"A. People who don't know anything about law (99.9999% of slashdot)."
I think when analysing the law, the primary objective of the law should be to implement justice.
How can we begin to understand the law when it fails so consistently on its primary objective in regard to tech matters.
The law will probably always be unjust to techies ad its based on precedents going back hundreds of years, a few people will always have to get persecuted before the lawmakers will consider changing a now irrelevent law.
Why should we try and understand the law when it ignores us and is clueless to make informed descisions.
To obey a bad law is worse than breaking it.
The first thing we need to learn about the law is how to evade it, its the only way to get justice... ironic isnt it.
I dont use assembler because its not portable at all, where as C was designed to be portable, its only the external libraries that may not be portable.
When your an advanced programmer you make less mistakes, you shouldnt be confused by syntax, you should be using programs that help you to track down the nasty errors (try dmalloc)
I interpret your points about speed and size as meaning its not much worse than c, but it is still worse.
Graphics libraries are worse than any other type of library as far as portability goes, there are a few about, but i conceed a point there.
Sun will always own the name rights to Java, so i imagine they could easly and swiftly force kaffe to no longer use the Java trademark in relation to their product.
They could make it very difficult for anyone to make a java compiler without their blessing, as they have done to MS. (which strikes me as poetic justice)
I didnt give a reason as i didnt think i would be questioned.
Its interpreted.. or rather run time compiled, call it what you will it will _never_ be as fast as c.
It requires a virtual machine, so it will always be more bloated than c.
As the "portability" that you and others in this thread mention, gcc is portable. if you want portable code dont make it closed source.
There are "feature-rich" libraries that can be linked to in c also.
Java's only good point is its easy to program in, its the modern day equivalent of basic, or visual basic. Once you become a more advanced programmer, the benefit of being easy to programming in is of reduced benefit.
Sun will never let java be really free.. they want to control it just as badly as any other large mega-corporation would, its just about money for them.
Can you install linux on it ?
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 1
If so, ill give $1 to the first distro to supports the xbox arch.
"I'm merely pointing out that if there's no financial incentive for authors, you'll see less authors."
Maybe it wouldnt be a bad thing if Authors who are ONLY in it for the money changed their profession, people should try and work on something they enjoy, it leads to better workmanship.
As long as everyone contributes to society who cares how or why they do it, as long as everyone does contribute.
In my book someone who demands large amounts of compensation for there contribution, is contributing less because of their demands.
i.e. if you take more in return, you are giving less.
Why does modern society generally look up to people who TAKE the most rather than those who GIVE the most.
It can be generalised than people can take more because they are giving more, but thats a bit of a stretch in a lot of cases.
"free free free"
You are demonstrating a lack of understanding of the free software movement if thats what you think we are saying.
In most arguments speaking out against copyright you will find there reasoning in there somewhere.
In fact your the only one who ive heard mention the phrase "free free free"
""Free free free" is not an adequate replacement be3cause of the simple fact that someone has to pay for the initial production."
Someone has to pay for the initial design, nobody has to pay for the manufacture. Do you mean production is to design ?
Last time you purchased a pair of shoes, what % of the purchase price do you think went to the person who designed them, virutally nothing unless they are designer shoes. (and you cant copyright fashion)
Why should digital goods have the right to charge excessive (relative to ANY other industry ever) amounts for design ?
"you'd need to find a decent payment model to fund the creation of digital goods"By the same reasoning, you would have to find a decent payment model to fund the developemnt of free software.... im sure you can see the flaws in yoru own arguements there.
Do you honestly think if people didnt get money for designing things that people all over the owrld would suddenly down tools and change professions.
Some people actually enjoy their work, and not for the $$$
bsd partitions have a lot of cruft in them, there are fields for storing all sorts of irrelivant information.
(e.g fields extracted from http://www.tac.eu.org/cgi-bin/man-cgi?disklabel+5)
num of spare sectors per track
num of spare sectors per cylinder
num of alt. cylinders per unit
rotational speed
hardware sector interleave
sector 0 skew, per track
sector 0 skew, per cylinder
head switch time, usec
track-to-track seek, usec
cmon, do we need/want this information with modern storage systems, the details are taken care of in hardware, we dont need to clutter up our partition tables.
PC partition tables are a pile of crap, legacy crap going back 20 years, we only need LBA support and nothing else.
Whats the go with 4 primary partitions, the nextended partitions, some OS's primary partitions have to overlap extended partitions, some they done, some you can only use 1 primary partition, some you can use them all.
And having to reserve the whole first track, usually 32 sectors, just to put in about 170 bytes of data... what a waste.
The extra space can be used by other disk externder type programs, but there is no standard way to reserve it or anything, its first in best dressed, use it at your own risk.
And look at what it has to do, it just has to mark the start and end of a section of raw disk space, how difficult is it ?
The format has just been butchered too much by too many people. But for practical reasons we are stuck with PC partition tables because of convenience for the masses.
You could do a raw LVM partition.
I like Acorn partition types (if thats the one im thinking of), nice and simple, only what you need.
"Most people at least believe copyright is in principle a good idea."
Most people beleive what they are told to believe, unfortunatly most if it comes from mass media.
The fact is digital works should not be treated the same as physical goods as digital works have effectively zero __reproduction__ costs.
Thats not to say digital works cost nothing to make, but its only the design of digital works that cost moeny, not manufacture, its a TOTALLY different thing.
Id like to see the elimination of the artifical scarcity of goods.
"It is also family-friendly. Each computer can be used by a number of different members of the household"
This is very generous of microsoft, im sure in future release they will want to remove this benefit.
Image the extra profit if they could charge the full retial price to every member of the family who uses it.
Re:How to write tiny applications
on
Tiny Apps
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· Score: 1
"If you really want size, try rewriting in Perl or maybe Shell, which can easily get below the minimal ELF binary in size."
They are just scripts though, they arent real programs, they call real programs to do the work.
If you dont count the real programs (perl interpreter or shell and various commands) the scripts call then of course its tiny, but its not its true size
Its the same as writing a whole application in a library and then then saying the program's size is just the code that links to that lib.
Scripts are just temperary things.
I agree with your comments about assembler though.
"That's a possibility. However VectorC is something other than a general compiler, although that's ultimately the goal. My current thinking is that if you want a free general purpose compiler than there's nothing wrong with GCC. If you have a need to write high performance code, you're probably doing this because you have a serious application in mind."
If there is no free (as in beer) version then how can one decide if the performance benefits are worth the $$$ ?
If company has a good idea AND manages it right they can stay ahead of the competition.
Sometimes existing companaies are too ignorant or too tied up with their own self importance to consider new markets.
Sure mastercard or someone could do something similar, but they wouldnt do it for free, and they probably have no real understanding of the market. They would probably want to just treat it like normal retail transfers... which it is not.
Its not an easy job to buy people who understand a new market, they will be playing catchup for a while.
In the long run for paypal to defend their market against mastercard type people it will require good managment, they need to keep the momentum going.
Slashdot Mirror
"A. People who don't know anything about law (99.9999% of slashdot)."
I think when analysing the law, the primary objective of the law should be to implement justice.
How can we begin to understand the law when it fails so consistently on its primary objective in regard to tech matters.
The law will probably always be unjust to techies ad its based on precedents going back hundreds of years, a few people will always have to get persecuted before the lawmakers will consider changing a now irrelevent law.
Why should we try and understand the law when it ignores us and is clueless to make informed descisions.
To obey a bad law is worse than breaking it.
The first thing we need to learn about the law is how to evade it, its the only way to get justice... ironic isnt it.
News for nerds, stuff that matters.
Sure nerds have to eat, but seriously its a BIG stretch to consider this topic to be relevent to anything here.
I dont use assembler because its not portable at all, where as C was designed to be portable, its only the external libraries that may not be portable.
C is the ideal all round programming language
When your an advanced programmer you make less mistakes, you shouldnt be confused by syntax, you should be using programs that help you to track down the nasty errors (try dmalloc)
I interpret your points about speed and size as meaning its not much worse than c, but it is still worse.
Graphics libraries are worse than any other type of library as far as portability goes, there are a few about, but i conceed a point there.
Sun will always own the name rights to Java, so i imagine they could easly and swiftly force kaffe to no longer use the Java trademark in relation to their product.
They could make it very difficult for anyone to make a java compiler without their blessing, as they have done to MS. (which strikes me as poetic justice)
I didnt give a reason as i didnt think i would be questioned.
Its interpreted.. or rather run time compiled, call it what you will it will _never_ be as fast as c.
It requires a virtual machine, so it will always be more bloated than c.
As the "portability" that you and others in this thread mention, gcc is portable. if you want portable code dont make it closed source.
There are "feature-rich" libraries that can be linked to in c also.
Java's only good point is its easy to program in, its the modern day equivalent of basic, or visual basic. Once you become a more advanced programmer, the benefit of being easy to programming in is of reduced benefit.
Sun will never let java be really free.. they want to control it just as badly as any other large mega-corporation would, its just about money for them.
If so, ill give $1 to the first distro to supports the xbox arch.
except efficiency...
Face the truth, java is a cripled language for lots of reasons
The latest trick to increase your karma is to post the entire contents of the link in a comment
If i have to install windows jsut to play civ3 i will, but has anyone tried getting this working under WINE ?
What does this mean ?
Or put another way..
Is this new hiring of 700 (in total) examiners is a significant percentage of their current staff levels.
If it is significant, then they are practically confessing to prior mismanagment (as if that is in question) due to staff levels.
"I'm merely pointing out that if there's no financial incentive for authors, you'll see less authors."
Maybe it wouldnt be a bad thing if Authors who are ONLY in it for the money changed their profession, people should try and work on something they enjoy, it leads to better workmanship.
As long as everyone contributes to society who cares how or why they do it, as long as everyone does contribute.
In my book someone who demands large amounts of compensation for there contribution, is contributing less because of their demands.
i.e. if you take more in return, you are giving less.
Why does modern society generally look up to people who TAKE the most rather than those who GIVE the most.
It can be generalised than people can take more because they are giving more, but thats a bit of a stretch in a lot of cases.
"free free free"
You are demonstrating a lack of understanding of the free software movement if thats what you think we are saying.
In most arguments speaking out against copyright you will find there reasoning in there somewhere.
In fact your the only one who ive heard mention the phrase "free free free"
""Free free free" is not an adequate replacement be3cause of the simple fact that someone has to pay for the initial production."
Someone has to pay for the initial design, nobody has to pay for the manufacture. Do you mean production is to design ?
Last time you purchased a pair of shoes, what % of the purchase price do you think went to the person who designed them, virutally nothing unless they are designer shoes. (and you cant copyright fashion)
Why should digital goods have the right to charge excessive (relative to ANY other industry ever) amounts for design ?
"you'd need to find a decent payment model to fund the creation of digital goods"By the same reasoning, you would have to find a decent payment model to fund the developemnt of free software.... im sure you can see the flaws in yoru own arguements there.
Do you honestly think if people didnt get money for designing things that people all over the owrld would suddenly down tools and change professions.
Some people actually enjoy their work, and not for the $$$
bsd partitions have a lot of cruft in them, there are fields for storing all sorts of irrelivant information.
)
(e.g fields extracted from http://www.tac.eu.org/cgi-bin/man-cgi?disklabel+5
num of spare sectors per track
num of spare sectors per cylinder
num of alt. cylinders per unit
rotational speed
hardware sector interleave
sector 0 skew, per track
sector 0 skew, per cylinder
head switch time, usec
track-to-track seek, usec
cmon, do we need/want this information with modern storage systems, the details are taken care of in hardware, we dont need to clutter up our partition tables.
Not something to boast about.
lame slashdot lame filter prevented acurate formating
PC partition tables are a pile of crap, legacy crap going back 20 years, we only need LBA support and nothing else.
Whats the go with 4 primary partitions, the nextended partitions, some OS's primary partitions have to overlap extended partitions, some they done, some you can only use 1 primary partition, some you can use them all.
And having to reserve the whole first track, usually 32 sectors, just to put in about 170 bytes of data... what a waste.
The extra space can be used by other disk externder type programs, but there is no standard way to reserve it or anything, its first in best dressed, use it at your own risk.
And look at what it has to do, it just has to mark the start and end of a section of raw disk space, how difficult is it ?
The format has just been butchered too much by too many people. But for practical reasons we are stuck with PC partition tables because of convenience for the masses.
You could do a raw LVM partition.
I like Acorn partition types (if thats the one im thinking of), nice and simple, only what you need.
"Most people at least believe copyright is in principle a good idea."
Most people beleive what they are told to believe, unfortunatly most if it comes from mass media.
The fact is digital works should not be treated the same as physical goods as digital works have effectively zero __reproduction__ costs.
Thats not to say digital works cost nothing to make, but its only the design of digital works that cost moeny, not manufacture, its a TOTALLY different thing.
Id like to see the elimination of the artifical scarcity of goods.
"It is also family-friendly. Each computer can be used by a number of different members of the household"
This is very generous of microsoft, im sure in future release they will want to remove this benefit.
Image the extra profit if they could charge the full retial price to every member of the family who uses it.
"If you really want size, try rewriting in Perl or maybe Shell, which can easily get below the minimal ELF binary in size."
They are just scripts though, they arent real programs, they call real programs to do the work.
If you dont count the real programs (perl interpreter or shell and various commands) the scripts call then of course its tiny, but its not its true size
Its the same as writing a whole application in a library and then then saying the program's size is just the code that links to that lib.
Scripts are just temperary things.
I agree with your comments about assembler though.
If you want standard unix commands goto busybox.lineo.com
There are about 130 general functions all compilable into a single binary unpto a few hundred kB.
"isn't it high time we started seeing something new out of Sid Meier?"
I sincerly hope not, there are tons of civ wannabes out there, but none come close e.g. CTP.
I hope they keep producing improved versions of the same style game.
Unfortunately i have to sell my soul and install windows to play it.
"That's a possibility. However VectorC is something other than a general compiler, although that's ultimately the goal. My current thinking is that if you want a free general purpose compiler than there's nothing wrong with GCC. If you have a need to write high performance code, you're probably doing this because you have a serious application in mind."
If there is no free (as in beer) version then how can one decide if the performance benefits are worth the $$$ ?
What is your opinion on the average politians understanding of technology ?
What role (if any) do you think government should play in _cotrolling_ technology, is there hope they will one day pass sane laws ?
"Another fact.. people report seeing huge orange flames billowing from it.. but hydrogen burns as an almost invisible blue flame..."
What to say people could have seen a nearly invisible blue flame over the relatively bright orange flame anyway.
If company has a good idea AND manages it right they can stay ahead of the competition.
Sometimes existing companaies are too ignorant or too tied up with their own self importance to consider new markets.
Sure mastercard or someone could do something similar, but they wouldnt do it for free, and they probably have no real understanding of the market. They would probably want to just treat it like normal retail transfers... which it is not.
Its not an easy job to buy people who understand a new market, they will be playing catchup for a while.
In the long run for paypal to defend their market against mastercard type people it will require good managment, they need to keep the momentum going.
An IPO will help them grow.