Color me duly chastised... but I still don't buy it. It's a splash screen, which not only can you disable while it's displaying, you can even elect to not use it. Your argument appears to me that you want variety, so long as it was never in Windows, because that would make it "too much like Windows". Does Microsoft's job for them, really... true, if it's copied then they can claim that Linux is "chasing taillights", but otherwise they can claim it's a "unique Microsoft innovation" that Linux can't even copy.
I can only imagine the extent of your apoplexy at the very thought of a binary C++ linker standard and API like COM ever making it into unix. Diversity is attained through cross-fertilization, not specialization of every individual.
> For those of us that do, we do not want to be stuck having to choose between Windows and what used to be a Unix clone but is now a Windows clone
Thank god for companies and the occasional OS developer that believes that there is a possibility of not only more than two operating systems existing in the universe, but that even a Unix-like OS need not recycle its existing C API and TTY interface for every purpose from now until the end of time lest it become corrupted with the foul taint of the unclean.
You're the one creating the dichotomy where none need exist. If my only choices are Unix The Way It Was And Shall Be Forever And Ever Amen and Microsoft "Where Does Marketing Want You To Go Today" Windows, I want neither.
...about the splash screen hiding the boot info, try emulating FreeBSD's behavior. Hit space while the splash screen is up, and there's your scrolly messages again. The selection of a splash screen is done in the bootloader too, controlled by a module the bootloader loads (the kernel is loaded the same way as any other module, at least interface-wise, it can even unload a kernel and use a different one).
> Mushes and MUDs are not dead, not by a long shot.
I don't know about that. Whether from collapsing under its often hostile social atmosphere, building stagnation, lag-ridden server, or ill-thought ballots, LambdaMOO which once had more than 10000 players and 200 connected at once, still keeps roughly 150 connected at once (perhaps 100 active) but the playerbase is down to around 4500 and shrinking. Most other MOOs count themselves lucky to break double-digits in connected_players(). Perhaps if Lambda ran on something better than a museum piece (1 CPU of a sparccenter 1000) it might find new life... but I doubt it.
FurryMUCK does continue to amaze me, having on average over 300 people connected with roughly 200 active. It would seem to just be one freak instance though (in more ways than one).
I have had in mind a project to create the next super-duper-driver-uber-alles, fast, scaleable, flexible, etc... but for what? There are probably more people chatting right now on IRC than the entire player population of every last MOO, MUSH, MUX, or any of the other "social" VR's put together. The writing on the wall was never clearer to me.
I was using filter expressions in Elm in 1991. It provides a view just a normal mail folder, but that of mail that matches the filter. The only difference was that Elm's weren't persistent. It's not a terribly new concept, and it certainly isn't going to revolutionize e-mail.
> I'm guessing by "function arity" you mean functions taking arbitrary numbers of arguments.
You guessed wrong, about as completely opposite as it gets. Function arity refers to typing a function by how many args it takes, which is useful when the function is overloaded (which LISP doesn't support, either).
> Partial evaluation == lazy evaluation?
Wrong again. Think "currying".
> I don't know what you mean by list comprehension, but I'm willing to bet that it's not hard.
Do me a favor, learn what I'm talking about before responding to it. Learn a little about Haskell or ocaml first perhaps? I'm really too tired to flame, but you would deserve it otherwise.
That's debateable. LISP has no typing, function arity, partial evaluation, composition, list comprehension, or even function predicates (not sure if that's the right name, it's where it only applies the function if the predicate matches).
Sure you can do all of those in lisp, but you have to do it by hand. I could do the same in python, java, or even C, if I were wont to do such grunt work by hand.
I'd suggest that ocaml or haskell are closer to being functional languages than lisp. lisp to me feels like pascal with prefix syntax.
Yes. Lend your support for a different opensource OS, such as Fluke or EROS. Get it running under VMWare and the rest of the hardware support picture can be done at a more leisurely pace. Linux isn't the only game in town.
> Funny, but just after that transition phase I took an engineering management role in a dot com and help in the setup of a several hundred K in unix hardware
Most people who don't do IT for a living are not going to be as driven to this as you were. Take it now from the perspective of my aunt, who is a riding instructor. Heck, what benefit does she derive from switching in the first place? Lack of reboots? She only has the computer on for about a half hour a day anyway.
Right, and she's actually developed talent. Listen to "Frozen" sometime. That's William Orbit who did all the backing orchestra and synths. Best listened to in a dark room with good speakers and eyes closed.
I still hate most of her stuff, but who the fuck elected you minister of culture?
This entire scheme requires new device drivers or filesystem drivers, and likely both. If Microsoft states it won't write them or accept them from OEM's in the windows distribution, this scheme will simply end up in the trashcan.
> It's probably off topic, but does anyone think it is possible to recognise an mp3 as a specific song
Hell yes. We have speech recognition, it's not too far-fetched to imagine a "dictionary" of CD tracks. Purple Haze is always going to start with the same two alternating notes, same pitch, same rhythm... Easier than spoken word by far.
> You can use a binary frontend to encrypt the protocol
Who has to decrypt it? That's right, the client. Or else the frontend has to pass unencrypted instructions to the (hacked or not) client. Cryptography cannot be used to hide information from its intended recipient.
You think non-gaming users really care whether their GUI is "single user" or not? I speak as one of the biggest X bashers around: Joe User is not going to edit ~/.Xresources, font names suck, fonts suck (that is looking to get better soon). Inconsistent appearance isn't *that* bad, there's not really mountains of consistency in Windows or Mac apps either -- the interface for Photoshop is entirely and necessarily different than that of Excel.
Most users at Sun don't even know you can get a non-X console screen (believe it or not they're not all techies there). They sit down at their machine, and they have a GUI. They also take for granted the fact that by hitting a menu option and typing the name of their workstation back at the office, they can log in remotely to their old workstation. When I did PC support, most users wanted me to install PCAnywhere on their machine so they could get to it.
Now what are the builtin advantages of a "single user" GUI again?
BTW, a logical volume manager allows you to treat physical disks as a raw pool of resources that can be drawn upon for filesystms. You can create new filesystems, grow them in size, add more disks to the pool, all on the fly, without even having to unmount the filesystem
And FreeBSD has had it for ages. vinum. The author of vinum is interested in a Linux port, too.
VHS had longer record times than Beta. The tapes were cheaper, had less moving parts, and broke less. And Beta was around first, so "inertia" doesn't apply. S-VHS has made up the differences anyway (most people don't have betacam decks in their homes).
IBM can and should fork Linux. It'll be a cold day in hell before Linus accepts a patch that isn't emailed, inline, not as an attachment, under a few K, and can be understood personally by Linus in under an hour of reading.
If Linus gets hit by a bus, the progression of Linux is fairly clear. If he decides to reject patches because he's having a bad day, the answer seems a little less clear.
Enough to hold them to the vote they claimed to cast when similar motions come up before congress. Congresscritters talk a lot with their fellows about how they're going to vote on bills. A pattern of baldfaced lies to the constituents on their vote wouldn't look terribly good to the ethics committee.
Nit: DMCA was passed by a anonymous voice vote. For all practical purposes, it is unanimous, but we have no idea whom the dissenters were because that was not recored.
Simple way to fix that: ask. Pick up the phone and ask what their vote was on the bill. Mind you DMCA was probably a rider on a totally unrelated bill, probably a disaster-relief bill or Protection Of Children And Puppies act.
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> The GNU isn't a PACK animal
:)
'course not, it's a HURD animal
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Color me duly chastised ... but I still don't buy it. It's a splash screen, which not only can you disable while it's displaying, you can even elect to not use it. Your argument appears to me that you want variety, so long as it was never in Windows, because that would make it "too much like Windows". Does Microsoft's job for them, really ... true, if it's copied then they can claim that Linux is "chasing taillights", but otherwise they can claim it's a "unique Microsoft innovation" that Linux can't even copy.
I can only imagine the extent of your apoplexy at the very thought of a binary C++ linker standard and API like COM ever making it into unix. Diversity is attained through cross-fertilization, not specialization of every individual.
--
> For those of us that do, we do not want to be stuck having to choose between Windows and what used to be a Unix clone but is now a Windows clone
Thank god for companies and the occasional OS developer that believes that there is a possibility of not only more than two operating systems existing in the universe, but that even a Unix-like OS need not recycle its existing C API and TTY interface for every purpose from now until the end of time lest it become corrupted with the foul taint of the unclean.
You're the one creating the dichotomy where none need exist. If my only choices are Unix The Way It Was And Shall Be Forever And Ever Amen and Microsoft "Where Does Marketing Want You To Go Today" Windows, I want neither.
--
...about the splash screen hiding the boot info, try emulating FreeBSD's behavior. Hit space while the splash screen is up, and there's your scrolly messages again. The selection of a splash screen is done in the bootloader too, controlled by a module the bootloader loads (the kernel is loaded the same way as any other module, at least interface-wise, it can even unload a kernel and use a different one).
--
> Mushes and MUDs are not dead, not by a long shot.
... but I doubt it.
... but for what? There are probably more people chatting right now on IRC than the entire player population of every last MOO, MUSH, MUX, or any of the other "social" VR's put together. The writing on the wall was never clearer to me.
I don't know about that. Whether from collapsing under its often hostile social atmosphere, building stagnation, lag-ridden server, or ill-thought ballots, LambdaMOO which once had more than 10000 players and 200 connected at once, still keeps roughly 150 connected at once (perhaps 100 active) but the playerbase is down to around 4500 and shrinking. Most other MOOs count themselves lucky to break double-digits in connected_players(). Perhaps if Lambda ran on something better than a museum piece (1 CPU of a sparccenter 1000) it might find new life
FurryMUCK does continue to amaze me, having on average over 300 people connected with roughly 200 active. It would seem to just be one freak instance though (in more ways than one).
I have had in mind a project to create the next super-duper-driver-uber-alles, fast, scaleable, flexible, etc
--
I was using filter expressions in Elm in 1991. It provides a view just a normal mail folder, but that of mail that matches the filter. The only difference was that Elm's weren't persistent. It's not a terribly new concept, and it certainly isn't going to revolutionize e-mail.
--
> I'm guessing by "function arity" you mean functions taking arbitrary numbers of arguments.
You guessed wrong, about as completely opposite as it gets. Function arity refers to typing a function by how many args it takes, which is useful when the function is overloaded (which LISP doesn't support, either).
> Partial evaluation == lazy evaluation?
Wrong again. Think "currying".
> I don't know what you mean by list comprehension, but I'm willing to bet that it's not hard.
Do me a favor, learn what I'm talking about before responding to it. Learn a little about Haskell or ocaml first perhaps? I'm really too tired to flame, but you would deserve it otherwise.
--
Perl is the language
perl is the program
PERL is no more correct than PYTHON or LINUX
just ask anyone on #perl
...now that Unix/UNIX thing I'm still not sure of...
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> LISP is a functional language
That's debateable. LISP has no typing, function arity, partial evaluation, composition, list comprehension, or even function predicates (not sure if that's the right name, it's where it only applies the function if the predicate matches).
Sure you can do all of those in lisp, but you have to do it by hand. I could do the same in python, java, or even C, if I were wont to do such grunt work by hand.
I'd suggest that ocaml or haskell are closer to being functional languages than lisp. lisp to me feels like pascal with prefix syntax.
--
> Can we solve this problem?
Yes. Lend your support for a different opensource OS, such as Fluke or EROS. Get it running under VMWare and the rest of the hardware support picture can be done at a more leisurely pace. Linux isn't the only game in town.
--
> Windows NT dulls the mind of an IT person
IT people don't need beginner tutorials. You may perhaps have noticed that people not in the IT field use computers too.
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> Funny, but just after that transition phase I took an engineering management role in a dot com and help in the setup of a several hundred K in unix hardware
Most people who don't do IT for a living are not going to be as driven to this as you were. Take it now from the perspective of my aunt, who is a riding instructor. Heck, what benefit does she derive from switching in the first place? Lack of reboots? She only has the computer on for about a half hour a day anyway.
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> But Madonna just won't fucking go away
Right, and she's actually developed talent. Listen to "Frozen" sometime. That's William Orbit who did all the backing orchestra and synths. Best listened to in a dark room with good speakers and eyes closed.
I still hate most of her stuff, but who the fuck elected you minister of culture?
--
"We will not support this"
This entire scheme requires new device drivers or filesystem drivers, and likely both. If Microsoft states it won't write them or accept them from OEM's in the windows distribution, this scheme will simply end up in the trashcan.
--
> Sorry, I might have had a brainfart. Whichever law they're trying to pass that'll make EULAs completely and utterly binding.
UCITA. Not like that silly little license game would work under any remote circumstance on anything resembling this planet.
--
> It's probably off topic, but does anyone think it is possible to recognise an mp3 as a specific song
Hell yes. We have speech recognition, it's not too far-fetched to imagine a "dictionary" of CD tracks. Purple Haze is always going to start with the same two alternating notes, same pitch, same rhythm... Easier than spoken word by far.
--
> You can use a binary frontend to encrypt the protocol
Who has to decrypt it? That's right, the client. Or else the frontend has to pass unencrypted instructions to the (hacked or not) client. Cryptography cannot be used to hide information from its intended recipient.
--
How much did Frauenhofer pay Creative to make sure it wouldn't be able to play Vorbis? Or did they just threaten them with lawsuits again?
--
Samba-TNG has preliminary support for DFS, but I wouldn't call it production-ready just yet. If IBM threw in with Samba, that would just make my day :)
--
You think non-gaming users really care whether their GUI is "single user" or not? I speak as one of the biggest X bashers around: Joe User is not going to edit ~/.Xresources, font names suck, fonts suck (that is looking to get better soon). Inconsistent appearance isn't *that* bad, there's not really mountains of consistency in Windows or Mac apps either -- the interface for Photoshop is entirely and necessarily different than that of Excel.
Most users at Sun don't even know you can get a non-X console screen (believe it or not they're not all techies there). They sit down at their machine, and they have a GUI. They also take for granted the fact that by hitting a menu option and typing the name of their workstation back at the office, they can log in remotely to their old workstation. When I did PC support, most users wanted me to install PCAnywhere on their machine so they could get to it.
Now what are the builtin advantages of a "single user" GUI again?
--
BTW, a logical volume manager allows you to treat physical disks as a raw pool of resources that can be drawn upon for filesystms. You can create new filesystems, grow them in size, add more disks to the pool, all on the fly, without even having to unmount the filesystem
And FreeBSD has had it for ages. vinum. The author of vinum is interested in a Linux port, too.
--
VHS had longer record times than Beta. The tapes were cheaper, had less moving parts, and broke less. And Beta was around first, so "inertia" doesn't apply. S-VHS has made up the differences anyway (most people don't have betacam decks in their homes).
--
IBM can and should fork Linux. It'll be a cold day in hell before Linus accepts a patch that isn't emailed, inline, not as an attachment, under a few K, and can be understood personally by Linus in under an hour of reading.
If Linus gets hit by a bus, the progression of Linux is fairly clear. If he decides to reject patches because he's having a bad day, the answer seems a little less clear.
--
> Just how much do you trust that congressman?
Enough to hold them to the vote they claimed to cast when similar motions come up before congress. Congresscritters talk a lot with their fellows about how they're going to vote on bills. A pattern of baldfaced lies to the constituents on their vote wouldn't look terribly good to the ethics committee.
--
Nit: DMCA was passed by a anonymous voice vote. For all practical purposes, it is unanimous, but we have no idea whom the dissenters were because that was not recored.
Simple way to fix that: ask. Pick up the phone and ask what their vote was on the bill. Mind you DMCA was probably a rider on a totally unrelated bill, probably a disaster-relief bill or Protection Of Children And Puppies act.
--