Those new, shiny languages like java and C# are often promoted as something magical that absolve developers entirely of memory management issues.
The truth is that garbage collection are tuned based on heuristics that are not necessarily adapted to the workload of your particular program. But since it's designed and sold as a system to take memory management out of your hands, you can be left clueless as to what the fuck happens, and end up with problems even more complicated and obscure to solve than when you do manual or semi-manual memoetry management and something leaks.
Give me C++ RAII any time along with reference counting smart pointers and I'm happy. Sure, circular references are a problem, but some people (among which Mr. Boehm) are working to include the concept of litter collection in the next C++ standard (basically a garbage collector that could be ran at a very low frequency and only intended to pick up the trash left by the smart pointers, ie circular references)
Doesn't the US fingerprint foreigners too? I know I was fingerprinted a couple years ago when I came for vacation, but I don't know if it's systematic or if every state does it.
I'm used to the/proc/config.gz thing because this way I know I can avoid keeping my old kernel sources around without worrying about backing up the config.
Wait, why am I even responding to a guy who's getting his panties in a bunch over/proc/config.gz? I wasn't aware this was such a controversial issue.
The difference lies in the Qt4 licensing versus Qt3. Qt3 was available with a GPL license only for X11, so the previous effort to port KDE to windows had to reimplement a GPL version of Qt for win32 from scratch, which is quite a big undertaking.
Qt4 is available under the GPL for every platform, so that big roadblock is cleared. And the KDE project is officially supporting and ecouraging the win32 port this time. Also, some other things like KDE switching to a much nicer and cross platform build system than autoconf/automake (cmake) probably helps a lot too.
The reason a port is useful is because there are some very good applications in KDE that really deserve more exposure. And I suspect there are quite a few people like me who have to use windows at work and are frustrated to be unable to use some of those nice KDE apps at work.
Even if you're not building linux from scratch, you are allowed to compile your own kernel you know. It most likely won't kill you or make your machine burn in flames, just avoid to do it on for instance a production server.
But do keep a backup of your current kernel that you can easily access by editing the path when booting in grub (or even create a grub menu entry for it), so if your new kernel fails for some reason or another you can still boot and fix it without using a live cd.
As for the kernel configuration, if you're lucky your distro has enabled/proc/config.gz. In that case you can just copy the file over into/usr/src/linux, unpack it, rename it.config. You can then tweak the settings using make menuconfig or make xconfig.
Yeah, font kerning was a big issue in koffice 1.x - and from what little research I did, the issue was in Qt so I figure they couldn't solve it easily without writing their own text renderer from scratch, and since Qt4 was around the corner, they decided to skip that.
I look forward to koffice 2.0 - I don't need to produce text based documents often, but when I do, I could really do without having to use OOo.
There are people who haven't read the bible, and are not inclined to, you know.
There is no need to read the bible to make fun of a religion worshipping a naked guy affixed to a torture device and hypocrit enough to preach "tolerance" while being against gays, people who like to fuck for fun and people who don't share the same beliefs.
I've seen that in the tutorial part of the game, yes.
However, after that it was back to the beaten-to-death formula: a elevation-map based terrain with the very occasional cave, and mobs spawning at random and standing there, attacking you when you get within some fixed radius from them.
The only slightly original thing is that instead of just popping in existence out of thin air, they have this (badly looking) animation where a ship shows up and the guys drop from it.
Add the also beaten-to-death "go collect 5 mutant bulls balls" kind of quests and you get a game that really looks like a dead horse.
The whole "just works" thing is really just a myth in the windows/microsoft world.
I routinely run into difficult to disgnose problems without even trying. I currently work at a company where about no one has administrator rights on their machines, most of them running xp. The amount of small and less small issues not running as administrator brings. For instance, if you open a VB6 project that has references to some unregistered ocx, it tries to registers them automatically. But as you're not running as administrator, it fails - and not quite gracefully, it just crashes and you have absolutely no clue as to why.
I'm also forced to use ie7, and oh boy, sloppy doesn't even begin to describe it. It's slow, the interface has numerous issues, and it crashes on me at least a couple times every day. I honestly did expect it not to be quite as bad as I thought it'd be, but I was mistaken.
Oh, and microsoft in their deep wisdom, decided that if you buy visual studio in france, you can only run it in french. But the translations, especially of the msdn, are terrible and misleading. And of course, every error message and such are translated (poorly as well), so it completly defeats using google to find out more information about any puzzling error condition you may come accross.
And I'm not even going to detail into all the windows explorer performance and random hanging issues I always experienced on every single windows machine I ever used - I think I have kill it and restart it at least once every day.
Even shutting down windows is a painful process. They obviously never heard of timeouts, so you have to quit everything manually. And sometimes it just closes everything and hangs on the empty desktop background, and you have to turn off your pc manually.
What I'm getting at is that there is not one single microsoft software that I use daily that don't have huge flaws. It feels like all they ever churn out is utter and complete shit, which is inexcusable in regard to the fact that many free products don't have nearly as many issues as their paid for (and often quite expensive) stuff.
And I hate the "it just works" argument, because my daily experience of microsoft products for the past 8 years says the opposite. The correct argument would be "people are used to the many quirks of windows, and not of the linux ones". But really, if you are used to use linux to do everything, switching to windows is horribly painful - probably more than switching from windows to linux.
The day apple have 90% of the market and people have to buy macs not out of personnal choice but because most of the apps needed by every business run only on them, then yes, they should be held to the same rules.
Currently however, windows is the only os that should be unbundled because it's the one that has a monopoly.
Replace the "no suitable boot device found" console based message with a graphical screen explaining the stuff (something like "congratulation on your new purchase, before you can use your computer you need to install an operating system on it")
Yes, they will have to buy an OS along with the computer - but it would be the vendor's job to sell them one, just like it's their job to make sure they sell them a mouse and a keyboard.
Of course, also figure out a way to simplify the os installation. perhaps come up with a standard layout for a driver cd that would contain drivers for all major OSes and would be asked for during the OS installation.
This stuff can certainly be made fool proof enough to become a simple installation formality no more complicated than setting up a TV or a tuner.
All smileys suck, even though I agree that the graphic ones turned it into suckage of epic proportions.
When I post something meant as being humorous, if people understand it as humor then all is fine. If they fail to see it as humor, get offended and overreact, it's even funnier plus you get to mock them for lacking humor and getting angry over some post on the internets.
By doing that, you kind of throw out the baby with the bathwater: a good programmer who already has some experience with several other language/frameworks can pick up something like python pretty quickly, the nitty gritty syntax details as well as the overall philosophy of the language and the scope of the associated framework (aka knowing that if you need to do something, there's probably already a module that implements it)
Of course, someone calling themselves "experts" are probably not, most of the time. I'd think that people really experienced in a technology would just have to mention how long they worked with it.
Even if they don't open up the older cards, it won't matter anymore in a few years - as long as they stay commited to open up the specs for all their new cards.
As far as I'm concerned, unless nvidia follows my next graphic card will be an AMD.
This is thing that the US love so much, you know - free market. China can manufacture things more competitively, so they get the jobs. Although it's more because of the fact that their money and cost of life is so low compared to the western world than because they are more efficient, I think.
But anyway, you can't expect free market to be free only insofar as it doesn't deprive Americans of jobs, it's a global thing. If company from country A can provide a service for much cheaper than company from country B, then company from country A gets the contracts. Those jobs are not "yours" (as in american's jobs), those are the jobs of whoever can do it the cheapest. You are not entitled to them.
Don't like it? Tough luck, you don't get to reap the benefits of the free market without suffering its downsides as well.
Yeah, the deskstar are infamous from this, but I do believe that the recent generations are pretty reliable.
My previous harddisk was a deskstar 250GB. When I first installed it, I managed to put it in such a way that one of the small metallic grooves of the case lodged itself in the small ridge between the body of the hard disk and the covering plate, which tore an almost one centimeter hole in the join, which rather messily broke up in small rubber crumbs (some of which probably got inside).
I patched it up with some rubber paste, and the hard disk worked flawlessly for two years. The only reason it finally broke is that I got a new PC and amazingly, I was dumb enough to reiterate the same installation blunder, and this time a big section of the join went inside and was probably touching the platters.
More generally, which hard disk brand to avoid and which one to favor change at each hard disk generation. This is why I now just let the vendor advise me when I buy one, they know the return rates of the various brands and thus know which one are good and bad at a given point in time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, since when actual numbers were of any use? Personal hunches and hype are enough.
Does anyone have any reliable number on second life anyway?
The official ones are grossly inflated because they count free trial accounts that were only ever used once.
I strngly suspect that despite the hype there are really not many people playing it.
Those new, shiny languages like java and C# are often promoted as something magical that absolve developers entirely of memory management issues.
The truth is that garbage collection are tuned based on heuristics that are not necessarily adapted to the workload of your particular program. But since it's designed and sold as a system to take memory management out of your hands, you can be left clueless as to what the fuck happens, and end up with problems even more complicated and obscure to solve than when you do manual or semi-manual memoetry management and something leaks.
Give me C++ RAII any time along with reference counting smart pointers and I'm happy. Sure, circular references are a problem, but some people (among which Mr. Boehm) are working to include the concept of litter collection in the next C++ standard (basically a garbage collector that could be ran at a very low frequency and only intended to pick up the trash left by the smart pointers, ie circular references)
Doesn't the US fingerprint foreigners too? I know I was fingerprinted a couple years ago when I came for vacation, but I don't know if it's systematic or if every state does it.
You mean, something like that: http://edu.kde.org/ ?
Bleh.
That goddamn stinger minigun would get even more annoying.
I'm used to the /proc/config.gz thing because this way I know I can avoid keeping my old kernel sources around without worrying about backing up the config.
/proc/config.gz? I wasn't aware this was such a controversial issue.
Wait, why am I even responding to a guy who's getting his panties in a bunch over
Did the source code for Thunderbird evaporate when those two developers left or something?
The difference lies in the Qt4 licensing versus Qt3.
Qt3 was available with a GPL license only for X11, so the previous effort to port KDE to windows had to reimplement a GPL version of Qt for win32 from scratch, which is quite a big undertaking.
Qt4 is available under the GPL for every platform, so that big roadblock is cleared. And the KDE project is officially supporting and ecouraging the win32 port this time.
Also, some other things like KDE switching to a much nicer and cross platform build system than autoconf/automake (cmake) probably helps a lot too.
The reason a port is useful is because there are some very good applications in KDE that really deserve more exposure. And I suspect there are quite a few people like me who have to use windows at work and are frustrated to be unable to use some of those nice KDE apps at work.
Even if you're not building linux from scratch, you are allowed to compile your own kernel you know. It most likely won't kill you or make your machine burn in flames, just avoid to do it on for instance a production server.
/proc/config.gz. In that case you can just copy the file over into /usr/src/linux, unpack it, rename it .config. You can then tweak the settings using make menuconfig or make xconfig.
But do keep a backup of your current kernel that you can easily access by editing the path when booting in grub (or even create a grub menu entry for it), so if your new kernel fails for some reason or another you can still boot and fix it without using a live cd.
As for the kernel configuration, if you're lucky your distro has enabled
Yeah, font kerning was a big issue in koffice 1.x - and from what little research I did, the issue was in Qt so I figure they couldn't solve it easily without writing their own text renderer from scratch, and since Qt4 was around the corner, they decided to skip that.
I look forward to koffice 2.0 - I don't need to produce text based documents often, but when I do, I could really do without having to use OOo.
There are people who haven't read the bible, and are not inclined to, you know.
There is no need to read the bible to make fun of a religion worshipping a naked guy affixed to a torture device and hypocrit enough to preach "tolerance" while being against gays, people who like to fuck for fun and people who don't share the same beliefs.
I've seen that in the tutorial part of the game, yes.
However, after that it was back to the beaten-to-death formula: a elevation-map based terrain with the very occasional cave, and mobs spawning at random and standing there, attacking you when you get within some fixed radius from them.
The only slightly original thing is that instead of just popping in existence out of thin air, they have this (badly looking) animation where a ship shows up and the guys drop from it.
Add the also beaten-to-death "go collect 5 mutant bulls balls" kind of quests and you get a game that really looks like a dead horse.
The whole "just works" thing is really just a myth in the windows/microsoft world.
I routinely run into difficult to disgnose problems without even trying. I currently work at a company where about no one has administrator rights on their machines, most of them running xp.
The amount of small and less small issues not running as administrator brings. For instance, if you open a VB6 project that has references to some unregistered ocx, it tries to registers them automatically. But as you're not running as administrator, it fails - and not quite gracefully, it just crashes and you have absolutely no clue as to why.
I'm also forced to use ie7, and oh boy, sloppy doesn't even begin to describe it. It's slow, the interface has numerous issues, and it crashes on me at least a couple times every day. I honestly did expect it not to be quite as bad as I thought it'd be, but I was mistaken.
Oh, and microsoft in their deep wisdom, decided that if you buy visual studio in france, you can only run it in french. But the translations, especially of the msdn, are terrible and misleading. And of course, every error message and such are translated (poorly as well), so it completly defeats using google to find out more information about any puzzling error condition you may come accross.
And I'm not even going to detail into all the windows explorer performance and random hanging issues I always experienced on every single windows machine I ever used - I think I have kill it and restart it at least once every day.
Even shutting down windows is a painful process. They obviously never heard of timeouts, so you have to quit everything manually. And sometimes it just closes everything and hangs on the empty desktop background, and you have to turn off your pc manually.
What I'm getting at is that there is not one single microsoft software that I use daily that don't have huge flaws. It feels like all they ever churn out is utter and complete shit, which is inexcusable in regard to the fact that many free products don't have nearly as many issues as their paid for (and often quite expensive) stuff.
And I hate the "it just works" argument, because my daily experience of microsoft products for the past 8 years says the opposite. The correct argument would be "people are used to the many quirks of windows, and not of the linux ones". But really, if you are used to use linux to do everything, switching to windows is horribly painful - probably more than switching from windows to linux.
The day apple have 90% of the market and people have to buy macs not out of personnal choice but because most of the apps needed by every business run only on them, then yes, they should be held to the same rules.
Currently however, windows is the only os that should be unbundled because it's the one that has a monopoly.
Replace the "no suitable boot device found" console based message with a graphical screen explaining the stuff (something like "congratulation on your new purchase, before you can use your computer you need to install an operating system on it")
Yes, they will have to buy an OS along with the computer - but it would be the vendor's job to sell them one, just like it's their job to make sure they sell them a mouse and a keyboard.
Of course, also figure out a way to simplify the os installation. perhaps come up with a standard layout for a driver cd that would contain drivers for all major OSes and would be asked for during the OS installation.
This stuff can certainly be made fool proof enough to become a simple installation formality no more complicated than setting up a TV or a tuner.
All smileys suck, even though I agree that the graphic ones turned it into suckage of epic proportions.
When I post something meant as being humorous, if people understand it as humor then all is fine. If they fail to see it as humor, get offended and overreact, it's even funnier plus you get to mock them for lacking humor and getting angry over some post on the internets.
Then again, it might be my inner troll speaking.
See subject.
The linux development model is built on forking anyway.
Trying to fork linux is like trying to burn fire.
Maybe it's only the case if you change it yourself instead of having a Peugeot agreed service shop install it for you?
I believe that's how it work with Renault, at least.
By doing that, you kind of throw out the baby with the bathwater: a good programmer who already has some experience with several other language/frameworks can pick up something like python pretty quickly, the nitty gritty syntax details as well as the overall philosophy of the language and the scope of the associated framework (aka knowing that if you need to do something, there's probably already a module that implements it)
Of course, someone calling themselves "experts" are probably not, most of the time. I'd think that people really experienced in a technology would just have to mention how long they worked with it.
I'd rather have the range/direction to Sarah Connor myself.
Even if they don't open up the older cards, it won't matter anymore in a few years - as long as they stay commited to open up the specs for all their new cards.
As far as I'm concerned, unless nvidia follows my next graphic card will be an AMD.
This is thing that the US love so much, you know - free market. China can manufacture things more competitively, so they get the jobs. Although it's more because of the fact that their money and cost of life is so low compared to the western world than because they are more efficient, I think.
But anyway, you can't expect free market to be free only insofar as it doesn't deprive Americans of jobs, it's a global thing. If company from country A can provide a service for much cheaper than company from country B, then company from country A gets the contracts. Those jobs are not "yours" (as in american's jobs), those are the jobs of whoever can do it the cheapest. You are not entitled to them.
Don't like it? Tough luck, you don't get to reap the benefits of the free market without suffering its downsides as well.
Yeah, the deskstar are infamous from this, but I do believe that the recent generations are pretty reliable.
My previous harddisk was a deskstar 250GB. When I first installed it, I managed to put it in such a way that one of the small metallic grooves of the case lodged itself in the small ridge between the body of the hard disk and the covering plate, which tore an almost one centimeter hole in the join, which rather messily broke up in small rubber crumbs (some of which probably got inside).
I patched it up with some rubber paste, and the hard disk worked flawlessly for two years. The only reason it finally broke is that I got a new PC and amazingly, I was dumb enough to reiterate the same installation blunder, and this time a big section of the join went inside and was probably touching the platters.
More generally, which hard disk brand to avoid and which one to favor change at each hard disk generation. This is why I now just let the vendor advise me when I buy one, they know the return rates of the various brands and thus know which one are good and bad at a given point in time.
You can use eclipse/mingw, code::blocks, etc.
Alternatives are out there if you take the effort of using google.
Your apathetic comment demonstrates what I meant by "market inertia".