Actually, I respect this a lot. X11 is an old, OLD and outdated protocol that people have been trying to move past for years.
Change for changes sake is not necessarily a good thing. If I were to say "hey lets all switch from a linux kernel to plan9" doesn't necessarily make it smart.
Ubuntu has been consistently making great strides because they WILL do stuff like this.
Aside from including closed source codecs and drivers, upstart seems to be the only thing contributed. Considering the contributions of redhat, ibm etc to the community canonical/ubuntu is just a drop in the bucket in terms of innovation.
What they have succeeded in well is marketing though, I'm still not quite sure how this cult of ubuntu came about, don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with another distro, but people seem to think they do more than they actually do.
I thought the "people who actually know what they're doing" preferred things to be harder?
This idea is stupid, people who know what they are doing just consider a different subset of things to be 'hard' to noobs the cli might be hell but to a person who knows what they are doing it could be the most convenient and easiest way to do things.
IMO it's much better to have a key combination that people aren't going to hit accidentally
Hitting that key combo accidentally? seriously? while i know some laptops could put those keys close to each other I have yet to see a single one in practice ever. Wouldn't it make sense for the perhaps.01% of users that encounter the problem to disable it as opposed to changing it for everyone else?
When you've installed it, you'll inevitably have to update half the packages. It's less downloading to install a basic system from the live CD and then install all the rest over the net.
Fedora uses delta rpms, so that 30mb package you already have installed could be a 300k update as opposed to 30mb download if you had it from the get go at the install
not to mention if you are installing on multiple computers and don't have a squid proxy setup on your home network to cache files, instead of 30mb for each computer it would be 300k for each computer.
Yeah, anyone who is upset at how "dumbed down" something like Ubuntu is, actually is showing how dumb they are..
Like how due to pressure from ubuntu users xorg disabled the ZAP functionality (ctrl-alt-backspace) by default? Then when the rare occasion where it was needed happened it was useless.
Nobody gives two hoots if they make it easier until by trying to cater to some noob thing they make it harder for the people who actually know what they are doing.
I don't use gnome or pulseaudio in my linux setup (kde and jack are used instead) but this systemd business does seem rather retarded, I see many potential problems for people such as myself that run more uncommon setups.
I always get the Fedora KDE install, but it's never seeded as well as the Fedora proper torrent.
This is why you get the 3.8gig dvd iso which contains them both and pretty much almost all software you could ever need minus codecs/flash. While this is a larger download it saves you downloading gigs and gigs from the repositories later on and you can have a system properly set up for your needs from the get go.
Since this was modded insightful, I'll bite, what geneva conventions has australia broken?
Most mental institutions tend to check you out when you get there, if they don't release you it tends to be a good sign that maybe they were right in putting you there. Last I checked there weren't masses of people tossing their perfectly mentally able parents etc in there either.
By the general rant against mental health institutions and putting scientology in a positive light, would I be correct in saying you are in fact a scientologist? Would go a long way to explaining the hatred.
It may be good for a junior but as soon as you hit the second or third year and you have classes requiring you to run heavy MATLAB or R calculations those little machines just don't keep up (or literally melt their plastic).
I happen to do classes that require that, and I do use a netbook, however I use the netbook to ssh into my home quad core machine and load up a screen session where the matlab (octave) work is done. beats lugging around a behemoth of a machine for no reason, and more powerful too.
In one of the classes I support, Windows users have to run Linux in a VM which is unbearable on those things (5 minutes to start the OS). Some students just went out and bought a MacBook Pro instead (under $1000 once you get the student discount). Dell has been heavily lacking in power/$ for the last two or three years unless you invest heavily in their overpriced upgrades. Sure they can get you a $500 15" laptop but again, P4 tech or early Core2Duo is not good enough.
As a general principle if a course requires something the uni should be able to provide it (in this case desktops at uni that can run vm's and adequate user storage for the images).
Let them use uni computers at uni and their beefy big machine at home to do the vm stuff there if they so need to.
This is assuming of course it has to be vm'd and you can't just get them to use a live usb stick.
Netbooks are great if you just need a laptop with 5 year old tech to browse around. But single cores without a decent GPU, RAM or hard drive in any somewhat advanced environment simply don't cut it these days.
Then use your dumb terminal to access faster resources over the network.. makes sense.
what I don't get about arduino is... why don't people just get the atmel chips and make their own boards? the arduino branding makes little sense to me since all of the boards are comparatively simple and all of the chips are readily available.
It still isn't clear to me why that can't be done on a PC.
Of course it can, but some people like developing for other things.. JUST BECAUSE!. You can write commercial software for pc, so why aren't you? same thing applies, for some reason you want to code for a console that is not just for your own amusement, if it's a job take it seriously and go through proper channels it's what they're used for. Homebrew serves a special purpose, for the tinkerer and people who like to share creations, if you are not a part of this category I don't see why you even want to bother with homebrew.
Over the years I have written code for the snes, dreamcast, ds and wii and it was entirely for academic curiosity and personal fun.
As said, homebrew is not just a convenient way of skirting licensing fees as you seem to treat it. It is for people to use their own hardware any way they wish...
I guess some people don't understand the 'I do things because I can and I think it's neat' mantra. I find it very odd you can have such a commercial centric view with seemingly not enough passion to do it for the love of it and yet still actually care about it.
If cost is such an issue, it is a fair likelihood that you could not easily make a game to the publishers quality. If the quality standards are lowered you get a whole bunch of crap you'd never actually run.
So if a platform limits me to developing software to be distributed non-commercially, I see no incentive to put in effort to develop for that platform instead of nettop PCs.
Then you are not homebrew's intended audience, the general idea is to have fun making things and doing experiments/etc. If you want to go commercial go commercial, make your company and be done with it.
Homebrew is not meant to just be a way of skirting license fees for commercial devs. It's doing things just because you can.
In the comment I replied to it was never clear you wanted to sell the programs made to average people. I took it from a homebrew "I want to run my own code on my console" perspective.
And for that currently, the wii is the best. Yes there are brief periods where there are no exploits.. but if you want to write your own code for your wii even if you buy a new updated one all you have to do is not update for a month or two and you're fine.
And for that currently, the wii is the best. Yes there are brief periods where there are no exploits.. but if you want to write your own code for your wii even if you buy a new updated one all you have to do is not update for a month or two and you're fine.
depends on how highly you value low level access to the hardware, the wii is easiest to hack and can be rather pleasant. Sure there aren't as many libraries but all the more fun hey?
Standard off the shelf boards will typically just beep at you if there is no video card of any sort.
Yes you can get boards that work without a video card of any kind, however they tend to be of the dual slot xeon kind and completely blow the price considerations out of the water.
Why, why, why would you restrict yourself to just plain C if you know exactly what these C++ constructs are going to do?
Code readability for one, yes it may be a little more verbose but c is a very simple beast and what you see is usually what you get. The use of c++ gives you enough tools to make things more difficult to understand unless either you were the one that wrote the code, or it's mostly just c anyway.
Even if you're an awesome guy that doesn't use the c++ constructs unless they are extremely appropriate, that does not mean a co-worker or someone else using your code won't go 'ooh, I'll just do *insert resource intensive thing here*' because it's running c++. In essence using c enforces a very consistent readable codebase in small projects.
Of course you can use c++ for embedded design, but you have to admit a lot of what makes c++ differ from c can be very ill suited for memory constrained devices, sure you can not use those language constructs that are ill suited, but when you limit yourself to a mostly c subset anyway (compared to the entirety of c++) why not just use c?
Would I try and use exceptions and the like on a device with a harvard architecture with 4kb of code storage and 512bytes of ram? I think not, same with RAII etc, that's a lot over overhead for such a small device.
I've went through a reasonable chunk of quake3 source and I'd have to say it's extremely easy to read c.
because of the crazy number of valid things you can do in c++ a lot of code can be harder to read. Yes this is the programmers fault, but most c programmers code is usually quite clear unless they are aiming for the obfuscated c contest.
Of course C can be made perfect... but so can assembly language so why not use that? (Ignoring portability for a moment...)
The correct answer to that is when you really need it, which you still do in some cases where cpu specific functionality needs to be dealt with. The more abstractions you have, the further you get away from what the hardware actually does.
C is more or less portable assembly when it comes down to it, everything fits perfectly with the way cpu's are designed, whereas the cpu has no idea what an object is (hey you can just pass methods structure pointers to the data to work on and get the same thing in c without confusing people as to how it actually works).
If I know exactly how to do what I want with the X11 libraries nice and cleanly, and it's al mad science kind of project that is weird, why should I use a higher level abstraction such as QT where do to what I want I'll have to fight it all the way, wind up with a larger, slower program etc.
The same can be said of c++ and c, yes the higher level functions are convenient.. if they suit your purpose, but trying to shoe-horn them onto something they were not designed to do works but causes cludges, in which case it can be better to make people think a little about what they are doing and not give them too much abstraction.
I for one do not like the.net, java filled extremely abstracted world you seem to want to propose, yes they fill their niche with making some things quite easy to program. But once you get to a certain level of abstraction you really have to think, couldn't I do this more efficiently?
The irony is I am forced to do most of my coding in c# and c++ these days, when I actually prefer the simplicity and elegance of c. (I like assembly too, but it is rather verbose)
In regards to stubbornness of not accepting c++ in the kernel, at what point do you want to stop (for example exceptions aren't exactly something you can do in kernel space). Next thing you know you'll want java in there. When the overwhelming majority of people who have coded for the kernel agree that c++ is a bad idea, usually it's good to either trust them or fully read up on the myriad of problems it would cause that really just are not worth it.
Linus is *wrong*, there's no downside to using C++ instead of C. If a bad program results from using C++ then it's the fault of the programmer, not the language.
Personally I find C a lot easier to read and a lot simpler, granted to achieve the same thing it might be more verbose but generally you always know exactly what it is doing.
If you really want high level so much why not use JNode or the like? and oh wait, there still had to be a whole heap of low level assembly and c involved to get the kernel running, and it's far slower from the high level overheads.
I sometimes wonder where we'll be in 20 years when commonly no-one remembers how their compiler translates code into assembly.
Sometimes quality over speed of development is worth it, especially in instances where millions of people will be running your code as a base piece, those efficiency savings add up
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I respect this a lot. X11 is an old, OLD and outdated protocol that people have been trying to move past for years.
Change for changes sake is not necessarily a good thing. If I were to say "hey lets all switch from a linux kernel to plan9" doesn't necessarily make it smart.
Ubuntu has been consistently making great strides because they WILL do stuff like this.
Aside from including closed source codecs and drivers, upstart seems to be the only thing contributed. Considering the contributions of redhat, ibm etc to the community canonical/ubuntu is just a drop in the bucket in terms of innovation.
What they have succeeded in well is marketing though, I'm still not quite sure how this cult of ubuntu came about, don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with another distro, but people seem to think they do more than they actually do.
I thought the "people who actually know what they're doing" preferred things to be harder?
This idea is stupid, people who know what they are doing just consider a different subset of things to be 'hard' to noobs the cli might be hell but to a person who knows what they are doing it could be the most convenient and easiest way to do things.
IMO it's much better to have a key combination that people aren't going to hit accidentally
Hitting that key combo accidentally? seriously? while i know some laptops could put those keys close to each other I have yet to see a single one in practice ever. Wouldn't it make sense for the perhaps .01% of users that encounter the problem to disable it as opposed to changing it for everyone else?
When you've installed it, you'll inevitably have to update half the packages. It's less downloading to install a basic system from the live CD and then install all the rest over the net.
Fedora uses delta rpms, so that 30mb package you already have installed could be a 300k update as opposed to 30mb download if you had it from the get go at the install
not to mention if you are installing on multiple computers and don't have a squid proxy setup on your home network to cache files, instead of 30mb for each computer it would be 300k for each computer.
I'm a fedora user, ubuntu got xorg to make the change to the defaults so all distros were affected.
I just change my xorg.conf, but still, one more thing to do because of retarded noobs having too much influence.
The only thing ubuntu provides that other distros don't out of the box are the nvidia binary drivers, audio/video codecs and flash
All of which on other distros is merely an apt-get or yum command away (or their respective front end guis)
Ubuntu has ridden the wave, and got most of the credit for things that have appeared in fedora far earlier.
Yeah, anyone who is upset at how "dumbed down" something like Ubuntu is, actually is showing how dumb they are..
Like how due to pressure from ubuntu users xorg disabled the ZAP functionality (ctrl-alt-backspace) by default? Then when the rare occasion where it was needed happened it was useless.
Nobody gives two hoots if they make it easier until by trying to cater to some noob thing they make it harder for the people who actually know what they are doing.
I don't use gnome or pulseaudio in my linux setup (kde and jack are used instead) but this systemd business does seem rather retarded, I see many potential problems for people such as myself that run more uncommon setups.
I always get the Fedora KDE install, but it's never seeded as well as the Fedora proper torrent.
This is why you get the 3.8gig dvd iso which contains them both and pretty much almost all software you could ever need minus codecs/flash. While this is a larger download it saves you downloading gigs and gigs from the repositories later on and you can have a system properly set up for your needs from the get go.
Since this was modded insightful, I'll bite, what geneva conventions has australia broken?
Most mental institutions tend to check you out when you get there, if they don't release you it tends to be a good sign that maybe they were right in putting you there. Last I checked there weren't masses of people tossing their perfectly mentally able parents etc in there either.
By the general rant against mental health institutions and putting scientology in a positive light, would I be correct in saying you are in fact a scientologist? Would go a long way to explaining the hatred.
It may be good for a junior but as soon as you hit the second or third year and you have classes requiring you to run heavy MATLAB or R calculations those little machines just don't keep up (or literally melt their plastic).
I happen to do classes that require that, and I do use a netbook, however I use the netbook to ssh into my home quad core machine and load up a screen session where the matlab (octave) work is done. beats lugging around a behemoth of a machine for no reason, and more powerful too.
In one of the classes I support, Windows users have to run Linux in a VM which is unbearable on those things (5 minutes to start the OS). Some students just went out and bought a MacBook Pro instead (under $1000 once you get the student discount). Dell has been heavily lacking in power/$ for the last two or three years unless you invest heavily in their overpriced upgrades. Sure they can get you a $500 15" laptop but again, P4 tech or early Core2Duo is not good enough.
As a general principle if a course requires something the uni should be able to provide it (in this case desktops at uni that can run vm's and adequate user storage for the images).
Let them use uni computers at uni and their beefy big machine at home to do the vm stuff there if they so need to.
This is assuming of course it has to be vm'd and you can't just get them to use a live usb stick.
Netbooks are great if you just need a laptop with 5 year old tech to browse around. But single cores without a decent GPU, RAM or hard drive in any somewhat advanced environment simply don't cut it these days.
Then use your dumb terminal to access faster resources over the network.. makes sense.
what I don't get about arduino is... why don't people just get the atmel chips and make their own boards? the arduino branding makes little sense to me since all of the boards are comparatively simple and all of the chips are readily available.
So why don't people just make their own designs?
It still isn't clear to me why that can't be done on a PC.
Of course it can, but some people like developing for other things.. JUST BECAUSE!. You can write commercial software for pc, so why aren't you? same thing applies, for some reason you want to code for a console that is not just for your own amusement, if it's a job take it seriously and go through proper channels it's what they're used for. Homebrew serves a special purpose, for the tinkerer and people who like to share creations, if you are not a part of this category I don't see why you even want to bother with homebrew.
Over the years I have written code for the snes, dreamcast, ds and wii and it was entirely for academic curiosity and personal fun.
As said, homebrew is not just a convenient way of skirting licensing fees as you seem to treat it. It is for people to use their own hardware any way they wish...
I guess some people don't understand the 'I do things because I can and I think it's neat' mantra. I find it very odd you can have such a commercial centric view with seemingly not enough passion to do it for the love of it and yet still actually care about it.
If cost is such an issue, it is a fair likelihood that you could not easily make a game to the publishers quality. If the quality standards are lowered you get a whole bunch of crap you'd never actually run.
Also keeping with India can be hard
So if a platform limits me to developing software to be distributed non-commercially, I see no incentive to put in effort to develop for that platform instead of nettop PCs.
Then you are not homebrew's intended audience, the general idea is to have fun making things and doing experiments/etc. If you want to go commercial go commercial, make your company and be done with it.
Homebrew is not meant to just be a way of skirting license fees for commercial devs. It's doing things just because you can.
In the comment I replied to it was never clear you wanted to sell the programs made to average people. I took it from a homebrew "I want to run my own code on my console" perspective.
And for that currently, the wii is the best. Yes there are brief periods where there are no exploits.. but if you want to write your own code for your wii even if you buy a new updated one all you have to do is not update for a month or two and you're fine .
And slashdot mangled my last comment, my bad
And for that currently, the wii is the best. Yes there are brief periods where there are no exploits.. but if you want to write your own code for your wii even if you buy a new updated one all you have to do is not update for a month or two and you're fine .
XNA is best among modern consoles,
depends on how highly you value low level access to the hardware, the wii is easiest to hack and can be rather pleasant. Sure there aren't as many libraries but all the more fun hey?
Standard off the shelf boards will typically just beep at you if there is no video card of any sort.
Yes you can get boards that work without a video card of any kind, however they tend to be of the dual slot xeon kind and completely blow the price considerations out of the water.
Hasn't happened yet, yes they keep on trying but tell me when they succeed, k?
Same can be said of the USA, uk, etc... so your point?
Why, why, why would you restrict yourself to just plain C if you know exactly what these C++ constructs are going to do?
Code readability for one, yes it may be a little more verbose but c is a very simple beast and what you see is usually what you get. The use of c++ gives you enough tools to make things more difficult to understand unless either you were the one that wrote the code, or it's mostly just c anyway.
Even if you're an awesome guy that doesn't use the c++ constructs unless they are extremely appropriate, that does not mean a co-worker or someone else using your code won't go 'ooh, I'll just do *insert resource intensive thing here*' because it's running c++. In essence using c enforces a very consistent readable codebase in small projects.
Of course you can use c++ for embedded design, but you have to admit a lot of what makes c++ differ from c can be very ill suited for memory constrained devices, sure you can not use those language constructs that are ill suited, but when you limit yourself to a mostly c subset anyway (compared to the entirety of c++) why not just use c?
Would I try and use exceptions and the like on a device with a harvard architecture with 4kb of code storage and 512bytes of ram? I think not, same with RAII etc, that's a lot over overhead for such a small device.
This makes it great for system code (drivers, kernels)
Most of the rest of your post I could agree with, but not this, there is a reason we code in c not c++ in embedded systems.
Which ironically was their last popular engine.
Even when quake3 was made? (around 1999)
I've went through a reasonable chunk of quake3 source and I'd have to say it's extremely easy to read c.
because of the crazy number of valid things you can do in c++ a lot of code can be harder to read. Yes this is the programmers fault, but most c programmers code is usually quite clear unless they are aiming for the obfuscated c contest.
Of course C can be made perfect ... but so can assembly language so why not use that? (Ignoring portability for a moment...)
The correct answer to that is when you really need it, which you still do in some cases where cpu specific functionality needs to be dealt with. The more abstractions you have, the further you get away from what the hardware actually does.
C is more or less portable assembly when it comes down to it, everything fits perfectly with the way cpu's are designed, whereas the cpu has no idea what an object is (hey you can just pass methods structure pointers to the data to work on and get the same thing in c without confusing people as to how it actually works).
If I know exactly how to do what I want with the X11 libraries nice and cleanly, and it's al mad science kind of project that is weird, why should I use a higher level abstraction such as QT where do to what I want I'll have to fight it all the way, wind up with a larger, slower program etc.
The same can be said of c++ and c, yes the higher level functions are convenient.. if they suit your purpose, but trying to shoe-horn them onto something they were not designed to do works but causes cludges, in which case it can be better to make people think a little about what they are doing and not give them too much abstraction.
I for one do not like the .net, java filled extremely abstracted world you seem to want to propose, yes they fill their niche with making some things quite easy to program. But once you get to a certain level of abstraction you really have to think, couldn't I do this more efficiently?
The irony is I am forced to do most of my coding in c# and c++ these days, when I actually prefer the simplicity and elegance of c. (I like assembly too, but it is rather verbose)
In regards to stubbornness of not accepting c++ in the kernel, at what point do you want to stop (for example exceptions aren't exactly something you can do in kernel space). Next thing you know you'll want java in there. When the overwhelming majority of people who have coded for the kernel agree that c++ is a bad idea, usually it's good to either trust them or fully read up on the myriad of problems it would cause that really just are not worth it.
Linus is *wrong*, there's no downside to using C++ instead of C. If a bad program results from using C++ then it's the fault of the programmer, not the language.
Personally I find C a lot easier to read and a lot simpler, granted to achieve the same thing it might be more verbose but generally you always know exactly what it is doing.
If you really want high level so much why not use JNode or the like? and oh wait, there still had to be a whole heap of low level assembly and c involved to get the kernel running, and it's far slower from the high level overheads.
I sometimes wonder where we'll be in 20 years when commonly no-one remembers how their compiler translates code into assembly.
Sometimes quality over speed of development is worth it, especially in instances where millions of people will be running your code as a base piece, those efficiency savings add up