C# is all the interesting things about Java plus a couple more interesting features. Microsoft had a quite a while to learn from the lessons learned with Java so this is quite understandable.
If you care about learning an interesting language that will give you a broader perspective on programming, go with C#. If you care about getting marketable skills, I honestly believe they are both equivalent. There are probably more Java jobs out there right now but C# is catching up. Keep in mind, these jobs are really about either J2EE or.NET not the actual languages. Both markets are likely saturated with vocational school graduates so I don't think learning either is going to give you and special advantage.
If you like the MS development environment, go with C#. If, instead, you prefer things like Eclipse, go with Java.
Is the guys that put bots on Usenet to troll for lyrics, then setup lyric sites (any google search for a song name will turn these sites up) with a ton of obnoxious ads. These people are making a living off of someone else's work. It's not right.
Of course, I'd hate to see legal action against fan sites or usenet groups. Unfortunately, the MPAA doesn't have a good reputation in choosing its lawsuits carefully.
The utility screen will let you split your terminal space between an arbitrary number of applications (and each one recognizes that it has its own tty).
M-x shell
In emacs let's you have as many shells as you want and to easily copy-paste between them (without using the mouse).
The hypervisor assumption is based on the backwards compatibility of the xbox360 with the xbox.
A hypervisor really doesn't help that. I was under the impression that the Xbox360 has an x86 emulator (more likely, a dynamic binary translator). Note that this approach for backwards compatibility is very well established and usually quite successful.
A hypervisor only gives you the ability to run multiple bare metal operating systems. When you have to support native binaries of a different platform, you have to do dynamic translation.
The original post is very misleading in linking to the sHype page.
sHype is not a hypervisor per say, but rather a hypervisor security architecture (sHype is to hypervisors as SELinux is to Linux). sHype is a research project (and a rather neat one actually) that currently is implemented in two hypervisors, rHype and Xen. Both of these hypervisors are GPL.
I'm not sure where the original poster determined that the XBox had a hypervisor. I have never seen anything that would suggest that. Perhaps it's being confused with the PS3?
At any rate, it's very easy to write a hypervisor (relatively speaking) especially for the Power platform. If the XBox360 does have a hypervisor (which seems unlikely to me honestly) than I would expect it to have come from Microsoft.
Of course, why would Microsoft have a hypervisor? My understanding was that the games ran within a special version of Windows (descended from the version that ran in the original XBox).
But what is the point of throwing your weight behind a president you don't support? Why not do what people in a lot of other countries would do, and do whatever you can to make it impossible for him to govern?
When my co-workers and I go out to lunch, we usually end up doing informal votes on where to go. If I want to get, say, Vietnamese, and the 5-6 other guys want to get BBQ, I usually state my case (we just went there) and see if anyone changes their vote. If not, I say, okay, and never mention it again.
If I spent the entire time in the car bitching about how we should have gotten Vietnamese, lunch wouldn't be that enjoyable. That's the way democracies work. You don't always get what you want but you respect your fellow citizens enough to not be a complete tool about not getting your way (as long as it doesn't impede on a fundamental right--hence the Constitution).
The problem today is that too many people are bitching about not getting what they wanted for lunch.
The American government is built on the principle[1] that the government are servants of the people. They are elected by the people and the people are protected from the government through the Constitution and checks and balances. The structure of the American government is one that is untrusting of itself. This is the way it's always been. There's no history of monarchy in American government.
Americans have trouble with organizations like the UN because it exists outside of this world. The UN presupposes trust in government--which Americans simply don't possess.
The idea of turning over control of something as important as the internet to an organization that assumes that government is a trust worthy thing is very contrary to the basis of the American form of government.
It's not because the US doesn't respect the rest of the world or wants to control everything. American's don't trust government. I'm not claiming this is the best system, I'm just attempting to explain the mentality.
[1] You can argue until the cows come home whether this is true in practice but it suffices to say that American's believe this to be mostly true.
Yes it is. SCIENCE is the BELIEF that the universe is set up with a series of laws which can be discovered, and which produce identical results when tested multiple times.
You're making an existential argument here. I strongly dislike existentialism as I feel it is simply a play on the imperfections of our communication systems.
Anyway, you cannot make an existential argument and expect to win because according to existentialism there is no right or wrong. If there's no right, you cannot win. You cannot say science is a belief because that presumes that there are things such as science and beliefs.
Evolution is the belief that life adapts following a set of rules.
NO.
Evolution is not a belief. It is a scientific theory that began as a hypothesis over a century ago and since then has been refined and supported by vast amounts of empirical data which has led to it being accepted as a theory. It is not a law (like Netwon's law's of gravity) because it cannot be proven given the mathematical systems that we have today.
A belief is something that is not based on facts or evidence but rather on some whimsical concept of what someone would like to see.
Intelligent design is not a new idea. This debate occurred during Darwin's time. Evolutionists were divided into two camps: those that believed in "intelligent design" and those that felt that natural selection was a better model.
The belief in an intelligent design led to the belief that we were evolving into some better system, which led to the study of Eugenics, since it was then possible to say that some people were closer to the design then other.
Interestingly enough, the "science" of Eugenics was used by the Nazi party to justify the superiority of the German people.
You cannot pick and choose which pieces of science you wish to support. It's like saying that 2 + 2 = 4, but 4 - 2 = 3, because those damn secularists want you to believe that things are reversable and that's an affront to God.
Andrew has been open to including Xen (after appropriate changes) in his tree for quite a few months. The Xen developers have been busy working on the 3.0 release (which has finally tapered off but is a very ambitious release). Just a couple of weeks ago, the Xen 3.0 Linux port was forked into a new tree so that there could be a focused effort on getting it into shape for inclusion by Andrew.
The currently plan is to try and aim for 2.6.15. That's most likely the earliest it could go in. One of the difficulities in preparing the Xen port for inclusion in the kernel is that it touches a lot of Linux and requires a ton of kernel knowledge and a bunch of people to agree that it's the right thing to do. Getting key kernel guys involved (like the kind at RedHat) is critical to have this happen.
From what I have read, it is not that the code is low quality in XEN, it is that the XEN patch adds a new architecture which means a *lot* of code duplication.
You're right. The xen architecture is a problem. The drivers also need a lot of cleanup. It's not bad code, it's just not kernel code. The kernel guys tend to be fickle about how code looks.
There are a few problems with Xen. First, it's i386 only.
Not true. Today, Xen supports i386, x86_64, and ia64. Xen is currently being ported to PowerPC also.
Second (and this is the biggest problem IMO) - Xen is venture-backed, and seems to be extremely eager to show their investors a return.
XenSource is a company backed by VC. Xen is developed by a much larger community though. There are a ton of press-releases that XenSource puts out that have the typical marketting junk that most Open Source folks despise but whatever, XenSource != Xen. Most of there people aren't even actively working on Xen anyway (they have a product for Xen management),
If XenSource does not turn out to be a great business, then will Xen still be developed and maintained?
Absolutely.
Also, there is another project that I plug every chance I get - Linux Vserver. Unlike Xen, this is a purely volunteer effort, and is very innovative and attemtps to solve a difficult issue. Unlike Xen, these guys actually do not want to be in the mainline for now, becuase they think it will slow down development.
Yup. That's why VServer is not in the kernel--they don't want to be in the kernel. VServer is a cool project, and I would love to see it end up in the kernel. Xen is also a cool project and it would be great to see it in the kernel. The kernel guys *will not* accept crap. Large portions of the Xen Linux port are currently being rewritten to live up to kernel standards. I have a ton of faith in the kernel folks overseeing the process.
It basically lets you run multiple instances of the OS concurrently, where each instance thinks it's the only one running on the computer, right?
Sort of.
There is really two parts to virtualization: 1) processor virtualization and 2) hardware virtualization. Processor virtualization allows multiple virtual machines to think they have the whole processor. In this case, there's a lot of interesting tricks you can do (and new hardware support) so that the virtual machine thinks it has the actual underlying processor.
Hardware virtualization is really a relatively immature area. In general, you cannot virtualize hardware so you almost always end up emulating hardware. This is what let's you create a Window that the Virtual Machine thinks is it's VGA card. The VGA card is entirely emulated in software so you can make it do pretty much whatever you want.
I believe the best advertising is still genuine word of mouth amoung your friends and associates - not paid schills who want to read you a bulleted list.
The Apple iPod is a great example of this - I heard of it from my friends as recommendations long before I've seen it advertised by the company.
You do realize you've fallen victim to an extremely aggressive marketing campaign right? The iPod, from a technical standpoint, is no different than a myriad of mp3 players already out there. They tied into "emo" cultural explosion and did a heavy target of metropolitan areas which led to the iPod obtaining a "hip" image.
The iPod is an example of descent technology (not bad, but not great), extremely good marketing, and margins set just right (high enough to make everything else seem cheap but low enough to still be accessible to the average Joe).
The only problem with the iPod thus far is that it's becoming too popular. As more overweight, middle age, unkept guys are seen walking down the street with those little white ear buds, the less popular iPods are going to become. Popularity always kill fads though...
Re:Intellisense #1 feature, pay Bram to add it
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
People who know how to use VIM well find themselves really productive in it. But, that said, I end up being slightly more productive writing Java code in Eclipse, ONLY because of completion, even though all my other editing features from VIM aren't there (or are buried).
Sorry, I don't mean to be a bastard here, but this is my biggest pet peeve. I *hate* Intellisense or whatever the hell it's called. I think syntax autocompletion is ruining a new generation of programmers.
Here's my reasoning. Writing code that always works is hard. Writing code that works some of the time is easy. To write code that works all of the time you have to understand the exact behavior of every function you call and handle all possible scenarios properly. It's the difference between writing:
read(fd, &myInt, 4);
And then writing a wrapper around read that checks for EAGAIN, EINTR, performs endianness conversion, handles partial reads, and potentially implements this all asynchronously. Back to my original point though, it takes time to learn all of the sublities of an API. The best way to learn them is by studying the interfaces (reading manuals, man pages, whatever).
If you cannot remember the name of a function, go back to the manual and study it. You're going to not handle the edge cases of it. If it's Java, you'll ignore a potential exception. If it's C, you'll miss a potential error code.
I'm not against all the features in things like Eclipse. Some of the refactoring stuff is useful. It's just intellisense that drives me nuts.
Who has done the real donkey-work in getting accessibility into GNOME?... Sun. All the boring but necessary work to turn GNOME from a hacker's paradise into a genuinely usable desktop, not just for the typical American geek, but for everyone across the world.
There are two types of people involved in the Free Software community. People that care about Free Beer and people that care about Free Speech. OpenOffice is Free Beer. It's not Free Speech. To use copyright assignments to release code that people intend to be Free Software as non-Free Software is wrong, wrong, wrong.
If OpenOffice was BSD, fine, whatever, at least everyone has the right to turn around and release non-Free versions. However, since Sun feels like they're the only ones who should be allowed to do this, they decided to LGPL it to prevent IBM from releasing a closed version of OpenOffice (except it's okay for Sun to release it closed).
I appreciate their work on accessibility but remember, they did that because they ship Gnome as part of Solaris. They took a Free Software project, used it instead of implementing their own Desktop, and did a little bit of work on it to bring it up to their standards. They would have had to invest a lot more if they did it all from scratch. Sun has gotten as much from the Gnome project as the Gnome project has gotten from Sun.
See here for details of the procedure used in situations where copyright isn't being handed over, along with a list of modules that have been integrated into OpenOffice without copyright assignment. Basically, you have to tell Sun about it, so that their lawyers can check the module's license over to make sure it's acceptable for inclusion, and then they grab a copy of the source of the module and stick it in CVS. Simple enough.
They are simply hosting libraries that are used by OpenOffice. They're stored in a different CVS module. You cannot submit a patch to the core OpenOffice code without turning over your copyright to Sun.
The FSF also requires you to assign your copyright to them if you contribute to some of their projects (such as emacs -- I know; I've contributed to emacs).
Which is why there has been the historic forks of Emacs and GCC. A lot of people don't like this. The FSF will accept a dual copyright assignment which is slightly better. They're reasoning is that owning the full copyright gives the FSF a better legal ground to defend Emacs/GCC against litigation.
Of course, Sun's reasoning is much less noble. Sun just wants to be able to sell it for $70 a pop without releasing source code--cute way of avoiding the copyleft properties of the GPL.
The submitter praises GNOME's premier word processor in that it can surpass OpenOffice.org because it is GPL'ed, whereas the inflexible LGPL license of OpenOffice.org cripples development.
No, I think you (and most posters) misunderstand what the licensing issue is. The problem with OpenOffice.org is *not* that it's LGPL'd, but rather that for code to be integrated into OpenOffice.org, Sun requires you turn your copyright over to Sun. Very few existing Open Source projects are willing to do that--because frankly it's evil. This makes it very difficult for OpenOffice.org to integrate anything that isn't home grown.
This filesystem most likely stems from the ideas in Venti which is a filesystem that came out a few years ago. Link is included at the bottom. The (quite compelling) argument made originally is if you graph unique data growth (unique is important here) and compare it to the growth of commidity storage, as long as the storage growth is greater than unique data growth, there's no reason to ever delete anything since you essentially have infinite storage.
This is actually compelling for a large number of use cases. Many types of servers (think any sort of application server that's not a file server or something) fit this model. The disaster recover story is just fantastic, you can rollback to virtually any instance of the previous state of the filesystem.
FWIW, most new distributed SCMs are based on this same idea (like git or mercurial) so this is a pretty well-understood paradigm.
I was going to post something similiar to this. It's a very compelling argument. I'll bastard it here:
Happiness is the most important thing in life. The most effective path to happiness is learning how to eliminate unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness are states of mind and unhappiness is caused by a series of emotions (fear, anger, attachment). Learning how to eliminate these emotions (and to increase positive emotions like compassion) will ultimately lead to happiness. You can learn to control destructive emotions through mediation and prayer (although it is not the only way, just an effective and reproducisble way).
ps2pdf has been around since.. hell, as long as I can remember using Linux (probably before Office95). Since printing in Linux has always been based around postscript, I've never even thought about the fact that people have trouble printing to PDF.
PDF has been a target printer in Gnome for a long time. I reckon longer than OS X has been around.
the problem today with gazillions of copies of the same library isn't that they waste disk space -- it's that they each present an independent pathway for security failure.
Yeah, this is another difficult problem. How do you ensure that security updates are applied.
If you have something better than a linear versioning system, then you can distiguish between security updates and other sorts of updates. I still think you need a system where you have multiple versions of libraries that are functionally different. I think it's just a fact of life of software development. Libraries aren't going to just stagnat.
I always thought the equivalent to a "Blue Screen" was a "Panic" in Linux.
Tough call, Windows BSODs are sometimes recoverable and sometimes not. panic()s halt the system. Panic or oops is probably a good comparision to a BSOD. A core dump certainly isn't though.
Slashdot Mirror
C# is all the interesting things about Java plus a couple more interesting features. Microsoft had a quite a while to learn from the lessons learned with Java so this is quite understandable.
.NET not the actual languages. Both markets are likely saturated with vocational school graduates so I don't think learning either is going to give you and special advantage.
If you care about learning an interesting language that will give you a broader perspective on programming, go with C#. If you care about getting marketable skills, I honestly believe they are both equivalent. There are probably more Java jobs out there right now but C# is catching up. Keep in mind, these jobs are really about either J2EE or
If you like the MS development environment, go with C#. If, instead, you prefer things like Eclipse, go with Java.
A 45 year old programmer (who has spent their entire career programming) has been programming since 1980. There weren't a lot of programmers in 1980.
There will be a considerably higher population of older programmers in 2025 but right now it's still a young industry.
Is the guys that put bots on Usenet to troll for lyrics, then setup lyric sites (any google search for a song name will turn these sites up) with a ton of obnoxious ads. These people are making a living off of someone else's work. It's not right.
Of course, I'd hate to see legal action against fan sites or usenet groups. Unfortunately, the MPAA doesn't have a good reputation in choosing its lawsuits carefully.
The utility screen will let you split your terminal space between an arbitrary number of applications (and each one recognizes that it has its own tty).
M-x shell
In emacs let's you have as many shells as you want and to easily copy-paste between them (without using the mouse).
The hypervisor assumption is based on the backwards compatibility of the xbox360 with the xbox.
A hypervisor really doesn't help that. I was under the impression that the Xbox360 has an x86 emulator (more likely, a dynamic binary translator). Note that this approach for backwards compatibility is very well established and usually quite successful.
A hypervisor only gives you the ability to run multiple bare metal operating systems. When you have to support native binaries of a different platform, you have to do dynamic translation.
The original post is very misleading in linking to the sHype page.
sHype is not a hypervisor per say, but rather a hypervisor security architecture (sHype is to hypervisors as SELinux is to Linux). sHype is a research project (and a rather neat one actually) that currently is implemented in two hypervisors, rHype and Xen. Both of these hypervisors are GPL.
I'm not sure where the original poster determined that the XBox had a hypervisor. I have never seen anything that would suggest that. Perhaps it's being confused with the PS3?
At any rate, it's very easy to write a hypervisor (relatively speaking) especially for the Power platform. If the XBox360 does have a hypervisor (which seems unlikely to me honestly) than I would expect it to have come from Microsoft.
Of course, why would Microsoft have a hypervisor? My understanding was that the games ran within a special version of Windows (descended from the version that ran in the original XBox).
But what is the point of throwing your weight behind a president you don't support? Why not do what people in a lot of other countries would do, and do whatever you can to make it impossible for him to govern?
When my co-workers and I go out to lunch, we usually end up doing informal votes on where to go. If I want to get, say, Vietnamese, and the 5-6 other guys want to get BBQ, I usually state my case (we just went there) and see if anyone changes their vote. If not, I say, okay, and never mention it again.
If I spent the entire time in the car bitching about how we should have gotten Vietnamese, lunch wouldn't be that enjoyable. That's the way democracies work. You don't always get what you want but you respect your fellow citizens enough to not be a complete tool about not getting your way (as long as it doesn't impede on a fundamental right--hence the Constitution).
The problem today is that too many people are bitching about not getting what they wanted for lunch.
Including many Americans...
The American government is built on the principle[1] that the government are servants of the people. They are elected by the people and the people are protected from the government through the Constitution and checks and balances. The structure of the American government is one that is untrusting of itself. This is the way it's always been. There's no history of monarchy in American government.
Americans have trouble with organizations like the UN because it exists outside of this world. The UN presupposes trust in government--which Americans simply don't possess.
The idea of turning over control of something as important as the internet to an organization that assumes that government is a trust worthy thing is very contrary to the basis of the American form of government.
It's not because the US doesn't respect the rest of the world or wants to control everything. American's don't trust government. I'm not claiming this is the best system, I'm just attempting to explain the mentality.
[1] You can argue until the cows come home whether this is true in practice but it suffices to say that American's believe this to be mostly true.
Yes it is. SCIENCE is the BELIEF that the universe is set up with a series of laws which can be discovered, and which produce identical results when tested multiple times.
You're making an existential argument here. I strongly dislike existentialism as I feel it is simply a play on the imperfections of our communication systems.
Anyway, you cannot make an existential argument and expect to win because according to existentialism there is no right or wrong. If there's no right, you cannot win. You cannot say science is a belief because that presumes that there are things such as science and beliefs.
It's quite a silly argument to make.
Evolution is the belief that life adapts following a set of rules.
NO.
Evolution is not a belief. It is a scientific theory that began as a hypothesis over a century ago and since then has been refined and supported by vast amounts of empirical data which has led to it being accepted as a theory. It is not a law (like Netwon's law's of gravity) because it cannot be proven given the mathematical systems that we have today.
A belief is something that is not based on facts or evidence but rather on some whimsical concept of what someone would like to see.
Intelligent design is not a new idea. This debate occurred during Darwin's time. Evolutionists were divided into two camps: those that believed in "intelligent design" and those that felt that natural selection was a better model.
The belief in an intelligent design led to the belief that we were evolving into some better system, which led to the study of Eugenics, since it was then possible to say that some people were closer to the design then other.
Interestingly enough, the "science" of Eugenics was used by the Nazi party to justify the superiority of the German people.
You cannot pick and choose which pieces of science you wish to support. It's like saying that 2 + 2 = 4, but 4 - 2 = 3, because those damn secularists want you to believe that things are reversable and that's an affront to God.
The Slashdot summary is a bit misleading.
As is the article. Let me try to clarify:
Andrew has been open to including Xen (after appropriate changes) in his tree for quite a few months. The Xen developers have been busy working on the 3.0 release (which has finally tapered off but is a very ambitious release). Just a couple of weeks ago, the Xen 3.0 Linux port was forked into a new tree so that there could be a focused effort on getting it into shape for inclusion by Andrew.
The currently plan is to try and aim for 2.6.15. That's most likely the earliest it could go in. One of the difficulities in preparing the Xen port for inclusion in the kernel is that it touches a lot of Linux and requires a ton of kernel knowledge and a bunch of people to agree that it's the right thing to do. Getting key kernel guys involved (like the kind at RedHat) is critical to have this happen.
From what I have read, it is not that the code is low quality in XEN, it is that the XEN patch adds a new architecture which means a *lot* of code duplication.
You're right. The xen architecture is a problem. The drivers also need a lot of cleanup. It's not bad code, it's just not kernel code. The kernel guys tend to be fickle about how code looks.
There are a few problems with Xen. First, it's i386 only.
Not true. Today, Xen supports i386, x86_64, and ia64. Xen is currently being ported to PowerPC also.
Second (and this is the biggest problem IMO) - Xen is venture-backed, and seems to be extremely eager to show their investors a return.
XenSource is a company backed by VC. Xen is developed by a much larger community though. There are a ton of press-releases that XenSource puts out that have the typical marketting junk that most Open Source folks despise but whatever, XenSource != Xen. Most of there people aren't even actively working on Xen anyway (they have a product for Xen management),
If XenSource does not turn out to be a great business, then will Xen still be developed and maintained?
Absolutely.
Also, there is another project that I plug every chance I get - Linux Vserver. Unlike Xen, this is a purely volunteer effort, and is very innovative and attemtps to solve a difficult issue. Unlike Xen, these guys actually do not want to be in the mainline for now, becuase they think it will slow down development.
Yup. That's why VServer is not in the kernel--they don't want to be in the kernel. VServer is a cool project, and I would love to see it end up in the kernel. Xen is also a cool project and it would be great to see it in the kernel. The kernel guys *will not* accept crap. Large portions of the Xen Linux port are currently being rewritten to live up to kernel standards. I have a ton of faith in the kernel folks overseeing the process.
It basically lets you run multiple instances of the OS concurrently, where each instance thinks it's the only one running on the computer, right?
Sort of.
There is really two parts to virtualization: 1) processor virtualization and 2) hardware virtualization. Processor virtualization allows multiple virtual machines to think they have the whole processor. In this case, there's a lot of interesting tricks you can do (and new hardware support) so that the virtual machine thinks it has the actual underlying processor.
Hardware virtualization is really a relatively immature area. In general, you cannot virtualize hardware so you almost always end up emulating hardware. This is what let's you create a Window that the Virtual Machine thinks is it's VGA card. The VGA card is entirely emulated in software so you can make it do pretty much whatever you want.
I believe the best advertising is still genuine word of mouth amoung your friends and associates - not paid schills who want to read you a bulleted list.
The Apple iPod is a great example of this - I heard of it from my friends as recommendations long before I've seen it advertised by the company.
You do realize you've fallen victim to an extremely aggressive marketing campaign right? The iPod, from a technical standpoint, is no different than a myriad of mp3 players already out there. They tied into "emo" cultural explosion and did a heavy target of metropolitan areas which led to the iPod obtaining a "hip" image.
The iPod is an example of descent technology (not bad, but not great), extremely good marketing, and margins set just right (high enough to make everything else seem cheap but low enough to still be accessible to the average Joe).
The only problem with the iPod thus far is that it's becoming too popular. As more overweight, middle age, unkept guys are seen walking down the street with those little white ear buds, the less popular iPods are going to become. Popularity always kill fads though...
Sorry, I don't mean to be a bastard here, but this is my biggest pet peeve. I *hate* Intellisense or whatever the hell it's called. I think syntax autocompletion is ruining a new generation of programmers.
Here's my reasoning. Writing code that always works is hard. Writing code that works some of the time is easy. To write code that works all of the time you have to understand the exact behavior of every function you call and handle all possible scenarios properly. It's the difference between writing:And then writing a wrapper around read that checks for EAGAIN, EINTR, performs endianness conversion, handles partial reads, and potentially implements this all asynchronously. Back to my original point though, it takes time to learn all of the sublities of an API. The best way to learn them is by studying the interfaces (reading manuals, man pages, whatever).
If you cannot remember the name of a function, go back to the manual and study it. You're going to not handle the edge cases of it. If it's Java, you'll ignore a potential exception. If it's C, you'll miss a potential error code.
I'm not against all the features in things like Eclipse. Some of the refactoring stuff is useful. It's just intellisense that drives me nuts.
Who has done the real donkey-work in getting accessibility into GNOME? ... Sun. All the boring but necessary work to turn GNOME from a hacker's paradise into a genuinely usable desktop, not just for the typical American geek, but for everyone across the world.
There are two types of people involved in the Free Software community. People that care about Free Beer and people that care about Free Speech. OpenOffice is Free Beer. It's not Free Speech. To use copyright assignments to release code that people intend to be Free Software as non-Free Software is wrong, wrong, wrong.
If OpenOffice was BSD, fine, whatever, at least everyone has the right to turn around and release non-Free versions. However, since Sun feels like they're the only ones who should be allowed to do this, they decided to LGPL it to prevent IBM from releasing a closed version of OpenOffice (except it's okay for Sun to release it closed).
I appreciate their work on accessibility but remember, they did that because they ship Gnome as part of Solaris. They took a Free Software project, used it instead of implementing their own Desktop, and did a little bit of work on it to bring it up to their standards. They would have had to invest a lot more if they did it all from scratch. Sun has gotten as much from the Gnome project as the Gnome project has gotten from Sun.
See here for details of the procedure used in situations where copyright isn't being handed over, along with a list of modules that have been integrated into OpenOffice without copyright assignment. Basically, you have to tell Sun about it, so that their lawyers can check the module's license over to make sure it's acceptable for inclusion, and then they grab a copy of the source of the module and stick it in CVS. Simple enough.
They are simply hosting libraries that are used by OpenOffice. They're stored in a different CVS module. You cannot submit a patch to the core OpenOffice code without turning over your copyright to Sun.
The FSF also requires you to assign your copyright to them if you contribute to some of their projects (such as emacs -- I know; I've contributed to emacs).
Which is why there has been the historic forks of Emacs and GCC. A lot of people don't like this. The FSF will accept a dual copyright assignment which is slightly better. They're reasoning is that owning the full copyright gives the FSF a better legal ground to defend Emacs/GCC against litigation.
Of course, Sun's reasoning is much less noble. Sun just wants to be able to sell it for $70 a pop without releasing source code--cute way of avoiding the copyleft properties of the GPL.
The submitter praises GNOME's premier word processor in that it can surpass OpenOffice.org because it is GPL'ed, whereas the inflexible LGPL license of OpenOffice.org cripples development.
No, I think you (and most posters) misunderstand what the licensing issue is. The problem with OpenOffice.org is *not* that it's LGPL'd, but rather that for code to be integrated into OpenOffice.org, Sun requires you turn your copyright over to Sun. Very few existing Open Source projects are willing to do that--because frankly it's evil. This makes it very difficult for OpenOffice.org to integrate anything that isn't home grown.
This filesystem most likely stems from the ideas in Venti which is a filesystem that came out a few years ago. Link is included at the bottom. The (quite compelling) argument made originally is if you graph unique data growth (unique is important here) and compare it to the growth of commidity storage, as long as the storage growth is greater than unique data growth, there's no reason to ever delete anything since you essentially have infinite storage.
t ml
This is actually compelling for a large number of use cases. Many types of servers (think any sort of application server that's not a file server or something) fit this model. The disaster recover story is just fantastic, you can rollback to virtually any instance of the previous state of the filesystem.
FWIW, most new distributed SCMs are based on this same idea (like git or mercurial) so this is a pretty well-understood paradigm.
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.h
I was going to post something similiar to this. It's a very compelling argument. I'll bastard it here:
Happiness is the most important thing in life. The most effective path to happiness is learning how to eliminate unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness are states of mind and unhappiness is caused by a series of emotions (fear, anger, attachment). Learning how to eliminate these emotions (and to increase positive emotions like compassion) will ultimately lead to happiness. You can learn to control destructive emotions through mediation and prayer (although it is not the only way, just an effective and reproducisble way).
ps2pdf has been around since.. hell, as long as I can remember using Linux (probably before Office95). Since printing in Linux has always been based around postscript, I've never even thought about the fact that people have trouble printing to PDF.
PDF has been a target printer in Gnome for a long time. I reckon longer than OS X has been around.
the problem today with gazillions of copies of the same library isn't that they waste disk space -- it's that they each present an independent pathway for security failure.
Yeah, this is another difficult problem. How do you ensure that security updates are applied.
If you have something better than a linear versioning system, then you can distiguish between security updates and other sorts of updates. I still think you need a system where you have multiple versions of libraries that are functionally different. I think it's just a fact of life of software development. Libraries aren't going to just stagnat.
I always thought the equivalent to a "Blue Screen" was a "Panic" in Linux.
Tough call, Windows BSODs are sometimes recoverable and sometimes not. panic()s halt the system. Panic or oops is probably a good comparision to a BSOD. A core dump certainly isn't though.