Thank god the Microsoft Bob team didn't trumpet its use of LISP
Bob, which became MS Agents, which when you take away the paperclip front end, became one of the better help systems out there... a help system with a search engine, speech recognition, an API ridiculously easy to extend, and so on... But you just had to get your stupid little jab against Microsoft in there, didn't you. Not a slashdot article without one.
"Command line??? How primitive! Look at all the colorful and pretty pictures I have on my desktop, you dirty UNIX user!"
Show me one single usenet or mail list archive post with this sentiment from someone who shouldn't have been canned as a troll anyway. In other words, show me an example of this sentiment used as serious argument. Whereas I see attacks like "point and drool" taken as serious argument every day. As usual, those that can do, do, those that can't argue about it on slashdot (I guess I just indicted myself)
From the "i-dunno-better-beat-that-horse-til-it's-disassoci ated-atoms" department...
Basically the guy told me that it is impossible to create 'state of the art' programs with command-line tools....
But when I asked him to give me reasons why he just called me stupid and 'behind the times'.
I would simply call you insecure. He finds it impossible to create state of the art tools with CLI, you interpret it as a direct personal attack.
Considering he was an avid supporter of anything Microsoft, I take what he says with a grain of salt.
We all know any argument that comes from a supporter of Microsoft is instantly void of logic or or any merit whatsoever.
[snip]
I am personally writing code for Soar (a symbolic AI language) in xemacs then importing it into a Tcl-based environment where I type things into the console like "print somerule" that dumps out a rule, then right-clicking on operators to generate more print statements, at which time i hilight some of these print statements and copy and paste them into a notepad window. And on windows, so process that, CLI boy.
Here's what happened: you grew up. Your tastes are more demanding, refined, jaded, whatever. Games that throw a pretty skin onto the same concept aren't that exciting -- but neither is some "back to basics" that simply rehashes the original concept. I would be bored stiff if I went back and replayed the Bards Tale games now, and not just because I finished them once already.
It's production qualities like graphical polish, music, sound, writing, and voice acting that really makes a game an experience. If the game has any kind of story, it has to have mood. Otherwise you better have something addictive as tetris or solitaire. Alpha Centauri for example had graphics that were mediocre in the game engine (but quite consistent), but the cutscenes were sumptuous. The music was eerie and alien, the sound was harsh and industrial. And of course the excellent color text quotes for every single advance and building, not to mention diplomacy screens with complete sentences. All this created a mood that had me playing over and over. I find myself wanting to play Grim Fandango again (and can't, alas it doesn't work under win2k) for the same reasons: great story, beautiful art and music, and fabulous voice acting. These are all qualities that are *HARD* for any open-source project to get talent for, and unsurprisingly comprise a very large part of the budget of game development houses.
Yawn. Yet another "programming would be much better if everyone used My Favorite Toy Language". Eiffel, Ada, Java, LISP, ocaml, modula-3, it's always the same argument: that the magical property of being not-C++ or not-whatever-language-is-icky will transform all code into a paragon of quality, and that people are pigheaded ornery inflexible narrow-minded dinosaurs clinging on to their legacy language instead of joining The True Faith...
Massive traffic jams would occur as users stop at each end and call for help because they can't figure out how to drive across
I've seen traffic rerouted for construction in such a haphazard fashion I have made a full stop while I figured out which way to go lest I drive into oncoming traffic or hit the end of the road because it just wasn't clearly marked, and it was night with no one in front of me to follow. If bridges were programmed, there would be a permanent cone zone instead of lines to guide traffic, and it would switch sides for the hell of it every so often.
Re:Perl Software Pet Peeve: not using warn and str
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2
If anyone reading this does NOT use warn (invoked by putting a '-w' after your perl interpreter call, ie: #!/usr/bin/perl -w
Obsolete, use use warnings; for recent versions of perl.
Er, no it is not. It's very much C++, though crippled to such a degree in the name of portability to compilers more brain damaged than cfront 1.0 that it may as well be C.
If that doesn't get modded up to +5 informative, there's something wrong, because that was a damn fine exposition of recursive composition. I still don't know that it's very interesting tho, since recursive composition in a nutshell is: instances of a class have have has-a or linked-to relationships with objects that are concrete subclasses of that class. Almost any tree structure is like that. It just looks interesting in a UML diagram when you see that arrow looping back onto the same class.
Anyway, there's DOM-based XML parsers already in C, like gnome-xml (or whatever it's called, it doesn't really require gnome, I've used it elsewhere with no difficulty). Same library works in both stream (sax) and tree (dom) mode, actually. And MS has an outstanding DOM-based parser usable in pretty much any language with their XML parser, which IE happens to use too.
Anyway, I'm under the impression that XSLT was designed for this task of descending a DOM tree and translating it to another domain, e.g. ps or html...
I was recently exploring a change of job opportunity. Most people I talked to said, "Send me your resume in Word format." Even for a Linux sysadmin position. At one point, I told the recruiter, "I don't have access to Microsoft Office but I have my resume in HTML form which you can load in Word with no trouble." His (her?) response was, "Well, you can hardly call yourself a professional if you don't use Office, now can you?" and the conversation dropped.
As well it should have -- that conversation should only have been continued with that recruiter's manager, at which time you should have focused on the very unprofessional insult rather than any technology choice issues involved. Anyway, I send my resume in HTML format, it views in their email client just fine, never raises a peep. If they're really insistent, I have a copy in Wordpad. The reason's technical: I only have Word2k, which didn't seem to want to convert down properly last time, and I don't have access to older versions of Word anymore to test.
So, how long do you guess it will take M$ to introduce a default-encrypting-scheme on.doc and all their other proprietary formats and starts haunting all the Word-et-al-filter-authors for breaking the DMCA?
For all the machievellian things Microsoft does, and except for the gaffe over the Kerberos doc, Microsoft is one of the least litigous tech companies around (and notice how quick they were to distance themselves from legal aggression over it once the PR backlash began). Considering how closely their every move is scrutinized, I haven't seen a single slashdot article about Microsoft sueing anyone. Apparently the legal system is not part of their bag of dirty tricks. They probably could have sued Wine into oblivion, and they havent -- even though it's now getting functional enough in parts to start making serious inroads. Adobe on the other hand is already trying to put people in iron cages for competing with them.
Probably a better solution is to convince everyone who currently e-mails Word attachments to start e-mailing PDF attachments. It could still be used inappropriately, but at least everyone could read it with open-source software
Until Adobe adds an incompatible feature to PDF and has people sent to prison for reverse engineering it...
Off this topic, one other thing that kind of bothers me is the massive ammount of reinventing the wheel. Now while having many options is good, there are just far too many open source projects that are each trying to create their own robust, fully-featured office suite. Why is the community wasting so much time?
In the absence of being paid for their work, open source hackers prefer to work with people they know, toolkits they're comfortable with, languages they prefer, and so on. This will always create fragmentation.
Some of these really should merge and share code more. Or at least, there should be one organization that is dedicated to creating a unified set of the features found in all open source office suite projects. That way, they could create a big set of libraries that do these things... so when the next guy has this reckless desire to make his own office suite... well, you get the idea.
I frankly don't see anyone joining into a bureacracy like that. Agglomerating incompatible organizations together like that just drags everyone down. What we could use is a component standard, like COM (or XPCOM, assuming it actually has binary level compatibilty). It has to be less painful than removing one's own spleen to create such components, and they really do have to work in various languages, C, C++, perl, and python at the very least. It's COM and OLE that have really made windows a platform of choice for hordes of developers. It'd be nice to see at least those successes brought to open source, even if MS is moving one step beyond that now...
CORBA itself is neither slow nor bloated. Baroque and annoying, yes, mostly due to the lack of ORBs that implement anything close to a friendly API that glosses over all the necessary bookkeeping (that bookkeeping is worse with DCOM but MS did a good job of making it transparent). What is slow and bloated and evil is IIOP. I sincerely hope Berlin is not planning on using IIOP for its client/server communication...
> quantum computing (yes, a big fucking hoax that one is),
you forgot cold fusion... anyway, do you have any cites of papers debunking quantum computing? i've been hearing that it's quite reproducible, a pretty important criterion...
You perhaps run Linux as an alternative. I run it as a complement. On Windows, I like the games, I like IE as a browser, I like the unified scripting engine support, I like OLE, I like the easy printer installs, I like explorer extensions like TortoiseCVS.
I don't like the crappy IRC clients, the crippled commandline (cygwin is nice but not 100% there and it's kind of "weird" sometimes), the lack of mailbox scriptability (but I like the UI of mail clients on windows), and the $#@!$% file locking semantics I run into whenever I try to delete or move things.
So I like to cvs update files with tortoise, browse around them with one of the quick viewers (like the text file viewer in the resource kit), then do real development work on them with xemacs on the bsd side in vmware. Running bsd under vmware meant not having to worry about whether my cardbus pcmcia ethernet card was supported, or most other hardware for that matter.
This solution lets me test my server scripts on both IIS and apache (I know IIS is a gaping security hole so I only bind it to a local interface), and their output on ie, netscape, mozilla, and konquerer (if only writing HTML to spec was sufficient, *sigh*). And I don't even have to be connected to the network to do it, I do it all from one laptop wherever I am.
That's just my story, I'm sure other people have their own reasons.
Why doesn't an OEM make a bootable CD that resizes the FAT filesystem (which would be defragmented before shipping), install an OS image, and rewrite the boot sector?
BeOS shipped with a copy of Partition Magic which did precisely that (PM moves the data itself, no need to defrag). It wouldn't matter if it ran off the CD the first time then magically off the HDD right after with no "installation" at all. People just didn't give a damn about BeOS, since it offered zero value proposition for them over their current OS.
Microsoft would have to create a clause that states that you can't sell other operating systems at all, which is much too stupid for even Microsoft
They had precisely such a clause, and it made them filthy rich. Well, the clause had to do with preinstallation, and no OEM wants to bother with providing an aftermarket OS for their own systems. Microsoft may be unethical, and they occasionally make bad decisions, but no one in their right mind calls them stupid.
There are already distributions of Linux that install with just a double-click on an icon. It could be that there are other barriers to entry, and just possibly, not all wre put there by Microsoft.
... the majority of people using computers will never have the know-how or courage or need
to make an OS change.
I can't begin to go into how insultingly patronizing this sentiment is. My father recently called and was bemoaning the state of his win98 box. Programs crashing, system utilities failing all over the place... I recommended win2k as an alternative. Nope, not Linux or BSD. He's a music freak, jazz mostly, and gets a lot of it with Morpheus. Also likes games, desktop toy stuff mostly, like simcity 3000. Frankly it wouldn't matter if Linux could run every last game and support every single soundcard in existence without hassle -- he just doesn't have a reason to run it. I've had all of one BSOD on win2k, less than the number of kernel panics I got with linux. Once you're into user application land, I see app after app after app on Linux crash with segfaults. And on the security front, I just tell him to get ZoneAlarm, something I still haven't seen anything like for Linux (maybe because the notion of user interaction with the firewall is considered heresy). All this goes double for BSD, I just don't see as many of that camp deluding themselves about viability on the desktop.
Linux might be a workable solution for him if he had a full-time sysadmin to get basic stuff working for him. Guess it keeps families together at any rate...
First the percentage of Duplicate, Invalid, and Worksforme bugs continues to rise and is at about 50% so nearly half of all bugs reported turn out to be something other than new bugs in the code.
Where I come from, "works for me" cannot close an open issue, and must be followed with "cannot duplicate with same configuration". I get a whole lot of "works for me" anecdotes when I tell people about my miserable experiences with new kernels, reiserfs, and mozilla builds. Well, most firestone tires didn't blow out either. Still want a set on your SUV?
I realize you don't have the resources to investigate every worksforme problem, but if you come up with a product that's only perfect in your test lab, you still don't have a quality product.
It never fails. Ask for advice, and at least one person tells me to do it my damn self. Clue check, this particular little advocacy tactic is really counterproductive. If you can't answer the damn question, keep your righteous cheerleading to yourself, ok?
cvsup makes it tolerable to have a cvs client, which concurrently does the recentness compare with the downloads itself -- no BIG...LONG...PAUSE for a cvs update to scan everything then download the changes.
unfortunately it's still ultimately based on the highly excreble CVS, which still can't handle something as simple as a renamed file, to say nothing of the hell it puts you through for directories. If McVoy would stop playing silly license games with Bitkeeper so he can try to become the next Sourceforge (sorry, but you lost), then the world would probably beat a path to his door.
In the meantime, are there any robust and free alternatives to cvs?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a classic cognitive dissonance effect that causes programmers of other languages to complain
:MY-PET-LANGUAGE, could it? No, must be that you're the only objective one in this universe...
This couldn't possibly be true with
Thank god the Microsoft Bob team didn't trumpet its use of LISP
... a help system with a search engine, speech recognition, an API ridiculously easy to extend, and so on... But you just had to get your stupid little jab against Microsoft in there, didn't you. Not a slashdot article without one.
Bob, which became MS Agents, which when you take away the paperclip front end, became one of the better help systems out there
"Command line??? How primitive! Look at all the colorful and pretty pictures I have on my desktop, you dirty UNIX user!"
Show me one single usenet or mail list archive post with this sentiment from someone who shouldn't have been canned as a troll anyway. In other words, show me an example of this sentiment used as serious argument. Whereas I see attacks like "point and drool" taken as serious argument every day. As usual, those that can do, do, those that can't argue about it on slashdot (I guess I just indicted myself)
From the "i-dunno-better-beat-that-horse-til-it's-disassoci ated-atoms" department...
...
Basically the guy told me that it is impossible to create 'state of the art' programs with command-line tools.
But when I asked him to give me reasons why he just called me stupid and 'behind the times'.
I would simply call you insecure. He finds it impossible to create state of the art tools with CLI, you interpret it as a direct personal attack.
Considering he was an avid supporter of anything Microsoft, I take what he says with a grain of salt.
We all know any argument that comes from a supporter of Microsoft is instantly void of logic or or any merit whatsoever.
[snip]
I am personally writing code for Soar (a symbolic AI language) in xemacs then importing it into a Tcl-based environment where I type things into the console like "print somerule" that dumps out a rule, then right-clicking on operators to generate more print statements, at which time i hilight some of these print statements and copy and paste them into a notepad window. And on windows, so process that, CLI boy.
Here's what happened: you grew up. Your tastes are more demanding, refined, jaded, whatever. Games that throw a pretty skin onto the same concept aren't that exciting -- but neither is some "back to basics" that simply rehashes the original concept. I would be bored stiff if I went back and replayed the Bards Tale games now, and not just because I finished them once already.
It's production qualities like graphical polish, music, sound, writing, and voice acting that really makes a game an experience. If the game has any kind of story, it has to have mood. Otherwise you better have something addictive as tetris or solitaire. Alpha Centauri for example had graphics that were mediocre in the game engine (but quite consistent), but the cutscenes were sumptuous. The music was eerie and alien, the sound was harsh and industrial. And of course the excellent color text quotes for every single advance and building, not to mention diplomacy screens with complete sentences. All this created a mood that had me playing over and over. I find myself wanting to play Grim Fandango again (and can't, alas it doesn't work under win2k) for the same reasons: great story, beautiful art and music, and fabulous voice acting. These are all qualities that are *HARD* for any open-source project to get talent for, and unsurprisingly comprise a very large part of the budget of game development houses.
Yawn. Yet another "programming would be much better if everyone used My Favorite Toy Language". Eiffel, Ada, Java, LISP, ocaml, modula-3, it's always the same argument: that the magical property of being not-C++ or not-whatever-language-is-icky will transform all code into a paragon of quality, and that people are pigheaded ornery inflexible narrow-minded dinosaurs clinging on to their legacy language instead of joining The True Faith...
I really am so weary of it.
Massive traffic jams would occur as users stop at each end and call for help because they can't figure out how to drive across
I've seen traffic rerouted for construction in such a haphazard fashion I have made a full stop while I figured out which way to go lest I drive into oncoming traffic or hit the end of the road because it just wasn't clearly marked, and it was night with no one in front of me to follow. If bridges were programmed, there would be a permanent cone zone instead of lines to guide traffic, and it would switch sides for the hell of it every so often.
If anyone reading this does NOT use warn (invoked by putting a '-w' after your perl interpreter call, ie: #!/usr/bin/perl -w
Obsolete, use use warnings; for recent versions of perl.
Mozilla is written in C
Er, no it is not. It's very much C++, though crippled to such a degree in the name of portability to compilers more brain damaged than cfront 1.0 that it may as well be C.
If that doesn't get modded up to +5 informative, there's something wrong, because that was a damn fine exposition of recursive composition. I still don't know that it's very interesting tho, since recursive composition in a nutshell is: instances of a class have have has-a or linked-to relationships with objects that are concrete subclasses of that class. Almost any tree structure is like that. It just looks interesting in a UML diagram when you see that arrow looping back onto the same class.
Anyway, there's DOM-based XML parsers already in C, like gnome-xml (or whatever it's called, it doesn't really require gnome, I've used it elsewhere with no difficulty). Same library works in both stream (sax) and tree (dom) mode, actually. And MS has an outstanding DOM-based parser usable in pretty much any language with their XML parser, which IE happens to use too.
Anyway, I'm under the impression that XSLT was designed for this task of descending a DOM tree and translating it to another domain, e.g. ps or html...
I was recently exploring a change of job opportunity. Most people I talked to said, "Send me your resume in Word format." Even for a Linux sysadmin position. At one point, I told the recruiter, "I don't have access to Microsoft Office but I have my resume in HTML form which you can load in Word with no trouble." His (her?) response was, "Well, you can hardly call yourself a professional if you don't use Office, now can you?" and the conversation dropped.
As well it should have -- that conversation should only have been continued with that recruiter's manager, at which time you should have focused on the very unprofessional insult rather than any technology choice issues involved. Anyway, I send my resume in HTML format, it views in their email client just fine, never raises a peep. If they're really insistent, I have a copy in Wordpad. The reason's technical: I only have Word2k, which didn't seem to want to convert down properly last time, and I don't have access to older versions of Word anymore to test.
So, how long do you guess it will take M$ to introduce a default-encrypting-scheme on .doc and all their other proprietary formats and starts haunting all the Word-et-al-filter-authors for breaking the DMCA?
For all the machievellian things Microsoft does, and except for the gaffe over the Kerberos doc, Microsoft is one of the least litigous tech companies around (and notice how quick they were to distance themselves from legal aggression over it once the PR backlash began). Considering how closely their every move is scrutinized, I haven't seen a single slashdot article about Microsoft sueing anyone. Apparently the legal system is not part of their bag of dirty tricks. They probably could have sued Wine into oblivion, and they havent -- even though it's now getting functional enough in parts to start making serious inroads. Adobe on the other hand is already trying to put people in iron cages for competing with them.
Probably a better solution is to convince everyone who currently e-mails Word attachments to start e-mailing PDF attachments. It could still be used inappropriately, but at least everyone could read it with open-source software
Until Adobe adds an incompatible feature to PDF and has people sent to prison for reverse engineering it...
Off this topic, one other thing that kind of bothers me is the massive ammount of reinventing the wheel. Now while having many options is good, there are just far too many open source projects that are each trying to create their own robust, fully-featured office suite. Why is the community wasting so much time?
In the absence of being paid for their work, open source hackers prefer to work with people they know, toolkits they're comfortable with, languages they prefer, and so on. This will always create fragmentation.
Some of these really should merge and share code more. Or at least, there should be one organization that is dedicated to creating a unified set of the features found in all open source office suite projects. That way, they could create a big set of libraries that do these things... so when the next guy has this reckless desire to make his own office suite... well, you get the idea.
I frankly don't see anyone joining into a bureacracy like that. Agglomerating incompatible organizations together like that just drags everyone down. What we could use is a component standard, like COM (or XPCOM, assuming it actually has binary level compatibilty). It has to be less painful than removing one's own spleen to create such components, and they really do have to work in various languages, C, C++, perl, and python at the very least. It's COM and OLE that have really made windows a platform of choice for hordes of developers. It'd be nice to see at least those successes brought to open source, even if MS is moving one step beyond that now...
CORBA itself is neither slow nor bloated. Baroque and annoying, yes, mostly due to the lack of ORBs that implement anything close to a friendly API that glosses over all the necessary bookkeeping (that bookkeeping is worse with DCOM but MS did a good job of making it transparent). What is slow and bloated and evil is IIOP. I sincerely hope Berlin is not planning on using IIOP for its client/server communication...
What a stupid analogy, using Lenin and Stalin!
YHBT. HAND.
chuck "just Stalin for time" adams
Start with a biiiig one-pixel screen....
> quantum computing (yes, a big fucking hoax that one is),
you forgot cold fusion... anyway, do you have any cites of papers debunking quantum computing? i've been hearing that it's quite reproducible, a pretty important criterion...
You perhaps run Linux as an alternative. I run it as a complement. On Windows, I like the games, I like IE as a browser, I like the unified scripting engine support, I like OLE, I like the easy printer installs, I like explorer extensions like TortoiseCVS.
I don't like the crappy IRC clients, the crippled commandline (cygwin is nice but not 100% there and it's kind of "weird" sometimes), the lack of mailbox scriptability (but I like the UI of mail clients on windows), and the $#@!$% file locking semantics I run into whenever I try to delete or move things.
So I like to cvs update files with tortoise, browse around them with one of the quick viewers (like the text file viewer in the resource kit), then do real development work on them with xemacs on the bsd side in vmware. Running bsd under vmware meant not having to worry about whether my cardbus pcmcia ethernet card was supported, or most other hardware for that matter.
This solution lets me test my server scripts on both IIS and apache (I know IIS is a gaping security hole so I only bind it to a local interface), and their output on ie, netscape, mozilla, and konquerer (if only writing HTML to spec was sufficient, *sigh*). And I don't even have to be connected to the network to do it, I do it all from one laptop wherever I am.
That's just my story, I'm sure other people have their own reasons.
Why doesn't an OEM make a bootable CD that resizes the FAT filesystem (which would be defragmented before shipping), install an OS image, and rewrite the boot sector?
BeOS shipped with a copy of Partition Magic which did precisely that (PM moves the data itself, no need to defrag). It wouldn't matter if it ran off the CD the first time then magically off the HDD right after with no "installation" at all. People just didn't give a damn about BeOS, since it offered zero value proposition for them over their current OS.
Microsoft would have to create a clause that states that you can't sell other operating systems at all, which is much too stupid for even Microsoft
They had precisely such a clause, and it made them filthy rich. Well, the clause had to do with preinstallation, and no OEM wants to bother with providing an aftermarket OS for their own systems. Microsoft may be unethical, and they occasionally make bad decisions, but no one in their right mind calls them stupid.
There are already distributions of Linux that install with just a double-click on an icon. It could be that there are other barriers to entry, and just possibly, not all wre put there by Microsoft.
... the majority of people using computers will never have the know-how or courage
or need
to make an OS change.
I can't begin to go into how insultingly patronizing this sentiment is. My father recently called and was bemoaning the state of his win98 box. Programs crashing, system utilities failing all over the place... I recommended win2k as an alternative. Nope, not Linux or BSD. He's a music freak, jazz mostly, and gets a lot of it with Morpheus. Also likes games, desktop toy stuff mostly, like simcity 3000. Frankly it wouldn't matter if Linux could run every last game and support every single soundcard in existence without hassle -- he just doesn't have a reason to run it. I've had all of one BSOD on win2k, less than the number of kernel panics I got with linux. Once you're into user application land, I see app after app after app on Linux crash with segfaults. And on the security front, I just tell him to get ZoneAlarm, something I still haven't seen anything like for Linux (maybe because the notion of user interaction with the firewall is considered heresy). All this goes double for BSD, I just don't see as many of that camp deluding themselves about viability on the desktop.
Linux might be a workable solution for him if he had a full-time sysadmin to get basic stuff working for him. Guess it keeps families together at any rate...
First the percentage of Duplicate, Invalid, and Worksforme bugs continues to rise and is at about 50% so nearly half of all bugs reported turn out to be something other than new bugs in the code.
Where I come from, "works for me" cannot close an open issue, and must be followed with "cannot duplicate with same configuration". I get a whole lot of "works for me" anecdotes when I tell people about my miserable experiences with new kernels, reiserfs, and mozilla builds. Well, most firestone tires didn't blow out either. Still want a set on your SUV?
I realize you don't have the resources to investigate every worksforme problem, but if you come up with a product that's only perfect in your test lab, you still don't have a quality product.
I believe because NS was trying to keep up with all the proprietary changes that MS were making to HTML
<layer>yeah, netscape would <blink>never</blink> do anything like that</layer>
> That's how open source works you know.
It never fails. Ask for advice, and at least one person tells me to do it my damn self. Clue check, this particular little advocacy tactic is really counterproductive. If you can't answer the damn question, keep your righteous cheerleading to yourself, ok?
cvsup makes it tolerable to have a cvs client, which concurrently does the recentness compare with the downloads itself -- no BIG...LONG...PAUSE for a cvs update to scan everything then download the changes.
unfortunately it's still ultimately based on the highly excreble CVS, which still can't handle something as simple as a renamed file, to say nothing of the hell it puts you through for directories. If McVoy would stop playing silly license games with Bitkeeper so he can try to become the next Sourceforge (sorry, but you lost), then the world would probably beat a path to his door.
In the meantime, are there any robust and free alternatives to cvs?