You may recall that the DMCA is only effective in the States... I'm sure that the authors of mplayer would be up shit creek for distributing those windows codecs otherwise.
Console games don't have patches though, which makes that 'no bug' bar quite a bit higher, than say Everquest or Anarchy Online (which, from what I've heard, might as well have been a development release)
IME, most of the bugs in console games have to do with AI.
I hate to break this to you, but welcome to the world of CAPITALISM.
The freedom to speak and to operate a private business also allows the freedom to sell whatever legal product you feel like to whatever nation. Of course, unless they are under sanctions. The US Private Sector is not a picky host.
Do you blame General Dynamics, makers of missles, artillery, and other defense goodness for the lives that are taken when the US uses them? I doubt it. Or for a matter of fact Microsoft, whose Windows NT powers US Navy submarines, that potentially can be used to destroy lives as well? I'm willing to bet you're a smarter person than to suggest that the US hasn't used these vehicles for unethical purposes.
I really do agree with your ideal, however, it is just an ideal. Modern Capitalism is a very ethically-void business model, and doubtful to change anytime soon.
Not quite. Technically it's what is called 'pejorative', meaning that it's used by many for one definition when it's technically *not* that definition. So, basically a widespread form of transposed slang.
It doesn't make it any less 'english', but it doesn't make it any more the definition, either.
AWT was actually concieved and developed within a month's time, to add extra (and obviously very useful in the java world nowadays) functionality as a GUI. Java was not originally intended to do GUI apps.
Swing is *really* nice when it comes to cross platform work. It's a very full featured widget set, and writing your own custom widgets for it is very easy, listeners and all.
And of course, making it work in a 'native' gui ocntext really amounts to what Swing theme you use.. There are generally platform-specific themes in the JRE's for said platform.
If python really wants it's own GUI abstraction layer, they should really write a real toolkit that doesn't piggyback on the (mal)functionality of the overall GUI world out there.
If you look at the user-agent string for mozilla it *explicitly* states that it's IE 5.0 compliant.
Of course, the bigger problem now is that IE, as of 5.5 and 6.0, has removed support for netscape-style plugins, which is probably something that's going to make a lot of Internet-in-a-box companies like Compu$erve and AOL think twice before integrating it with their software.
That, and the fact that all of these systems only run on windows, which lets the user use IE if they want to anyways.
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
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· Score: 1
Use debian and the kpackage tool, and you won't have the problem.
Of course, this requires wading through the thousands of programs that are in the debian system, but it is what you're asking.
Re:this is neither healthy nor a sign of life
on
Loki Goes Postal
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· Score: 1
I think this stems from the fact that in the gaming world, PC games are at the bottom of the heap.
Games like Zelda 64 sell in the *millions*, where an outstanding selling game like diablo for the PC is proud to sell a million, period.
IMHO, the problem is the envelope that games 'have' to push to make it big in the PC market. Of course, this envelope leads to users purchasing more hardware, and less games, so only the 'big' games sell.
The guy who buys the $300 console has a good 2-3 years to just spend his money on GAMES. Of course, this doesn't even account for the disgustingly *HUGE* rental market which accounts for a good portion of these sales. As you may recall, PC software titles have a lot of laws surrounding them which restrict rentals (if not ban them outright, IANAL).
How much do you think people are going to spend to see DOOM 3 on their computer, not counting the price of software alone? Frankly, if it weren't for games, I have a nice k6-300 that works as a workstation rather well, it's gotten to a point where cutting-edge hardware just isn't required for the average user.
And for those who are 'out of the loop', a cutting-edge graphics card starts at around $250, a processor/mobo around $200 (if you buy AMD), and RAM around $70/256M DDR. If I bought my $300 console, I could get at least 6 games plus the console for that price.
Without a compiler, there would be no applications to run on the operating system. The fact is, is that someone, SOMEWHERE, has to have a compiler so that you can run your application.
Granted, I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that GNU/Linux should be called GNU/Linux. The basic toolset and libraries that are required run the system should be the reasons it's called GNU/Linux.
I think the major point here is that without the GNU toolset (just about everything in/bin and/sbin, and a good portion of/lib too), there would be no Linux OS, just a kernel. If someone decides to port the vast quanitity of FreeBSD tools to Linux, then I think that would make a bit more sense.
I have several systems that do not have XFree86, Samba, etc on the machines. All of them carry the basic GNU tools, regardless if they have a compiler or not.
Granted, I think that GNU/Linux would be better treated as a 'formal' name, and not expected to always be referred to as that name. eg, WinME vs Windows Millenium Edition.
www.refcards.(com|org) has a good XEmacs refcard, which is comparable in binds to GNU Emacs, in postscript.
EMACS IMHO is a *programmers* editor, which is why you don't find features like a locked wordwrap and postscript is not rendered, etc. The average person who uses word is not going to *want* to know that M-x font-lock-mode turns on the 'pretty colors'.
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN. WORST FLAMEBAIT ON /.
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
Do you teach your children that there are other religions, and that your children have the right to choose which one may be correct for them?
If you do, you're in the *very small* minority.
I'm all for religions which teach this, but the few that do really don't teach a religion themselves at all.. Which is why I'm waiting for quite some time before I bring my children to a church, I want them to make their own decision.
Regardless to the viewpoint, Expression of personal opinion is hardly flamebait.
the point is that you shouldn't be judging the company based on their single section that you can avoid easily by simply NOT VISITING it. the search engine and all the other directories in yahoo work fine.
i'm no porn hound myself, but frankly, i'm not goign to judge someone simply because they think that there's a overbearing market for something out there. my only concerns with businesses is that they play fair w/ competition and understand that I want to be treated like a customer.
porn and sex are the BIGGEST businesses on the net. does the business create the market or do the customers in a capitalist society? with rare exception, the customer does.
just to clear something up -- as your post definately displays, the problem that most non-christians have with christians is the simple fact that christians believe they're special and owed something, simply because in the past, that's how they've been treated.
Of course, in the name of religion and morality, mormons and islamic members of society aren't able to keep harems, rastafarians aren't able to smoke pot, and wiccans and other more 'occult' religions aren't able to engage in more.... eccentric practices because of your petty christian whining.
Of course, all of this is in the name of 'morality'. The things I listed above are very moral conventions for the religions they're associated with. And they say that jews have a penchant for complaining.
I don't want to sound like a devil's advocate here, but there are a lot of places in code where a debugger does little to any help...
Logic errors come to mind, which as I'm sure most of you know, are 99.9999% of software bugs. Sometimes a debugger catches an improperly derefed or typed pointer, but again, it doesn't catch things like
c=0; while(c1) { do_stuff(); };
Personally, being one of thwe many of zillions of CS students who never finished their degree program, I would like to see more 'guts' in CS classes. Ie, good uses of bit twiddling and assembler, compiler theory in the first 2 years. Algo's of course are normally taught in this period (if not indirectly through higher level math classes). Driver development would also be a big one at the top of hte list.
And, a class on reading and writing MAINTAINABLE source code. This is easily my #1 beef with working with other programs, the programmers name extern vars things like 'my_foo' or 'pointer', define macros with lowercase variables or don't dictate type expectations for more complex ones, which drives me nuts. If you tack in that I work with a lot of PERL as well, you can see where this goes. PERL is an elegant language in the right hands, but outright evil in the wrong ones.
Frankly, I choose the above because after these classes, there's not much of a way that you *can't* learn the rest of the conventions.
As for your algo hell, dunno, but we were taught stacks and sorts in our CS 111 class, as we were learning C. I found it to be very useful.
Oracle admins cost a bundle for a *reason*. They are well trained, know their software inside and out and if you watched one work on an Oracle system, it's amazing (like watching a greybeard work on a VMS machine).
And to plug oracle even more, you're not at the mercy of the OS -- Get me a copy of MSSQL for Unix and we'll talk, but if the NT server goes down, and you can't take it anymore, you have all sorts of other OS's to slap oracle on. This is true for most other RDBMS's as well.
However, it should really be noted that 90% of 'relational databases' are so unrelated it's really sick. We have actual relations at our work, and it all runs on MySQL, which is a pile of crap, IMHO.
No subselects, transactions, real locking. About the only thing that mysql does well is serialization and select statements, both of which I could do with flat file databases and a perl script, and probably get decent -enough- performance to be usable in an environment that uses mysql.
To put it simply, if you know what you're doing and have any experience with this stuff, go oracle or perhaps PostgreSQL, as the 7.x series is probably the best free database that you can get your hands on right now.
Stay FAR AWAY from Informix. I yet to see a slower RDBMS... Granted, it's stable... And if you work on lucent switches, you're probably going to have to deal with it anyways.
If you just need to store crap to belch out later on a webpage, sure, use mysql.
that's because banks have been using IBM since the dawn of time, and banks aren't exactly ones to move quickly when it comes to what stores their 'money'.
Find a bank, PERIOD, in the US, that doesn't use AS/400's somewhere along the line. (even those that outsource their storage and transactions to places like Alltel do this)
I think that most of us are really missing hte point here when it comes to the debian system, apt, the 'base', and what it really means.
Basically read debian-devel for a couple of days.
After you manage to wade through the 1000 or so messages you'll undoubtedly get, you'll realize that each and every day, there are a disgusting amount of people that are inspecting, patching, and checking on the latest whathaveyou for your packages.
Find a bug? Submit it -- if it's a core package, expect a response back in MINUTES. I found a bug in debconf, reported the bug to submit@bugs.debian.org, some correspondence with Joey Hess (the maintainer), about an hour later he was packaging a bugfix which I downloaded the next morning (the apt mirrors sync twice a day, IIRC).
Similar (repeated) fixes with the lilo package have come like this as well.
If you want to get at the changelogs for apt-getted packages, install the package 'apt-listchanges', which will show you what's going on before it's downloaded... Although, I think this is only in the unstable distribution.
Basically the system is slick and will only get better. Ironically, I was making this comment earlier today that in the end, Debian and Slackware will end up being the only dists left..
Before anyone trolls, note that Slack was one of the first major dists (after SLS and Ygg, RIP:) and still gathers a sizable userbase because of it's more BSD-like setup. I don't think it's going anywhere soon.
Slashdot Mirror
You may recall that the DMCA is only effective in the States... I'm sure that the authors of mplayer would be up shit creek for distributing those windows codecs otherwise.
:)
This is why debian has non-US servers
Heh, what you should be worried about are the kiddies who are going to 'Just DoS one more time'
Console games don't have patches though, which makes that 'no bug' bar quite a bit higher, than say Everquest or Anarchy Online (which, from what I've heard, might as well have been a development release)
IME, most of the bugs in console games have to do with AI.
I hate to break this to you, but welcome to the world of CAPITALISM.
The freedom to speak and to operate a private business also allows the freedom to sell whatever legal product you feel like to whatever nation. Of course, unless they are under sanctions. The US Private Sector is not a picky host.
Do you blame General Dynamics, makers of missles, artillery, and other defense goodness for the lives that are taken when the US uses them? I doubt it. Or for a matter of fact Microsoft, whose Windows NT powers US Navy submarines, that potentially can be used to destroy lives as well? I'm willing to bet you're a smarter person than to suggest that the US hasn't used these vehicles for unethical purposes.
I really do agree with your ideal, however, it is just an ideal. Modern Capitalism is a very ethically-void business model, and doubtful to change anytime soon.
Not quite. Technically it's what is called 'pejorative', meaning that it's used by many for one definition when it's technically *not* that definition. So, basically a widespread form of transposed slang.
It doesn't make it any less 'english', but it doesn't make it any more the definition, either.
AWT was actually concieved and developed within a month's time, to add extra (and obviously very useful in the java world nowadays) functionality as a GUI. Java was not originally intended to do GUI apps.
Swing is *really* nice when it comes to cross platform work. It's a very full featured widget set, and writing your own custom widgets for it is very easy, listeners and all.
And of course, making it work in a 'native' gui ocntext really amounts to what Swing theme you use.. There are generally platform-specific themes in the JRE's for said platform.
If python really wants it's own GUI abstraction layer, they should really write a real toolkit that doesn't piggyback on the (mal)functionality of the overall GUI world out there.
It's a fact, and if you want a good count, check out any server browser that counts players, and check Quake3 vs CS.. (or anything vs CS)
CS has on average at any time around 30,000 players online.
Quake3 *might* have 10,000... on a good day.
This is far from FUD, it's been fact for at least a good 6-12 months now.
If you look at the user-agent string for mozilla it *explicitly* states that it's IE 5.0 compliant.
Of course, the bigger problem now is that IE, as of 5.5 and 6.0, has removed support for netscape-style plugins, which is probably something that's going to make a lot of Internet-in-a-box companies like Compu$erve and AOL think twice before integrating it with their software.
That, and the fact that all of these systems only run on windows, which lets the user use IE if they want to anyways.
Use debian and the kpackage tool, and you won't have the problem.
Of course, this requires wading through the thousands of programs that are in the debian system, but it is what you're asking.
I think this stems from the fact that in the gaming world, PC games are at the bottom of the heap.
Games like Zelda 64 sell in the *millions*, where an outstanding selling game like diablo for the PC is proud to sell a million, period.
IMHO, the problem is the envelope that games 'have' to push to make it big in the PC market. Of course, this envelope leads to users purchasing more hardware, and less games, so only the 'big' games sell.
The guy who buys the $300 console has a good 2-3 years to just spend his money on GAMES. Of course, this doesn't even account for the disgustingly *HUGE* rental market which accounts for a good portion of these sales. As you may recall, PC software titles have a lot of laws surrounding them which restrict rentals (if not ban them outright, IANAL).
How much do you think people are going to spend to see DOOM 3 on their computer, not counting the price of software alone? Frankly, if it weren't for games, I have a nice k6-300 that works as a workstation rather well, it's gotten to a point where cutting-edge hardware just isn't required for the average user.
And for those who are 'out of the loop', a cutting-edge graphics card starts at around $250, a processor/mobo around $200 (if you buy AMD), and RAM around $70/256M DDR. If I bought my $300 console, I could get at least 6 games plus the console for that price.
Without a compiler, there would be no applications to run on the operating system. The fact is, is that someone, SOMEWHERE, has to have a compiler so that you can run your application.
Granted, I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that GNU/Linux should be called GNU/Linux. The basic toolset and libraries that are required run the system should be the reasons it's called GNU/Linux.
I think the major point here is that without the GNU toolset (just about everything in /bin and /sbin, and a good portion of /lib too), there would be no Linux OS, just a kernel. If someone decides to port the vast quanitity of FreeBSD tools to Linux, then I think that would make a bit more sense.
I have several systems that do not have XFree86, Samba, etc on the machines. All of them carry the basic GNU tools, regardless if they have a compiler or not.
Granted, I think that GNU/Linux would be better treated as a 'formal' name, and not expected to always be referred to as that name. eg, WinME vs Windows Millenium Edition.
Parrot has been 'released' as of a few days ago, it was a hoax, now it's a language, I don't think anyone is taking it seriously though.
www.refcards.(com|org) has a good XEmacs refcard, which is comparable in binds to GNU Emacs, in postscript.
EMACS IMHO is a *programmers* editor, which is why you don't find features like a locked wordwrap and postscript is not rendered, etc. The average person who uses word is not going to *want* to know that M-x font-lock-mode turns on the 'pretty colors'.
Do you teach your children that there are other religions, and that your children have the right to choose which one may be correct for them?
If you do, you're in the *very small* minority.
I'm all for religions which teach this, but the few that do really don't teach a religion themselves at all.. Which is why I'm waiting for quite some time before I bring my children to a church, I want them to make their own decision.
Regardless to the viewpoint, Expression of personal opinion is hardly flamebait.
... I see here is that emulating the *bugs* in the API's will pose the biggest time waster for these guys.
The fact that they're using Object Pascal will bode to be an even bigger task at that.
Knows that the TRS-80 thing is a total joke... The BASIC contains commands like 'POOP' and 'PUKE', which last I checked, aren't BASIC commands :)
the point is that you shouldn't be judging the company based on their single section that you can avoid easily by simply NOT VISITING it. the search engine and all the other directories in yahoo work fine.
.... eccentric practices because of your petty christian whining.
i'm no porn hound myself, but frankly, i'm not goign to judge someone simply because they think that there's a overbearing market for something out there. my only concerns with businesses is that they play fair w/ competition and understand that I want to be treated like a customer.
porn and sex are the BIGGEST businesses on the net. does the business create the market or do the customers in a capitalist society? with rare exception, the customer does.
just to clear something up -- as your post definately displays, the problem that most non-christians have with christians is the simple fact that christians believe they're special and owed something, simply because in the past, that's how they've been treated.
Of course, in the name of religion and morality, mormons and islamic members of society aren't able to keep harems, rastafarians aren't able to smoke pot, and wiccans and other more 'occult' religions aren't able to engage in more
Of course, all of this is in the name of 'morality'. The things I listed above are very moral conventions for the religions they're associated with. And they say that jews have a penchant for complaining.
I don't want to sound like a devil's advocate here, but there are a lot of places in code where a debugger does little to any help...
Logic errors come to mind, which as I'm sure most of you know, are 99.9999% of software bugs. Sometimes a debugger catches an improperly derefed or typed pointer, but again, it doesn't catch things like
c=0; while(c1) { do_stuff(); };
Personally, being one of thwe many of zillions of CS students who never finished their degree program, I would like to see more 'guts' in CS classes. Ie, good uses of bit twiddling and assembler, compiler theory in the first 2 years. Algo's of course are normally taught in this period (if not indirectly through higher level math classes). Driver development would also be a big one at the top of hte list.
And, a class on reading and writing MAINTAINABLE source code. This is easily my #1 beef with working with other programs, the programmers name extern vars things like 'my_foo' or 'pointer', define macros with lowercase variables or don't dictate type expectations for more complex ones, which drives me nuts. If you tack in that I work with a lot of PERL as well, you can see where this goes. PERL is an elegant language in the right hands, but outright evil in the wrong ones.
Frankly, I choose the above because after these classes, there's not much of a way that you *can't* learn the rest of the conventions.
As for your algo hell, dunno, but we were taught stacks and sorts in our CS 111 class, as we were learning C. I found it to be very useful.
Today is LISP's 41st birthday.
:)
Just figured, given the subject, this was rather appropriate
I know that money isn't everything, but...
Oracle admins cost a bundle for a *reason*. They are well trained, know their software inside and out and if you watched one work on an Oracle system, it's amazing (like watching a greybeard work on a VMS machine).
And to plug oracle even more, you're not at the mercy of the OS -- Get me a copy of MSSQL for Unix and we'll talk, but if the NT server goes down, and you can't take it anymore, you have all sorts of other OS's to slap oracle on. This is true for most other RDBMS's as well.
However, it should really be noted that 90% of 'relational databases' are so unrelated it's really sick. We have actual relations at our work, and it all runs on MySQL, which is a pile of crap, IMHO.
No subselects, transactions, real locking. About the only thing that mysql does well is serialization and select statements, both of which I could do with flat file databases and a perl script, and probably get decent -enough- performance to be usable in an environment that uses mysql.
To put it simply, if you know what you're doing and have any experience with this stuff, go oracle or perhaps PostgreSQL, as the 7.x series is probably the best free database that you can get your hands on right now.
Stay FAR AWAY from Informix. I yet to see a slower RDBMS... Granted, it's stable... And if you work on lucent switches, you're probably going to have to deal with it anyways.
If you just need to store crap to belch out later on a webpage, sure, use mysql.
that's because banks have been using IBM since the dawn of time, and banks aren't exactly ones to move quickly when it comes to what stores their 'money'.
Find a bank, PERIOD, in the US, that doesn't use AS/400's somewhere along the line. (even those that outsource their storage and transactions to places like Alltel do this)
I think that most of us are really missing hte point here when it comes to the debian system, apt, the 'base', and what it really means.
:) and still gathers a sizable userbase because of it's more BSD-like setup. I don't think it's going anywhere soon.
Basically read debian-devel for a couple of days.
After you manage to wade through the 1000 or so messages you'll undoubtedly get, you'll realize that each and every day, there are a disgusting amount of people that are inspecting, patching, and checking on the latest whathaveyou for your packages.
Find a bug? Submit it -- if it's a core package, expect a response back in MINUTES. I found a bug in debconf, reported the bug to submit@bugs.debian.org, some correspondence with Joey Hess (the maintainer), about an hour later he was packaging a bugfix which I downloaded the next morning (the apt mirrors sync twice a day, IIRC).
Similar (repeated) fixes with the lilo package have come like this as well.
If you want to get at the changelogs for apt-getted packages, install the package 'apt-listchanges', which will show you what's going on before it's downloaded... Although, I think this is only in the unstable distribution.
Basically the system is slick and will only get better. Ironically, I was making this comment earlier today that in the end, Debian and Slackware will end up being the only dists left..
Before anyone trolls, note that Slack was one of the first major dists (after SLS and Ygg, RIP
apt and rpm aren't the same, been said already.
regardless though, try the system before actually making the assumption that dpkg+apt and the debian binary tree is not something to standardize on.
once you realize how DISTURBINGLY easy dependency handling is, you won't come back.
i mean, yes, some like to configure the source for their programs, (BSD comes to mind) but for libraries, things like binutils, etc, this is nice.
like gnome-apt?