Having done the whole "Linux from scratch" thing as a learning experience, I can tell you that building a complete Gnome installation takes at around 3-5x longer than KDE and is much more difficult. This was 4-5 years ago, but the situation has gotten worse from casual observation of the Debian packaging.
Four or five years ago??! You can't possibly be serious, thinking an experience you had five years ago with gnome has any relevance today, whatsoever.
FWIW, I'm not trying to bash Gnome, but I do think there is some re-evaluation in order. Competition is good, but wheel re-inventing is usually not.
Wheel reinventing, like, say, Qt reinventing practically all of the C++ wheel?
Let's hope that the current brand of Convatives (political party of canada) do not ever get a majority.
I used to think the conservatives would probably screw everything up pretty bad. Then I moved to Australia for a year.
Now I know the conservatives will screw everything up really bad. The conservative equivalent party here has completely destroyed the country.
Everything that has been privatised got far worse because of it, you have to pay for everything, but.. they still get taxed to hell. The private health care company (singular, not plural, for the record) is actively screwing me out of twice the money they should have taken, and getting my money back is proving almost impossible.
The government is completely fucking the people out of all their money and giving them nothing for it, it's amazing. Living in Canada is so so much better. (Disclaimer: government wise. The people and everything here are great. Government != people)
Want to vote conservative? Move to the states and stop trying to destroy our country, thanks.
I'm a Canadian currently in Australia for a year. This is one of the things I noticed here - in Australia, they actually do check the signature on the back of your card, almost every single time. One of my cards has a really blurry signature from my wallet and I get suspicious stares about it all the time.
In Canada, they never check the signature. Ever, ever. The only places that might check it is the huge chains like Wal-Mart that (I assume) have a corporate policy to do so. But even they hardly do.
Just in case you can't get at the page, here's a quick summary:
"Volunteer Gnome developers aren't my unpaid slaves! Waah, waah, waah! I want this and I want that and I want it done immediately without any thought about whether it's actually a good idea whatsoever! Waah, waah, waah! Open source is crap because all these people don't do whatever I say, for free, always, without question! Waah, waah, waah! How dare they work on things they want to, and find interesting?!? Waaaaahhh!"
Anything that needs to "line up" at all should be done with spaces. Period. No argument.
Indentation levels are done with tab, and indentation levels only. Lining things up is done with space. If you ever, ever, ever, smash tab a bunch of times then start hitting space to "line something up", you're doing it wrong. A tab is not a substitute for "a few" spaces. Ever.
It's really not that hard to ask yourself "will a changing tab size screw this up?" - I don't understand how it's such an issue.
In short, no the tab display size does not matter in any case. If it matters, you are doing something wrong.
For example, for a small dataset insertion sorts are much more efficient than a quicksort or a heapsort. Although that's contrary to what you'd learn in a class on algorithms.
No it's not. Better Big-O doesn't mean faster on all datasets - it means asymptotically faster, ie faster after a certain point.
There's no way you could get through a university algorithms course without learning this (usually with nice little graphs where you can see the functions cross over at some point, which you're probably going to have to calculate).
Normal consumer users don't contact Microsoft for help - if they did, you really think they would actually get useful help? Ever called MS tech support? People either find someone they know to fix their computers, or bring it to a shop and pay to get it fixed.
The "holy monolith of corporate stability" (ahem) that is Microsoft has absolutely nothing at all to do with home users using Windows.
And anyway, I don't think a big concern of the Firefox project is to be (er..) "economically viable". Firefox is given away for free - what does "economically viable" have to do with anything? Sounds like you've taken a few too many marketing classes for your own good.
FLOSS is completely different than proprietary commercial software. "The Market"(TM) and "economically viable" mean nothing. These things are not the primary motivation of free software projects in general - this is a completely different ballgame.
[BadSlashdotAnalogy] You can't watch a hockey game and comment on it as if it were football, without looking like a dumbass.[/BadSlashdotAnalogy] You, my friend, know shit about hockey.
Nowadays Xterm can use anti-aliased fonts (see the -fa option) so using it instead of gnome-terminal is a much nicer option than it was a little while ago.
I switched to Xterm for this reason, it starts instantaneously, and terminal I/O is way faster than gnome-terminal (and uses much less CPU).
Linux is not Windows or OS/2. This article implies the reason Linux is a contender (in the server market at least) is because IBM is putting "weight" behind it.. please!
How long has IBM really been putting weight behind Linux? A couple years? How much actual progresss has been made as a direct result of IBM's Linux support? Not that damn much.
These industry types just can't understand something like Linux at all. The "weight" behind Linux has nothing to do with big corporations or money. Linux is killing AIX etc. because it's Free, and it's better, and IBM has nothing to do with that at all.
Millions of hackers worldwide have everything to do with that. They are the weight behind Linux. Corporations spewing PR don't actually get any work done. Coders do.
Here is an example of the FSF being pig headed. GCC vs EGCS. EGCS was a free version of GCC taken up by Cygnus (a commercial company). EGCS was better about adding needed patches than GCC was, and was the only usable alternative for a while until the mainstream GCC incorporated the patches.
Um.. so the GCC team was slower at incorporating patches than the EGCS people. How, exactly, does this make the FSF "pig headed"??
I suppose the fact that Cygnus is a commercial company - which has absolutely no relevance to that situation whatsoever - automatically makes the FSF pig headed, because as everyone knows RMS and the FSF are militant anti-money communists who hateeverythingcommercial, right?
Yeah, your little proprietary media player helps out the cause SO much.
Proprietary drivers in the kernel have somehow become acceptable, now we fall all over ourselves when simple desktop apps go proprietary. In 5 years the whole f(#*$#@ OS is going to be proprietary, clueless retards who Don't Get It cheering the whole way along.
One day we'll wake up and Linux will be just as huge a pile of worthless trash as Windows and wonder what went wrong.
If being a "first class citizen" means destroying everything that Linux is about in the first place, I'll take second class status thanks.
Shutting out community input altogether for no reason is stupid though.. you might miss out on an important design consideration. Public "inspection" is useless if the public can't contribute.
The ideal thing to do is the best of both worlds. Have a list, get as much input/discussion as possible, but in the end it's your project and you'll make the decisions. Just because there's a list and open discussion doesn't mean you HAVE to listen to everyone. There will be gamer kiddies ranting about the latest DX shader support or whatever - just ignore them. Like you said, block out the interference - but don't block all input.
Look at the linux-audio-dev community, lots of great technologies (Jack, Ladspa, Lash, etc) were created in exactly this way (and generally anyone's input is considered as valid as anyone else's). They would certainly be worse (or not exist at all) without the community input.
However, using Wikipedia as a sole source (not that you are) is probably less wise than using Encyclopedia Britannica or Funk & Wagnalls' for the same purpose.
True, but I would argue that using a single source, including Britannica, is just an incredibly unwise thing to do in the first place. If it's important enough to matter you would be a fool to use a single source. Even the oh so holy Britannica has it's biases and omissions.
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Four or five years ago??! You can't possibly be serious, thinking an experience you had five years ago with gnome has any relevance today, whatsoever.
Wheel reinventing, like, say, Qt reinventing practically all of the C++ wheel?
Way to contradict yourself.
Executable packages? Gee, that hasn't shown to be a brutally horrible idea by a certain other OS, has it?
No thank you.
I used to think the conservatives would probably screw everything up pretty bad. Then I moved to Australia for a year.
Now I know the conservatives will screw everything up really bad. The conservative equivalent party here has completely destroyed the country.
Everything that has been privatised got far worse because of it, you have to pay for everything, but.. they still get taxed to hell. The private health care company (singular, not plural, for the record) is actively screwing me out of twice the money they should have taken, and getting my money back is proving almost impossible.
The government is completely fucking the people out of all their money and giving them nothing for it, it's amazing. Living in Canada is so so much better. (Disclaimer: government wise. The people and everything here are great. Government != people)
Want to vote conservative? Move to the states and stop trying to destroy our country, thanks.
People are always going to push for corrupt laws. Always.
The problem is that the US government is corrupt and broken, not that the media industry pushes for laws.
Perhaps later.
I'm a Canadian currently in Australia for a year. This is one of the things I noticed here - in Australia, they actually do check the signature on the back of your card, almost every single time. One of my cards has a really blurry signature from my wallet and I get suspicious stares about it all the time.
In Canada, they never check the signature. Ever, ever. The only places that might check it is the huge chains like Wal-Mart that (I assume) have a corporate policy to do so. But even they hardly do.
Just in case you can't get at the page, here's a quick summary:
"Volunteer Gnome developers aren't my unpaid slaves! Waah, waah, waah! I want this and I want that and I want it done immediately without any thought about whether it's actually a good idea whatsoever! Waah, waah, waah! Open source is crap because all these people don't do whatever I say, for free, always, without question! Waah, waah, waah! How dare they work on things they want to, and find interesting?!? Waaaaahhh!"
Pathetic.
No, the real solution is to strictly enforce exactly what one indentation level of whitespace is.
Vasstly differing code styles between people writing in the same language is nothing but a nuisance, and productivity/cooperation killer.
no no no.
Anything that needs to "line up" at all should be done with spaces. Period. No argument.
Indentation levels are done with tab, and indentation levels only. Lining things up is done with space. If you ever, ever, ever, smash tab a bunch of times then start hitting space to "line something up", you're doing it wrong. A tab is not a substitute for "a few" spaces. Ever.
It's really not that hard to ask yourself "will a changing tab size screw this up?" - I don't understand how it's such an issue.
In short, no the tab display size does not matter in any case. If it matters, you are doing something wrong.
No it's not. Better Big-O doesn't mean faster on all datasets - it means asymptotically faster, ie faster after a certain point.
There's no way you could get through a university algorithms course without learning this (usually with nice little graphs where you can see the functions cross over at some point, which you're probably going to have to calculate).
This is why there are python "guidelines" for how you should indent. (IMO it should be standard and forced to avoid these problems)
;)
Hopefully more languages will get this strict and we'll actually be able to read other people's code in general in the future.
People's petty little preferences and habits aside, it is a good thing, and you know it.
Aaah living on the 97 route.
:)
Doesn't hurt that it runs until 3 in the morning and goes downtown either, eh?
I'm sick of this argument, it's nonsense.
Normal consumer users don't contact Microsoft for help - if they did, you really think they would actually get useful help? Ever called MS tech support? People either find someone they know to fix their computers, or bring it to a shop and pay to get it fixed.
The "holy monolith of corporate stability" (ahem) that is Microsoft has absolutely nothing at all to do with home users using Windows.
And anyway, I don't think a big concern of the Firefox project is to be (er..) "economically viable". Firefox is given away for free - what does "economically viable" have to do with anything? Sounds like you've taken a few too many marketing classes for your own good.
FLOSS is completely different than proprietary commercial software. "The Market"(TM) and "economically viable" mean nothing. These things are not the primary motivation of free software projects in general - this is a completely different ballgame.
[BadSlashdotAnalogy] You can't watch a hockey game and comment on it as if it were football, without looking like a dumbass.[/BadSlashdotAnalogy] You, my friend, know shit about hockey.
Uh... compared to what, exactly?
The way you manage your windows is far, far, far slower than someone using a descent multi-desktop linux environment.
Even moving and resizing windows is painfully more slow and annoying in Windows - you can't really debate that one.
Windows' window management just sucks, in a very concrete, objective sense.
Serves you right for using proprietary archive formats.
Nowadays Xterm can use anti-aliased fonts (see the -fa option) so using it instead of gnome-terminal is a much nicer option than it was a little while ago.
I switched to Xterm for this reason, it starts instantaneously, and terminal I/O is way faster than gnome-terminal (and uses much less CPU).
Uh... we do have sufficient specs for the CPU, northbridge, southbridge, and RAM to implement free software drivers.
I don't remember having to download a proprietary kernel module to use my RAM.
Dumbass.
Linux is not Windows or OS/2. This article implies the reason Linux is a contender (in the server market at least) is because IBM is putting "weight" behind it.. please!
How long has IBM really been putting weight behind Linux? A couple years? How much actual progresss has been made as a direct result of IBM's Linux support? Not that damn much.
These industry types just can't understand something like Linux at all. The "weight" behind Linux has nothing to do with big corporations or money. Linux is killing AIX etc. because it's Free, and it's better, and IBM has nothing to do with that at all.
Millions of hackers worldwide have everything to do with that. They are the weight behind Linux. Corporations spewing PR don't actually get any work done. Coders do.
Um.. so the GCC team was slower at incorporating patches than the EGCS people. How, exactly, does this make the FSF "pig headed"??
I suppose the fact that Cygnus is a commercial company - which has absolutely no relevance to that situation whatsoever - automatically makes the FSF pig headed, because as everyone knows RMS and the FSF are militant anti-money communists who hate everything commercial, right?
Amazing...
Yeah, your little proprietary media player helps out the cause SO much.
Proprietary drivers in the kernel have somehow become acceptable, now we fall all over ourselves when simple desktop apps go proprietary. In 5 years the whole f(#*$#@ OS is going to be proprietary, clueless retards who Don't Get It cheering the whole way along.
One day we'll wake up and Linux will be just as huge a pile of worthless trash as Windows and wonder what went wrong.
If being a "first class citizen" means destroying everything that Linux is about in the first place, I'll take second class status thanks.
KDE is the Linux desktop that originally built itself on a proprietary toolkit.
I'd say that shows just how much KDE gives a crap about the success of free software in general.
Shutting out community input altogether for no reason is stupid though.. you might miss out on an important design consideration. Public "inspection" is useless if the public can't contribute.
The ideal thing to do is the best of both worlds. Have a list, get as much input/discussion as possible, but in the end it's your project and you'll make the decisions. Just because there's a list and open discussion doesn't mean you HAVE to listen to everyone. There will be gamer kiddies ranting about the latest DX shader support or whatever - just ignore them. Like you said, block out the interference - but don't block all input.
Look at the linux-audio-dev community, lots of great technologies (Jack, Ladspa, Lash, etc) were created in exactly this way (and generally anyone's input is considered as valid as anyone else's). They would certainly be worse (or not exist at all) without the community input.
True, but I would argue that using a single source, including Britannica, is just an incredibly unwise thing to do in the first place. If it's important enough to matter you would be a fool to use a single source. Even the oh so holy Britannica has it's biases and omissions.
So your example of an application of tubes more widely used than amplifiers is... amplifiers?
Bravo!