute Awards, Nobel Prizes, MacArthur Grants, and even cushy research Professorships all serve as a payoff for these kinds of things. You don't need patents on top off that.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's why:
1) NIMBY - If Z is a feature or program I don't use, not only do I not care about it, I don't care about whether or not it can interact properly with programs I do care about.
2) Windows-ism - Many projects now try to replicate the functions of Windows apps. But the clones and work-alikes they produce are not only imperfect, programmers also can't take the same shortcuts that the Windows developers do.
3) Real Programmers - If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing, and if you make it easy for programmers to write for a platform, especially new ones, they will only produce crap that you somehow have to deal with. Compare this with MS's "Developers developer developers" motto, or Apple's excellent dev tools.
4) Esoterism - The command line is better than graphics. Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant. It's okay for GUI tools and programs to just be front-ends for their command-line equivalents, even if it puts unnecessary limits on the graphical version.
5) Arrogance - (related to 1) There is only one right way to do things, one language, one library, one kernel, one package, one work-flow set-up. If you do it any other way, you're wrong; if you suggest that another way is good, I must shoot you down and insult you because you implicitly threaten the validity of my worldview; if you say that there can be more than one solution to a problem, you are really saying that your solution is right and mine is wrong.
I once listened in on a conversation by some digital typographers about their work set-ups, and unlike linux-heads they were genuinely interested in the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of solving the same problem, instead of arguing over whether which was best.
I don't think they should be allowed to publish them without permission.
It's a bit of a slippery-slope conundrum, but my opinion remains that legal protection of privacy wrt photographs, etc ought to be a great deal stronger.
The Greeks were perfectly fine immortalizing themselves as strangely misshapen people with red skin, I don't see why we couldn't get used to requiring public-space photography published without consent of the depicted to have blurred faces.
Remember: the more information people have, the more they can screw you with it. Does your face appear on the sidelines in Stage 13? I guess your boss knows you weren't sick after all. Has a voyeur circulated nude photos of you taking a shower to his friends on the internet? Good luck getting a job with an employer who googles your address, and forget about a security clearance. Does your Facebook profile or a craiglist posting out you as a homosexual? Suddenly your prospective boss decides you don't have the qualifications he's looking for. Etc.
For one thing, they get to not listen to annoying "Just a dollar a day" commercials on TV. They don't have to read depressing news stories about what's happening in other countries, or if they do (and this is probably the key) they get to feel good about themselves for doing something about it.
This is a bit off-topic, but my friends and I decided that the Tour should declare that the race is so hard that no one can win, and disqualify anyone who looks to be doing too well. They did that last year during the race (including Rasmussen, KlÃden, and Kaschechkin, who were kicked for being suspected of maybe having the opportunity to dope, during the off-season). They did it the year before, too, mostly before the start of the race, on the evidence of a list of names in some doctor's lab. Including, perhaps not surprisingly, most of the elite field of the previous year.
If I were a cyclist, I'd plan on coming in tenth or so, and end up with the crown once everyone else got kicked out for being too good.
No, there need to be stronger privacy laws all around. However, Google is doing privacy advocates a service by doing it so publicly, and on such a large scale, that it may raise enough awareness to change minds.
No, Islamic law as practiced in Iran only forbids non-coerced apostasy from people (and, I think, only from men) who have asserted faith in Islam as adults. There may be lesser penalties for causing a child to convert, but given that execution is punishment demanded by the holy texts for Muslims, the law in Iran is rather lenient compared to those on adultery and lasciviousness.
The problem is not with foreign aid per se, but with ham-handed or otherwise poorly thought out aid. Welfare checks are bad. Watershed management is good. Infrastructure construction is good. Training (which the Gates Foundation does a lot of) is very good. Agricultural efficiency research is good. Potable water is good.
Working through governments is usually bad, since they are often corrupt and prefer big showy projects to the things that are more necessary. On the other hand, government will remain corrupt until honest civil servants can make a decent living.
In summary, the whole question of whether foreign aid is good or bad is a lot more complex than more people, including apparently Mr. Stallman, realize.
The whole idea of not investing in industries you find objectionable is completely bogus. If you don't want to support firms or industries that pollute, or exploit children, or whatever, don't buy stock at an IPO or when new shares are issued. But once the stock is on the market, the funds you spend on shares don't go to the companies coffers, they just go to another investor. By owning shares (and voting and going to shareholder meetings) you can only make a positive difference in the operations of the company. In fact, when you earn a dividend, you're taking money away from the company that they could have used to do something evil instead!
Don't think of buying stock as an endorsement of wickedness, think of it as one small part of a hostile takeover for the better.
I've dealt with both hippies and professionals, and let me tell you, I'd much rather deal with professionals. You might think that a lot of the 'professionals' are pompous jerks who don't know what they're doing or what they're talking about, but hippies are about fifty times worse, and pay you with carrot juice.
Stallman is desperate for attention because he is increasingly irrelevant. He is, like Eric Raymond, one of the annoying, un-charismatic, self-appointed leaders of dubious talent[1] that were in charge in the early days because at the time, there was no one else to do it. But, as time went on, the Free Software community decided it didn't like people like Stallman or Raymond telling them the way things have to be all the time.
Stallman has given up on trying to beat Linus. A year later, GPL v3 remains unadopted by a vast majority of copyleft projects, with Linux being the most prominent. Saying anything negative about Linus or Linux will just cause his support to drop further, so instead he goes back to the man his followers love to hate: Bill Gates.
To a certain extent, some of that criticism is justified, but Gates has also had a positive effect on the economics of computers. IBM, Dell, and others get credit for the emergence of the low-cost PC in the 1980s, but it's important to remember that the existence of the clones would be irrelevant if not for the possibility of running the same software (DOS) on them. There would be a sea of PC-compatibles, but each of them would still have their own proprietary operating systems bundled with them, and much less incentive to switch to a free alternative.
I read Stallman's FA, and on the whole I have to say it was whiny, provincial, poorly-written, and full of the sort of the cheap-shots I've come to expect from people like Stallman. He's gotten so caught up in hating Bill Gates, Microsoft, and a copyright-based economy that he can't the positive side to any of it. If the Gates Foundation eliminated malaria or AIDS, you can bet Stallman would be complaining about them driving a native African species to extinction.
[1]: Here is a list (incomplete) of people who have spearheaded their own Unix-like kernels: Ken & Dennis, Bill Joy & CSRG, Andrew Tanenbaum, Linus Torvalds. See who's missing?
Stallman gets a lot of credit for free software work, but most of the best work on GNU projects has historically been done by fork groups that got folded back into GNU once people realized how much better they were: XEmacs, EGCS, etc. Libc is an exception that outlived its fork, but Stallman wasn't in charge of that one.
Commercial information sources can't cop out if they're wrong about something. Information wants to be free, so their business model must rest on keeping their reputation strong. Therefore they have a deep financial incentive to get it right, and if they make a mistake, clean it up quickly and apologize.
The NYT, for example, prints apologetic correction notices in each day's paper. If a WikiMedia project contains a factual accuracy, it gets fixed silently, and you have to go digging (usually pretty deeply as many of any given page's edits are stylistic and grammatical changes, rather than alterations of content).
In fact, sometimes, the record of the edit itself is erased, so a person who accessed the page when it was wrong is left wondering whether he actually saw that (for example) Almaty is the capital of Kazakhstan, or if he just misread the article.
Add to this the ethos of removing statements which are true but not backed up with an inline citation, and you have a system where, given any two versions of a wikipedia article from different days, you can't tell which emendations are accurate and which aren't.
Yeah, the only case I can think of where the guy wearing red always wins in bullfighting, and that's kind of rigged.
As an aside, people also turn red when they are embarrassed or drunk, so wouldn't the psychological effect cancel itself out?
Well, for one thing, it's possible to write a compiler to the Objective-C specification.
In all seriousness, though, all your C code will compile under Objective-C. Not "all of it" in the C++ sense, but actually all of it. The only way it might cause problems is if you use 'id', 'YES', 'NO', or 'BOOL' differently from how the language uses them. I believe, but cannot be certain, that 'self' and 'super' are only in-scope in Objective-C class and method code.
Objective-C has a fast, flexible runtime and very elegant libraries. It's possible to build fairly sophisticated applications without actually having to subclass any of the framework classes, and spending a bit of time in Interface Builder.
The framework concept is also an advantage: instead of having hundreds of smaller libraries to worry about dependencies, each framework is like a library of libraries, and they usually contain several historical versions of the code. This means that first of all, you don't need something like autoconf to figure out whether or not the necessary components are installed, since the runtime will not only figure it out, but you can tell it to prefer a specific version too. Additionally, since much less code is public-facing, it's easier to make big changes to the code without having to worry about flag days.
That said, there are really only two such sets of frameworks available, Apple's Cocoa and GNUStep. If you're certain that the necessary frameworks and run-time are available on your target platform, it's actually a great choice. If not, then it's probably not worth your while to bundle the frameworks and run-time along with your app. However, I think Safari and iTunes for Windows use ported versions of the Cocoa frameworks, so your potential install base may be larger than you think.
Yes, it's more like this:
Alice has accounts at a Bank. One of the accounts involves credit, so the Bank reports to the Credit Agency. Eve steals Alice's SSN and opens a credit account with Discover. Eve doesn't pay off the account, Discover reports it to the Creditagency, and tries to collect from Alice. Alice tries to get a loan from the Bank for a new car, the Bank gets a report from the Creditagency and refuses the loan. Discover finds out it was the victim of fraud, but instead of pursuing the fraudster, continues to hound Alice. The Creditagency and the Bank both know that Alice's credit data is tainted, but they refuse to change it. Alice, in order not to be ruined, has to spend a ton of money on legal fees to get her life back. Meanwhile, Eve gets away, and Discover just writes the money off as a loss and moves on. My point stands: Alice did nothing wrong. The lender was defrauded, but chose to pursue the law-abiding citizen rather than the criminal because, ironically, she was the easier target.
(Not to pick on Discover, but they happened to begin with D.)
Or, it could be a security invulnerability in Safari. Think about it: if everyone set up their websites so the latest Windows patches and a free anti-virus program would automatically download to the desktop and run the next time IE was opened, we could take down all the botnets and malware!
One thing X doesn't do is attract developers.
But seriously, what you say is all true, but there's so much outdated cruft in the code that it's nearly gotten to the point it may be better to start over from scratch, or at the very least remove a substantial portion of the code.
I don't know much about X myself, but I think it would probably benefit from a major rehaul. Push as much stuff as possible to the semi-exterior, and allow the main X process to load or unload plugins for various situations as needed. In other words, do it sort of like IOKit does device drivers for darwin, or the way most Unices handles different filesystems as a 'specific case' of vfs.
For example, cut and paste. X ought to start with an abstract cut and paste layer, and then figure out what it will need to connect the central abstraction with the applications. Mac OS X has pboard, KDE has its thing, GNOME has its thing, Windows has its own thing. So if, for example, I have X open on my Mac and I copy something in Safari and want to paste it into KOffice, KOffice will ask kde, kde will ask X, X will ask pboard, and then once it gets the text from pboard it will send it back the other way. There would need to be a mechanism for X to say that it needed to be notified whenever the status of any of the other cut/paste mechanisms changed, but if you built in the possibility of doing that it would be implemented quickly.
Okay, ready to learn Objective-C? Class names normally begin with capital letters and instances of classes begin with lowercase, just like Java.
/* of @interface */
/* private variables go here */
You call a procedure from an object with the syntax [object function:argument], similar to lisp. If there are multiple arguments, it looks like [object function:argument arg2Name:argument2 arg3Name:argument3].
You declare classes as follows:
@interface :
{
float aFloat;
NSString *string;
}
- (NSString * ) string;
- (void) setString:(NSString *)newString;
- (NSString *) theFloat;
- (void) setFloat:(float)value;
+ (NSArray *) someArray;
@end
Obj-C objects are always pointers. Methods (functions) that begin with a '-' are instance methods; they would be called by an instance of the object (i.e. [instance method]. Those beginning with a '+' are class methods; they are called with [Class method].
Use #import instead of #include. #import always checks to make sure it doesn't include a file twice, so you don't need to bother with #ifndef's.
Here's an implementation file
@implementation
{
}
- (id) init
{
if (self=[super init])
{
string = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"This is a string.";
}
returm self;
}
- (void) setString:(NSString *)newString
{
string=newString;
}
- (void) setFloat:(float)value
{
aFloat=value;
}
- (NSString *) string
{
return string;
}
- (float) theFloat
{
return aFloat;
}
+ (NSArray *) someArray
{
return [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:
}
You can see that, as in Java, variables are in-scope within member functions.
The method alloc is implemented in the ObjC base class, NSObject, and allocates memory for the instance. It will always be followed up with an init method of some kind.
The keyword 'id' is a macro for any instance of NSObject or any of its subclasses.
The variable 'self' refers to the current object. The variable 'super' refers to the current object, interpreted as it it were its parent class. Since every object but NSObject begins with self=[super init], only NSObject needs to know precisely how the Objective-C runtime is implemented.
Not shown here is how flags are handled, which is usually of the form [object shouldDoSomething], which then returns YES or NO. To set behavior, it's [object shouldDoSomething:YES].
In Objective-C, NSStrings are denoted like C strings, but with an @ before the open quote marks: @"This is an NSString." [object description] will return an NSString that tells you something about object, usually for classes within the core frameworks it is a text representation of the data.
The null pointer as an object is called nil. nil, or indeed any object, will accept any method call and fail silently, so make sure you properly alloc and init your objects, and double-check that they actually respond to the methods you send them.
Write to the console with NSLog(NSString*).
There. Now you know Objective-C. How the fuck hard was that?
NB: I wrote this off the top of my head, and it's been a while, so there are probably a ton of bugs in it. But, you get the idea.
But it's an awesome belt!
I think what you mean to say is to allow someone else to get in the game early and work up to high levels, and then buy his account off of him so you don't have to waste your time killing squirrels or whatever.
In fact, it is. Well, not Detroit, but Japanese, Korean, and European car mfrs are opening plants in the USA (mostly the South) faster than the Big Three close them.
The problem is not the USA, not really. The problem is the culture of entitlement that the automotive cartel fostered in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. They could charge whatever they wanted for cars, since they were about the only game in town (back then, if you wanted an import, it was a Rolls or a Ferrari, and at that point you don't care about price anyway). They made up for this by giving obscene benefits packages for employees, and in the 70s when Japanese imports started to outdo in price and efficiency, they stupidly agreed to even more boneheaded benefits packages for people who got laid off.
If they had the balls to say to the UAW, "You know what? From now on, you're getting fair wages for the work you do for us and only current employees get benefits," they wouldn't be so hard up. But there's too much of a culture of failure among management, and the UAW would throw a hissy-fit strike if they tried it.
It really boils down to the need for nationalized healthcare. If we had that, this whole problem wouldn't exist.
I've been saying this for years. Identity theft, like intellectual property theft, doesn't actually occur. What happens is financial-services fraud, to take advantage of my name and fiscal responsibility to get cash. At no point does anything that properly belongs to me ever get taken, or even leveraged. What gets leveraged are things like Social Security Number (property of the US government) and Credit Rating/Credit Score (property of the various agencies that compile them). I don't get tricked into anything, the bank gets tricked.
The problem is, if you call it 'fraud' then the defrauded entity is on the hook, and that entity gives and lends tons of money to politicians, lawyers, and judges. If you call it 'identity theft,' then it seems more reasonable to blame the person whose name was forged, but (and this is important so it's gonna be in all caps) THE PERSON WHOSE ID IS STOLEN IS NOT THE VICTIM. The bank is, and the whole process from start to finish ought to be the bank's problem.
If we had more strict laws on consumer data protection, this shit wouldn't happen.
I miss those stupid walk-around games. They were.... different, if frustrating.
I'll one up you, I actually use a hybrid early D&D/AD&D 1e system (I also ditched a bunch of rules just to reduce book-keeping). The main thing I like about the original D&D is rules is that they were way, way, way less stat-focused. +1 bonuses started at 13 and maxed out with +3 at 18. No clerics starting out with three times as many spells, no monstrous dwarf fighters with 40hp at fourth level, and consequently no need for the ridiculously elaborate character-rolling rules to make sure everyone gets a couple of decent stats. If you're a fighter with 13 strength, that's not so bad, you're only two points of damage per blow behind someone with an 18 (as opposed to being six points behind someone with 18/00).
What I don't think WotC has figured, and I know TSR never figured it out, is that less is usually more when it comes to gameplay. Having tables to roll up monsters and treasure is great for days when you don't feel like doing a lot of planning, but when it comes to moment of tension like combat or disarming traps, more die rolls and table look-ups mean less excitement and fun.
KISS, guys. KISS
I agree: differential calculus was the last non-obvious thing mathematicians came up with.
What's more, there are prizes for things like that. The reward for coming up with new abstract ideas is a whole mess of money and junkets from award-granting institutions. Clay Mathematics Institute Awards, Nobel Prizes, MacArthur Grants, and even cushy research Professorships all serve as a payoff for these kinds of things. You don't need patents on top off that.