I *want* swooshy 3-D graphics stolen directly from OS X! Not stolen, just copied. Stolen would mean Apple no longer had it. Copying is a good thing.
I *want* the Blue Screen of Death in 5.1 surround-sound! The Windows NT line doesn't usually blue screen, it just freezes and/or restarts.
I *want* to play solitaire on an x86 box that has 8 gigs of RAM and a 200 gig hard drive! Are you kidding me? Games are about the only good reason for anyone to be using Windows one their desktop, and it's a very good reason if you're really into computer games.
I hate Windows, and I only use Linux on my desktop, but this is really stupid FUD. Nobody will take you seriously if you exaggerate this much.
You are fighting a losing battle. (Or perhaps I should say "loosing" battle?) People who are unable to modernize have dismissed assembly language, high-level languages (like C), OOP, etc as "hand-holding tools" that real programmers didn't need, but those things took over anyway.
If you can't code in binary/hexadecimal, you belong in a different profession. But you also belong in a different profession if you willingly chose to code in binary/hexadecimal and refuse to use new technologies that would make you more efficient.
If something will make you a more efficient programmer, it's a good thing! It's not something to be dismissed!
That doesn't mean you should always use the latest and greatest. After all, assembly still has it's place. It just means you shouldn't think of new more efficient ways of programming as being only for poor programmers.
Firefox already has a garbage collector for detecting memory leaks. (It's only used for debugging.) Of course, it probably doesn't help much when JavaScript objects create circular references with C++ XPCOM components, which are reference counted. Those circular references are the main source of memory leaks (or object leaks?) for Firefox. It's very easy to create them, and many extensions are very bad about creating lots of them.
Tasers aren't supposed to be used to stop people from squirming around and making noise. They're only supposed to be used to stop people who pose a threat of harm to others. This kid was most definitely not posing any kind of threat to anyone.
I agree. GIMP's interface isn't the problem. I've only used Photoshop and GIMP a little, but even a basic user like me can tell that Photoshop is much more powerful.
In both GIMP and Photoshop, I can add a drop shadow to a layer. But with Photoshop, I can make all kinds of adjustments to the shadow (angle, opacity, spread, etc) and see it updated in real time. When I edit the layer, (e.g. cutting away parts of it, moving it around) the shadow is instantly updated. In GIMP, the shadow just sits there doing nothing, so I have to delete it and then recreate it again and again.
I use only Linux on my desktop, and I try to use mostly libre software (drivers and maybe codecs being the only major exceptions). That means I use GIMP instead of Photoshop. However, it's very clear to me that even for basic users Photoshop is highly superior to GIMP.
Since Slashdot always has affiliate links to Barnes and Noble even though the Amazon prices are almost always lower, I would be more surprised if they aren't getting kickbacks from ComputerWorld. Slashvertisements aren't so uncommon.
Are you seriously claiming that it's actually good that nobody can get ahead in socialist societies, because it prevents corruption? That's absurd. When people can't get ahead by playing fair, like they can with a capitalist economy, they'll start playing dirty.
How many times will socialism have to fail horribly before people realize that it just doesn't work? I'd rather have a working economy than a broken economy with high ideals.
You shouldn't have to know how something is designed to use it. It's the separation of interface and implementation. Imagine if when programming you had to know how every class was coded to use it. Imagine if when writing in Python or Ruby you had to know how the parser, interpreter, and libraries were implemented.
Not having to know how things are implemented is great!
I'm libertarian and I hate the United States Libertarian Party (though much less than other parties).
I'm libertarian because I actually like freedom, unlike the liberals and conservatives. I don't want to try to restrict other people from doing something unless there's clear evidence of substantial harm to someone else. Prostitution, drug use, gun ownership, incest, bestiality, etc, I'd like to see legalized. I'd like for people to be able to hire someone for any wage they'll agree to, start a business without having to put in handicapped parking, and deny business to any person for any reason, no matter how stupid the reason.
Liberals and conservatives both want to greatly restrict behavior they don't like. They just want to restrict different behavior.
If you hit Ctrl+Alt+F# (F1, F2, etc) you can get into a command line, then login and use sudo nano/etc/X11/xorg.conf to edit your configuration file. Of course, users should never be expected to do such a thing, but it's at least nice to know that you can.
You're totally right. Canonical should do like Apple and only allow users to run Ubuntu on hardware they sell to you. That way you'll always know your Canonical PC will be fully compatible with Ubuntu.
When will people learn that being rude doesn't help? If you want somebody to work with you, you need to play nice. It's not pleasant, and it's not easy to make yourself calm down and act like a pussy, but it's important if you ever want any collaboration.
Example:
Interesting, but I don't see this. Can you point it out?
I think you misunderstood me. It may not be a common problem, but it is a conceptual problem. The rounding has been improved lately, so it's not as easy to trigger with some simple busy loops. Peter's patches don't remove limit_wait_runtime() and AFAICT they can't, so I don't see how what you said can be correct.
I'm worried about how quickly you judged this issue, and that you haven't been more in contact with me discussing it. This issue is important to me, and I'd really like to work with you to get it resolved.
Perhaps we should allow people to die earlier with dignity. If people didn't have such strong irrational hang-ups about suicide, that would be the best answer. Live as long as you possibly can until something like Alzheimers comes along, and then wack yourself. You avoid the long terrible death associated with living too long, while still having a longer life.
ODF is still being worked on, and has a much more open specification process. They care more about doing things well than doing things quickly.
If Microsoft really cared about interop with OpenOffice, they can have someone create documentation from the source code of OpenOffice. That isn't a very desirable situation, but it's much better than the situation with the closed-source Microsoft Office.
Who said anything about communism? The same person who said "Wow, capitalism in action." If you go to his website http://nickhart.com/mie/ you'll see at the top in big bold letters "NICKHART.COMMIE". He even has this definition of socialism right next to it: "The self-emancipation of the working class." This person is in favor of economic systems that have been shown time and time again to just plain not work.
I for one would rather have an economic system that, you know, actually works. Capitalism might not be as idealistic and not sound as noble, but in practice it leads to a happier and more affluent population.
Do you have even the slightest clue about what capitalism is? Because you don't seem to.
The problem here is the government-granted monopoly. If you don't have a free market, you don't have capitalism. Capitalism would be the savior here, not the enemy.
Why are you being so negative? It's entirely possible the ISO will not approve OOXML. From what I've been hearing, it could still go either way, but it's leaning more towards not approving it.
What the fuck is the point of a byte-order-mark on an encoding that is byte-order neutral? So you know what the character encoding is, just like STD 63 aka RFC 3629 explains. It's not a very good method of specifying the character encoding, but it's better than not saying anything at all, which most text files do. Whenever there's another method, as there is in XML, you should use it (without the BOM), but there often is no other way to specify the character encoding.
I remember a time when I was working on a UTF-8 text file with lots of characters that weren't ASCII-compatible. One day I opened the file up in a program that didn't recognize it as UTF-8, and it defaulted to some other character encoding. I didn't notice the problem, so I edited a little something and saved. All the non-ASCII characters were replaced with question marks. If the file had a BOM, the program would have recognized it as UTF-8 and the problem wouldn't have happened.
Only an extremely poor programmer could not understand that it's possible to represent and work with numbers of arbitrary complexity. IEEE floats are fast and easy, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to represent a number that can't be fit into an IEEE float.
We've had lots of well tested relatively fast bignum libraries for years. Introducing rounding errors in a spreadsheet without being explicitly told by the user that such errors are allowed is absolutely unacceptable.
How did the Big Bang get around the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy? This question doesn't make sense. The Big Bang is about how the matter behaved extremely soon after it came into existence, not how it got here. The matter got here somehow, and then the Big Bang explains what happened next.
Why is this distinction important? Some religious people say that matter can't just pop out of nothing, so therefore the Big Bang theory must be entirely wrong. You have no chance of convincing them that matter really can pop out of nothing. If you can keep the distinction between the arrival of matter and how the matter behaved soon after, you have a much better chance of getting a religious person to consider the Big Bang. The distinction takes away their easy answer (other than religious texts).
Slashdot Mirror
I hate Windows, and I only use Linux on my desktop, but this is really stupid FUD. Nobody will take you seriously if you exaggerate this much.
The dialect of English you're referring to is British English.
I don't think having cron browse the web for me (Slashdot, anyone?) would be a very enjoyable experience.
Any takers?
Why? Probably because you don't know that those specs were under an NDA and these newer specs aren't.
You are fighting a losing battle. (Or perhaps I should say "loosing" battle?) People who are unable to modernize have dismissed assembly language, high-level languages (like C), OOP, etc as "hand-holding tools" that real programmers didn't need, but those things took over anyway.
If you can't code in binary/hexadecimal, you belong in a different profession. But you also belong in a different profession if you willingly chose to code in binary/hexadecimal and refuse to use new technologies that would make you more efficient.
If something will make you a more efficient programmer, it's a good thing! It's not something to be dismissed!
That doesn't mean you should always use the latest and greatest. After all, assembly still has it's place. It just means you shouldn't think of new more efficient ways of programming as being only for poor programmers.
Firefox already has a garbage collector for detecting memory leaks. (It's only used for debugging.) Of course, it probably doesn't help much when JavaScript objects create circular references with C++ XPCOM components, which are reference counted. Those circular references are the main source of memory leaks (or object leaks?) for Firefox. It's very easy to create them, and many extensions are very bad about creating lots of them.
Tasers aren't supposed to be used to stop people from squirming around and making noise. They're only supposed to be used to stop people who pose a threat of harm to others. This kid was most definitely not posing any kind of threat to anyone.
I agree. GIMP's interface isn't the problem. I've only used Photoshop and GIMP a little, but even a basic user like me can tell that Photoshop is much more powerful.
In both GIMP and Photoshop, I can add a drop shadow to a layer. But with Photoshop, I can make all kinds of adjustments to the shadow (angle, opacity, spread, etc) and see it updated in real time. When I edit the layer, (e.g. cutting away parts of it, moving it around) the shadow is instantly updated. In GIMP, the shadow just sits there doing nothing, so I have to delete it and then recreate it again and again.
I use only Linux on my desktop, and I try to use mostly libre software (drivers and maybe codecs being the only major exceptions). That means I use GIMP instead of Photoshop. However, it's very clear to me that even for basic users Photoshop is highly superior to GIMP.
Since Slashdot always has affiliate links to Barnes and Noble even though the Amazon prices are almost always lower, I would be more surprised if they aren't getting kickbacks from ComputerWorld. Slashvertisements aren't so uncommon.
Are you seriously claiming that it's actually good that nobody can get ahead in socialist societies, because it prevents corruption? That's absurd. When people can't get ahead by playing fair, like they can with a capitalist economy, they'll start playing dirty.
How many times will socialism have to fail horribly before people realize that it just doesn't work? I'd rather have a working economy than a broken economy with high ideals.
You shouldn't have to know how something is designed to use it. It's the separation of interface and implementation. Imagine if when programming you had to know how every class was coded to use it. Imagine if when writing in Python or Ruby you had to know how the parser, interpreter, and libraries were implemented.
Not having to know how things are implemented is great!
I'm libertarian and I hate the United States Libertarian Party (though much less than other parties).
I'm libertarian because I actually like freedom, unlike the liberals and conservatives. I don't want to try to restrict other people from doing something unless there's clear evidence of substantial harm to someone else. Prostitution, drug use, gun ownership, incest, bestiality, etc, I'd like to see legalized. I'd like for people to be able to hire someone for any wage they'll agree to, start a business without having to put in handicapped parking, and deny business to any person for any reason, no matter how stupid the reason.
Liberals and conservatives both want to greatly restrict behavior they don't like. They just want to restrict different behavior.
If you hit Ctrl+Alt+F# (F1, F2, etc) you can get into a command line, then login and use sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf to edit your configuration file. Of course, users should never be expected to do such a thing, but it's at least nice to know that you can.
You're totally right. Canonical should do like Apple and only allow users to run Ubuntu on hardware they sell to you. That way you'll always know your Canonical PC will be fully compatible with Ubuntu.
Example: Interesting, but I don't see this. Can you point it out?
I think you misunderstood me. It may not be a common problem, but it is a conceptual problem. The rounding has been improved lately, so it's not as easy to trigger with some simple busy loops. Peter's patches don't remove limit_wait_runtime() and AFAICT they can't, so I don't see how what you said can be correct.
I'm worried about how quickly you judged this issue, and that you haven't been more in contact with me discussing it. This issue is important to me, and I'd really like to work with you to get it resolved.
ODF is still being worked on, and has a much more open specification process. They care more about doing things well than doing things quickly.
If Microsoft really cared about interop with OpenOffice, they can have someone create documentation from the source code of OpenOffice. That isn't a very desirable situation, but it's much better than the situation with the closed-source Microsoft Office.
I for one would rather have an economic system that, you know, actually works. Capitalism might not be as idealistic and not sound as noble, but in practice it leads to a happier and more affluent population.
Do you have even the slightest clue about what capitalism is? Because you don't seem to.
The problem here is the government-granted monopoly. If you don't have a free market, you don't have capitalism. Capitalism would be the savior here, not the enemy.
Why are you being so negative? It's entirely possible the ISO will not approve OOXML. From what I've been hearing, it could still go either way, but it's leaning more towards not approving it.
I remember a time when I was working on a UTF-8 text file with lots of characters that weren't ASCII-compatible. One day I opened the file up in a program that didn't recognize it as UTF-8, and it defaulted to some other character encoding. I didn't notice the problem, so I edited a little something and saved. All the non-ASCII characters were replaced with question marks. If the file had a BOM, the program would have recognized it as UTF-8 and the problem wouldn't have happened.
Only an extremely poor programmer could not understand that it's possible to represent and work with numbers of arbitrary complexity. IEEE floats are fast and easy, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to represent a number that can't be fit into an IEEE float.
We've had lots of well tested relatively fast bignum libraries for years. Introducing rounding errors in a spreadsheet without being explicitly told by the user that such errors are allowed is absolutely unacceptable.
Why is this distinction important? Some religious people say that matter can't just pop out of nothing, so therefore the Big Bang theory must be entirely wrong. You have no chance of convincing them that matter really can pop out of nothing. If you can keep the distinction between the arrival of matter and how the matter behaved soon after, you have a much better chance of getting a religious person to consider the Big Bang. The distinction takes away their easy answer (other than religious texts).