No; well, there are 13-year-olds in my family, but that's neither here nor there.
scratch that, eh you're a bad shill for child labor.
Au contraire; I think the main reason they code so well is it's done out of love rather than for material gain - and there are no deadlines or project management in their way.
Sure, a young kid can write some novel little things, but serious software? No. It does in fact take teams of people do to that - in the OSS world or corporate world (or as often is the case, a mix of the two.)
No it doesn't. Any piece of software actually large enough to need a team (which is a far far smaller number than the number which are generally written by team) should be separated into smaller components. A single good coder beats a team - of any size - every time; I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a kid write a superior replacement for something that took a major corp. six months in one 36-hour shot.
Generally speaking, 13 year old boys don't do much on the Internet except beg for shit, yell at shit, and talk shit. Lots of shit is involved.
95% of everything is shit. Yes, a lot of 13 year olds are doing shit, but they aren't the ones who are writing and releasing code.
It's not limited to 13 year olds, but it sure is true for many 1st person shooter type games. I used to enjoy playing games like CS and stuff with my friend but we both eventually got tired of the little kiddies ruining every game.
You'd be surprised how many of those "kiddies" are actually in their 20s or worse.
Try and remember how you were when you were 13. I've noticed a strong tendency for annoying 13 year olds to write damn good code. They're idealistic, trying to prove themselves, and don't have anything better to do; dealing with a little language silliness is a small price to pay.
Seriously, I'd trust code written by 13 year olds a lot more than that written by major companies.
I found that running DOS on a laptop actually increased the battery life, because the hard drive span down completely and was never used - it's a lot easier to run DOS entirely from memory than anything else.
I've been doing functional programming for years; I'm not arguing against functional programming, but against Haskell and similar languages. Yes, no one paradigm is perfect - which is why a multi-paradigm language with support for both OO and functional programming, along with the ability to do without either of them when you don't need it, is better. Take a closer look at modern languages like Python or Ruby - there's a lot of support for functional programming there, if you need it, but it's not thrust in your face if you don't want to use it.
Oh, I "get" it all right. Don't get me wrong, Haskell is a very good language - possibly the best one around currently - for doing new computer science in. It's just that less than 1% of any given program will be new computer science. Most of the code you write isn't doing actual computation, it's interfacing - with the OS, with libraries, with other programs, or with the user - and Haskell isn't very good at it. Consider a problem I'm currently grappling with - converting "hard", "burned-in" video subtitles to "soft" programmed ones. If I was doing this from scratch, in a world where nothing of the sort had been done before, Haskell might well be the best language to do it in. But I'm not - decoding video is a solved problem. Detecting where things have been superposed on a video is a mostly-solved problem. OCR is a mostly-solved problem. Putting a nice GUI and a web frontend on this are definitely solved problems. Very little of the program I eventually come out with will be dealing with the actual gruntwork, mostly it's a question of connecting the solutions to already-solved problems together to form a solution to a problem which hasn't (as far as I know) yet been solved. And Haskell is worse for that 90%, and this vastly outweighs being any better on the perhaps 10% that is the core of the problem.
Yes, it can play DVDs without any extra codecs. I've yet to see a DVD VLC couldn't play (of course, I've only played a couple of hundred different DVDs in it).
It can't handle the save system in the DVD version of the visual novel Phantom of Inferno. (But you are right in general; this fact is a bug in its dvd navigation support).
I'm not convinced VLC is actually illegal. I'd like someone to show proof that bundling a proprietary codec in your open source software is actually a violation of the TOS for that codec. I think if it were illegal, Quicktime, RealMedia, or one of the proprietary video player makers would have sued them already.
It's illegal based on some rather dubious patents. At the moment the cost/benefit isn't worth suing over - it's not like videolan have a lot of money, and if their patents were ruled invalid their whole business would collapse. You can bet that if someone started making serious money out of it they would sue, and I believe this has happened before.
The DVD stuff, on the other hand, is clearly illegal in the USA, based on the good ol' DeCSS case. You'll notice that VLC isn't hosted in or distributed from the US.
This would take the form of vegetation mass (not increasing) or a coal seam somehow forming underneath all the tree roots (not observed).
How'd the coal we're burning now get formed in the first place? Since we're going through millions of years' worth so quickly, obviously coal doesn't form very fast and we wouldn't observe a whole lot of it being made, but it's gotta happen eventually.
The drive makers haven't paid for a license for the drive; rather they pay a software maker for a software player, who have paid for a license for their player. So MS would have to ship their own player and play the license fee, or take a free player and pay the license fee, and as someone else pointed out they would probably get into competition trouble either way (I really hope MS ceases to be a monopoly, not so much because it causes me trouble as it would mean they could start making their OS good again, but that's a separate argument)
You and me might think that licenses should be per-hardware-drive, but the CSSLA doesn't do things that way (and there's no way to compel it to; RAND licensing is required, but they've chosen to do it at the per-software-player level, which isn't especially unreasonable).
The three you can only pick two of are better, faster and cheaper. The point of the program is that given that even the best probes have quite a high failure rate, it's not worth trying to engineer everything to be "perfect"; it's better to send three cheap probes and accept that one of them will fail than one expensive probe that has a substantial chance of failing and losing everything.
Because the basic premise of liberal economic policy is that it's OK to abridge the rights of the individual (to a certain extent) for the good of society. So the economic left naturally favours gun control, environmentalist legislation, socialized healthcare etc.
What's a lot more paradoxical is why the economic right is socially restrictive - you'd expect the right to be in favour of drug legalization, anti-censorship, lowering the age of consent etc.
I call FUD. The Hackage databasehas literally hundreds of libraries sat there ready for you to use.
Sure, but how many of them actually work? How many have a big enough userbase that you can be confident? And even if I give you that, it's still an order of magnitude fewer than you'd get with more popular languages. Last time I looked I couldn't find one that would let me *send an email*; ended up doing it myself with raw sockets. That particular case may have been fixed now, but the point remains: there are many common, easy tasks that should be one call into a library, but aren't, because the haskell users are mostly academics who have no need to do that.
And if you really need something that isn't there, the FFI is mature, and very easy to use.
Please. No such automatic interface is reliable enough to depend on - they always break on the one function you particularly need. The FFI is not a real solution.
The problem with Haskell is that it's a superb language for solving the sort of problems its designers foresaw. Unfortunately it makes it almost impossible to do things they didn't expect; you're too trapped in the rigours of the Haskell way of doing things.
A separate, but related problem is that the community doesn't seem interested in practical use of it - there aren't lots of bindings to libraries to make easy things easy. Heck, even doing i/o at all isn't really supported very well. Functional programming is very good for the pure computer science part of programming, but unfortunately that's going to make up less than half of any given program. You also need to be able to interface.
So I think the quote in the summary is right: people won't be adopting Haskell or similar pure-functional languages any time soon. What will happen is the next generation of dynamic languages will adopt the best features from functional programming; we've seen that happen already in python and ruby, and it'll happen again. And people will start using them there.
Of course, how much of the IRA's actions were funded by hollywood profits (donated by rich Irish-Americans with a somewhat romanticised view of their activities) is rarely brought up.
That's not the way it happened. It wasn't the Mozilla contact, it was debian's own people, pointing out that their deal with mozilla was against debian principles - debian does not allow itself to accept licenses which are specific to debian, believing this could lead to it distributing non-free stuff. (After all, that agreement meant that a user couldn't take debian, call it something else, and distribute it as a new distro, because they wouldn't have that agreement for the mozilla trademarks).
Does too violate the spirit of the GPL. The point is that the main program should be GPL as well; if they wanted it to behave the way you describe, it would have been LGPL-licensed.
Not GNU HURD, that's the name for the kernel specifically, but GNU. And you'll find some support for that; while I won't argue with what people call it, it's hard to deny that on a technical level the system is at this point GNU, and Linux has become part of GNU.
And is there any piece of application software that takes more time to update than iTunes?
I guess you're not one of the lucky folks like I am where Acrobat Reader spends an hour and a half "optimizing" its installer. (Or you did the sensible thing and upgraded to version 3.0)
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No; well, there are 13-year-olds in my family, but that's neither here nor there.
scratch that, eh you're a bad shill for child labor.
Au contraire; I think the main reason they code so well is it's done out of love rather than for material gain - and there are no deadlines or project management in their way.
You say that like there's a difference.
No it doesn't. Any piece of software actually large enough to need a team (which is a far far smaller number than the number which are generally written by team) should be separated into smaller components. A single good coder beats a team - of any size - every time; I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a kid write a superior replacement for something that took a major corp. six months in one 36-hour shot.
Generally speaking, 13 year old boys don't do much on the Internet except beg for shit, yell at shit, and talk shit. Lots of shit is involved.
95% of everything is shit. Yes, a lot of 13 year olds are doing shit, but they aren't the ones who are writing and releasing code.
It's not limited to 13 year olds, but it sure is true for many 1st person shooter type games. I used to enjoy playing games like CS and stuff with my friend but we both eventually got tired of the little kiddies ruining every game.
You'd be surprised how many of those "kiddies" are actually in their 20s or worse.
Seriously, I'd trust code written by 13 year olds a lot more than that written by major companies.
I found that running DOS on a laptop actually increased the battery life, because the hard drive span down completely and was never used - it's a lot easier to run DOS entirely from memory than anything else.
What's with all the swearing and insults? Guess I must've hit too close to home.
I've been doing functional programming for years; I'm not arguing against functional programming, but against Haskell and similar languages. Yes, no one paradigm is perfect - which is why a multi-paradigm language with support for both OO and functional programming, along with the ability to do without either of them when you don't need it, is better. Take a closer look at modern languages like Python or Ruby - there's a lot of support for functional programming there, if you need it, but it's not thrust in your face if you don't want to use it.
Oh, I "get" it all right. Don't get me wrong, Haskell is a very good language - possibly the best one around currently - for doing new computer science in. It's just that less than 1% of any given program will be new computer science. Most of the code you write isn't doing actual computation, it's interfacing - with the OS, with libraries, with other programs, or with the user - and Haskell isn't very good at it. Consider a problem I'm currently grappling with - converting "hard", "burned-in" video subtitles to "soft" programmed ones. If I was doing this from scratch, in a world where nothing of the sort had been done before, Haskell might well be the best language to do it in. But I'm not - decoding video is a solved problem. Detecting where things have been superposed on a video is a mostly-solved problem. OCR is a mostly-solved problem. Putting a nice GUI and a web frontend on this are definitely solved problems. Very little of the program I eventually come out with will be dealing with the actual gruntwork, mostly it's a question of connecting the solutions to already-solved problems together to form a solution to a problem which hasn't (as far as I know) yet been solved. And Haskell is worse for that 90%, and this vastly outweighs being any better on the perhaps 10% that is the core of the problem.
It can't handle the save system in the DVD version of the visual novel Phantom of Inferno. (But you are right in general; this fact is a bug in its dvd navigation support).
I'm not convinced VLC is actually illegal. I'd like someone to show proof that bundling a proprietary codec in your open source software is actually a violation of the TOS for that codec. I think if it were illegal, Quicktime, RealMedia, or one of the proprietary video player makers would have sued them already.
It's illegal based on some rather dubious patents. At the moment the cost/benefit isn't worth suing over - it's not like videolan have a lot of money, and if their patents were ruled invalid their whole business would collapse. You can bet that if someone started making serious money out of it they would sue, and I believe this has happened before.
The DVD stuff, on the other hand, is clearly illegal in the USA, based on the good ol' DeCSS case. You'll notice that VLC isn't hosted in or distributed from the US.
How'd the coal we're burning now get formed in the first place? Since we're going through millions of years' worth so quickly, obviously coal doesn't form very fast and we wouldn't observe a whole lot of it being made, but it's gotta happen eventually.
You and me might think that licenses should be per-hardware-drive, but the CSSLA doesn't do things that way (and there's no way to compel it to; RAND licensing is required, but they've chosen to do it at the per-software-player level, which isn't especially unreasonable).
The three you can only pick two of are better, faster and cheaper. The point of the program is that given that even the best probes have quite a high failure rate, it's not worth trying to engineer everything to be "perfect"; it's better to send three cheap probes and accept that one of them will fail than one expensive probe that has a substantial chance of failing and losing everything.
What's a lot more paradoxical is why the economic right is socially restrictive - you'd expect the right to be in favour of drug legalization, anti-censorship, lowering the age of consent etc.
Sure, but how many of them actually work? How many have a big enough userbase that you can be confident? And even if I give you that, it's still an order of magnitude fewer than you'd get with more popular languages. Last time I looked I couldn't find one that would let me *send an email*; ended up doing it myself with raw sockets. That particular case may have been fixed now, but the point remains: there are many common, easy tasks that should be one call into a library, but aren't, because the haskell users are mostly academics who have no need to do that.
And if you really need something that isn't there, the FFI is mature, and very easy to use.
Please. No such automatic interface is reliable enough to depend on - they always break on the one function you particularly need. The FFI is not a real solution.
A separate, but related problem is that the community doesn't seem interested in practical use of it - there aren't lots of bindings to libraries to make easy things easy. Heck, even doing i/o at all isn't really supported very well. Functional programming is very good for the pure computer science part of programming, but unfortunately that's going to make up less than half of any given program. You also need to be able to interface.
So I think the quote in the summary is right: people won't be adopting Haskell or similar pure-functional languages any time soon. What will happen is the next generation of dynamic languages will adopt the best features from functional programming; we've seen that happen already in python and ruby, and it'll happen again. And people will start using them there.
when opera mobile is already out there and working fantastically? I very much doubt firefox will get its memory usage down enough to compete.
Gentoo - it's that little bit more up to date that makes all the difference. Working beautifully on my P45 motherboard right here.
Some of us like a game that actually involves skill in play, rather than just rolling the dice enough times. I'm sorry if that's too elitist for you.
Of course, how much of the IRA's actions were funded by hollywood profits (donated by rich Irish-Americans with a somewhat romanticised view of their activities) is rarely brought up.
We shouldn't pat ourselves on the back too much; there are places with better standards than here.
That's not the way it happened. It wasn't the Mozilla contact, it was debian's own people, pointing out that their deal with mozilla was against debian principles - debian does not allow itself to accept licenses which are specific to debian, believing this could lead to it distributing non-free stuff. (After all, that agreement meant that a user couldn't take debian, call it something else, and distribute it as a new distro, because they wouldn't have that agreement for the mozilla trademarks).
Does too violate the spirit of the GPL. The point is that the main program should be GPL as well; if they wanted it to behave the way you describe, it would have been LGPL-licensed.
Not GNU HURD, that's the name for the kernel specifically, but GNU. And you'll find some support for that; while I won't argue with what people call it, it's hard to deny that on a technical level the system is at this point GNU, and Linux has become part of GNU.
It's not the booting, you need to disable the "legacy USB device emulation" or similar option.
I guess you're not one of the lucky folks like I am where Acrobat Reader spends an hour and a half "optimizing" its installer. (Or you did the sensible thing and upgraded to version 3.0)