For a government concerned about control, Microsoft's obvious motivations (control and profit) may be both more familiar, more predictable - and because Microsoft is centralized, mor tractable. This in comparison to the diverse coalition of interests making up the free and open source community.
Please refrain from relating everything with politics. You can see Chinese people, though not as many as in Western countries, contributing to open-source projects. Have you seen people living in isolated countries like Iran or North Korea do that?
China is opening its gates. Full stop. Things will definitely change over time. If you have really been to China, as well as countries like Iran or North Korea, you can easily tell the difference between these countries. I can tell you that as long as one does not talk about the independence of Tibet or Taiwan, or some controversial ‘religions’ (OK if you are a usual Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist), one has quite a lot of freedom.
I compiled hello-iostream.cpp using MinGW and the executable was over 200 KiB after running strip, compared to the 6 KiB executable produced from hello-cstdio.cpp.
This is a problem of code optimization. Developers on the PC seem to pay less and less attention to code size now. It did not use to be the case. GCC 2.95.3 w/ SGI STL will produce HelloWorld.exe a few dozens of kilobytes, if my memory serves me right.
This said, I do not feel it a serious issue. When developing for embedded system, where storage/memory restrictions are high, a serious developer has to get some decent libraries optimized for code size. In fact, even with the standard C++ library implementation of MinGW GCC 3.4.5, using just std::map does not increase the code as much as std::cout. In my case, it is 30+ kilobytes (compared to 200+ in the case of iostream).
The real story is how Microsoft changed its patent covenant, after the deal with Linspire was already finalized. Is Microsoft free under that deal to alter the patent covenant however they want - making it useless?
Why is this surprising? Linspire is not a static object. If it can change and adopt new licences—GPLv3 in this case—why can't Microsoft change its convenant?
Although I dislike DRM and patents, the way in which many GPLv3 advocates treat Microsoft makes me uncomfortable. They have their rights too. Whether their rights are legal/moral or not should not be judged by just advocates of FOSS.
At least I did not read it anywhere. What I have found in his writing is:
There is much overlap between the interests of computer science and mathematics, but this core concern with the nature of process expression itself is the unique conceptual focus that distinguishes computer science from the other sciences and from mathematics.
The notion of the algorithm simply does not provide conceptual enlightenment for the questions that most computer scientists are concerned with.
Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims and the mathematicians tools are not as appropriate as once supposed to the questions of the computer scientist. The primary questions of computer science are not of computational possibilities but of expressional possibilities. Computer science does not need a theory of computation it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression.
But no, the most important part is that math still evolves, and rapidly. As so many other critics, the author of the article appears to have a very limited understanding of math.
Specifically he mentioned in the introduction (emphasis mine):
We will argue that the conceptual concerns of computer science are quite different from the conceptual concerns of mathematics, and that this mathematical legacy, in particular the notion of the algorithm, has been largely ineffective as a paradigm for computer science.
It is worth reading (RTFA:-) ). I guess his book is an expansion of his long-holding ideas. Though he speaks against mathematics in computer science, apparently he knows a lot of mathematics. He mentioned Hilbert's problems and Gödel's incomplete theorem. He also talked about the definition of computer science. If people had read his article, there would not have been so many posts trying to say what CS is here.
You are a programmer, not a computer scientist. I'd hire you to write code based on a specification. I wouldn't hire you to design rendering algorithms. It is too bad they didn't teach you the difference between compsci and programming during day one of your CS program.
Do companies generally recruit computer scientists or programmers? Programmers. Where do programmers come from? CS majors!
Apparently the author is right. Whatever we name the CS department, we have a mismatch between what is taught and what is needed.
You don't need it. Just hit Enter. BTW, although I consider myself an experienced PC user (no Mac experience at all), I do not know this shortcut key. I dare say a very small percentage of people know about it.
2. Refitting the browser window to the desktop is challenging.
I can't imagine how difficult it is. On the contrary, I often found myself mis-resize the windows. I did waste some time to resize it back, since generally I like to have fixed-size windows (esp. true for browsers, in order to test standard resolutions).
3. Plug-in support is non-existent.
It turns out the author confused plug-ins with add-ons. Plug-in support is there, but add-ons are few. I do not think add-ons are a blocking issue, since people are using Internet Explorer without add-ons most of the time.
4. Your website and application won't look/work correctly.
This is even not worth rebutting. This is the reason why Web developers need Safari on Windows and why it is beta.
5. Importing bookmarks not a part of the installation process.
I can't understand why it is an issue. If only you click on Bookmarks - Show All Bookmarks, you will see all the imported bookmarks immediately.
6. Another reason I can't justify buying a Mac.
This varies between people. I like the look of Safari, and I believe Safari on Mac will have fewer bugs and less memory footprint. So it will not affect when I am to buy a Mac (I don't have one yet, but am considering buying one).
It is based on something less proprietary, and more TeX-like. The output is nicer too. I believe Nature and Science will accept the new.docx format some time. The ODF recommendation does not make sense, simply because no authors will be using it.
I think the parsing of who owns what is the critical issue. Physical CD, copyright, song, electronic file, information; who owns what?
Do you agree that people can own a copy of a book? Then how about owning an e-copy of a book without the physical media? And then how about an e-copy of a song without the CD? I would like to argue they are similar.
Some people think that one can own something while another can dictate control over it
I would agree to this interpretation, kind of. Strictly speaking, we should all say, ‘I own a copy of...’ for books, music, and so on. However, human languages are always ambiguous.
I may own the physical book, but I do not own the story. That's copyrighted.
song is to CD as story is to book
Words are always vague, but your wording does not work when there is not a physical media like a CD. When one says one owns a book, one never owns the copyright (generally, except when the author or the publisher says so). For me, a song purchased is like a book purchased. I have the fair use rights, but I do not have the copyright. I have the fair use rights, and that is the point. Whether I own a book or a song, I never have the copyright.—It would be sophism to argue on the use of the word “own”.
I would be really glad if all Microsoft patents ‘infringed’ by a SUSE distro were automatically invalid now for good. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be true. Following your argument, the best result you can get is stop Microsoft to ‘distribute’ Linux, which is really trivial.
As a software Engineer I have experienced bad software development and good software development, and believe it or not, good, solid, bug free (99.9%) software takes less time to design, write and test, than the majority of the crap beta software corporations like MS spits out to the unsuspecting public.
Show us your way, great Moses, how to defeat Microsoft the ugly giant with your little finger. Enlighten us with your wisdom how to design bug-free software and solve the software problems for once and for good!
The text in the address bar and Firefox widgets is indeed not subpixel rendered, however, the web page text is. The comparison I was making was between the web page text (rendered by OS X) and the image on the page (rendered by Microsoft's ClearType). The web page text is rendered by my system using subpixel rendering and is what I am referring to, since most text on my system is rendered that way. Firefox's GUI widgets are probably custom rendered or something, but Finder's widgets do indeed use subpixel rendering.
True. And it really puzzled me a little. However, checking your screen shot carefully again, I think OS X is not using ClearType (though subpixel rendering is used), since I can tell clearly that even the font display in Firefox is fuzzier than the image below (sorry;-)).—Though it is really strange that only the first three lines in the image in your screen shot are clear, while in my browser all is good: http://wyw.dcweb.cn/temp/ClearType_MS.png
Try again. It's less coloured than the Microsoft font, but it is definitely coloured, as eyedropper in Photoshop reveals.
No, it simply is not. Check my zoomed image of your original one: http://wyw.dcweb.cn/temp/ClearType.png
Compare the text in the top and that in the bottom.
If you zoom in, you can see I'm definitely using subpixel rendering. I get the odd blurry looking font on my OS X system, but nowhere near the sort of stuff I see on other people's Windows laptops.
I zoomed in your screen shot, and regretfully you were not using subpixel rendering. The ClearType fonts (as in the Microsoft sample text) have coloured pixels in even black text, while the black text in your address line is complete black and white.
"Under GPL 2, they have already given away the rights to use Microsoft patents that are applied in the Novell distribution, for any use in any GPL software, by anyone, forever," Perens said.
Prove to me how this holds. I believe only GPLv3 Draft 2 (maybe Draft 1 too?) has such implications.
Sorry to be frank, but I think this is sophism, and will not hold in court. Would you really want to argue about this before a judge?
In the Linux world you essentially have two package management standards: apt and rpm. With those two you cover 99 percent of the market. While a single standard would seem to simplify things, this sort of differentiation and competition is just how innovation happens in the open source world. For a desktop system, I think a Debian/apt based systems is they way to go. It will give you the broadest coverage of software. Anything you can find in an RPM based distro is probably also available in apt.
Packaging standards are less than enough, because of the dependency hell. The problem is that you need to have one RPM for each different distro. I am not sure about APT, but I know RPM has a lot of problems on the dependency stuff (where ESR choked). This is partly because it is simple too easy for the developer to switch to a new library. On Windows I do not feel some much pain when installing a new application—even on Windows 98; while it is very difficult to find existing packages (or even ready-to-build source) for an old, say, Red Hat 8.0 installation.
This is a really great example of the misconceptions many still have about Linux... the perception that installing software is a geeky struggle with downloading, configuring, compiling, etc. This is not necessary for most apps, certainly not after they reach the level of polish and popularity as Gaim.
It seems we were arguing on different planes. No, I do not object to your statement that the Ubuntu repository is nice, or apt is great (in fact, I found in an article that the Linux dependency hell occurs less on Debian-based systems). My point is more like that the lack of a common packaging system and ABIs (yes,.so interfaces are still ABIs) cause many problems in the Linux world. You admitted too that the newer Windows systems tend to have less DLL problems. Debian/Ubuntu is not the standard on Linux (yet).
I've been surfing exclusively with Firefox and using OpenOffice for home and business use for several years now with no troubles, so obviously mileage can vary.
I nearly exclusively use Firefox for surfing, except, well, some sites are IE-only. I do not think I am a big power user of Office, but OpenOffice is just not good enough for Chinese users:-(. Natural for the developing countries since people there are more occupied in earning our living instead of making contributions to free software—something idealists like RMS tend to ignore. That is one of the reasons why F/OSS does not work in some areas.
I've been using both Windows and Linux almost since the origins of both, and my experience just does not match yours. The Linux API and ABI have remained very stable, usually more so than Windows. Just look at how much Vista breaks backwards compatibility to see what I mean. Do google search on the term 'DLL hell' for earlier examples.
DLL hell as described above was a very common phenomenon on pre-Windows 2000 versions of Microsoft operating systems, the primary cause being that the operating system did not restrict DLL installations...
James Donald, in his 2003 paper titled Improved Portability of Shared Libraries[3] argued that DLL Hell is worse under Linux than Microsoft Windows. Several Linux distributions have had problems with software not packaged for the distribution when updating libraries, since the application programming interfaces of some Open Source libraries are prone to change between releases. When occurring in non-Windows environments, these problems are often referred to as dependency hell.
I believe it was exactly because of the ‘dependency hell’ that made ESR nuts some time ago.
What is the business to do with Ubuntu? Does Ubuntu carry all the Linux applications on the planet?
Very nearly so. Via apt repositories, most refined and stable applications (certainly the most popular ones) are available with a click.
While I appreciate much the work done in Ubuntu, I do not think a centralized repository works all the time.
I've been using both Windows and Linux almost since the origins of both, and my experience just does not match yours. The Linux API and ABI have remained very stable, usually more so than Windows. Just look at how much Vista breaks backwards compatibility to see what I mean. Do google search on the term 'DLL hell' for earlier examples.
I do not want to argue with you that Vista is bad. However, most user-level applications are not affected. And I do not think 'DLL hell' is inherently a problem of Windows architecture (still, Microsoft may be to blame, or the other producers of DLLs).
For a great many people, it is a better option than what they have now. Perhaps not if you play a lot of games, but certainly for Internet surfing and office productivity and such it is a stable, friendly, virus free alternative.
Maybe maybe. However, there is some doubt even on surfing (there are still a lot of IE-only sites around). No, I can tell you clearly that OOo is not as good as Microsoft Office, though I like very much the PDF output of OOo—even that is not for technical reasons, I believe. And you would need a lot more to exist in a business environment, which is the biggest source of Windows sales....
No one wants to have to worry about distro, GUI, etc. and compatibility issues, hunting for drivers,etc.
Have you tried Ubuntu? Your argument might have been true at one time, but it doesn't hold water anymore. Ubuntu is actually easier to install and manage than Windows, and installing software is waaaaay easier with their point and click Add/Remove Applications interface.
What is the business to do with Ubuntu? Does Ubuntu carry all the Linux applications on the planet?
The lack of a stable ABI means lack of commercial applications, and a big waste of open-source debelopers’ time on unnecessary porting and building. I still can run the Win32 applications published ten years ago, and even DOS applications published fifteen or more years ago—I call that an advantage.
As long as there is not a free alternative to Windows (and I doubt its possibility, given the technical and legal obstacles), I do not see the decline of Microsoft Windows in the near future.
The OSS community actually needs more thinking like this. The question shouldn't be, "why is Linux so cool?" The question should be, "how does Linux make my life easier than other operating systems?"
I agree with you. I just can't help thinking how RMS will respond to this. Maybe: ‘Crappy comment. You value convenience better than freedom? You deserve enslaved for ever by evil empires!’. Blah blah blah...
There are some of them like amarok and k3b that are the best in their class, including closed source ones, and there are others that are as good as the closed sourced ones like krita, krusader, scribus, kivio and some others.
Amarok is good, but seriously you think it is among the best? I guess not (on Windows, at least). Does it have systray and toolbar integration? Is its interface very attractive? Does it have kernel streaming? Windows media applications are a crowded world, and I do not think Amarok (or k3b) has a good chance competing with iTunes, foobar 2000, Windows Media Player, WinAmp, and such like.
Slashdot Mirror
Please refrain from relating everything with politics. You can see Chinese people, though not as many as in Western countries, contributing to open-source projects. Have you seen people living in isolated countries like Iran or North Korea do that?
China is opening its gates. Full stop. Things will definitely change over time. If you have really been to China, as well as countries like Iran or North Korea, you can easily tell the difference between these countries. I can tell you that as long as one does not talk about the independence of Tibet or Taiwan, or some controversial ‘religions’ (OK if you are a usual Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist), one has quite a lot of freedom.
This is a problem of code optimization. Developers on the PC seem to pay less and less attention to code size now. It did not use to be the case. GCC 2.95.3 w/ SGI STL will produce HelloWorld.exe a few dozens of kilobytes, if my memory serves me right.
This said, I do not feel it a serious issue. When developing for embedded system, where storage/memory restrictions are high, a serious developer has to get some decent libraries optimized for code size. In fact, even with the standard C++ library implementation of MinGW GCC 3.4.5, using just std::map does not increase the code as much as std::cout. In my case, it is 30+ kilobytes (compared to 200+ in the case of iostream).
Why is this surprising? Linspire is not a static object. If it can change and adopt new licences—GPLv3 in this case—why can't Microsoft change its convenant?
Although I dislike DRM and patents, the way in which many GPLv3 advocates treat Microsoft makes me uncomfortable. They have their rights too. Whether their rights are legal/moral or not should not be judged by just advocates of FOSS.
I believe it is insightful.
At least I did not read it anywhere. What I have found in his writing is:
This guy knows math: A critical review of the notion of algorithm in computer science, which was published in the Proceedings of the 21st Annual Computer Science Conference 14 years ago.
Specifically he mentioned in the introduction (emphasis mine):
It is worth reading (RTFA :-) ). I guess his book is an expansion of his long-holding ideas. Though he speaks against mathematics in computer science, apparently he knows a lot of mathematics. He mentioned Hilbert's problems and Gödel's incomplete theorem. He also talked about the definition of computer science. If people had read his article, there would not have been so many posts trying to say what CS is here.
Do companies generally recruit computer scientists or programmers? Programmers. Where do programmers come from? CS majors!
Apparently the author is right. Whatever we name the CS department, we have a mismatch between what is taught and what is needed.
You don't need it. Just hit Enter. BTW, although I consider myself an experienced PC user (no Mac experience at all), I do not know this shortcut key. I dare say a very small percentage of people know about it.
I can't imagine how difficult it is. On the contrary, I often found myself mis-resize the windows. I did waste some time to resize it back, since generally I like to have fixed-size windows (esp. true for browsers, in order to test standard resolutions).
It turns out the author confused plug-ins with add-ons. Plug-in support is there, but add-ons are few. I do not think add-ons are a blocking issue, since people are using Internet Explorer without add-ons most of the time.
This is even not worth rebutting. This is the reason why Web developers need Safari on Windows and why it is beta.
I can't understand why it is an issue. If only you click on Bookmarks - Show All Bookmarks, you will see all the imported bookmarks immediately.
This varies between people. I like the look of Safari, and I believe Safari on Mac will have fewer bugs and less memory footprint. So it will not affect when I am to buy a Mac (I don't have one yet, but am considering buying one).
Please have a look at the Microsoft blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archiv e/2006/10/04/Equations-in-Word-2007.aspx
It is based on something less proprietary, and more TeX-like. The output is nicer too. I believe Nature and Science will accept the new .docx format some time. The ODF recommendation does not make sense, simply because no authors will be using it.
Do you agree that people can own a copy of a book? Then how about owning an e-copy of a book without the physical media? And then how about an e-copy of a song without the CD? I would like to argue they are similar.
I would agree to this interpretation, kind of. Strictly speaking, we should all say, ‘I own a copy of ...’ for books, music, and so on. However, human languages are always ambiguous.
Words are always vague, but your wording does not work when there is not a physical media like a CD. When one says one owns a book, one never owns the copyright (generally, except when the author or the publisher says so). For me, a song purchased is like a book purchased. I have the fair use rights, but I do not have the copyright. I have the fair use rights, and that is the point. Whether I own a book or a song, I never have the copyright.—It would be sophism to argue on the use of the word “own”.
Ah, I see, you do not own a single book, do you? While I can brag I own thousands of books, you own none!
Sorry, I do not intend to adopt your definition of ‘own’.
I would be really glad if all Microsoft patents ‘infringed’ by a SUSE distro were automatically invalid now for good. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be true. Following your argument, the best result you can get is stop Microsoft to ‘distribute’ Linux, which is really trivial.
Show us your way, great Moses, how to defeat Microsoft the ugly giant with your little finger. Enlighten us with your wisdom how to design bug-free software and solve the software problems for once and for good!
True. And it really puzzled me a little. However, checking your screen shot carefully again, I think OS X is not using ClearType (though subpixel rendering is used), since I can tell clearly that even the font display in Firefox is fuzzier than the image below (sorry ;-)).—Though it is really strange that only the first three lines in the image in your screen shot are clear, while in my browser all is good: http://wyw.dcweb.cn/temp/ClearType_MS.png
No, it simply is not. Check my zoomed image of your original one:
http://wyw.dcweb.cn/temp/ClearType.png
Compare the text in the top and that in the bottom.
I zoomed in your screen shot, and regretfully you were not using subpixel rendering. The ClearType fonts (as in the Microsoft sample text) have coloured pixels in even black text, while the black text in your address line is complete black and white.
Prove to me how this holds. I believe only GPLv3 Draft 2 (maybe Draft 1 too?) has such implications.
Sorry to be frank, but I think this is sophism, and will not hold in court. Would you really want to argue about this before a judge?
Packaging standards are less than enough, because of the dependency hell. The problem is that you need to have one RPM for each different distro. I am not sure about APT, but I know RPM has a lot of problems on the dependency stuff (where ESR choked). This is partly because it is simple too easy for the developer to switch to a new library. On Windows I do not feel some much pain when installing a new application—even on Windows 98; while it is very difficult to find existing packages (or even ready-to-build source) for an old, say, Red Hat 8.0 installation.
It seems we were arguing on different planes. No, I do not object to your statement that the Ubuntu repository is nice, or apt is great (in fact, I found in an article that the Linux dependency hell occurs less on Debian-based systems). My point is more like that the lack of a common packaging system and ABIs (yes, .so interfaces are still ABIs) cause many problems in the Linux world. You admitted too that the newer Windows systems tend to have less DLL problems. Debian/Ubuntu is not the standard on Linux (yet).
I nearly exclusively use Firefox for surfing, except, well, some sites are IE-only. I do not think I am a big power user of Office, but OpenOffice is just not good enough for Chinese users :-(. Natural for the developing countries since people there are more occupied in earning our living instead of making contributions to free software—something idealists like RMS tend to ignore. That is one of the reasons why F/OSS does not work in some areas.
Did you google for 'DLL hell' yourself? I did, and found http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/DLL+hell :
I believe it was exactly because of the ‘dependency hell’ that made ESR nuts some time ago.
While I appreciate much the work done in Ubuntu, I do not think a centralized repository works all the time.
I do not want to argue with you that Vista is bad. However, most user-level applications are not affected. And I do not think 'DLL hell' is inherently a problem of Windows architecture (still, Microsoft may be to blame, or the other producers of DLLs).
On the other hand, have a look at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php to see how many packages are there for x86 Linus! That is what I think as bad as hell.
Maybe maybe. However, there is some doubt even on surfing (there are still a lot of IE-only sites around). No, I can tell you clearly that OOo is not as good as Microsoft Office, though I like very much the PDF output of OOo—even that is not for technical reasons, I believe. And you would need a lot more to exist in a business environment, which is the biggest source of Windows sales....
What is the business to do with Ubuntu? Does Ubuntu carry all the Linux applications on the planet?
The lack of a stable ABI means lack of commercial applications, and a big waste of open-source debelopers’ time on unnecessary porting and building. I still can run the Win32 applications published ten years ago, and even DOS applications published fifteen or more years ago—I call that an advantage.
As long as there is not a free alternative to Windows (and I doubt its possibility, given the technical and legal obstacles), I do not see the decline of Microsoft Windows in the near future.
I agree with you. I just can't help thinking how RMS will respond to this. Maybe: ‘Crappy comment. You value convenience better than freedom? You deserve enslaved for ever by evil empires!’. Blah blah blah...
Amarok is good, but seriously you think it is among the best? I guess not (on Windows, at least). Does it have systray and toolbar integration? Is its interface very attractive? Does it have kernel streaming? Windows media applications are a crowded world, and I do not think Amarok (or k3b) has a good chance competing with iTunes, foobar 2000, Windows Media Player, WinAmp, and such like.