Still, we lack any defined thresholds -- and in fact, it wouldn't make sense to define them. In a certain class of rocks (the rocks we find on Earth and are still called "single rocks"), we have named small rocks as pebbles, and big rocks as boulders. Now, where is the boundary between the former and the latter?
The difference between a planet and an asteroid is more a political one. I've even once heard a very important argument saying that "Pluto is a planet because without it, there wouldn't be any discovered by an American astronomer". This is but a sick joke, but to be honest, it pretty much sums the value of this discussion: there is no practical reason to back either side, just emotional ones.
In an attempt to paint the view of a semi-aware person, let me list the pros and cons that I remember after more than 5 years after reading about Pluto the last time. This should be pretty typical for a moderately erudite layman.
Pros: * Pluto orbits the sun on its own, and is a lot bigger than any other rock in its area * it has a moon (Charon) * historically it was always called a planet * it's 12 times bigger than the biggest thing called unanimously an asteroid
Cons: * Pluto is only 1/10 the size of the smallest planet in the Solar System * it's just a chunk of ice * it has a lot of smaller chunks of ice flying in similar orbits * it acts like a peer to Charon rather than "controlling" it (they rotate around a spot between them instead of having the center of mass only slightly shifted from the center of the main body)
The bottom line: it doesn't really matter how we call Pluto, it's just a name anyway. Now, let's go to Wikipedia or something...
OSS has an excellent interoperability with anything that doesn't try to opt out of interoperating or even doesn't try hard enough. And Microsoft is pretty much the only company that really cares about preventing that -- Apple smells like they deliberately made the DRM the record companies demanded weak, so Apple attempts to avoid being evil.
So, according to MS, who is the epitome of good interoperability? Uhm, let's see... isn't that the main culprit itself? Come one, this is a criminal act. False advertising and deliberately defaming your competition by spreading things that you know are false.
Well, show me a single usable Java VM. By usable I mean "not crashing all the time, able to run the same code the same way every time and still containing a decent set of features". I haven't seen one. This is not a flaw of the language itself -- but the fact that after all those years we still don't have a single stable Java environment says a lot.
Java is touted as a tool for writing safe code. Now, how many life-critical applications are written in Java? And how many in C? Hmm... And for things that don't need an extreme degree of efficiency and/or stability, there always are scripting languages like Perl or Python... (no,.NET is not an answer -- it has an abysmal record in both of these departments).
The amount of Java propaganda I perceive declined a lot in the last ten years. For me, Java is a failed experiment. Let's not try to dig up its corpse. Let it rot.
I am using Debian. It's an excellent distribution for me, it's just not good for grandmas.
A cow-orker who does tech support and software deployment couldn't manage to install it on both machines he tried to make Linux systems (he's generally a Windows user) without my help. In the first case (a year ago), the install media was a set of Woody CDs, in the latter (like two weeks ago) it was the new D-I targetted at Sarge.
During the first installation, my friend got stumped at making his USB ADSL work. He called me, I've got to his place -- and I needed quite a fair bit of time to realize that we need the eagle-* packages. A newbie-friendly distribution would identify the piece of USB equipment, consult it against some database and stuff the needed information into the user's face.
The second one broken when the packages chosen by tasksel didn't fit on the disk (it was an old 1GB drive). There was no warning that he's about to run ouf of space -- apt checks just the packages' installed size, ignoring both the.debs and space needed during the installation. The result? Most packages were left in a badly broken state, making it impossible to use any automated tool for recovery. I had to intervene, manually remove a number of random packages with dpkg to leave some space for apt. Only then we could start to even think about using apt again.
The bottom line: if even a techie got completely stumped by pretty basic tasks, how can you label Debian a distribution good for Joe Sixpack?
You're leaving the task of actually writing the documentation.
A very common downside of most software projects is the lack of documentation, even that of the technical variety. Can you volunteer to write it, and are you good at writing decent grandma docs? At least, I'm not.
What I need is a distro that is fit for me. A moderately skilled programmer/sysadmin with an inability to talk to non-technical users and a badly overgrown ego.
I need usable man pages. I need all that complex docs. I'm not a wizard who already knows everything by heart. I want documentation, not dumbed-down text asking me if the computer is turned on.
What those Joe Schmoe users need, is a clickable interface with anything that could make them shoot themselves in the foot carefully hidden. What I need, is a system that allows me to shoot my own foot if I tell it so. A system that doesn't try to pamper me, but does what I say -- without standing in my way. It needs to provide some examples and documentation that is not completely opaque -- and that documentation would be too dumbed down for those more skilled than me. In general, my goals are opposite to the goals of Grandma Jill. I, being selfish, can't stand if I get hurt due to someone trying to make it easier for grandmas.
I, a technical user, need a system fit for technical users. Grandmas need a system that's dumbed down. It's hard to have both in a single system, so any compromise will hurt both sides.
The thing is, to make a distro usable by grandmas, you need to dumb it down to a point where I wouldn't let it within a mile of my servers.
A man page usable by grandmas is a waste of disk space for me, and conversely, a man page I need is utterly incomprehensible for the grandma. There is no way to fix this except by having two completely separate sets of documentation. This could by possibly done by putting the files next to each other, but I quite fail to imagine any good way of integrating that into a single distribution.
They not only don't do god, they're damage to the Free Software community. Those patents are a means of sucking developers into their not-compatible-with-anything license. Code that you develop under CDDL cannot be used in anything that even links a GPLed library, and your CDDL-licensed libraries cannot be used in GPL programs. Thus, we would be better off without this "gift".
Just like in the uncle post, our phone at work was down for a month and a half around October, followed by a similar outage of my landline (and thus my ADSL as well) at home in December. The technicians when asked personally said it's just a matter of flipping a single switch at the central, but they're not allowed to do that themselves -- so, to get it done we would have to bribe one of their higher-ups. On a principle, we refused to -- and paid the consequences.
While this is not a board game, you'll certainly want to take a look at Doom2D (google for it). Too bad, it's semi-legal software (that is, it's pirating pirates: the guys who did it didn't care the slightest about any copyrights), but it's pretty much a must see for any former Doom2 maniac. The deathmatch is pretty good as well (hot-seat only).
Re:Dumbest Distribution Scheme Ever
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In a corrupt state (like Poland), you cannot register a company, build a house, get the electricity/gas connected without giving stuffed envelopes to several people. You also can choose between giving a bribe to get a place in a hospital now or to maybe get it in six months.
You can't really blame people for wanting to live semi-normal lives. Refusing to pay those corrupt officials is not really an option.
Check out debian-win32. It hasn't seem much action in years, but the concept isn't that new. Unfortunately, win32 differs so much from posix that emulating the needed parts, although possible (mostly), makes programs work at an unacceptable speed. Win32 doesn't even have fork().
Yes, we can record the errors made by the uneducated public (and even those done by, uhm, me). The question is: should we do that or not?
I was pretty taken aback when a council of linguist in Poland suddenly declared some widely-chastised and not even very popular errors to be valid usage. I've been brought up in the circles of people who not only put a lot of stress to the language you use, but also cruelly point out every incorrect word or phrase you use -- and this made me quite intolerant to bad speech.
Being but a dirty foreigner, I know that my English can sound bad in the ears of native English speakers -- that's why I sometimes ask people to correct me if they spot errors.
In other words: some people find careless speech repulsive. Thus, we should do whatever we can to promote correct usage as opposed to legalising incorrect uses.
Sorry, but regardless of how much testing you do, you cannot eliminate the possibility of a bug, you can just decrease the likelihood a bug will slip through. And yes, life critical equipment does fail. And multiple-layer failsave devices fail as well.
The above doesn't mean we should suddenly stop fighting against the shit -- but we can never have a guarantee it won't happen.
... especially in this field of work. If you have a project this big, the chance that nothing will go wrong are simply infinitessimal. Do you remember the last time when you wrote a program of 100 lines without doing a single error?
We should really praise the gods that the rest of Huygens mission was a grand success.
The thing is, for some odd reason, newer versions of Windows have normal anti-aliasing disabled. Just try this:
LOGFONT lf; lf.lfQuality=ANTIALIASED_QUALITY; lf.lfOutPr ecision=OUT_TT_ONLY_PRECIS; lf.lfHeight=-13; Cre ateFontIndirect(&lf); And then draw something with that font.
Now try this with lfQuality set to NONANTIALIASED_QUALITY and then 5 (CLEARTYPE_QUALITY, but it's not present in almost any headers). Somehow, the first two will yield identical results! This is why there is such a difference between normal drawing and ClearType -- if the normal gray-scale autoaliasing would be on, it would look nearly as good as ClearType on LCDs (but without color bleeding!) and much better on CRTs. On the other hand, WINE uses AA properly (it has worse text quality for other reasons).
Uhm, no one negotiated anything with me. No extortionist publisher association has any rights to give permissions for my works to anyone.
Of course, anything (software, documentation, game data) I ever published as myself went with a free license -- and they're pretty useless for a library, but that certainly isn't the case for a majority of authors. Remember: RIAA, MPAA, and in this case, GFPI and GBPA are not everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, we lack any defined thresholds -- and in fact, it wouldn't make sense to define them. In a certain class of rocks (the rocks we find on Earth and are still called "single rocks"), we have named small rocks as pebbles, and big rocks as boulders. Now, where is the boundary between the former and the latter?
The difference between a planet and an asteroid is more a political one. I've even once heard a very important argument saying that "Pluto is a planet because without it, there wouldn't be any discovered by an American astronomer". This is but a sick joke, but to be honest, it pretty much sums the value of this discussion: there is no practical reason to back either side, just emotional ones.
In an attempt to paint the view of a semi-aware person, let me list the pros and cons that I remember after more than 5 years after reading about Pluto the last time. This should be pretty typical for a moderately erudite layman.
Pros:
* Pluto orbits the sun on its own, and is a lot bigger than any other rock in its area
* it has a moon (Charon)
* historically it was always called a planet
* it's 12 times bigger than the biggest thing called unanimously an asteroid
Cons:
* Pluto is only 1/10 the size of the smallest planet in the Solar System
* it's just a chunk of ice
* it has a lot of smaller chunks of ice flying in similar orbits
* it acts like a peer to Charon rather than "controlling" it (they rotate around a spot between them instead of having the center of mass only slightly shifted from the center of the main body)
The bottom line: it doesn't really matter how we call Pluto, it's just a name anyway.
Now, let's go to Wikipedia or something...
OSS has an excellent interoperability with anything that doesn't try to opt out of interoperating or even doesn't try hard enough. And Microsoft is pretty much the only company that really cares about preventing that -- Apple smells like they deliberately made the DRM the record companies demanded weak, so Apple attempts to avoid being evil.
So, according to MS, who is the epitome of good interoperability? Uhm, let's see... isn't that the main culprit itself?
Come one, this is a criminal act. False advertising and deliberately defaming your competition by spreading things that you know are false.
Well, show me a single usable Java VM. By usable I mean "not crashing all the time, able to run the same code the same way every time and still containing a decent set of features". I haven't seen one.
.NET is not an answer -- it has an abysmal record in both of these departments).
This is not a flaw of the language itself -- but the fact that after all those years we still don't have a single stable Java environment says a lot.
Java is touted as a tool for writing safe code. Now, how many life-critical applications are written in Java? And how many in C? Hmm...
And for things that don't need an extreme degree of efficiency and/or stability, there always are scripting languages like Perl or Python... (no,
The amount of Java propaganda I perceive declined a lot in the last ten years. For me, Java is a failed experiment. Let's not try to dig up its corpse. Let it rot.
My apologies for abusing the word "grandma" :p
Being 27, and knowing a 14y old mom in the neighbourhood, I see that 27 is dangerously close to 2*14...
I am using Debian. It's an excellent distribution for me, it's just not good for grandmas.
.debs and space needed during the installation. The result? Most packages were left in a badly broken state, making it impossible to use any automated tool for recovery. I had to intervene, manually remove a number of random packages with dpkg to leave some space for apt. Only then we could start to even think about using apt again.
A cow-orker who does tech support and software deployment couldn't manage to install it on both machines he tried to make Linux systems (he's generally a Windows user) without my help. In the first case (a year ago), the install media was a set of Woody CDs, in the latter (like two weeks ago) it was the new D-I targetted at Sarge.
During the first installation, my friend got stumped at making his USB ADSL work. He called me, I've got to his place -- and I needed quite a fair bit of time to realize that we need the eagle-* packages. A newbie-friendly distribution would identify the piece of USB equipment, consult it against some database and stuff the needed information into the user's face.
The second one broken when the packages chosen by tasksel didn't fit on the disk (it was an old 1GB drive). There was no warning that he's about to run ouf of space -- apt checks just the packages' installed size, ignoring both the
The bottom line: if even a techie got completely stumped by pretty basic tasks, how can you label Debian a distribution good for Joe Sixpack?
You're leaving the task of actually writing the documentation.
A very common downside of most software projects is the lack of documentation, even that of the technical variety. Can you volunteer to write it, and are you good at writing decent grandma docs? At least, I'm not.
What I need is a distro that is fit for me. A moderately skilled programmer/sysadmin with an inability to talk to non-technical users and a badly overgrown ego.
I need usable man pages. I need all that complex docs. I'm not a wizard who already knows everything by heart. I want documentation, not dumbed-down text asking me if the computer is turned on.
What those Joe Schmoe users need, is a clickable interface with anything that could make them shoot themselves in the foot carefully hidden. What I need, is a system that allows me to shoot my own foot if I tell it so. A system that doesn't try to pamper me, but does what I say -- without standing in my way. It needs to provide some examples and documentation that is not completely opaque -- and that documentation would be too dumbed down for those more skilled than me.
In general, my goals are opposite to the goals of Grandma Jill. I, being selfish, can't stand if I get hurt due to someone trying to make it easier for grandmas.
I, a technical user, need a system fit for technical users.
Grandmas need a system that's dumbed down.
It's hard to have both in a single system, so any compromise will hurt both sides.
Let's say that that mile was an exaggeration.
The thing is, to make a distro usable by grandmas, you need to dumb it down to a point where I wouldn't let it within a mile of my servers.
A man page usable by grandmas is a waste of disk space for me, and conversely, a man page I need is utterly incomprehensible for the grandma.
There is no way to fix this except by having two completely separate sets of documentation. This could by possibly done by putting the files next to each other, but I quite fail to imagine any good way of integrating that into a single distribution.
Now, why exactly Encarta is less biased than Wikipedia?
ad 1) Indeed, you're right.
ad 2) GPL libraries are compatible with basically every other Free Software license -- and this is virtually everything except for OpenSSL and APL.
ad 3) Indeed -- the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is not negligible, and only people belonging to the former are hurt by CDDL.
They not only don't do god, they're damage to the Free Software community. Those patents are a means of sucking developers into their not-compatible-with-anything license. Code that you develop under CDDL cannot be used in anything that even links a GPLed library, and your CDDL-licensed libraries cannot be used in GPL programs. Thus, we would be better off without this "gift".
And especially, don't forget that both vi and Emacs suck. Use jstar.
Just like in the uncle post, our phone at work was down for a month and a half around October, followed by a similar outage of my landline (and thus my ADSL as well) at home in December. The technicians when asked personally said it's just a matter of flipping a single switch at the central, but they're not allowed to do that themselves -- so, to get it done we would have to bribe one of their higher-ups. On a principle, we refused to -- and paid the consequences.
While this is not a board game, you'll certainly want to take a look at Doom2D (google for it). Too bad, it's semi-legal software (that is, it's pirating pirates: the guys who did it didn't care the slightest about any copyrights), but it's pretty much a must see for any former Doom2 maniac.
The deathmatch is pretty good as well (hot-seat only).
In a corrupt state (like Poland), you cannot register a company, build a house, get the electricity/gas connected without giving stuffed envelopes to several people. You also can choose between giving a bribe to get a place in a hospital now or to maybe get it in six months.
You can't really blame people for wanting to live semi-normal lives. Refusing to pay those corrupt officials is not really an option.
This is the classic case of a kettle calling the refrigerator black.
Don't laugh so loud, grasshopper.
Check out debian-win32. It hasn't seem much action in years, but the concept isn't that new.
Unfortunately, win32 differs so much from posix that emulating the needed parts, although possible (mostly), makes programs work at an unacceptable speed. Win32 doesn't even have fork().
The MS EULA says you're not allowed to move your license to another computer.
Yes, we can record the errors made by the uneducated public (and even those done by, uhm, me). The question is: should we do that or not?
I was pretty taken aback when a council of linguist in Poland suddenly declared some widely-chastised and not even very popular errors to be valid usage. I've been brought up in the circles of people who not only put a lot of stress to the language you use, but also cruelly point out every incorrect word or phrase you use -- and this made me quite intolerant to bad speech.
Being but a dirty foreigner, I know that my English can sound bad in the ears of native English speakers -- that's why I sometimes ask people to correct me if they spot errors.
In other words: some people find careless speech repulsive. Thus, we should do whatever we can to promote correct usage as opposed to legalising incorrect uses.
Sorry, but regardless of how much testing you do, you cannot eliminate the possibility of a bug, you can just decrease the likelihood a bug will slip through. And yes, life critical equipment does fail. And multiple-layer failsave devices fail as well.
The above doesn't mean we should suddenly stop fighting against the shit -- but we can never have a guarantee it won't happen.
... especially in this field of work. If you have a project this big, the chance that nothing will go wrong are simply infinitessimal. Do you remember the last time when you wrote a program of 100 lines without doing a single error?
We should really praise the gods that the rest of Huygens mission was a grand success.
The thing is, for some odd reason, newer versions of Windows have normal anti-aliasing disabled. Just try this:
r ecision=OUT_TT_ONLY_PRECIS;e ateFontIndirect(&lf);
LOGFONT lf;
lf.lfQuality=ANTIALIASED_QUALITY;
lf.lfOutP
lf.lfHeight=-13;
Cr
And then draw something with that font.
Now try this with lfQuality set to NONANTIALIASED_QUALITY and then 5 (CLEARTYPE_QUALITY, but it's not present in almost any headers).
Somehow, the first two will yield identical results! This is why there is such a difference between normal drawing and ClearType -- if the normal gray-scale autoaliasing would be on, it would look nearly as good as ClearType on LCDs (but without color bleeding!) and much better on CRTs. On the other hand, WINE uses AA properly (it has worse text quality for other reasons).
Uhm, no one negotiated anything with me. No extortionist publisher association has any rights to give permissions for my works to anyone.
Of course, anything (software, documentation, game data) I ever published as myself went with a free license -- and they're pretty useless for a library, but that certainly isn't the case for a majority of authors. Remember: RIAA, MPAA, and in this case, GFPI and GBPA are not everything.
I still do have my set of Windows 1.0 disks. Of course, they have nails driven through them, but anyway...