> The sucess of English will be it's downfall. Just like Latin splintered into hundreds of languages, English will follow
Perhaps you've noticed that communication technology is a little more advanced than it was 2,000 years ago? You might want to revise your predictions in the face of trivial things like technology.
> But this isn't 1970. Memory (for the compiler) isn't as limited. All of us (most of us;) use indentation coding guidelines [emphasis mine]
Except for python, which makes it a stricture instead of a guideline. Try again. I swear, this is like arguing with a born-again christian or something.
Not having implementation inheritance means a little more typing when you implement your design, but it doesn't affect the design itself.
This is like saying a database that isn't normalized just requires "a little more typing". Having to re-implement the interface every time defeats the purpose when you do have a generic implementation. So in order to get around it, you either have to 1) use inheritance, defeating the purpose of interfaces, 2) use some kind of macro hack to do default implementations, or 3) use composition, and since you can't have friend classes, end up sticking everything in one file if god forbid the interface accesses private members.
In a *nix system, if the person screws up thier desktop too much, you can write a script that resets the desktop at each login. On top of that, the/home directories can come from the network so they are easier to backup.
If you did an iota of research, or put as much effort into learning the scripting abilities of Windows as you doubtless spend fiddling with your config files and reading man pages, you'd have found that all these are possible on Windows too.
The system and application files on the local machine should never be mucked with by a user, unless they are capable and are willing to take some responsibility when things go wrong.
This is a basic management issue, and last I looked, Unix doesn't make qualified sysadmins out of users any more than Windows does.
You have a good point, but if you were a programmer/developer/coder of some sort, you have to sign a NDA, which basically prohibits you from doing any development at all outside of your work environment, and if you do, it belongs to them
Maybe the one you signed. I've signed a few NDA's and gone onto projects covered by NDA, but all they said was that I couldn't talk about very clearly named specifics: a product idea, the purpose of a project, the composition of the team, etc. Wow. If you signed anything that says your time is not your own, I suggest renegotiating your contract or getting out while the getting's good.
Example #1: Amigas, old Macs, Ataris, old Suns, old Apollos, Sharp x68, some Ciscos... are all driven by some kind of Motorolas 68k CPU. If you think they all belong to one single hardware platform you must be incredible stupid. Well, I guess you are...
Have I developed some kind of "slashdot sense" or can most anybody see these pathetic cries for attention for miles away? Boy you're so knowledgeable, thanks for putting me in my place. I mean, I already knew that, but your combination of authority, condescension, and insult just reminded me and everyone on slashdot whose kung fu is better.
> Basically, the response was: there's way too much bad blood between us, and many of the core developers will spend weeks or months working on solutions to problems rather than even incorporate the idea that solved the problem in the other OS (e.g. the VM advances made in NetBSD vs. the VM work being done about a year ago in FreeBSD).
Good. Larry Wall would be proud, there *is* more than one way to do it. NetBSD has on occasion picked up ideas from FreeBSD. I also see no evidence of "bad blood" anywhere except between Net and Open... well between Open and the rest of the world really -- Theo's about as cuddly as OpenBSD's mascot.
Besides, I've been hearing rumors that FreeBSD is adopting NetBSD's VM. Keep in mind it's not exactly something you can just drop in. When it comes to the rest of userland, the BSD's are always sharing each others code, since it's much more amenable to change than kernel code.
> Actually, although he presents it in excruciatingly painfull and exagerated detail, the guy has a point.
And in typical fashion for one so obsessed with tech who thinks "management" is a swear word, he got so hung up on the detail of the curriculum of training that he failed to notice the question, which had nothing to do with the worth of that particular training program (though "tripling one's value" is quite an overstatement unless he's mounting tapes or something).
No, it was just to show the world how god damn knowledgeable and 'leet he is. I'm making it a point to not hire OS zealots of any stripe unless they have such DAMN good skills in other areas that it compensates, OR they can learn to muzzle their knee-jerk reactions and work with what they need to.
I don't think that that was the point. Think "meta". The BSD licenses allow someone to relicense with a very restrictive license. While the BSD-licensers don't place the restrictions, they obviously don't have a problem with them;)
You know, in all the years BSD and its license has been around, you'd think this worse-case scenario would have actually happened. I see some closed-source server appliances based on BSD, yet somehow BSD has not been killed off by these. And FreeBSD has managed to eclipse BSDi to the point where BSDi now distributes FreeBSD.
Can the different types of BSD's be compared to the different distros of Linux? Or are they really different from each other? I've seen the list of so-called differences on http://www.bsd.com, but what are the REAL differences?
Whereas Linux is technically just a kernel, BSD is the kernel and the base system, including libc, basic utilities like cat, sed, grep, and so on (occasionally a GNU tool like tar is just too good to pass up, so it gets used instead). Unlike Linux, the three free flavors of BSD (Free, Net, Open) have different kernels and base systems, though they still borrow from each other. They can all run pretty much the same thing, and to a novice user running a desktop like kde or gnome, you really can't tell them apart from each other or even a Linux distribution (aside from the obvious differences in a desktop a vendor would supply).
NetBSD is something of a research platform for new ideas. New virtual memory and driver architectures have usually come out of NetBSD first. NetBSD is also amazingly portable, running on more architectures and devices than Linux has ever imagined. I don't know much about their organization structure, it seems to revolve around a self-organized core team. NetBSD's slogan is "Of course it runs NetBSD".
FreeBSD, founded at the same time of NetBSD (they were both forks of BSD/386) is aimed more at "real world" use. This isn't to imply that NetBSD isn't good for production use, but FreeBSD makes it their main focus, and thus eschews portability in favor of performance. It runs on only two platforms, alpha and ia32 (there's also a sparc port that's perpetually broken). FreeBSD uses a CVS tree to maintain the source, and the major developers can commit directly to the CVS tree. There is a core team of developers that can veto changes or make major changes affecting many systems; this team was just recently changed to an elected body, picked by all the committers. FreeBSD's slogan is "FreeBSD: The Power to Serve"
OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD, but has grown into a full-fledged flavor in its own right. It's very unambiguous about its mission, and that's security. Every line of code in the distribution is audited for security holes, and encryption is ubiquitous, to the point of having features like encrypted swap partitions. OpenBSD's organization is most like Linux's in that it is run by a single person, Theo de Raadt, and a hand-picked team of developers, most of whom do the security audits.
All the BSD's are able to run Linux binaries at native speed. I personally run Linux Netscape on FreeBSD, because it supports Flash, and is more stable (which isnt saying much, I'm using IE to post this).
> The role of the State is to make a level playing field for everybody
Maybe in your world. In mine it's to protect me from external enemies and those seeking power through coercion, and not a hell of a lot more. All men are created equal, doesn't mean they stay that way.
Jesus, can we get a killfile feature for slashdot now please? I read at threshold 2 to screen out trolls like this moron, now they're getting in by default.
The entire article looks blatantly like market research. Not to imply it's for spamming or even, god forbid, closed-source software development purposes, but it raises some, how shall we call them, precursors to ethical questions: I sure with *I* could use slashdot as a vehicle to do market research for my products, dig? Maybe if I, oh, scratch the backs of the right people, nudge nudge?
Oh well, I got that off my chest, now to compromise my principles:
* support for differing time zones. This is so obvious it doesn't need to be mentioned, right? Believe it or not, dtcal in CDE doesn't do timezones. I get an appointment for a teleconference mailed from the east coast, it shows the same clock time for me as it did there. Or pull up someone else's calendar, and you can never see THEIR appointments in YOUR time (this is a problem with all the calendar apps I've seen actually). Maybe it was a configuration issue with dtcm, but it never even showed time zones at all for me to know for sure. un-freakin-believable. don't make that mistake, just store times in absolute format and localize it in the app. Let me see the same calendar from "my time" and "their time" side by side.
* Richer time and project management features. Let people attach notes to a meeting, let it be noted how long something actually took, allow one to put an appointment in "cancelled" and hide it instead of just deleting it, have reports that look for "wasted" time according to some various criteria like meeting overruns (but don't require the person to be a programmer to figure out how to run said reports).
* more fine grained time ranges than "working" and "non-working" hours. Some people have hours where they're in the office, when they're in the field, on call. Allow for warnings when scheduling someone in the "wrong" category, e.g. scheduling a staff meeting of the helpdesk but not the people currently on the phones.
> 2) What service can a Windows based server supply that a Linux server can't?
ACL's on file servers. Or local servers for that matter (do NOT tell me about ext3, I need something that ships now).
Auto-installation of printer drivers (hm does Samba do this yet?). I hack emacs lisp, I can hand-edit sendmail.cf (to some degree), I write perl, but jesus christ printing under Unix is still something I despise doing.
Cross-domain authentication. Kerberos you say? Show me a linux server and client that has everything kerberos-enabled out of the box. I won't touch NIS+ with a 10 foot bargepole. Even Sun won't (now they're moving to LDAP for all services, hope Linux keeps up)
So I guess Linux *can* do it all. Just by way of numerous crocks and kludges that even an experienced admin is loathe to touch, much less an intern.
Thankfully Black Isle seems to be picking up the single-player CRPG game where Origin left it beaten and for dead in the filth of Ultima 8 and 9. Even after making the proper incantations and getting U9 to run at a barely tolerable speed, I just didn't like the game. The first couple areas were insultingly basic (not to mention they completely broke the continuity, considering U8 had the guardian taunting you about his successful invasion, and you became a demigod and gave it all up just to return home... to earth?) The ubiquitous gypsy gives the most ham-handed delivery, lord british sends you on your quest like you were picking up a pack of salami from the 7-11, and nowhere in the game does it ever truly feel dramatic. Contrast to Baldurs Gate 2, which has lengthy intra-party dialogue (though not quite as interesting as Torment's -- also by Black Isle), numerous side plots, lots of color text (every item has a detailed description, from daggers to gems to unique magical items), and a main plot that doesn't reveal itself within the first hour of gameplay. The more than competent voice acting doesn't hurt either.
Interplay (parent of Black Isle) has a very long history of CRPG's, and even this Ultima fanatic will gladly hand them the crown. Origin will be as forgotten as the name of the company that made Wizardry... who was that anyway?
Much as I love MOO (I was a wizard on the weird and interesting E_MOO), it seems MOO development died years ago. We've still yet to see MOO 1.9 (which is supposed to have associative arrays), there have been no commits since the CVS tree was uploaded, and only one of the 13 patches submitted have even made it in. Finally the code internals of MOO, despite the heroic efforts of Jay and Ben, are still naively programmed, and just do not scale beyond 300 simultaneous users even on excellent hardware. It suffers from poor reference locality (the verb caching helped that, but the lookup is still naive), inefficient storage (Ben's property compacting patch still hasn't made it in), and without something like the waif patch becoming official, it's horribly inefficient to do real OOP with it (the overhead of create() is monstrous).
Frankly I think MUSH/MUX has more hope of evolving into something as expressive and flexible as MOO. MOO itself got put out to pasture years ago, we're just waiting for it to finally drop.
> And, with any luck, another nail in the coffin for patents
Are you kidding? A whole team of lawyers on the winning side just got paid about $30 million, a good chunk of which they'll use to continue buying congressmen to write laws that further perpetuate their industry. Even the ones on the losing side still got paid. Win or lose, it's more business for them.
> The Alt-Tab thing can be switch with three clicks (literally)
At the cost of switching the key used for all your accellerators too. I just wanted to switch that one feature, not make another big global change.
> Also, the group thing is due to the way BeOS organizes by application, then by window
I understand the thinking behind it just fine. I just can't stand it.
> Replicants allow you to use replicant enabled apps in your own programs
Translation for an end user? When I made a replicant of NetPositive from some menu, I forget where, it didn't seem all that useful. Was that just some kind of experimental feature to show it off to developers or something?
I like BeOS from an architectural point of view. It's a precocious new kid, but it seems to be an orphan without a home. It's like linux is for many other end users: "It's neat, but... what do I *do* with it?"
Technicalties and features count for something, but FEEL is king. For example, my mom just wandered into BeOS (the dual boot starts BeOS as default) and asked me to get Windows back. I asked her what she didn't like about it. She said it just felt bad. She's been using Windows for two days. Feel counts and it counts big time.
It doesn't help that out of some desire to be different and special, they used control-tab instead of alt-tab (even the mac has alt-tab, it just has a different name for alt -- same key position tho). And to switch it to alt, you have to reverse your accellerator keys from alt to control. Then there was the way they made it two-dimensional, with alt/ctl-tab going through groups and having to use the arrow keys to flip through each one. I never got used to that. Then there were replicants... never did get the point of those, they felt like a window manager bug the way they had no borders or draggability.
Maybe they fixed all that in the latest version. Too late for me, I still don't really have a use for it that isn't already covered by a Mac, Windows, or Unix.
> If any conessions to non-Free mode of thought is a failure and defeat then what is the purpose of LGPL?
A license that RMS has taken to deprecating, renaming it the Lesser GNU Public License, and will almost certainly disappear when GPL3 comes out. If rumors about GPL3's restrictions are accurate, it might not even meet DFSG standards... there's irony for you
> Microsoft can't point to/current/ competetors, but only to competetors during the period in question (when Linux most deffinately was NOT one)
I wouldn't be so sure... showing that there is credible competition would almost certainly affect the length and severity of continuing remedies, such as divestiture.
> Three-dimensional space is also quantized. See Zeno's Paradox.
You only need one dimension for this paradox, and to see how bogus it is. Zeno kinda forgot to mention that the time required to cross the remaining distance also approaches zero.
Actually Zeno knew that, knew he was full of shit, just that the math of his day that was taught to even more learned folks didn't have a way to really express the answer in a "standard" fashion. Pythagoras woulda eaten him for lunch.
The one that still bends my brain from time to time is the hangman's paradox. I saw it solved once too, but I can't remember how. Think it had to do with the fallacy of being able to assume any one date out of all possible days of the week that he could have been hung.
Slashdot Mirror
> The sucess of English will be it's downfall. Just like Latin splintered into hundreds of languages, English will follow
Perhaps you've noticed that communication technology is a little more advanced than it was 2,000 years ago? You might want to revise your predictions in the face of trivial things like technology.
> What is your opinion of the "capabilities" model of security, as implemented in Linux
Here's my opinion: Linux capabilities aren't. You want real capabilities, check out EROS.
> But this isn't 1970. Memory (for the compiler) isn't as limited. All of us (most of us ;) use indentation coding guidelines
[emphasis mine]
Except for python, which makes it a stricture instead of a guideline. Try again. I swear, this is like arguing with a born-again christian or something.
> For folks that think they need multiple inheritance, they haven't understood interfaces and inner classes yet.
For folks that think they need Object Oriented architecture, they haven't understood closures yet.
For folks that think they need turing machines, they haven't understood lambda calculus yet.
Not having implementation inheritance means a little more typing when you implement your design, but it doesn't affect the design itself.
This is like saying a database that isn't normalized just requires "a little more typing". Having to re-implement the interface every time defeats the purpose when you do have a generic implementation. So in order to get around it, you either have to 1) use inheritance, defeating the purpose of interfaces, 2) use some kind of macro hack to do default implementations, or 3) use composition, and since you can't have friend classes, end up sticking everything in one file if god forbid the interface accesses private members.
In a *nix system, if the person screws up thier desktop too much, you can write a script that resets the desktop at each login. On top of that, the /home directories can come from the network so they are easier to backup.
If you did an iota of research, or put as much effort into learning the scripting abilities of Windows as you doubtless spend fiddling with your config files and reading man pages, you'd have found that all these are possible on Windows too.
The system and application files on the local machine should never be mucked with by a user, unless they are capable and are willing to take some responsibility when things go wrong.
This is a basic management issue, and last I looked, Unix doesn't make qualified sysadmins out of users any more than Windows does.
You have a good point, but if you were a programmer/developer/coder of some sort, you have to sign a NDA, which basically prohibits you from doing any development at all outside of your work environment, and if you do, it belongs to them
Maybe the one you signed. I've signed a few NDA's and gone onto projects covered by NDA, but all they said was that I couldn't talk about very clearly named specifics: a product idea, the purpose of a project, the composition of the team, etc. Wow. If you signed anything that says your time is not your own, I suggest renegotiating your contract or getting out while the getting's good.
Example #1: Amigas, old Macs, Ataris, old Suns, old Apollos, Sharp x68, some Ciscos... are all driven by some kind of Motorolas 68k CPU. If you think they all belong to one single hardware platform you must be incredible stupid. Well, I guess you are...
Have I developed some kind of "slashdot sense" or can most anybody see these pathetic cries for attention for miles away? Boy you're so knowledgeable, thanks for putting me in my place. I mean, I already knew that, but your combination of authority, condescension, and insult just reminded me and everyone on slashdot whose kung fu is better.
Feel better?
> Basically, the response was: there's way too much bad blood between us, and many of the core developers will spend weeks or months working on solutions to problems rather than even incorporate the idea that solved the problem in the other OS (e.g. the VM advances made in NetBSD vs. the VM work being done about a year ago in FreeBSD).
... well between Open and the rest of the world really -- Theo's about as cuddly as OpenBSD's mascot.
Good. Larry Wall would be proud, there *is* more than one way to do it. NetBSD has on occasion picked up ideas from FreeBSD. I also see no evidence of "bad blood" anywhere except between Net and Open
Besides, I've been hearing rumors that FreeBSD is adopting NetBSD's VM. Keep in mind it's not exactly something you can just drop in. When it comes to the rest of userland, the BSD's are always sharing each others code, since it's much more amenable to change than kernel code.
> Actually, although he presents it in excruciatingly painfull and exagerated detail, the guy has a point.
And in typical fashion for one so obsessed with tech who thinks "management" is a swear word, he got so hung up on the detail of the curriculum of training that he failed to notice the question, which had nothing to do with the worth of that particular training program (though "tripling one's value" is quite an overstatement unless he's mounting tapes or something).
No, it was just to show the world how god damn knowledgeable and 'leet he is. I'm making it a point to not hire OS zealots of any stripe unless they have such DAMN good skills in other areas that it compensates, OR they can learn to muzzle their knee-jerk reactions and work with what they need to.
> There aren't any public companies selling BSD
What about this one? I seem to remember this little company used to sell a BSD before they went to SysV.
I don't think that that was the point. Think "meta". The BSD licenses allow someone to relicense with a very restrictive license. While the BSD-licensers don't place the restrictions, they obviously don't have a problem with them;)
You know, in all the years BSD and its license has been around, you'd think this worse-case scenario would have actually happened. I see some closed-source server appliances based on BSD, yet somehow BSD has not been killed off by these. And FreeBSD has managed to eclipse BSDi to the point where BSDi now distributes FreeBSD.
Meta schmeta. Show me results.
Can the different types of BSD's be compared to the different distros of Linux? Or are they really different from each other? I've seen the list of so-called differences on http://www.bsd.com, but what are the REAL differences?
Whereas Linux is technically just a kernel, BSD is the kernel and the base system, including libc, basic utilities like cat, sed, grep, and so on (occasionally a GNU tool like tar is just too good to pass up, so it gets used instead). Unlike Linux, the three free flavors of BSD (Free, Net, Open) have different kernels and base systems, though they still borrow from each other. They can all run pretty much the same thing, and to a novice user running a desktop like kde or gnome, you really can't tell them apart from each other or even a Linux distribution (aside from the obvious differences in a desktop a vendor would supply).
NetBSD is something of a research platform for new ideas. New virtual memory and driver architectures have usually come out of NetBSD first. NetBSD is also amazingly portable, running on more architectures and devices than Linux has ever imagined. I don't know much about their organization structure, it seems to revolve around a self-organized core team. NetBSD's slogan is "Of course it runs NetBSD".
FreeBSD, founded at the same time of NetBSD (they were both forks of BSD/386) is aimed more at "real world" use. This isn't to imply that NetBSD isn't good for production use, but FreeBSD makes it their main focus, and thus eschews portability in favor of performance. It runs on only two platforms, alpha and ia32 (there's also a sparc port that's perpetually broken). FreeBSD uses a CVS tree to maintain the source, and the major developers can commit directly to the CVS tree. There is a core team of developers that can veto changes or make major changes affecting many systems; this team was just recently changed to an elected body, picked by all the committers. FreeBSD's slogan is "FreeBSD: The Power to Serve"
OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD, but has grown into a full-fledged flavor in its own right. It's very unambiguous about its mission, and that's security. Every line of code in the distribution is audited for security holes, and encryption is ubiquitous, to the point of having features like encrypted swap partitions. OpenBSD's organization is most like Linux's in that it is run by a single person, Theo de Raadt, and a hand-picked team of developers, most of whom do the security audits.
All the BSD's are able to run Linux binaries at native speed. I personally run Linux Netscape on FreeBSD, because it supports Flash, and is more stable (which isnt saying much, I'm using IE to post this).
> The role of the State is to make a level playing field for everybody
Maybe in your world. In mine it's to protect me from external enemies and those seeking power through coercion, and not a hell of a lot more. All men are created equal, doesn't mean they stay that way.
Jesus, can we get a killfile feature for slashdot now please? I read at threshold 2 to screen out trolls like this moron, now they're getting in by default.
The entire article looks blatantly like market research. Not to imply it's for spamming or even, god forbid, closed-source software development purposes, but it raises some, how shall we call them, precursors to ethical questions: I sure with *I* could use slashdot as a vehicle to do market research for my products, dig? Maybe if I, oh, scratch the backs of the right people, nudge nudge?
Oh well, I got that off my chest, now to compromise my principles:
* support for differing time zones. This is so obvious it doesn't need to be mentioned, right? Believe it or not, dtcal in CDE doesn't do timezones. I get an appointment for a teleconference mailed from the east coast, it shows the same clock time for me as it did there. Or pull up someone else's calendar, and you can never see THEIR appointments in YOUR time (this is a problem with all the calendar apps I've seen actually). Maybe it was a configuration issue with dtcm, but it never even showed time zones at all for me to know for sure. un-freakin-believable. don't make that mistake, just store times in absolute format and localize it in the app. Let me see the same calendar from "my time" and "their time" side by side.
* Richer time and project management features. Let people attach notes to a meeting, let it be noted how long something actually took, allow one to put an appointment in "cancelled" and hide it instead of just deleting it, have reports that look for "wasted" time according to some various criteria like meeting overruns (but don't require the person to be a programmer to figure out how to run said reports).
* more fine grained time ranges than "working" and "non-working" hours. Some people have hours where they're in the office, when they're in the field, on call. Allow for warnings when scheduling someone in the "wrong" category, e.g. scheduling a staff meeting of the helpdesk but not the people currently on the phones.
> 2) What service can a Windows based server supply that a Linux server can't?
ACL's on file servers. Or local servers for that matter (do NOT tell me about ext3, I need something that ships now).
Auto-installation of printer drivers (hm does Samba do this yet?). I hack emacs lisp, I can hand-edit sendmail.cf (to some degree), I write perl, but jesus christ printing under Unix is still something I despise doing.
Cross-domain authentication. Kerberos you say? Show me a linux server and client that has everything kerberos-enabled out of the box. I won't touch NIS+ with a 10 foot bargepole. Even Sun won't (now they're moving to LDAP for all services, hope Linux keeps up)
So I guess Linux *can* do it all. Just by way of numerous crocks and kludges that even an experienced admin is loathe to touch, much less an intern.
Thankfully Black Isle seems to be picking up the single-player CRPG game where Origin left it beaten and for dead in the filth of Ultima 8 and 9. Even after making the proper incantations and getting U9 to run at a barely tolerable speed, I just didn't like the game. The first couple areas were insultingly basic (not to mention they completely broke the continuity, considering U8 had the guardian taunting you about his successful invasion, and you became a demigod and gave it all up just to return home ... to earth?) The ubiquitous gypsy gives the most ham-handed delivery, lord british sends you on your quest like you were picking up a pack of salami from the 7-11, and nowhere in the game does it ever truly feel dramatic. Contrast to Baldurs Gate 2, which has lengthy intra-party dialogue (though not quite as interesting as Torment's -- also by Black Isle), numerous side plots, lots of color text (every item has a detailed description, from daggers to gems to unique magical items), and a main plot that doesn't reveal itself within the first hour of gameplay. The more than competent voice acting doesn't hurt either.
... who was that anyway?
Interplay (parent of Black Isle) has a very long history of CRPG's, and even this Ultima fanatic will gladly hand them the crown. Origin will be as forgotten as the name of the company that made Wizardry
Much as I love MOO (I was a wizard on the weird and interesting E_MOO), it seems MOO development died years ago. We've still yet to see MOO 1.9 (which is supposed to have associative arrays), there have been no commits since the CVS tree was uploaded, and only one of the 13 patches submitted have even made it in. Finally the code internals of MOO, despite the heroic efforts of Jay and Ben, are still naively programmed, and just do not scale beyond 300 simultaneous users even on excellent hardware. It suffers from poor reference locality (the verb caching helped that, but the lookup is still naive), inefficient storage (Ben's property compacting patch still hasn't made it in), and without something like the waif patch becoming official, it's horribly inefficient to do real OOP with it (the overhead of create() is monstrous).
Frankly I think MUSH/MUX has more hope of evolving into something as expressive and flexible as MOO. MOO itself got put out to pasture years ago, we're just waiting for it to finally drop.
> And, with any luck, another nail in the coffin for patents
Are you kidding? A whole team of lawyers on the winning side just got paid about $30 million, a good chunk of which they'll use to continue buying congressmen to write laws that further perpetuate their industry. Even the ones on the losing side still got paid. Win or lose, it's more business for them.
> The Alt-Tab thing can be switch with three clicks (literally)
... what do I *do* with it?"
At the cost of switching the key used for all your accellerators too. I just wanted to switch that one feature, not make another big global change.
> Also, the group thing is due to the way BeOS organizes by application, then by window
I understand the thinking behind it just fine. I just can't stand it.
> Replicants allow you to use replicant enabled apps in your own programs
Translation for an end user? When I made a replicant of NetPositive from some menu, I forget where, it didn't seem all that useful. Was that just some kind of experimental feature to show it off to developers or something?
I like BeOS from an architectural point of view. It's a precocious new kid, but it seems to be an orphan without a home. It's like linux is for many other end users: "It's neat, but
It doesn't help that out of some desire to be different and special, they used control-tab instead of alt-tab (even the mac has alt-tab, it just has a different name for alt -- same key position tho). And to switch it to alt, you have to reverse your accellerator keys from alt to control. Then there was the way they made it two-dimensional, with alt/ctl-tab going through groups and having to use the arrow keys to flip through each one. I never got used to that. Then there were replicants
Maybe they fixed all that in the latest version. Too late for me, I still don't really have a use for it that isn't already covered by a Mac, Windows, or Unix.
> If any conessions to non-Free mode of thought is a failure and defeat then what is the purpose of LGPL?
... there's irony for you
A license that RMS has taken to deprecating, renaming it the Lesser GNU Public License, and will almost certainly disappear when GPL3 comes out. If rumors about GPL3's restrictions are accurate, it might not even meet DFSG standards
> Microsoft can't point to /current/ competetors, but only to competetors during the period in question (when Linux most deffinately was NOT one)
... showing that there is credible competition would almost certainly affect the length and severity of continuing remedies, such as divestiture.
I wouldn't be so sure
> Three-dimensional space is also quantized. See Zeno's Paradox.
You only need one dimension for this paradox, and to see how bogus it is. Zeno kinda forgot to mention that the time required to cross the remaining distance also approaches zero.
Actually Zeno knew that, knew he was full of shit, just that the math of his day that was taught to even more learned folks didn't have a way to really express the answer in a "standard" fashion. Pythagoras woulda eaten him for lunch.
The one that still bends my brain from time to time is the hangman's paradox. I saw it solved once too, but I can't remember how. Think it had to do with the fallacy of being able to assume any one date out of all possible days of the week that he could have been hung.