Now that IE is free MS makes no money on it, and does not, IMO, know how either. The result of this action is that Microsoft is stuck developing the worlds most popular web browser for free with no way to recoup development costs. A total loss to Netscape? I don't think so..
IE is no more a loss leader than any other piece of windows is. Doesn't matter what they tell the judge, it's a piece of windows. It's probably saved them a lot of money in the long run as well by not having to implement and integrate various viewers into other programs. Winhelp is gone, the help system now is 99.9% IE.
Even if it is a loss leader, it still sells Windows. This can scarcely be considered a failure. Bob and Comic Chat were a failures... quit while you're ahead.
So I must raise a question of symantics: Is this technically "porting" or mearly something akin to "cross-compiling"? After all, it's not compiling under Windows but a Unix facade over top of Windows?
Cross-compiling is when you compile on the system you are porting from for the system you are porting to. Cygwin has been self-hosting for quite some time -- it's all compiled with gcc on cygwin. So no, it's a port.
However, Cygwin's default install method is that you have to download about 20 files from their site, extract them, then use a script to get everything installed right
When was the last time you used cygwin? I installed it by clicking on the "get cygwin"
icon on the site, about a 200K download, running it from the save/run dialog, putting a checkbox next to every package I wanted, and letting it install itself. I just wish every distro was that easy to install.
The organizational scheme of debian. How things are packaged, how they are configured (be damn sure that config scripts are going to vary on win32), the debian quality control. cygwin currently doesn't even do dependencies in its packages, it's a pretty simplified distribution. The difference between debian and redhat and slackware is the same quality that would differentiate it from cygwin. Of course it's already been done, this project would just aim to do it better.
Is this about doing good for the users, promoting their freedom to run software on whatever platform they happen to be using?
Or is this about confining users by forcing them to use proprietary software just because their OS is proprietary, in the name of the ongoing battle between free and proprietary software?
Maybe it's about people who are scratching an itch, people who are sick to death of all the polemic and war metaphors who just want to do something interesting like create another gnuwin32 distribution. Cygwin is very much becoming a distribution in its own right, it just makes sense that debian would also pick it up.
I wonder...is there a way (perhaps via cygwin) too get a lot of those cool tools like grep available on windows (2k)? I would be extremely happy to be able to telnet into my machine and grep things...
Of course you can, just go to cygwin.com and download the distribution. The installer is a bit annoying when you don't want to install everything, but it is certainly simple. w2k has telnet built in, though I'm not sure whether it has security holes, so I don't run it. Possible that there's a sshd available, the source for that almost certainly wouldn't port out of the box. I use bash as my main command shell on w2k, though it still has annoying terminal emulation bugs.
> I wish there was a shallow grave option in BUILD MODE.
Build the smallest pool possible. Stick unwanted sims in pool. Remove ladder. You can even sell the resulting tombstones for 50 simoleans a pop.
> I'm waiting for The SIMS Fetish Pack to come out so I can tie this girl to a water pipe in a basement somewhere and walk away from the computer for a week.
Re:The Burning Question Everybody Wants to Know:
on
Good Games For Christmas?
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· Score: 3, Informative
> And exactly how smutty is the Sims Hot Date expansion?
It's still pretty much G-rated. You can turn it up to PG-13 here and to the next level here. The second site is a pay site, but it's cheap -- $3.50 US for 30 days, which is more than enough time to suck down everything on the site.
> and since it runs Linux it's x times faster/more efficient
No, they say "they'll save you a bundle", and that's it. Not a thing about faster or more efficient (though the second is implied). It implies they're replacing the racks full of unix servers, probably solaris, with the big eServer running Linux. Probably not migrating windows servers. The savings implied are in administration costs, having only one box to admin instead of hundreds (giving the sysadmin the leisure to stroll casually out of the room eating a donut).
> *mail: set up an auto-forward of all mail sent to your Exchange account. send all mail from a non-Exchange account. eventually wean people off the exchange address.
And watch as people complain because they can no longer send meetings through mail and check for scheduling conflicts.
> *office documents: demand that people send you the data as XML or HTML or RTF or TXT or any of the other zillions of formats available. if they will not: pout.
I don't think I really need to correct you here, because anyone in possession of two brain cells to rub together who wants to keep his job is not going to go demanding that customers reformat their data to suit your inability to read it (rtf generated from word2k is still useless in wordpad if it contains tables). God forbid pout. You can suggest, but in the end, you are in no position to demand.
> * web browsing: the only place Linux falls down is on terribly designed web pages and Flash. those sites are not worth viewing anyway. consider yourself rescued from bad web pages.:)
I'll chase you from the left here: Flash works just dandy on Linux. Flash is tiny both in filesize and the size of the library, the runtime is cross-platform (and the development side has traditionally been mac-friendly), and it's a hell of a lot smaller and faster than java for eye candy. You can harrumph all you want about eye candy, but there's these places called museums that will demonstrate that such nonfunctional useless decoration has been with us for thousands of years. Some people are even in the business of selling it.
We need some kind of super light window manager. For example take a window manager, like PWM my current wm, running on DirectFB. No bloated Xserver in the background and no bloated window manager just a simple frame buffer and a 2meg window manager.
Both Gtk and Qt have framebuffer ports, presumably including a mouse driver to at least handle movement and clicks. This means the hard part has been done, the rest is a matter of porting the local operations of window managers and ditching the X protocol. You might have to implement more windowing behavior, it's possible that the fb ports don't even grok overlapping windows. I don't think X is so much fundamentally broken as it is just crufty, but I am all for reductionism, as it tends to make what's left a lot more elegant.
> and the fact that apple didn't open up their hardware whereas IBM did
Actually, IBM sued Compaq for reverse engineering the PC BIOS and creating clones. Compaq just happened to win. It's not so much that IBM opened their hardware as that it was opened in spite of them. If Compaq had decided to clone Apple machines instead, the story might have been far different.
Ahh your method of using linux (that you assume is the most widely deployed) is utter bunk. It totally _bypasses_ the excellent community support in the community by using _untested_ recently released software.
So in short, it's my fault for using Linux, because new releases in the stable branch are not tested. Gotcha. I'm really trying to mend and stop being so glib all the time, but sometimes it's really hard.
Your admonishments to whatever moral character I might lack based on my criticisms, whining, whatever you might want to call it, have absolutely no truck when I have to make a recommendation based on requirements and Linux comes up short. Lemme save every respondent the bother: I am an ungrateful, whining jerk who spurns the community that provides this free software. I have problems none of you seem to have, and I cast aspersions wherever I can because of it. I am in short, a big fink meanie. Get used to it, there's thousands more like me, and they make recommendations too, so you might want to give the Wagging Finger Of Scolding +2 a rest and start listening to what we have to say, no matter how much venom we coat it with.
Re:Volunteer work would be great if you got paid..
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
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· Score: 2
If I had a company and somebody came to me with a resume showing he took off for a year to do goodwill work in some other country, all I'd see is a guy who needs retraining on a years worth of technology changes. You want to help out, donate money. Let the out of work hippies donate months of their lives.
I really don't want to judge you, but I won't hide the contempt I felt when I read that. Feels good saying who you'd hire and fire if you ran the zoo, doesn't it? Power trip fantasies, I know all about 'em, they really help boost the ego. Know what's also a good ego trip? Connecting to people, knowing what makes 'em tick. Knowing that with a few good questions, you could tell whether this guy was slumming it in the backwaters and lording it over the population while drinking down the local brew every night because they couldn't hack it back home, or whether this is someone who really knows how to relate to real strangers, folks with different cultures and idioms, someone who knows how to make do on a tight budget, under less than ideal conditions, with less than the state of the art. Heck, sometimes they're both the same person, not everyone who's effective is a saint. That's the real world... one in which you don't own that company, and perhaps never will if you don't appreciate what your employees bring to the workplace beyond empty certifications.
This linux system that depending on which "stable" version you download, locks up under high load, corrupts your filesystem when umounting it, invisibly reverts your filesystem to one that can be hosed from a power fail, or kills off processes at random -- like init -- when it starts running out of memory... And that's just what I recall off the top of my head from the last few months.
I don't think Linux is exactly a pile of shit either, but let's not kid ourselves, it's got the same problems that commercial OS's deal with, and the development model hasn't exactly been a panacea in that respect.
That made me laugh like mad. I love it. Sounds like me. Sounds like my friends. Hey, he cycles. He caves. He founds OpenBSD. He speaks his mind. He has a sense of humor. He sounds cool, not like an asshole at all.
This sort of social stuntedness is what you find novel, fresh, and daring? Cripes, it's just the typical petulance one normally comes to expect from this guy. Churchill could be quite an asshole, but he had style (e.g. "when I wake up, I'll be sober") Theo's an organizational genius, not a half bad coder, he's probably even nice to his own team... but he is not only utterly intolerant, he is vindictive, and it's precisely why NetBSD gave him the boot.
There are a lot of stupid people out there. Most of them aren't even worth dealing with. But it certainly doesn't make one an iconoclast to throwing around petty insults to prop up one's feelings of superiority. It makes for a pathetic maladjusted loner... or for those who have to witness this behavior day after day, just an asshole.
> Which is a shame. The other games put it to shame. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to control a 1st person shooter with a joystick was nuts.
Isn't Halo a third person squad level game?
Re:It all boils down to bit flipping 1's and 0's
on
Lightweight Languages
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· Score: 2
Thinking in terms of "1's and 0's" is seriously wrong. Binary data is simply data, it does not represent computation itself. You can encode a UTM in base 2, 3, 10, or 287 if you like. There is trinary computation, as covered on slashdot only a few days ago, there is quantum computation, which really flies in the face of a lot of classical computing rules.
The fact that every language is an application of basic computing concepts is no more help than telling a research pathologist that all viruses are made of matter. It's simply not science to keep pointing out things we already know.
Re:Whats the "lighest" you can get?
on
Lightweight Languages
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Can we get even more lightweight?:)
Oh my, yes. All you need to compute is three operations (and another couple to do i/o). Check out unlambda. Lighter than brainfuck, probably even more maddening, since it doesn't have state like a turing machine does.
Change the i/o ops to read and write arbitrary memory locations, and you could write an operating system in unlambda (same goes for any other of these toy languages)
> But can I inline Scheme and make my ten-year-old, SGML-based pagination engine understand it?
Probably. Good SGML processing tools understand DSSSL, which is, of all things, scheme. SGML used to just break down entirely to sexps, but that approach wasn't fast enough, given the state of the art of scheme at the time.
My regex would be the first of a chain of filters, using a pipe or lazy evaluation, that would still throw out 99% of pages it crawled, passing the remaining piece to a more computationally expensive algorithm. This is called a heuristic, see? This is a win when you have two machines, see? The second filter would probably try to look for something like an expiration date, which is a smaller string and thus is less optimal as a search.
I didn't realize I was going to have to teach a damn CS class about how to layer because some slashdoterati find it necessary to flaunt their coding dick size at every turn.
No, I expect them to double click the RPM file in their file manager. As for configure/make... when I get sources on Windows, I get a project file that may or may not have all the dependencies it needs, and may or may not detect them. Linux isn't easy to use... and from watching my mother struggle with her computer, neither is windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that IE is free MS makes no money on it, and does not, IMO, know how either. The result of this action is that Microsoft is stuck developing the worlds most popular web browser for free with no way to recoup development costs. A total loss to Netscape? I don't think so..
... quit while you're ahead.
IE is no more a loss leader than any other piece of windows is. Doesn't matter what they tell the judge, it's a piece of windows. It's probably saved them a lot of money in the long run as well by not having to implement and integrate various viewers into other programs. Winhelp is gone, the help system now is 99.9% IE.
Even if it is a loss leader, it still sells Windows. This can scarcely be considered a failure. Bob and Comic Chat were a failures
So I must raise a question of symantics: Is this technically "porting" or mearly something akin to "cross-compiling"? After all, it's not compiling under Windows but a Unix facade over top of Windows?
Cross-compiling is when you compile on the system you are porting from for the system you are porting to. Cygwin has been self-hosting for quite some time -- it's all compiled with gcc on cygwin. So no, it's a port.
However, Cygwin's default install method is that you have to download about 20 files from their site, extract them, then use a script to get everything installed right
When was the last time you used cygwin? I installed it by clicking on the "get cygwin"
icon on the site, about a 200K download, running it from the save/run dialog, putting a checkbox next to every package I wanted, and letting it install itself. I just wish every distro was that easy to install.
> Am I missing something?
The organizational scheme of debian. How things are packaged, how they are configured (be damn sure that config scripts are going to vary on win32), the debian quality control. cygwin currently doesn't even do dependencies in its packages, it's a pretty simplified distribution. The difference between debian and redhat and slackware is the same quality that would differentiate it from cygwin. Of course it's already been done, this project would just aim to do it better.
Is this about doing good for the users, promoting their freedom to run software on whatever platform they happen to be using?
Or is this about confining users by forcing them to use proprietary software just because their OS is proprietary, in the name of the ongoing battle between free and proprietary software?
Maybe it's about people who are scratching an itch, people who are sick to death of all the polemic and war metaphors who just want to do something interesting like create another gnuwin32 distribution. Cygwin is very much becoming a distribution in its own right, it just makes sense that debian would also pick it up.
I guess GNU's Not Unix after all...
I wonder...is there a way (perhaps via cygwin) too get a lot of those cool tools like grep available on windows (2k)? I would be extremely happy to be able to telnet into my machine and grep things...
Of course you can, just go to cygwin.com and download the distribution. The installer is a bit annoying when you don't want to install everything, but it is certainly simple. w2k has telnet built in, though I'm not sure whether it has security holes, so I don't run it. Possible that there's a sshd available, the source for that almost certainly wouldn't port out of the box. I use bash as my main command shell on w2k, though it still has annoying terminal emulation bugs.
> I wish there was a shallow grave option in BUILD MODE.
Build the smallest pool possible. Stick unwanted sims in pool. Remove ladder. You can even sell the resulting tombstones for 50 simoleans a pop.
> I'm waiting for The SIMS Fetish Pack to come out so I can tie this girl to a water pipe in a basement somewhere and walk away from the computer for a week.
Look no further
> And exactly how smutty is the Sims Hot Date expansion?
It's still pretty much G-rated. You can turn it up to PG-13 here and to the next level here. The second site is a pay site, but it's cheap -- $3.50 US for 30 days, which is more than enough time to suck down everything on the site.
> and since it runs Linux it's x times faster/more efficient
No, they say "they'll save you a bundle", and that's it. Not a thing about faster or more efficient (though the second is implied). It implies they're replacing the racks full of unix servers, probably solaris, with the big eServer running Linux. Probably not migrating windows servers. The savings implied are in administration costs, having only one box to admin instead of hundreds (giving the sysadmin the leisure to stroll casually out of the room eating a donut).
> *mail: set up an auto-forward of all mail sent to your Exchange account. send all mail from a non-Exchange account. eventually wean people off the exchange address.
:)
And watch as people complain because they can no longer send meetings through mail and check for scheduling conflicts.
> *office documents: demand that people send you the data as XML or HTML or RTF or TXT or any of the other zillions of formats available. if they will not: pout.
I don't think I really need to correct you here, because anyone in possession of two brain cells to rub together who wants to keep his job is not going to go demanding that customers reformat their data to suit your inability to read it (rtf generated from word2k is still useless in wordpad if it contains tables). God forbid pout. You can suggest, but in the end, you are in no position to demand.
> * web browsing: the only place Linux falls down is on terribly designed web pages and Flash. those sites are not worth viewing anyway. consider yourself rescued from bad web pages.
I'll chase you from the left here: Flash works just dandy on Linux. Flash is tiny both in filesize and the size of the library, the runtime is cross-platform (and the development side has traditionally been mac-friendly), and it's a hell of a lot smaller and faster than java for eye candy. You can harrumph all you want about eye candy, but there's these places called museums that will demonstrate that such nonfunctional useless decoration has been with us for thousands of years. Some people are even in the business of selling it.
We need some kind of super light window manager. For example take a window manager, like PWM my current wm, running on DirectFB. No bloated Xserver in the background and no bloated window manager just a simple frame buffer and a 2meg window manager.
Both Gtk and Qt have framebuffer ports, presumably including a mouse driver to at least handle movement and clicks. This means the hard part has been done, the rest is a matter of porting the local operations of window managers and ditching the X protocol. You might have to implement more windowing behavior, it's possible that the fb ports don't even grok overlapping windows. I don't think X is so much fundamentally broken as it is just crufty, but I am all for reductionism, as it tends to make what's left a lot more elegant.
> and the fact that apple didn't open up their hardware whereas IBM did
Actually, IBM sued Compaq for reverse engineering the PC BIOS and creating clones. Compaq just happened to win. It's not so much that IBM opened their hardware as that it was opened in spite of them. If Compaq had decided to clone Apple machines instead, the story might have been far different.
Ahh your method of using linux (that you assume is the most widely deployed) is utter bunk. It totally _bypasses_ the excellent community support in the community by using _untested_ recently released software.
So in short, it's my fault for using Linux, because new releases in the stable branch are not tested. Gotcha. I'm really trying to mend and stop being so glib all the time, but sometimes it's really hard.
Your admonishments to whatever moral character I might lack based on my criticisms, whining, whatever you might want to call it, have absolutely no truck when I have to make a recommendation based on requirements and Linux comes up short. Lemme save every respondent the bother: I am an ungrateful, whining jerk who spurns the community that provides this free software. I have problems none of you seem to have, and I cast aspersions wherever I can because of it. I am in short, a big fink meanie. Get used to it, there's thousands more like me, and they make recommendations too, so you might want to give the Wagging Finger Of Scolding +2 a rest and start listening to what we have to say, no matter how much venom we coat it with.
If I had a company and somebody came to me with a resume showing he took off for a year to do goodwill work in some other country, all I'd see is a guy who needs retraining on a years worth of technology changes. You want to help out, donate money. Let the out of work hippies donate months of their lives.
... one in which you don't own that company, and perhaps never will if you don't appreciate what your employees bring to the workplace beyond empty certifications.
I really don't want to judge you, but I won't hide the contempt I felt when I read that. Feels good saying who you'd hire and fire if you ran the zoo, doesn't it? Power trip fantasies, I know all about 'em, they really help boost the ego. Know what's also a good ego trip? Connecting to people, knowing what makes 'em tick. Knowing that with a few good questions, you could tell whether this guy was slumming it in the backwaters and lording it over the population while drinking down the local brew every night because they couldn't hack it back home, or whether this is someone who really knows how to relate to real strangers, folks with different cultures and idioms, someone who knows how to make do on a tight budget, under less than ideal conditions, with less than the state of the art. Heck, sometimes they're both the same person, not everyone who's effective is a saint. That's the real world
> Just build an http server into the gnutella client
...
> Of course the thing is that nobody bothered to do so sofar.
BearShare does precisely this. It's marginally useful at times.
> The strength and robustness of the linux system
This linux system that depending on which "stable" version you download, locks up under high load, corrupts your filesystem when umounting it, invisibly reverts your filesystem to one that can be hosed from a power fail, or kills off processes at random -- like init -- when it starts running out of memory... And that's just what I recall off the top of my head from the last few months.
I don't think Linux is exactly a pile of shit either, but let's not kid ourselves, it's got the same problems that commercial OS's deal with, and the development model hasn't exactly been a panacea in that respect.
Yeah, but no one will want to maintain code written in it, because it looks like ASS :)
By filtering out mails that contain the phrase "this is not spam"
Then I guess you are just stupid.
... but he is not only utterly intolerant, he is vindictive, and it's precisely why NetBSD gave him the boot.
... or for those who have to witness this behavior day after day, just an asshole.
That made me laugh like mad. I love it. Sounds like me. Sounds like my friends. Hey, he cycles. He caves. He founds OpenBSD. He speaks his mind. He has a sense of humor. He sounds cool, not like an asshole at all.
This sort of social stuntedness is what you find novel, fresh, and daring? Cripes, it's just the typical petulance one normally comes to expect from this guy. Churchill could be quite an asshole, but he had style (e.g. "when I wake up, I'll be sober") Theo's an organizational genius, not a half bad coder, he's probably even nice to his own team
There are a lot of stupid people out there. Most of them aren't even worth dealing with. But it certainly doesn't make one an iconoclast to throwing around petty insults to prop up one's feelings of superiority. It makes for a pathetic maladjusted loner
> Which is a shame. The other games put it to shame. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to control a 1st person shooter with a joystick was nuts.
Isn't Halo a third person squad level game?
Thinking in terms of "1's and 0's" is seriously wrong. Binary data is simply data, it does not represent computation itself. You can encode a UTM in base 2, 3, 10, or 287 if you like. There is trinary computation, as covered on slashdot only a few days ago, there is quantum computation, which really flies in the face of a lot of classical computing rules.
The fact that every language is an application of basic computing concepts is no more help than telling a research pathologist that all viruses are made of matter. It's simply not science to keep pointing out things we already know.
Can we get even more lightweight? :)
Oh my, yes. All you need to compute is three operations (and another couple to do i/o). Check out unlambda. Lighter than brainfuck, probably even more maddening, since it doesn't have state like a turing machine does.
Change the i/o ops to read and write arbitrary memory locations, and you could write an operating system in unlambda (same goes for any other of these toy languages)
> But can I inline Scheme and make my ten-year-old, SGML-based pagination engine understand it?
Probably. Good SGML processing tools understand DSSSL, which is, of all things, scheme. SGML used to just break down entirely to sexps, but that approach wasn't fast enough, given the state of the art of scheme at the time.
My regex would be the first of a chain of filters, using a pipe or lazy evaluation, that would still throw out 99% of pages it crawled, passing the remaining piece to a more computationally expensive algorithm. This is called a heuristic, see? This is a win when you have two machines, see? The second filter would probably try to look for something like an expiration date, which is a smaller string and thus is less optimal as a search.
I didn't realize I was going to have to teach a damn CS class about how to layer because some slashdoterati find it necessary to flaunt their coding dick size at every turn.
No, I expect them to double click the RPM file in their file manager. As for configure/make ... when I get sources on Windows, I get a project file that may or may not have all the dependencies it needs, and may or may not detect them. Linux isn't easy to use ... and from watching my mother struggle with her computer, neither is windows.