IE7 has the security and reliability. It's also quicker than FF and doesn't leak memory like a sieve. I don't care about Ad Ons, Open Source or Microsoft points. And it's funny that you accuse me or drinking Kool Aid when you're parroting Mozilla's evangelism.
Actually I use Opera on sites that support it which is almost all and IE for the rest (Gmail). FF always seems slow and bloated to me, and the UI isn't as elegant as Opera's. And the memory leaks are ridiculous, even as system with lots of Ram will be brought to its knees by FF given enough time.
Except Opera lagged behind with the most significant feature: being free.
According to the wiki timeline it wasn't until around 2000 when a 'free' version became available (supported by inbuilt ads), and then as recent as 2005 when finally the ads were removed.
Yeah and Porsches lag behind Trabbis in the most significant feature : being cheap.
Re:Can Oscar's be given posthumously?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
I know that Spencer Tracy was nominated posthumously, he died before Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? was even released. Sadly he lost out to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night.
Others have pointed out that it was awarded posthumously but I would have to dig further to see if anyone else was ever nominated posthumously. As much as I love both films Spence really should have won it. He was a giant on the silver screen.
I think that coloured actor should have got an oscar for Guess who's coming to Dinner.
Without developers, how do you expect to get software developed?
Oh great, you found a straw man. Have fun attacking it.
My point was that in a commercial environment, hell an environment where the developers aren't complete prima donnas, people work out an architecture first and then code it. Once it's releases, like a COM interface, it has to be preserved essentially for ever. The whole hippie bullshit line that developers should be free to express themselves by refactoring regardless of consequences on users of their code just irritates me intensely.
Now commercial companies are not immune from this. The difference is that customers tend to call your boss and shout at him if you do this in a commercial environment. In the OSS world, that can't happen. And that is why I despise OSS software.
Actually in the commercial world everyone comes out of Uni believing essentially in the OSS world view that elegant code is the most important thing. Either they learn that you sometimes have to compromise on elegance to keep customers happy, or they end up not earning much money. So if the OSS world is better at attracting developers who won't accept that, it's welcome to them.
(Also, why do you think Linux supports more devices than any other operating system right now?)
Most of those devices are old and no one uses them anymore. No one tests them anymore, so saying they are supported is only true if you mean "the kernel has some code for that VID/PID that someone reverse engineered 10 years ago and hasn't been tested for about a hundred kernel revisions". Linux support for newish hardware sucks, because reverse engineering takes time. At least that's my experience every time I tried to install it on a new PC.
... they create chaos in the commercial world, where if you release something and it doesn't work absolutely 100% of the time when tested by non experts, the company has a serious problem.
Which problem is that, too many customers lining up to throw money at them? I've never seen proprietary software work that reliably, and in my experience, it's rarely been solely fatal to the business.
Yeah, because customers love it when their application won't build after an update because some developer of a library they depend on has decided to refactor, break compatibility and not tell anyone. Or if the system won't boot up because of some change that makes things better in a way that they can't see but requires a few extra magic steps that no one has told them and break some process they invented for themselves. Once you tell them how elegant the refactored code is, they're just ecstatic to put up with a bit of short term pain (like a few days delay in their project, plus a man month or so to reinvent their private processes to work with the new architecture) to help you implement it.
I'm guessing if believe that your experience of operating in a commercial environment is pretty minimal.
It's not that commercial software is bug free, it's that popular commercial software is built in an environment where coders get told to fix bug reports from customers, not spend all their time on bullshit refactoring that introduces (from the customer point of view at least) bugs.
What annoys me about Linux users is the assumption that everyone who doesn't run it is essentially ignorant of the possibilities.
But I've tried it a couple of times. Each time was an epic battle getting all my newish hardware to work. And even after I did it, the free software versions of all the commercial software I use are completely amateurish. And I basically don't like the way Linux is developed - "Looks good and compiles ok, ship it!". People that have spent time on commercial software know that not doing an enormous amount of testing just means that you have to do an enormous amount of tech support. And with Linux the tech support is some teenage idiot on IRC who knows less about the platform than you do.
And I hate the idea that software development is about making things easy for developers as opposed to users. You can see this in the "No Stable API" rule. It means the kernel developers have freedom to refactor, but it also means that the only way you can get driver support for your card is if you hand over the source code to them and integrate it in the kernel. Microsoft, whatever its other failings doesn't work like this. Windows APIs are very stable across different OS versions. Even things which were not officially part of the API like stuff higher up on the stack will be faked in Windows N+1 if important applications depended on it in Windows N and earlier. Windows will shim even broken applications to keep them working when its internal structure changes.
Not having stable kernel APIs just allows the kernel people to release unfinished stuff and then rework it a dozen times. No one cares about this shit except for them - its not like most of it has much of an effect on performance. Sure the code might be beautiful to the person who wrote it, but that's a bit like babies being beautiful to their mothers. The rest of us can't see that.
And the very worst thing about it is that new programmers come out of uni thinking the Linux way is the best one. And they create chaos in the commercial world, where if you release something and it doesn't work absolutely 100% of the time when tested by non experts, the company has a serious problem. Or if the customers applications all fail to build on the new platform, that's a problem too.
One of the odd and very likable things about Dune is that there are occasionally implications that the society we read about is not the most advanced. Maybe their taboos are limiting them. Essentially the world we read about is actually in its own version of the Dark Ages where progress has all but stopped and feudalism is the only system. The Tleiaxu and the Ixians aren't in a Dark Age though. But we don't here too much about them because they are outside the known world because they violate the taboos that govern the know world.
Essentially it's a bit like reading history Taliban controlled Afghanistan, or unfortunately anywhere with an Islamic government. And I'm sure it's deliberate - Frank Herbert apparently was inspired by the Islamic uprisings against the British.
Or if you look at another way he wanted to write a hallucinogenic, retro sci fi epic, and he came up with a bunch of explanations - the Butlerian Jihad, the necessary for spice based prescience for interstallar travel, and the incompatibily between directed energy weapons and shields to explain why his universe was that way and not like conventional sci fi with ray guns, robots and open societies in the Popper sense.
This is very true. I worked on system where we had lots of redundancy in critical places. But given enough tests sometimes the bugs would get through, usually in ways that you hadn't thought of.
Twitter has a long way to go to be the most infamous poster on slashdot. The worst and hence most infamous trolls on slashdot are the paid to post losers.
How do you know they are paid by the Uncle Sam/Israel/RIAA/CIA/FBI/Microsoft etc?
I often defend all of those organizations (and much worse ones) just for shits and giggles.
Actually I always liked vxWorks. It's Unix like but very, very small and highly efficient. E.g. stepping through a read() call into the file system was probably hundreds of clock cycles. It had preemptive multitasking, file systems and a decent TCPIP stack and you could fit a very complex application and vxWorks into an 100-200KB image.
Linksys managed to save halve their flash usage by switching from Linux to vxWorks.
The fatal problem was that it was closed source and very expensive. But from a technical point of view it's still my favourite OS. You get what you pay for.
Do you know if there's some sort of media player for it? Sounds like it'd make for a great HTPC. If not you could just use it as a fast-booting fileserver I guess and stream from it (using Xbox Media Center etc.)
No, but you could write one Nasm in a week or so if you've spent a couple of years memorizing the Intel and AMD optimization guides, that crazy Russian guy's very colourful page on decoding MP3s on a Z80 board with a broken address bus and the Intel embedded audio register spec that got leaked by the guy who got sent to Gitmo under the DMCA.
You could do it by trolling Theo on the OpenBSD mailing lists. Propose lots of stuff and implement the bits that make him least angry. If you make him so angry he murders his wife, at least she died for something worthwhile.
Hell if that happens name the Linux distro after her.
Ok. I HAVE to bite this one in the butt. After trying ALL of the recent "light weight" distros on my fathers Pentium II 300 w/256 MB of ram, DSL, Xubuntu, etc ALL FAILED miserably on it. 5 minute boot times, sluggish response, you name it. It wasn't usable. Oddly enough, I threw Slackware 4.0 on it and it ran great, while Slackware 12 did not. Maybe it is the 2.6 kernel... I haven't a clue. But there isn't an up to date distro that will run sufficiently as a desktop on such hardware. Period.
Put another 256MB of Ram in it and XP will boot pretty quickly. Less than a minute at least.
What about Windows XP? I used to run it on a 6 year old Fujitsu ultraportable (1Ghz P3, 384M of Ram). Or a 10 year old Celeron 300A with 512MB. It was pretty snappy on those. It would boot to the GUI in ~30 seconds on both.
It's odd to know your classical education has taught you that tyranny doesn't do any harm to a society's cultural output. Especially as most of the classical Roman writers I read said the exact opposite.
You remind me of George Orwell's acid comment along the lines of "you have to be an educated man to believe something as daft as this. No ordinary man would be that stupid". Oddly enough he was talking about apologists for another slave state, Soviet Russia.
I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Mind you I think it's quaint that there are still apologists for Imperial Rome. I guess you prefer Sparta to Athens and the Confederate States to the Union too. All of which assumes that you'd be in the tiny privileged minority in those states, but that's unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
sulfuric acid in the atmosphere"
Next!
IE7 has the security and reliability. It's also quicker than FF and doesn't leak memory like a sieve. I don't care about Ad Ons, Open Source or Microsoft points. And it's funny that you accuse me or drinking Kool Aid when you're parroting Mozilla's evangelism.
Actually I use Opera on sites that support it which is almost all and IE for the rest (Gmail). FF always seems slow and bloated to me, and the UI isn't as elegant as Opera's. And the memory leaks are ridiculous, even as system with lots of Ram will be brought to its knees by FF given enough time.
Except Opera lagged behind with the most significant feature: being free.
According to the wiki timeline it wasn't until around 2000 when a 'free' version became available (supported by inbuilt ads), and then as recent as 2005 when finally the ads were removed.
Yeah and Porsches lag behind Trabbis in the most significant feature : being cheap.
If everything you use renders ok in IE, why not just use IE? Especially as it now has tabs, which was the main feature where Firefox was beating it.
Not using Opera can cause CANCER.
I know that Spencer Tracy was nominated posthumously, he died before Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? was even released. Sadly he lost out to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night.
Others have pointed out that it was awarded posthumously but I would have to dig further to see if anyone else was ever nominated posthumously. As much as I love both films Spence really should have won it. He was a giant on the silver screen.
I think that coloured actor should have got an oscar for Guess who's coming to Dinner.
Without developers, how do you expect to get software developed?
Oh great, you found a straw man. Have fun attacking it.
My point was that in a commercial environment, hell an environment where the developers aren't complete prima donnas, people work out an architecture first and then code it. Once it's releases, like a COM interface, it has to be preserved essentially for ever. The whole hippie bullshit line that developers should be free to express themselves by refactoring regardless of consequences on users of their code just irritates me intensely.
Now commercial companies are not immune from this. The difference is that customers tend to call your boss and shout at him if you do this in a commercial environment. In the OSS world, that can't happen. And that is why I despise OSS software.
Actually in the commercial world everyone comes out of Uni believing essentially in the OSS world view that elegant code is the most important thing. Either they learn that you sometimes have to compromise on elegance to keep customers happy, or they end up not earning much money. So if the OSS world is better at attracting developers who won't accept that, it's welcome to them.
(Also, why do you think Linux supports more devices than any other operating system right now?)
Most of those devices are old and no one uses them anymore. No one tests them anymore, so saying they are supported is only true if you mean "the kernel has some code for that VID/PID that someone reverse engineered 10 years ago and hasn't been tested for about a hundred kernel revisions". Linux support for newish hardware sucks, because reverse engineering takes time. At least that's my experience every time I tried to install it on a new PC.
Which problem is that, too many customers lining up to throw money at them? I've never seen proprietary software work that reliably, and in my experience, it's rarely been solely fatal to the business.
Yeah, because customers love it when their application won't build after an update because some developer of a library they depend on has decided to refactor, break compatibility and not tell anyone. Or if the system won't boot up because of some change that makes things better in a way that they can't see but requires a few extra magic steps that no one has told them and break some process they invented for themselves. Once you tell them how elegant the refactored code is, they're just ecstatic to put up with a bit of short term pain (like a few days delay in their project, plus a man month or so to reinvent their private processes to work with the new architecture) to help you implement it.
I'm guessing if believe that your experience of operating in a commercial environment is pretty minimal.
It's not that commercial software is bug free, it's that popular commercial software is built in an environment where coders get told to fix bug reports from customers, not spend all their time on bullshit refactoring that introduces (from the customer point of view at least) bugs.
That comment is funny, and he wrote it because the people he was arguing with annoy him. It doesn't invalidate the rest of what he says.
What annoys me about Linux users is the assumption that everyone who doesn't run it is essentially ignorant of the possibilities.
But I've tried it a couple of times. Each time was an epic battle getting all my newish hardware to work. And even after I did it, the free software versions of all the commercial software I use are completely amateurish. And I basically don't like the way Linux is developed - "Looks good and compiles ok, ship it!". People that have spent time on commercial software know that not doing an enormous amount of testing just means that you have to do an enormous amount of tech support. And with Linux the tech support is some teenage idiot on IRC who knows less about the platform than you do.
And I hate the idea that software development is about making things easy for developers as opposed to users. You can see this in the "No Stable API" rule. It means the kernel developers have freedom to refactor, but it also means that the only way you can get driver support for your card is if you hand over the source code to them and integrate it in the kernel. Microsoft, whatever its other failings doesn't work like this. Windows APIs are very stable across different OS versions. Even things which were not officially part of the API like stuff higher up on the stack will be faked in Windows N+1 if important applications depended on it in Windows N and earlier. Windows will shim even broken applications to keep them working when its internal structure changes.
Not having stable kernel APIs just allows the kernel people to release unfinished stuff and then rework it a dozen times. No one cares about this shit except for them - its not like most of it has much of an effect on performance. Sure the code might be beautiful to the person who wrote it, but that's a bit like babies being beautiful to their mothers. The rest of us can't see that.
And the very worst thing about it is that new programmers come out of uni thinking the Linux way is the best one. And they create chaos in the commercial world, where if you release something and it doesn't work absolutely 100% of the time when tested by non experts, the company has a serious problem. Or if the customers applications all fail to build on the new platform, that's a problem too.
Sucks to be you, human. Luckily I'm made out of a mimetic polyalloy not water. Enjoy your large water body!
Fields metal is good stuff - it's used as a mimetic polyalloy in several weapons related programs. Fields also won a medal for it.
One of the odd and very likable things about Dune is that there are occasionally implications that the society we read about is not the most advanced. Maybe their taboos are limiting them. Essentially the world we read about is actually in its own version of the Dark Ages where progress has all but stopped and feudalism is the only system. The Tleiaxu and the Ixians aren't in a Dark Age though. But we don't here too much about them because they are outside the known world because they violate the taboos that govern the know world.
Essentially it's a bit like reading history Taliban controlled Afghanistan, or unfortunately anywhere with an Islamic government. And I'm sure it's deliberate - Frank Herbert apparently was inspired by the Islamic uprisings against the British.
Or if you look at another way he wanted to write a hallucinogenic, retro sci fi epic, and he came up with a bunch of explanations - the Butlerian Jihad, the necessary for spice based prescience for interstallar travel, and the incompatibily between directed energy weapons and shields to explain why his universe was that way and not like conventional sci fi with ray guns, robots and open societies in the Popper sense.
This is very true. I worked on system where we had lots of redundancy in critical places. But given enough tests sometimes the bugs would get through, usually in ways that you hadn't thought of.
Only The Spice confers prescience.
I was joking.
Twitter has a long way to go to be the most infamous poster on slashdot. The worst and hence most infamous trolls on slashdot are the paid to post losers.
How do you know they are paid by the Uncle Sam/Israel/RIAA/CIA/FBI/Microsoft etc?
I often defend all of those organizations (and much worse ones) just for shits and giggles.
No one pays me a cent.
methinks you meant attorneys general.
You're the sort of person who orders two Whoppers Junior at Burger King aren't you?
I believe it was Ghettoo linux - a version of Gentoo for old hardware.
Actually I always liked vxWorks. It's Unix like but very, very small and highly efficient. E.g. stepping through a read() call into the file system was probably hundreds of clock cycles. It had preemptive multitasking, file systems and a decent TCPIP stack and you could fit a very complex application and vxWorks into an 100-200KB image.
Linksys managed to save halve their flash usage by switching from Linux to vxWorks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
The fatal problem was that it was closed source and very expensive. But from a technical point of view it's still my favourite OS. You get what you pay for.
Do you know if there's some sort of media player for it? Sounds like it'd make for a great HTPC. If not you could just use it as a fast-booting fileserver I guess and stream from it (using Xbox Media Center etc.)
No, but you could write one Nasm in a week or so if you've spent a couple of years memorizing the Intel and AMD optimization guides, that crazy Russian guy's very colourful page on decoding MP3s on a Z80 board with a broken address bus and the Intel embedded audio register spec that got leaked by the guy who got sent to Gitmo under the DMCA.
I think you're missing the point of MenuetOS.
You could do it by trolling Theo on the OpenBSD mailing lists. Propose lots of stuff and implement the bits that make him least angry. If you make him so angry he murders his wife, at least she died for something worthwhile.
Hell if that happens name the Linux distro after her.
Reading comprehension is a skill you can learn.
God I love to troll people like you.
Ok. I HAVE to bite this one in the butt. After trying ALL of the recent "light weight" distros on my fathers Pentium II 300 w/256 MB of ram, DSL, Xubuntu, etc ALL FAILED miserably on it. 5 minute boot times, sluggish response, you name it. It wasn't usable. Oddly enough, I threw Slackware 4.0 on it and it ran great, while Slackware 12 did not. Maybe it is the 2.6 kernel... I haven't a clue. But there isn't an up to date distro that will run sufficiently as a desktop on such hardware. Period.
Put another 256MB of Ram in it and XP will boot pretty quickly. Less than a minute at least.
What about Windows XP? I used to run it on a 6 year old Fujitsu ultraportable (1Ghz P3, 384M of Ram). Or a 10 year old Celeron 300A with 512MB. It was pretty snappy on those. It would boot to the GUI in ~30 seconds on both.
It's odd to know your classical education has taught you that tyranny doesn't do any harm to a society's cultural output. Especially as most of the classical Roman writers I read said the exact opposite.
You remind me of George Orwell's acid comment along the lines of "you have to be an educated man to believe something as daft as this. No ordinary man would be that stupid". Oddly enough he was talking about apologists for another slave state, Soviet Russia.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Mind you I think it's quaint that there are still apologists for Imperial Rome. I guess you prefer Sparta to Athens and the Confederate States to the Union too. All of which assumes that you'd be in the tiny privileged minority in those states, but that's unlikely.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.