Can we also have GDB make small source-level modifications to a running binary, like Visual Studio debugger did last time I used it.
No, but there is at least one open source debugger that does let you do just that, and it's been around for about 15 years (check the comp.sources.* archives; it should still be there).
I think most developers concluded it's not worth the effort: so many C++ bugs leave the program in an undefined state, that there is no point in supporting fix-and-continue.
Development environments for languages like Python and Java do, of course, let you modify the source code on the fly.
You may like Visual Studio. Good for you, keep on using it.
Other people prefer Eclipse, and arguably, Eclipse has long surpassed Visual Studio both in terms of UI and in terms of functionality.
Yet other people find Emacs a far better tool.
And, frankly, compared to the environments people had 20 years ago for Smalltalk and Lisp, all those tools still seem extremely cumbersome.
Visual Studio may be Microsoft's "ultimate killer app", but that's because people like you don't know how to work with anything else, not because it is actually better in any absolute sense.
"Unjustifiable"? You might want to think through the ramifications of your position. Starting with ditching the "copyright is only about the RIAA/MPAA" attitude.
Believe me, I have: the problems with current copyright law go far beyond RIAA/MPAA. Copyght should be far more limited than it is right now; that's even more important for books and other content than music.
The prblem with the "I download because of the Sonny Bono Act" argument is that pirates have made it a known fact that they'll distribute the minute (if not before. the latest SW's) it becomes available.
I don't see a "problem". The Sonny Bono Act should provoke outrage, but obviously, many people disagree with current copyright law beyond what the Sonny Bono Act contains. The real question is why we should continue to have copyright laws that so many people obviously don't want.
Even with observing correlations, you can run experiments with the data. While in Astronomy you can't run the same physical experiments as physics, chemistry, or biology, you still have run some sort of experiment (mostly mathematical) to ensure that your findings aren't purely coincidental.
Whether you call that kind of analysis "experiment" or not, you can do the same things you do in astronomy and paleontology to test intelligent design as a scientific hypothesis.
ID is a scientific hypothesis, there simply is no shred of evicence for it. Alien abductions and poltergeists are more plausible than ID.
Wrong. Apple and OSF Research Institute started MkLinux to run atop PowerPC hardware. In addition, Apple ran AIX on some of their older servers.
Macintosh hardware remains partially undocumented (in some cases, because Apple chose to use proprietary and undocumented PC components), and open source operating systems can't make full use of the hardware. That's true even for MkLinux.
That makes Macintosh a worse platform for open source operating systems than PC hardware. The fact that the only way you can buy a Macintosh is bundled with software also means it's not a good platform for open source operating systems.
"have been using completely standard PC components for quite awhile now", then yes, you'd be right on that part.:-)
Their processor, motherboard, and BIOS are clearly not standard PC components.
In order for it to be scientific, it must make falsifiable predictions. Please state what predictions ID makes so that we can design actual experiments to try to disprove it. That is how science works.
No, that's not how all science works. Astronomy and paleontology, for example, are based on observing correlations after the fact.
Intelligent design--the idea that an intelligent being designed life forms on earth--is a scientific hypothesis. It's analogous to many other kinds of hypotheses scientists formulate and test all the time. The problem with ID is that it's a bad scientific hypothesis: there is no support for it at all.
And if it were actually true, then a whole host of theological questions about the way God acts in the world become scientific questions. Among other things, we can start asking questions about the rationality and psychology of God's behavior (and that doesn't look good for God).
Intelligent Design is not just unproven, it is inherently unprovable.
Intelligent design, as described by its proponents, posits that a non-human intelligence has designed many biological organisms. That is very much something that is falsifiable--it is a scientific theory. The problem with it is that it is a bad scientific theory with no experimental support.
And from a religious point of view, it's bad religion as well: if intelligent design were actually true, it would reduce God to the status of little green men; there just is no theological or ethical reason to worship a being just because it has been tinkering with our biology.
Americans generally only get upset at the loss of Freedom when those it is the kind of abrupt in your face taking that DRM represents.
The trusted computing hardware doesn't prevent you from running untrusted code, it just prevents untrusted code from accessing protected data. What the lack of inclusion of trusted computing hardware would mean is simply that, if trusted computing catches on on Windows, a lot of Windows-based music and video can't be accessed on the Macintosh at all.
Would this leave Apple as the only "General computer" left?
Apple has never produced "general computers"; they don't support running other operating systems on their hardware, and they have a long history of using proprietary and undocumented hardware components in their Macintosh platform. The reason things have gotten better recently is not a change of heart at Apple, but the fact that they are increasingly using standard PC components in their systems.
A more accross the board move to Apple could even be a boon to linux as more people accept the fact that there are options to wintel
Apple hardware will be a decent choice for Linux as soon as (1) Apple gives you the option of buying the hardware without the software and (2) Linux developers aren't forced to create drivers by reverse engineering anymore.
On balance, I still think it's good for Apple to leave this out; if they really need it later, they should be able to provide it as a USB dongle. However, leaving it out doesn't make Macintosh an "open platform"; it never has been, and the way it looks, it won't be any time soon.
Why do the Chinese leaders have the self-restraint to not ban games altogether, but they don't have the self-restraint to ban games with PK elements?
If you think of the Chinese leaders as the right wing of the Republican party, you aren't so far off: these people are socially conservative and pro business. When those principles are in conflict, it is unpredictable which one wins. In this case, they found a compromise that isn't all that different from the US or other conservative Western nation.
One difference is that the Chinese leadership is less constrained by pesky democratic and legal principles, so they can act faster on their whims; but should a US party achieve a filibuster-proof margin in the US, we may be heading that way, too.
The same kind of social conservatives that write similar laws in the US. The kinds of people who get all pushed out of shape about GTA, withdraw its rating, and try to remove it from the market. Incidentally, Germany pretty much bans PK for all ages...
But it's amusing to see the undercurrent of outrage in these 'stories'.
With laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, outrage is entirely warranted. Furthermore, I have no sympathy for those companies; as far as I'm concerned, a lot of their copyrights are unjustifiable. (However, I have personally not downloaded music from P2P networks, so far.)
No, the pot smoker is right. Your brain is too small to absorb their goodness.
The authors have not shown that their system is resistant to attacks. Maybe it seems plausible to them and to you that it is, but plausibility is not the same as actually demonstrating that property.
his blog (JoelOnSoftware) has been read by many developers I've come across - at least the good ones...
"Good" can mean many things. Joel largely represents mainstream views of Windows and Macintosh programmers--the kind of views you might find among Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows XP kernel, Safari, or even Mozilla developers. If you want to be like one of those developers, then follow his advice. If you think that there is something seriously wrong with that kind of software (as I do), then you would do well to read Joel's writings more critically and assume that some of it is bad advice. Thinking about those issues will still make you a better programmer.
The notion of hiding multiple mouse buttons under a seamless cover in order to give Mac users the option of using multiple buttons without changing the appearance of a single button mouse has also been proposed multiple times on Slashdot, in particular for Powerbooks.
So, yes, you have another instance in which Apple marketing is a little too glowing and the actual product is just a prettier version of a standard PC product. But, hey, that's not bad: Apple's mouse is nice looking (but, then, it's also three times as expensive as the plain, functionally equivalent alternative).
Or if you're trying to avoid your carrier's extra fees for international calling, think again. If you use a calling card for that, you'll use up the minutes on your card at 10x-50x the normal rate.
That's total bullshit: the calling card company is just a local phone number as far as the cell phone company is concerned (if you take the local number option), and the calling card company doesn't care where you call from. The rate is no different from that of making a local phone call--that is, it is as low or lower than with iScoop.
What's more is, most calling cards now use VoIP behind the scenes, so you're getting the same wonderful quality as you'd get with this iScoop thing.
First of all, you can shop around and get one with good quality. Secondly, keeping a computer running is expensive and a lot of hassle.
"If you do notice, it is WAY better than Google's start page too - you can actually drag the various sections on the page and place them anywhere on the page."
There is nothing wrong with Microsoft copying Google, but please get your history straight.
Draggable sections is actually the part that makes start.com so similar to Google--Google was the first major site to offer that kind of customization. Start.com is clearly a copy of that, in just about every respect.
This is the first sensible approach towards innovation in GUIs and desktop operating systems I have seen in a long time. Unlike so many other efforts, these people are addressing the question of how to actually improve human computer interaction, while relying on tools that work and that lots of people understand (HTML, Perl, etc.).
Most of the other desktop efforts (including commercial ones) start from a systems programming perspective and demand that you first throw out all the tools you already know; and despite all that effort, they still end up with messy and complex WIMP interfaces that work little better than their predecessors.
I don't necessarily agree with all of Jason's principles, but this does look like a worthwhile effort.
Get a calling card with a local or 800 access number. Yes, they do work from your cell phone as well (duh), and if you shop around, you can find dirt cheap ones. Program the number into your cell phone for extra convenience.
No need to waste time, money, or electricity on a complicated software/hardware/broadband setup.
You are quite right that what the UK is doing is probably legal under UK law. British imperial rule and drug trafficking also were legal under UK law.
The question is not whether those kinds of policies are legal, the question is whether they are effective. And they are clearly not effective: terrorism is a worse problem than ever. Britain, and the West in general, cannot win the war on terrorism by attempting to suppress opposing politicial views, or even by going after terrorists and terrorist organizations. The only way to win is to help the people in those countries to become free and prosperous, and to convince them that we are friends and allies.
People like you exist on both sides, and they keep perpetuating the hostilities. Whether it's an Al Quaeda ideologue or a British right wing hard liner, you guys are ideologically pretty much the same, and you are threatening to destroy us all.
Overlapping bitmapped window systems were invented at PARC, AT&T, and several other places. Overlapping windows in general were even older than that.
drop down menus
Present in Smalltalk (with a slightly different look).
highly readable screenfonts
Apple was bitmapped like everybody else. When they came out with TrueType, outline fonts and hinting had already been used for on-screen display by Sun, NeXT, and IBM. The technology behind it came from Adobe and several other companies.
file oriented OS (instead of an application oriented one) [...] a full office suite
Two huge design mistakes that the industry has been suffering from ever since.
Not to mention auto power off and resume everything after power on(you have to see this to believe it).
Apple didn't invent that either, and it's also a feature that other systems had at the time (including Smalltalk).
Apple saw the idea, but implemented it correctly
Apple saw the idea and marketed it correctly. Big difference. Technologically, the software that Apple produces (to this day) sucks. You're right, though, that among the machines Apple has put out, the Lisa was probably technologically the best and most original.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we also have GDB make small source-level modifications to a running binary, like Visual Studio debugger did last time I used it.
No, but there is at least one open source debugger that does let you do just that, and it's been around for about 15 years (check the comp.sources.* archives; it should still be there).
I think most developers concluded it's not worth the effort: so many C++ bugs leave the program in an undefined state, that there is no point in supporting fix-and-continue.
Development environments for languages like Python and Java do, of course, let you modify the source code on the fly.
You may like Visual Studio. Good for you, keep on using it.
Other people prefer Eclipse, and arguably, Eclipse has long surpassed Visual Studio both in terms of UI and in terms of functionality.
Yet other people find Emacs a far better tool.
And, frankly, compared to the environments people had 20 years ago for Smalltalk and Lisp, all those tools still seem extremely cumbersome.
Visual Studio may be Microsoft's "ultimate killer app", but that's because people like you don't know how to work with anything else, not because it is actually better in any absolute sense.
"Unjustifiable"? You might want to think through the ramifications of your position. Starting with ditching the "copyright is only about the RIAA/MPAA" attitude.
Believe me, I have: the problems with current copyright law go far beyond RIAA/MPAA. Copyght should be far more limited than it is right now; that's even more important for books and other content than music.
The prblem with the "I download because of the Sonny Bono Act" argument is that pirates have made it a known fact that they'll distribute the minute (if not before. the latest SW's) it becomes available.
I don't see a "problem". The Sonny Bono Act should provoke outrage, but obviously, many people disagree with current copyright law beyond what the Sonny Bono Act contains. The real question is why we should continue to have copyright laws that so many people obviously don't want.
Even with observing correlations, you can run experiments with the data. While in Astronomy you can't run the same physical experiments as physics, chemistry, or biology, you still have run some sort of experiment (mostly mathematical) to ensure that your findings aren't purely coincidental.
Whether you call that kind of analysis "experiment" or not, you can do the same things you do in astronomy and paleontology to test intelligent design as a scientific hypothesis.
ID is a scientific hypothesis, there simply is no shred of evicence for it. Alien abductions and poltergeists are more plausible than ID.
Wrong. Apple and OSF Research Institute started MkLinux to run atop PowerPC hardware. In addition, Apple ran AIX on some of their older servers.
:-)
Macintosh hardware remains partially undocumented (in some cases, because Apple chose to use proprietary and undocumented PC components), and open source operating systems can't make full use of the hardware. That's true even for MkLinux.
That makes Macintosh a worse platform for open source operating systems than PC hardware. The fact that the only way you can buy a Macintosh is bundled with software also means it's not a good platform for open source operating systems.
"have been using completely standard PC components for quite awhile now", then yes, you'd be right on that part.
Their processor, motherboard, and BIOS are clearly not standard PC components.
In order for it to be scientific, it must make falsifiable predictions. Please state what predictions ID makes so that we can design actual experiments to try to disprove it. That is how science works.
No, that's not how all science works. Astronomy and paleontology, for example, are based on observing correlations after the fact.
Intelligent design--the idea that an intelligent being designed life forms on earth--is a scientific hypothesis. It's analogous to many other kinds of hypotheses scientists formulate and test all the time. The problem with ID is that it's a bad scientific hypothesis: there is no support for it at all.
And if it were actually true, then a whole host of theological questions about the way God acts in the world become scientific questions. Among other things, we can start asking questions about the rationality and psychology of God's behavior (and that doesn't look good for God).
Intelligent Design is not just unproven, it is inherently unprovable.
Intelligent design, as described by its proponents, posits that a non-human intelligence has designed many biological organisms. That is very much something that is falsifiable--it is a scientific theory. The problem with it is that it is a bad scientific theory with no experimental support.
And from a religious point of view, it's bad religion as well: if intelligent design were actually true, it would reduce God to the status of little green men; there just is no theological or ethical reason to worship a being just because it has been tinkering with our biology.
Americans generally only get upset at the loss of Freedom when those it is the kind of abrupt in your face taking that DRM represents.
The trusted computing hardware doesn't prevent you from running untrusted code, it just prevents untrusted code from accessing protected data. What the lack of inclusion of trusted computing hardware would mean is simply that, if trusted computing catches on on Windows, a lot of Windows-based music and video can't be accessed on the Macintosh at all.
Would this leave Apple as the only "General computer" left?
Apple has never produced "general computers"; they don't support running other operating systems on their hardware, and they have a long history of using proprietary and undocumented hardware components in their Macintosh platform. The reason things have gotten better recently is not a change of heart at Apple, but the fact that they are increasingly using standard PC components in their systems.
A more accross the board move to Apple could even be a boon to linux as more people accept the fact that there are options to wintel
Apple hardware will be a decent choice for Linux as soon as (1) Apple gives you the option of buying the hardware without the software and (2) Linux developers aren't forced to create drivers by reverse engineering anymore.
On balance, I still think it's good for Apple to leave this out; if they really need it later, they should be able to provide it as a USB dongle. However, leaving it out doesn't make Macintosh an "open platform"; it never has been, and the way it looks, it won't be any time soon.
Why do the Chinese leaders have the self-restraint to not ban games altogether, but they don't have the self-restraint to ban games with PK elements?
If you think of the Chinese leaders as the right wing of the Republican party, you aren't so far off: these people are socially conservative and pro business. When those principles are in conflict, it is unpredictable which one wins. In this case, they found a compromise that isn't all that different from the US or other conservative Western nation.
One difference is that the Chinese leadership is less constrained by pesky democratic and legal principles, so they can act faster on their whims; but should a US party achieve a filibuster-proof margin in the US, we may be heading that way, too.
Who writes these laws?
The same kind of social conservatives that write similar laws in the US. The kinds of people who get all pushed out of shape about GTA, withdraw its rating, and try to remove it from the market. Incidentally, Germany pretty much bans PK for all ages...
No, even that is bad in China -- one child per family!
That's why the Chinese should seriously investigate cybersex--it's sex without the biological consequences.
But it's amusing to see the undercurrent of outrage in these 'stories'.
With laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, outrage is entirely warranted. Furthermore, I have no sympathy for those companies; as far as I'm concerned, a lot of their copyrights are unjustifiable. (However, I have personally not downloaded music from P2P networks, so far.)
No, the pot smoker is right. Your brain is too small to absorb their goodness.
The authors have not shown that their system is resistant to attacks. Maybe it seems plausible to them and to you that it is, but plausibility is not the same as actually demonstrating that property.
his blog (JoelOnSoftware) has been read by many developers I've come across - at least the good ones...
"Good" can mean many things. Joel largely represents mainstream views of Windows and Macintosh programmers--the kind of views you might find among Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows XP kernel, Safari, or even Mozilla developers. If you want to be like one of those developers, then follow his advice. If you think that there is something seriously wrong with that kind of software (as I do), then you would do well to read Joel's writings more critically and assume that some of it is bad advice. Thinking about those issues will still make you a better programmer.
What about a 100% chance of not coming home? That would greatly lower the overall cost of such a trip...
This project could have been done on any operating system.
Could it? Linux gives full documentation and access to everything from the hardware level up.
"led most of us to believe"
People pointed out that this is just a prettier version of an optical mouse with trackball scroller, and similar to IBM's Scrollpoint mouse.
The notion of hiding multiple mouse buttons under a seamless cover in order to give Mac users the option of using multiple buttons without changing the appearance of a single button mouse has also been proposed multiple times on Slashdot, in particular for Powerbooks.
So, yes, you have another instance in which Apple marketing is a little too glowing and the actual product is just a prettier version of a standard PC product. But, hey, that's not bad: Apple's mouse is nice looking (but, then, it's also three times as expensive as the plain, functionally equivalent alternative).
Or if you're trying to avoid your carrier's extra fees for international calling, think again. If you use a calling card for that, you'll use up the minutes on your card at 10x-50x the normal rate.
That's total bullshit: the calling card company is just a local phone number as far as the cell phone company is concerned (if you take the local number option), and the calling card company doesn't care where you call from. The rate is no different from that of making a local phone call--that is, it is as low or lower than with iScoop.
What's more is, most calling cards now use VoIP behind the scenes, so you're getting the same wonderful quality as you'd get with this iScoop thing.
First of all, you can shop around and get one with good quality. Secondly, keeping a computer running is expensive and a lot of hassle.
"If you do notice, it is WAY better than Google's start page too - you can actually drag the various sections on the page and place them anywhere on the page."
There is nothing wrong with Microsoft copying Google, but please get your history straight.
Draggable sections is actually the part that makes start.com so similar to Google--Google was the first major site to offer that kind of customization. Start.com is clearly a copy of that, in just about every respect.
By the way, I mentioned the page before : here
Yes, and you were wrong back then, too.
This is the first sensible approach towards innovation in GUIs and desktop operating systems I have seen in a long time. Unlike so many other efforts, these people are addressing the question of how to actually improve human computer interaction, while relying on tools that work and that lots of people understand (HTML, Perl, etc.).
Most of the other desktop efforts (including commercial ones) start from a systems programming perspective and demand that you first throw out all the tools you already know; and despite all that effort, they still end up with messy and complex WIMP interfaces that work little better than their predecessors.
I don't necessarily agree with all of Jason's principles, but this does look like a worthwhile effort.
Get a calling card with a local or 800 access number. Yes, they do work from your cell phone as well (duh), and if you shop around, you can find dirt cheap ones. Program the number into your cell phone for extra convenience.
No need to waste time, money, or electricity on a complicated software/hardware/broadband setup.
To be specific, that's two years after Smalltalk-80, which clearly had overlapping windows and supported repainting in partially obscured windows.
You are quite right that what the UK is doing is probably legal under UK law. British imperial rule and drug trafficking also were legal under UK law.
The question is not whether those kinds of policies are legal, the question is whether they are effective. And they are clearly not effective: terrorism is a worse problem than ever. Britain, and the West in general, cannot win the war on terrorism by attempting to suppress opposing politicial views, or even by going after terrorists and terrorist organizations. The only way to win is to help the people in those countries to become free and prosperous, and to convince them that we are friends and allies.
People like you exist on both sides, and they keep perpetuating the hostilities. Whether it's an Al Quaeda ideologue or a British right wing hard liner, you guys are ideologically pretty much the same, and you are threatening to destroy us all.
I assume having suggested this several times on Slashdot over the last few years counts as prior art? Or will Apple attempt to patent this, too?
and invented overlapping windows
Overlapping bitmapped window systems were invented at PARC, AT&T, and several other places. Overlapping windows in general were even older than that.
drop down menus
Present in Smalltalk (with a slightly different look).
highly readable screenfonts
Apple was bitmapped like everybody else. When they came out with TrueType, outline fonts and hinting had already been used for on-screen display by Sun, NeXT, and IBM. The technology behind it came from Adobe and several other companies.
file oriented OS (instead of an application oriented one) [...] a full office suite
Two huge design mistakes that the industry has been suffering from ever since.
Not to mention auto power off and resume everything after power on(you have to see this to believe it).
Apple didn't invent that either, and it's also a feature that other systems had at the time (including Smalltalk).
Apple saw the idea, but implemented it correctly
Apple saw the idea and marketed it correctly. Big difference. Technologically, the software that Apple produces (to this day) sucks. You're right, though, that among the machines Apple has put out, the Lisa was probably technologically the best and most original.