If you don't like it well tough put your head back in the sand and keep hanging out with the vermin, but if you lie with dogs.... well you know the rest I'm sure.
Funny, but that's the exact same excuse given by most cops who abuse their authority during public protests. Think about that.
So no, if he doesn't have the drive to learn and problem solve he's better off outside playing with a ball... or girls since he's a teen.
And if he does, he's better off becoming a mathematician instead of a programmer. At least we don't look down upon those that decided to take a class instead of bashing their heads against a compiler until the thing worked.
The problem with javascript is, it doesn't have the l337 CLI c00ln3ss of Python and Ruby. Making things appear on your browser is web design, making things appear on a white-on-black terminal is stuff that only hackers do;)
Besides that, though, I think that the initial language is pretty much irrelevant with a good online tutorial and someone to ask questions to. I learned in friggin' C++, which I still consider the most complex programming language known to mankind, but having a friend and my dad to ask when I got confused negated any possible drawback of the language, IMHO.
Or maybe he's intelligent enough to use reliable repositories, and download the versions appropiate for his distro. Though you'll have to work harder on your Google-fu, your first link is about a small error on the part of a package maintainer (so, not apt's fault in any way), and the second is both user error and on Dapper Drake, so not very recent either.
Yeah, but developers have to balance between listening to complains from users, or working on improving the software, unlike commercial companies which usually have dedicated staff for that. And when the complains are poorly-worded and, sometimes, even aimed at completely the wrong project (like some people who criticize Linus Torvalds for the GNOME/KDE "war"), it's easy to understand why developers may choose to ignore those who are not devs themselves, in an effort to improve the poor signal/noise ratio.
Ohh, and a small note: businesses will attend a user's complain only if the cost for doing so is less than what they stand to lose if they don't. And examples of that are plentiful in Microsoft and Apple's land.
I read your post and, honestly, I still don't know exactly what you're asking for. Easy to install apps? in Ubuntu you just download the required DEB, double-click on it, put your password, and press "Install". Patching the OS, just right-click on the notification button and select "Install all updates", and I see no inflexibility in apt, nor yum, both allow for easy upgrading of the 'core' packages (as in, those that come with the OS), and easy install of outside apps, so the only problem is lack of standard distribution practices, but the package managers have absolutely nothing to do with that.
The problem however is that most free criticism sucks. I mean, look around, most of the criticism towards distros is that there are too many of them, arguing that instead There Should Be Only One(tm), ala MacOSX, completely missing the point of Free Software.
Yes, there are a few sane minds among them, like the ones who argue for Free Desktop standards to be more widely implemented, and for the large DEs to standardize it first, implement it later instead of the other way around, but those voices are quickly lost in the noise of those who want Linux to turn into a second-rate copy of a propietary OS.
And then you've got all the morons who believe that the Free in "Free Software" means "Free an in free labor", quickly proceeding to troll $OSS_PROJECT_X's forums about how the developers are so lazy since they hadn't yet fixed the bug he reported *five minutes* after he had filed it, who are the cause that the "go fix it yourself" reply got so popular in the first place.
So what's the best way to deal with it? beats me, but what's certain to me is that the current situation, of having so many people complain about idiotic things, is what's driving developers towards ignoring all non-dev users' requests, and that if we can find a way to deal with that, Free Software would improve at an even faster rate than it currently does.
Way to mischaracterize entire groups of people, dude. Sorry, but no, (most) online FPS players don't disregard anything outside the genre, they're mostly normal gamers that just enjoy playing deathmatches against other people online, and for whom the prospect of leaving that behind just to play Mario Kart is... unappealing, to say the least.
Also, based on the number of people playing Halo alone, they're hardly a niche either. Want a niche? how about my favorite one, racing simulators: on Xbox360 you've got Forza 2, on the PS3 there's GT5: Prologue and the inevitable full version in the future, and on both consoles there are plenty of other racing games from last-gen that can be played on it. But the Wii? outside of a crappy port of a crappy Gamecube game, absolutely nothing.
But likewise, it's not that I don't consider non-racing games, well, games, but since I value a good racing sim much more than, say, a good survival horror game, the Wii's game lineup is much less valuable to me, overall, than that of the other two consoles.
No, it's not semantics, because according to the science of semantics, they did steal. How that bullshit argument got so popular around here absolutely eludes me. Somehow, people who know nothing about law or linguistics have spawned a meme that has incredible staying power. UBISoft absolutely did steal that crack. THERE IS NO REQUIREMENT OF PHYSICAL DEPRIVATION IN THE ENGLISH VERB 'TO STEAL'. FURTHER, 'STEAL' IS NOT A LEGAL TERM OF ART, SO ANY THEFT ANALOGY IS DOOMED TO FAILURE.
The problem is that the verb "to steal" does require it to refer to actual property, not a government-granted, time-limited monopoly over distribution rights. Unless, of course, you fell for that idiotic "IP" scam, in which case I'd kindly refer you to this excellent rebuttal written by the man who wrote one of the world's most widely used software licenses, among various other works.
Example of why: fubar.2.0 makes a few incompatible config changes (a no-no in itself) over 1.99. Yum pulls the.rpmsave trick as part of a 25+ packages upgrade. You copy.rpmsave over. You lose. (Dovecot did this a few times).
That's precisely the reason why.rpmsave is used instead of.rpmnew, so that if the config file's syntax suddenly changes you've at least got the thing working in a default config. And you're not supposed to copy the.rpmsave over, you're supposed to diff both files, see what's changed, and copy the relevant lines over, it's just that if there hasn't been any syntax change, copying the file over amounts to pretty much the same thing, but that's a pretty big *if*, specially for a production server.
But since it's Linux we're all happy that Red Hat fixed an important SECURITY bug, while only introducing a minor (AKA, non-security) one so fast, since at least we won't get rooted.
As a South American, I can tell you that our opinion on the US landscape is pretty much the same, except that since we still remember the times when "the right" used to be for smaller, heavily regulated governments instead of Big Brother-style control, we simply consider the US' reps and dems to be a group of nutjobs with big ego problems instead of associating them to a specific side of the political spectrum.
And everyone knows IBM *SHOULD* have done the same, why does Apple get lambasted for it...just because people don't like Stevie?
No, it's because everybody knows IBM *SHOULDN'T* have done the same, but rather, figure out how to profit from an open platform, since trying to stick to their monopolistic practices is what almost drove them to bankrupcy the first time around. Kinda sorta like your favorite fruity-flavored company, huh.
I'd agree that games are supposed to look good but the problem is, how do you define "good graphics"? personally I define it as "it preserves a distinct artistic style throughout the entire presentation", but many people seem to define it as "how many polygons does it use for the main character".
For example, just to pick two old games, which one do you think has the best graphics, Castlevania 3 for the NES or Syphon Filter for the PSX? me, I'd take the former, since as much as I enjoyed the latter, it's graphics always gave me the feeling that they had been created by three different teams and then shoved together in the final product. Yet, the technology it uses is much superior to that of the NES, being 3D vs basic 2D.
So, it all depends on how you define it, and for those who define it the same way I do, criticizing developers for focusing solely on pushing more polygons instead of worrying about the gameplay is a perfectly valid complain, since for us all we're getting is higher system requirements, not better graphics, and certainly not better games.
The problem with that philosophy is that it drives the costs of making games *way* up, eventually creating a market where only big companies like EA are able to compete, and anything that's not a sequel is considered 'a risky investment', utterly crushing the chances of independant developers of going mainstream.
No, we don't ignore Apple and Microsoft's licenses, but we do fire up the pot of boiling oil when courts give them even more power than they already have. Copyright is already FUBAR, so it's only natural if we don't like it when judges make the situation even worse (see also: recent Blizzard case) instead of trying to fix it.
Remember when you could be assured that using the software you bought for your own, private use would be legal despite whatever claims to the contrary? remember when EULAs still had a core set of rights they could not infringe upon?
Sorry, I'm a F/OSS advocate, but I do not wish such a phyrric victory for Free Software, winning only because you need to hire a lawyer to use any other kind of software is not a reason to celebrate.
Because people don't feel as bad when they feel they've wasted $10 than when they feel they've wasted $1000, so of course Apple consumers won't admit to their dissatisfaction as easily as, say, Dell customers. Yes, even to themselves.
because nintendo decided uniqueness was more important than graphics. not necessarily a bad move, but certainly one that prevent certain games from being ported to Wii
There, corrected that for you. "Good gameplay" isn't a characteristic unique to any one of the three consoles, and I'd say that having to overhaul their entire control scheme is a bigger roadblock for companies porting their games to the Wii than downscaling the graphics is. Yeah, yeah, "classic controller" and all that, which have the acceptance of Motif apps on a Mac.
If I owned the game I'd be able to copy it, sell it, license it for one million dollars, or even print the source-code, throw it into the air, chop it up with a katana then make a sandwich with the pieces and eat it, and there's nothing the law could do to prevent me from doing it.
All of the 'rights' given by laws such as Fair Use and section 117 aren't meant for the owner of the software, otherwise they'd be superfluous, but rather to owners of legally-obtained *copies* of it, and were it not for Hanlon's Razor I'd be tempted to believe that this ruling was made only to give even more power to large copyright holders in their battle against "the internets".
How about bindings for languages other than C/C++? last time I tried working with QT on Python (admittedly, many years ago), it felt like a whitespace-aware version of C++ instead of, y'know, Python. Compare that with GTK2 which feels as if it had been designed for the language from the ground-up in at least Python, Ruby and Mono, and you'd see why I strongly prefer the latter.
Plus there's the whole thing with licensing. You may feel OK with having the theoretical "one and only" toolkit under the GPL, but I, personally, feel it's a bit *too* hostile towards closed-source companies, without any advantage other than the extra cash for Trolltech/Nokia.
The thing about freedom is that it goes both ways, both for those who want to do unproductive acts (such as sending photos as Powerpoint 2003 slides) as well as for those who want to tell the former how stupid they are. So, unless they attempt to pass laws against the use of closed-source software, please stop with the "they're trying to impose their views on mine" crap, they're just excercising their "free speech" rights.
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If you don't like it well tough put your head back in the sand and keep hanging out with the vermin, but if you lie with dogs.... well you know the rest I'm sure.
Funny, but that's the exact same excuse given by most cops who abuse their authority during public protests. Think about that.
So no, if he doesn't have the drive to learn and problem solve he's better off outside playing with a ball ... or girls since he's a teen.
And if he does, he's better off becoming a mathematician instead of a programmer. At least we don't look down upon those that decided to take a class instead of bashing their heads against a compiler until the thing worked.
The problem with javascript is, it doesn't have the l337 CLI c00ln3ss of Python and Ruby. Making things appear on your browser is web design, making things appear on a white-on-black terminal is stuff that only hackers do ;)
Besides that, though, I think that the initial language is pretty much irrelevant with a good online tutorial and someone to ask questions to. I learned in friggin' C++, which I still consider the most complex programming language known to mankind, but having a friend and my dad to ask when I got confused negated any possible drawback of the language, IMHO.
To quote myself:
Patching the OS, just right-click on the notification button and select "Install all updates"
Next time you try making a smart-ass comment, try to *read* the post you're replying to.
Or maybe he's intelligent enough to use reliable repositories, and download the versions appropiate for his distro. Though you'll have to work harder on your Google-fu, your first link is about a small error on the part of a package maintainer (so, not apt's fault in any way), and the second is both user error and on Dapper Drake, so not very recent either.
Yeah, but developers have to balance between listening to complains from users, or working on improving the software, unlike commercial companies which usually have dedicated staff for that. And when the complains are poorly-worded and, sometimes, even aimed at completely the wrong project (like some people who criticize Linus Torvalds for the GNOME/KDE "war"), it's easy to understand why developers may choose to ignore those who are not devs themselves, in an effort to improve the poor signal/noise ratio.
Ohh, and a small note: businesses will attend a user's complain only if the cost for doing so is less than what they stand to lose if they don't. And examples of that are plentiful in Microsoft and Apple's land.
I read your post and, honestly, I still don't know exactly what you're asking for. Easy to install apps? in Ubuntu you just download the required DEB, double-click on it, put your password, and press "Install". Patching the OS, just right-click on the notification button and select "Install all updates", and I see no inflexibility in apt, nor yum, both allow for easy upgrading of the 'core' packages (as in, those that come with the OS), and easy install of outside apps, so the only problem is lack of standard distribution practices, but the package managers have absolutely nothing to do with that.
The problem however is that most free criticism sucks. I mean, look around, most of the criticism towards distros is that there are too many of them, arguing that instead There Should Be Only One(tm), ala MacOSX, completely missing the point of Free Software.
Yes, there are a few sane minds among them, like the ones who argue for Free Desktop standards to be more widely implemented, and for the large DEs to standardize it first, implement it later instead of the other way around, but those voices are quickly lost in the noise of those who want Linux to turn into a second-rate copy of a propietary OS.
And then you've got all the morons who believe that the Free in "Free Software" means "Free an in free labor", quickly proceeding to troll $OSS_PROJECT_X's forums about how the developers are so lazy since they hadn't yet fixed the bug he reported *five minutes* after he had filed it, who are the cause that the "go fix it yourself" reply got so popular in the first place.
So what's the best way to deal with it? beats me, but what's certain to me is that the current situation, of having so many people complain about idiotic things, is what's driving developers towards ignoring all non-dev users' requests, and that if we can find a way to deal with that, Free Software would improve at an even faster rate than it currently does.
Way to mischaracterize entire groups of people, dude. Sorry, but no, (most) online FPS players don't disregard anything outside the genre, they're mostly normal gamers that just enjoy playing deathmatches against other people online, and for whom the prospect of leaving that behind just to play Mario Kart is... unappealing, to say the least.
Also, based on the number of people playing Halo alone, they're hardly a niche either. Want a niche? how about my favorite one, racing simulators: on Xbox360 you've got Forza 2, on the PS3 there's GT5: Prologue and the inevitable full version in the future, and on both consoles there are plenty of other racing games from last-gen that can be played on it. But the Wii? outside of a crappy port of a crappy Gamecube game, absolutely nothing.
But likewise, it's not that I don't consider non-racing games, well, games, but since I value a good racing sim much more than, say, a good survival horror game, the Wii's game lineup is much less valuable to me, overall, than that of the other two consoles.
No, it's not semantics, because according to the science of semantics, they did steal. How that bullshit argument got so popular around here absolutely eludes me. Somehow, people who know nothing about law or linguistics have spawned a meme that has incredible staying power. UBISoft absolutely did steal that crack. THERE IS NO REQUIREMENT OF PHYSICAL DEPRIVATION IN THE ENGLISH VERB 'TO STEAL'. FURTHER, 'STEAL' IS NOT A LEGAL TERM OF ART, SO ANY THEFT ANALOGY IS DOOMED TO FAILURE.
The problem is that the verb "to steal" does require it to refer to actual property, not a government-granted, time-limited monopoly over distribution rights. Unless, of course, you fell for that idiotic "IP" scam, in which case I'd kindly refer you to this excellent rebuttal written by the man who wrote one of the world's most widely used software licenses, among various other works.
Example of why: fubar.2.0 makes a few incompatible config changes (a no-no in itself) over 1.99. Yum pulls the .rpmsave trick as part of a 25+ packages upgrade. You copy .rpmsave over. You lose. (Dovecot did this a few times).
That's precisely the reason why .rpmsave is used instead of .rpmnew, so that if the config file's syntax suddenly changes you've at least got the thing working in a default config. And you're not supposed to copy the .rpmsave over, you're supposed to diff both files, see what's changed, and copy the relevant lines over, it's just that if there hasn't been any syntax change, copying the file over amounts to pretty much the same thing, but that's a pretty big *if*, specially for a production server.
But since it's Linux we're all happy that Red Hat fixed an important SECURITY bug, while only introducing a minor (AKA, non-security) one so fast, since at least we won't get rooted.
And I totally missed both of your points. WTF!?
As a South American, I can tell you that our opinion on the US landscape is pretty much the same, except that since we still remember the times when "the right" used to be for smaller, heavily regulated governments instead of Big Brother-style control, we simply consider the US' reps and dems to be a group of nutjobs with big ego problems instead of associating them to a specific side of the political spectrum.
And everyone knows IBM *SHOULD* have done the same, why does Apple get lambasted for it...just because people don't like Stevie?
No, it's because everybody knows IBM *SHOULDN'T* have done the same, but rather, figure out how to profit from an open platform, since trying to stick to their monopolistic practices is what almost drove them to bankrupcy the first time around. Kinda sorta like your favorite fruity-flavored company, huh.
I'd agree that games are supposed to look good but the problem is, how do you define "good graphics"? personally I define it as "it preserves a distinct artistic style throughout the entire presentation", but many people seem to define it as "how many polygons does it use for the main character".
For example, just to pick two old games, which one do you think has the best graphics, Castlevania 3 for the NES or Syphon Filter for the PSX? me, I'd take the former, since as much as I enjoyed the latter, it's graphics always gave me the feeling that they had been created by three different teams and then shoved together in the final product. Yet, the technology it uses is much superior to that of the NES, being 3D vs basic 2D.
So, it all depends on how you define it, and for those who define it the same way I do, criticizing developers for focusing solely on pushing more polygons instead of worrying about the gameplay is a perfectly valid complain, since for us all we're getting is higher system requirements, not better graphics, and certainly not better games.
The problem with that philosophy is that it drives the costs of making games *way* up, eventually creating a market where only big companies like EA are able to compete, and anything that's not a sequel is considered 'a risky investment', utterly crushing the chances of independant developers of going mainstream.
No, we don't ignore Apple and Microsoft's licenses, but we do fire up the pot of boiling oil when courts give them even more power than they already have. Copyright is already FUBAR, so it's only natural if we don't like it when judges make the situation even worse (see also: recent Blizzard case) instead of trying to fix it.
Remember when you could be assured that using the software you bought for your own, private use would be legal despite whatever claims to the contrary? remember when EULAs still had a core set of rights they could not infringe upon?
Sorry, I'm a F/OSS advocate, but I do not wish such a phyrric victory for Free Software, winning only because you need to hire a lawyer to use any other kind of software is not a reason to celebrate.
Because people don't feel as bad when they feel they've wasted $10 than when they feel they've wasted $1000, so of course Apple consumers won't admit to their dissatisfaction as easily as, say, Dell customers. Yes, even to themselves.
because nintendo decided uniqueness was more important than graphics. not necessarily a bad move, but certainly one that prevent certain games from being ported to Wii
There, corrected that for you. "Good gameplay" isn't a characteristic unique to any one of the three consoles, and I'd say that having to overhaul their entire control scheme is a bigger roadblock for companies porting their games to the Wii than downscaling the graphics is. Yeah, yeah, "classic controller" and all that, which have the acceptance of Motif apps on a Mac.
As the saying goes, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
If I owned the game I'd be able to copy it, sell it, license it for one million dollars, or even print the source-code, throw it into the air, chop it up with a katana then make a sandwich with the pieces and eat it, and there's nothing the law could do to prevent me from doing it.
All of the 'rights' given by laws such as Fair Use and section 117 aren't meant for the owner of the software, otherwise they'd be superfluous, but rather to owners of legally-obtained *copies* of it, and were it not for Hanlon's Razor I'd be tempted to believe that this ruling was made only to give even more power to large copyright holders in their battle against "the internets".
How about bindings for languages other than C/C++? last time I tried working with QT on Python (admittedly, many years ago), it felt like a whitespace-aware version of C++ instead of, y'know, Python. Compare that with GTK2 which feels as if it had been designed for the language from the ground-up in at least Python, Ruby and Mono, and you'd see why I strongly prefer the latter.
Plus there's the whole thing with licensing. You may feel OK with having the theoretical "one and only" toolkit under the GPL, but I, personally, feel it's a bit *too* hostile towards closed-source companies, without any advantage other than the extra cash for Trolltech/Nokia.
And I don't give a flying fuck about 'Joe User'. I just want everything to work 10 years from now.
The thing about freedom is that it goes both ways, both for those who want to do unproductive acts (such as sending photos as Powerpoint 2003 slides) as well as for those who want to tell the former how stupid they are. So, unless they attempt to pass laws against the use of closed-source software, please stop with the "they're trying to impose their views on mine" crap, they're just excercising their "free speech" rights.