Re:But Safari isn't intended to run in X11
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 1
"Complaints that Apple's patches don't work in X11"
And NOONE has been pissed because of that. Recheck your sources.
The problem is not Apple is developing for Aqua; that's expected, indeed. The problem is the way they release their source code and changelogs which is the most unuseful possible for the KDE guys, and the fact people is telling how great is that Apple is somehow helping konqueror development, which is untrue.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 1
"That sounds painful."
Not having such access is much more painful for sure.
It is painful indeed when you first access to a program, but it is quite comfortable on your ongoing work with a program, which is exactly the current situation. Of course it's difficult to have a look to the thousands of checkins to date, but it is quite convinient, once you are in the road, being able to have a look to today's half a dozen checkins.
"There's almost certainly lots of information in the logs referring to unannounced products and features"
Yeah... a changelog like this: *Fixed bug #13415 *Fixed bug #431343 *Added support for stuff #1344513
adds quite a lot of information.
"Apple would either have to sanitize the logs (costing time) or grant NDAs to "trusted" individuals"
They could, but they haven't. There have been KDE developers which already suggested sign NDAs to be able to access Apple's repos to no avail (not that I think it would be a good idea, anyway).
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Let me get this straight..."
Straigth but wrong.
"KDE gives Apple (and everyone else) access to a monolithic block of code that doesn't run on Mac OS X"
The question is, it is NOT a monolithic block of code: everybody has access to KDE source code repositories and they can be analized checkin by checkin.
"Apple gives KDE (and everyone else) access to a monolithic block of code that doesn't run on Linux, and that is the moral equivalent of spitting in their face?"
Yes.
It is not because it doesn't run in Linux (the problem is not Linux, either, but XWindow). In fact, if Apple would develop its safari port in a way compatible with XWindow it should have been seen as a GREAT FAVOUR, but it wouldn't been asked not taken as an offense if the code itself was exactly what it is now.
The offense comes from Apple not giving (read)access to their source code repositories so you only gain access to a bunch of incompatible inextricable code while it would cost NOTHING to them to allow read access to the repo so that very same code could be analyzed checkin by checkin thus making possible to segregate incompatibilities from useful code in understandable bits.
No one sane would say Apple is not doing what is legally bound to do, nor anyone sane would say Apple's behaviour to be unexpectable (so this news is kind of flamebait), but yes, they could do things much better without them costing nothing and they decided to go for the most difficult and unuseful path for the KDE team, so KDE guys are reasonably feeling insulted.
"If you're talking about, say, a small business that needs basic desktop machines, the overhead in say, going with an OS OS will far exceed any price savings."
Not at all. Small bussinesses have a lot to gain from OS OSs. Where they fail is in having enough knowledge to know that!
How many two-to-twenty PCs can have an in-house computer expert? No one. And how can a company gain profits from supporting these kinds of companies out of Windows apart from hardware maintenance and fees from time to time for re-formating their computers? But I can offer a competitive bussiness solution to these kind of companies out of, say, Linux, since I can properly and effectively support two hundred boxes spotted over twenty to forty companies at a price they can afford.
Yeah, I know your version of the story (which is the "usual one"), and that's exactly what I was challenging.
You say "...there was a time in the late 1980s when it looked like Unix workstation vendors might reach down into the commodity PC market and seriously challenge Microsoft for dominance there"
And I say there's nothing as "The Unix Vendors": there exists SCO, and HP, and Sun, and Microsoft, and IBM, and a lot of others wanting to make themselves millionaires. And that's the point: *themselves*. IBM wanted making Sun millionarie no more than Microsoft wanted SCO being rich, so it is not "The Unix Vendors vs Microsoft"; it is "each vendor against each other".
Then, there was the new pristine market name "commodity PC". In theory any vendor could take out its piece of the cake, but it was Microsoft due to luck and/or successful marketing practices the one that ate it all.
"...the fact that there were half a dozen "differentiated" flavors of Unix was a more immediate cause of failure"
And I say: not at all, since it is impossible. As I said, the PC market was a pristine new one and its users knew nothing about how looked this product or the other. In fact, almost no Microsoft user knew he could install any other OS in his computer this having nothing to do with how similar or different were those other products among themselves. As a matter of fact, you say that, say, Sun failed to gain the PC market because Solaris was different to HP-Ux, but that's simply a non-sense: if that were the fact, why PC-DOS (exactly identical to Ms-DOS) failed too? Why OS/2, which didn't resemble any of those Unix, failed too?
In fact, seeing that no Microsoft product from these days were the best one could choose (not that this has changed nowadays) I stay that "The Unix Wars" had nothing to do with those vendors inability to take their piece of the PC cake, but their marketing inability: some of them failed in seeing sooner the PC was going to be a profitable market and stayed with their "big iron"; some of them failed to convince the people their product was the one they need... and even others, managed to gain a stable, profitable piece at least for a while, like Novell and SCO did.
The SCO case is specially enligthning: it offered one of those unix so unable to gain the PC market niche due to "The Unix Wars", but the case is that SCO *DID* manage to take its own piece of the PC cake, and managed to be quite profitable, at least till Linux killed them. Even more interestingly SCO's unices were with AIX the ugliest of the whole lot! And this hadn't too much to do with their success or failure.
"The problem I see with this is, it's the same thinking that drove the Unix vendors to implement dozens of solutions for every single problem"
Yes, but this is much more about "perception" than about "reality". While it is true that any unix vendor tried to diferenciate themselves in order to gain market oportunity and that was called "The Unix Wars", it is even truer that Microsoft was always much much more different to anyone of those than any two others, and Microsoft made tons of money out of those differences. Still, noone seems to take care about Microsoft's differences and even call them "de facto standard". Now: if differences among unix vendors was what gave chance to Microsoft to gain the position it holds today, why can anyone say this is because the differences among unices when Microsoft were the most different among them?
"the history of Unix as a cautionary tale"
No doubt about that. The question is, can you tell me again what exactly the story is?
Remember: it is not unix against windows; it is IBM against Sun against HP against Microsoft against Red Hat against Novell against...
It is a new technology specially developed for datacentres: you either predict which moment any computer gonna crash, or you can point a box and predict that one will crash, but you can't predict at the same time which computer and when.
I think they call it "Ballmer's Uncertainty Principle", or something like that.
"One of the many things that svn fixes is atomic commits. In svn a commit either fully succeeds or fails. In cvs on the other hand it may actually fail halfway and leave the repository in an inconsistent state. When that happens, ascii files on disk are quite nice to have."
I bet here and now you *never* had a problem due to the non-atomicity of CVS.
And I'll go further and I'll bet you can't provide information about *any* single real situation where the fact CVS stores file history in ASCII has been useful to repair a problem due to the non-atomic CVS nature.
I'm waiting.
"If the worst happens (diskcrash?), you have the svndumpfiles, database backups and your user's local work directories to work with. That should provide everything you need to recover all data. If not, it is not a technology problem but a matter of backup discipline."
Now I will ask about how is this *any* different from a CVS environment where you have rsync copies, hard symlinks or just plain tarred backpus. And easier!
"but "coulder" seems more natural for a sound (at least for me)."
Well, but that's what seemed *specially* curious. As you say, to get cider from cdr I just only need to fill in the blanks, but I think there migth be a dozen different words I can get that way. The thing is that if you just try to spell c-d-r what comes is already almost see-dee-ar => cider.
Well, I am not English native, and a soon as I saw "cdr", first thing that came to my mind was "Cider... Strongbow cider, yumm..." (ala Homer Simpson).
It's curious to know other people will see differently when "cider" became so patently obvious to me.
But they notized that while it is sure they will lose the case, people will talk about them, so it makes marketing sense (they surely studied the costs of a marketing campaing and what will cost them to sue -and lose, against Apple).
"its not as if they would need to learn the whole emacs multiverse"
And please tell me, what's the benefit of learning emacs over simpler editors like mcedit or nano -to name only console-based ones, if you don't expect to go further than basic key combinations (the same is valid for vim too)?
I'd say that would be like the "no pain, no gain" motto... without the "gain" part!
"I thin kthe main thing is that all these works will be preserved digitally, open for people to read whenever they want to"
Well... it is only that's NOT the objective. You should now that if there's a country in Europe right now that would make RIAA and MPA wet themselves, that's France. You can bet that work is NOT to be "open for other people to read whenever they want to". Jeanninne or whatever it spells is a moronic braindead paper-man from hard "intellectual property" lobbies. What they want is taking off fucking Google to make their books "open" and to control the internet "market" for their own purpouses.
The real problem is almost all other european countries, pressed by their own lobbies are happily following them: now you have to pay a tax on computers and hard disks in Germany (to compensate for the right to possess and give away in a non-lucrative manner books and/or music); you pay the same tax on blank CDs, DVDs, tapes, photocopiers, paper, etc. almost in whole Europe, right now the Spanish Royal Academy of Language has given exclusive rights to a private company to publish not only the paper edition of its Spanish Dictionary but to the electronic, PDF, Palm and any other electronic support, while that very dictionary and the Royal Academy herself is sustained by public taxes, etc.
The case of France maybe publicly relate to its famous and well known French chauvinism, but indeed it is nothing more than another maneouver of a paneuropean complot from the media productors and rights managers lobby.
No. I think I quite knowledgeable about Windows intricacies, since I can test myself on microsoft support lists and newsgroups against the "average" windows sysadmin.
Slashdot Mirror
"Complaints that Apple's patches don't work in X11"
And NOONE has been pissed because of that. Recheck your sources.
The problem is not Apple is developing for Aqua; that's expected, indeed. The problem is the way they release their source code and changelogs which is the most unuseful possible for the KDE guys, and the fact people is telling how great is that Apple is somehow helping konqueror development, which is untrue.
"That sounds painful."
Not having such access is much more painful for sure.
It is painful indeed when you first access to a program, but it is quite comfortable on your ongoing work with a program, which is exactly the current situation. Of course it's difficult to have a look to the thousands of checkins to date, but it is quite convinient, once you are in the road, being able to have a look to today's half a dozen checkins.
"There's almost certainly lots of information in the logs referring to unannounced products and features"
Yeah... a changelog like this:
*Fixed bug #13415
*Fixed bug #431343
*Added support for stuff #1344513
adds quite a lot of information.
"Apple would either have to sanitize the logs (costing time) or grant NDAs to "trusted" individuals"
They could, but they haven't. There have been KDE developers which already suggested sign NDAs to be able to access Apple's repos to no avail (not that I think it would be a good idea, anyway).
"Let me get this straight..."
Straigth but wrong.
"KDE gives Apple (and everyone else) access to a monolithic block of code that doesn't run on Mac OS X"
The question is, it is NOT a monolithic block of code: everybody has access to KDE source code repositories and they can be analized checkin by checkin.
"Apple gives KDE (and everyone else) access to a monolithic block of code that doesn't run on Linux, and that is the moral equivalent of spitting in their face?"
Yes.
It is not because it doesn't run in Linux (the problem is not Linux, either, but XWindow). In fact, if Apple would develop its safari port in a way compatible with XWindow it should have been seen as a GREAT FAVOUR, but it wouldn't been asked not taken as an offense if the code itself was exactly what it is now.
The offense comes from Apple not giving (read)access to their source code repositories so you only gain access to a bunch of incompatible inextricable code while it would cost NOTHING to them to allow read access to the repo so that very same code could be analyzed checkin by checkin thus making possible to segregate incompatibilities from useful code in understandable bits.
No one sane would say Apple is not doing what is legally bound to do, nor anyone sane would say Apple's behaviour to be unexpectable (so this news is kind of flamebait), but yes, they could do things much better without them costing nothing and they decided to go for the most difficult and unuseful path for the KDE team, so KDE guys are reasonably feeling insulted.
"If you're talking about, say, a small business that needs basic desktop machines, the overhead in say, going with an OS OS will far exceed any price savings."
Not at all. Small bussinesses have a lot to gain from OS OSs. Where they fail is in having enough knowledge to know that!
How many two-to-twenty PCs can have an in-house computer expert? No one. And how can a company gain profits from supporting these kinds of companies out of Windows apart from hardware maintenance and fees from time to time for re-formating their computers? But I can offer a competitive bussiness solution to these kind of companies out of, say, Linux, since I can properly and effectively support two hundred boxes spotted over twenty to forty companies at a price they can afford.
"Once upon a time ..."
Yeah, I know your version of the story (which is the "usual one"), and that's exactly what I was challenging.
You say "...there was a time in the late 1980s when it looked like Unix workstation vendors might reach down into the commodity PC market and seriously challenge Microsoft for dominance there"
And I say there's nothing as "The Unix Vendors": there exists SCO, and HP, and Sun, and Microsoft, and IBM, and a lot of others wanting to make themselves millionaires. And that's the point: *themselves*. IBM wanted making Sun millionarie no more than Microsoft wanted SCO being rich, so it is not "The Unix Vendors vs Microsoft"; it is "each vendor against each other".
Then, there was the new pristine market name "commodity PC". In theory any vendor could take out its piece of the cake, but it was Microsoft due to luck and/or successful marketing practices the one that ate it all.
"...the fact that there were half a dozen "differentiated" flavors of Unix was a more immediate cause of failure"
And I say: not at all, since it is impossible. As I said, the PC market was a pristine new one and its users knew nothing about how looked this product or the other. In fact, almost no Microsoft user knew he could install any other OS in his computer this having nothing to do with how similar or different were those other products among themselves. As a matter of fact, you say that, say, Sun failed to gain the PC market because Solaris was different to HP-Ux, but that's simply a non-sense: if that were the fact, why PC-DOS (exactly identical to Ms-DOS) failed too? Why OS/2, which didn't resemble any of those Unix, failed too?
In fact, seeing that no Microsoft product from these days were the best one could choose (not that this has changed nowadays) I stay that "The Unix Wars" had nothing to do with those vendors inability to take their piece of the PC cake, but their marketing inability: some of them failed in seeing sooner the PC was going to be a profitable market and stayed with their "big iron"; some of them failed to convince the people their product was the one they need... and even others, managed to gain a stable, profitable piece at least for a while, like Novell and SCO did.
The SCO case is specially enligthning: it offered one of those unix so unable to gain the PC market niche due to "The Unix Wars", but the case is that SCO *DID* manage to take its own piece of the PC cake, and managed to be quite profitable, at least till Linux killed them. Even more interestingly SCO's unices were with AIX the ugliest of the whole lot! And this hadn't too much to do with their success or failure.
"The problem I see with this is, it's the same thinking that drove the Unix vendors to implement dozens of solutions for every single problem"
Yes, but this is much more about "perception" than about "reality". While it is true that any unix vendor tried to diferenciate themselves in order to gain market oportunity and that was called "The Unix Wars", it is even truer that Microsoft was always much much more different to anyone of those than any two others, and Microsoft made tons of money out of those differences. Still, noone seems to take care about Microsoft's differences and even call them "de facto standard". Now: if differences among unix vendors was what gave chance to Microsoft to gain the position it holds today, why can anyone say this is because the differences among unices when Microsoft were the most different among them?
"the history of Unix as a cautionary tale"
No doubt about that. The question is, can you tell me again what exactly the story is?
Remember: it is not unix against windows; it is IBM against Sun against HP against Microsoft against Red Hat against Novell against...
"I hope they're not going down this road just to be different from Red Hat."
Red Hat is market leader (within this niche). Were Novell/SuSE just the same as Red Hat why anyone would choose them?
It is not only that Novell wants to be different, it is that they *need* to be different.
Well, not exactly.
It is a new technology specially developed for datacentres: you either predict which moment any computer gonna crash, or you can point a box and predict that one will crash, but you can't predict at the same time which computer and when.
I think they call it "Ballmer's Uncertainty Principle", or something like that.
"Distrowatch counts downloads,"
Not even this. They count visits to the "home" page within distrowatch for a given distro.
So take a new distribution with good marketing and you will have your #1 disregarding ENTERILY its user base numbers.
"I haven't found anything it's "better" at."
Well, I use Debian GNU/Linux and I can tell OOo runs waaaay, waaaaay better than Ms Office here.
"Some people have better things to do than to justify themselves..."
Sure they have; meanwhile no facts that anyone really had any atomicity-related problem with CVS.
"I cannot believe you have ever used CVS for anything more than a few files or single users."
You are of course free to believe what you better want.
"Maybe a real-world comparison would be more meaningful, like Slashware on Apache vs. IIS, with a real load."
Then, ask yourself. What does Slashdot uses? What does Google uses? Who uses IIS on Windows 2000 for heavy loaded web sites?
"Well, you just lost your bet if you made it with me."
Please tell me what your problem was and then I'll can see if that was really an atomicity-related problem.
"One of the many things that svn fixes is atomic commits. In svn a commit either fully succeeds or fails. In cvs on the other hand it may actually fail halfway and leave the repository in an inconsistent state. When that happens, ascii files on disk are quite nice to have."
I bet here and now you *never* had a problem due to the non-atomicity of CVS.
And I'll go further and I'll bet you can't provide information about *any* single real situation where the fact CVS stores file history in ASCII has been useful to repair a problem due to the non-atomic CVS nature.
I'm waiting.
"If the worst happens (diskcrash?), you have the svndumpfiles, database backups and your user's local work directories to work with. That should provide everything you need to recover all data. If not, it is not a technology problem but a matter of backup discipline."
Now I will ask about how is this *any* different from a CVS environment where you have rsync copies, hard symlinks or just plain tarred backpus. And easier!
"but "coulder" seems more natural for a sound (at least for me)."
Well, but that's what seemed *specially* curious. As you say, to get cider from cdr I just only need to fill in the blanks, but I think there migth be a dozen different words I can get that way. The thing is that if you just try to spell c-d-r what comes is already almost see-dee-ar => cider.
Quite offtopic but...
Well, I am not English native, and a soon as I saw "cdr", first thing that came to my mind was "Cider... Strongbow cider, yumm..." (ala Homer Simpson).
It's curious to know other people will see differently when "cider" became so patently obvious to me.
"I got my start using lisp in emacs. I highly recommend this method"
But, but... this way I should use emacs!
Well, for now I'll stick to my ubereditor... Notepad, no less.
Why "coulder" instead of "cider"?
Not exactly.
But they notized that while it is sure they will lose the case, people will talk about them, so it makes marketing sense (they surely studied the costs of a marketing campaing and what will cost them to sue -and lose, against Apple).
That most probably will never happen. You can read Zack Rusin's rant about it.
Well, that points out that "true" open source development is not only about licenses but about the will to cooperate too.
"its not as if they would need to learn the whole emacs multiverse"
And please tell me, what's the benefit of learning emacs over simpler editors like mcedit or nano -to name only console-based ones, if you don't expect to go further than basic key combinations (the same is valid for vim too)?
I'd say that would be like the "no pain, no gain" motto... without the "gain" part!
Well... I use Debian (Sarge) and all text console, kterm or xterm will go to next line without further configuration, so go figure
"I thin kthe main thing is that all these works will be preserved digitally, open for people to read whenever they want to"
Well... it is only that's NOT the objective. You should now that if there's a country in Europe right now that would make RIAA and MPA wet themselves, that's France. You can bet that work is NOT to be "open for other people to read whenever they want to". Jeanninne or whatever it spells is a moronic braindead paper-man from hard "intellectual property" lobbies. What they want is taking off fucking Google to make their books "open" and to control the internet "market" for their own purpouses.
The real problem is almost all other european countries, pressed by their own lobbies are happily following them: now you have to pay a tax on computers and hard disks in Germany (to compensate for the right to possess and give away in a non-lucrative manner books and/or music); you pay the same tax on blank CDs, DVDs, tapes, photocopiers, paper, etc. almost in whole Europe, right now the Spanish Royal Academy of Language has given exclusive rights to a private company to publish not only the paper edition of its Spanish Dictionary but to the electronic, PDF, Palm and any other electronic support, while that very dictionary and the Royal Academy herself is sustained by public taxes, etc.
The case of France maybe publicly relate to its famous and well known French chauvinism, but indeed it is nothing more than another maneouver of a paneuropean complot from the media productors and rights managers lobby.
No. I think I quite knowledgeable about Windows intricacies, since I can test myself on microsoft support lists and newsgroups against the "average" windows sysadmin.
"What was your point again? The point of my post was to show that compiler optimizations are generally better for long duration codes"
Yes; and my point was a non-relevant optimization on the short run makes a non-relevant optimization on the long run too.
AND I took the time to show my numbers to prove it.