The Oxford English Dictionary comes in twenty volumes. It costs about a thousand dollars. If you think your Dude's Handy Pocket Reference to English has every word in the language, such thoughts are gravely erroneous.
If we look back at the labor saving devices invented in the last 200 years, it boggles the mind. Yet today we still mostly work for a living. Many people work longer hours than ever as companies shed as many employees as the possibly can.
Perhaps you missed the subtle effects of these time-saving devices. Often the invention of these devices can be directly linked to modern happiness. For example, computers (the modern, analog and digital kind) crunched numbers for munitions trajectories. In this century, computers also carried out various encryption and decryption duties for governmental war efforts.
How does this affect me now, half a decade after the primary concerns which prompted the development of these devices have evaporated? I, and millions of others, have the opportunity to take a "job" in an industry which offers exciting things. I enjoy my work; it certainly doesn't bore me. That's what those archaic devices provided me.
Do your knives crash often too? Can you only use one implement at a time, or can Knife 8.5 now work with Fork 8.5 simultaneously for more efficient eating?
Personally, if it came down to buying a $1800 laptop with no OS or an $1805 laptop with Windows pre-installed, I would by the Windows one. Granted, I would probably wipe the drive and Linux and maybe other OS's, but I would have a Windows CD as well. At the very least, they make good coasters, and at most, the OS does have some advantages (even if they aren't technical advantages)!
Through your logic you would be buying a $5 coaster? I'm glad you don't pay my bills.
OK, workstations. But the only thing I'm in awe of is that people consider Intel processors to be worth more than the multi-colored cardboard box they come in. I'm not sure why a completely proprietary memory bus and supporting chipset would impress anyone either.
I wasn't clear. If I can't redistribute it, it's not worth the time to modify it. What time am I saving if everyone else has to do the same work to get the same results when the associated cost of replicating my work is zero?
Thanks for the tip about the "free source" definition. I had briefly scanned over the definition of this odd term and had missed the redistribution and modification restrictions statement. I have seen "free source" used to mean the same thing as "free software" before, as a sort of compromise between the vagueness of "Open Source" (What is open? If I can see it is it open? If I can change it is it open? Can I sell it?) and the double meaning of "Free Software" (beer vs. speech). This time it meant "freeware" and having no cost is hardly very special to me. Bits are inherently cost-less, as is light from the sun, but I don't enjoy them because I'm not paying for them, I enjoy them because they're useful--I can make USE of them.
I had filled out lengthy answers, accounts of real-life experiences and real software. I listed the projects to which I can remember contributing. I filled out every field as best I could, but with the misconception that "free source" meant I cared about. It didn't at all; I don't support software that can be had for no cost but doesn't allow me the right to change it. I should have read more closely.
Realizing I have never had any specific motivation to encourage others to prohibit modification and redistribution of anything, I removed all my comments. I support free software, call it "Open Source" if you wish--the useful stuff.
I've seen very little comment that Linux might actually really be slower on a 4-way. I would be disappointed, but not amazed if Linux were slightly slower on a 4-way given the maturity of NT SMP compared to Linux.
Maturity of NT's SMP? Wait, I thought we were talking performance. Obviously you've never used SMP NT. Add a processor it gains 20%. Add two more and it loses 10%. Scalable like mud.
Glade pops up. It looks like Visual Basic or Visual C++'s form designer, but behaves quite differently (if you know how GTK packing and layout works, you'll understand these differences). You create a window, fill it with containers (horizontal boxes, vertical boxes, tables, fixed position regions, etc.), then fill those containers with widgets (buttons, combo boxes, labels, pictures, etc.). You can make your window a resizable top-level, a fixed size dialog, whatever--when you're done with all your dialogs, save your project, then hit "Write Source Code" and pick a directory. It builds a project base full of GNU autoconf scripts to generate Makefiles for the code it wrote.
If you run "configure", and run "make", you get a program. Run it and windows appear, they don't do anything. You get to edit the code it wrote (or transplant the window construction into another project) and add events, data, etc. It's a very, very handy tool (I use it to lay out AbiWord's dialogs) and I'd love to send a case of beer to the guy who wrote it.
Glade does more than just lay out widgets. It allows the user to set properties of these widgets through its properties panel window, set and edit named GTK widget styles, and more. Because GTK is pretty darn nifty, Glade is actually constructing widgets on the fly when you add them to your window area. These widgets act like they will in your program, respond to events like they will in your program, and can even take a bit of data right there for a test drive (for example, you can supply example entries for a drop-down list box and see how the pop-down window sizes up). What you see is what you get.
Glade is not a complete development environment, and I'm glad it doesn't try to be. I have XEmacs to do my editing work, and I really don't need another editor I won't use laying around.
I use Glade to build my dialogs (and it works very nicely), write soruce code to an empty directory, and I cut out the dialog construction code and place it into a class dialog wrapper. It works wonderfully, and if you take the time to name your GUI elements in Glade, the code it writes is surprisingly easy to maintain by hand.
Certainly I don't think most of us would want to lose the "click on the email link in the browser and up pops an email window" feature.
I would certainly LOVE to lose that feature! When I click on a "mailto:" link, I want it to spawn an rxvt with mutt in it, where I can fill out the headers, and continue to Emacs to compose my message. The Netscape mail "editor" sucks, it really does.
And, of course, once you do that... you'd might as well put email in. And, since the basic email interface is similar to NNTP, here comes NNTP, too.
There's some anti-logic for ya. "The interface is similar, thus the implementation must be similarly trivial!" Gee, a web browser looks kind of like the front of my Marshall digital effects processor. Should Netscape just throw in a 24-bit digital multi-effect processor so that when we click on a link that might be PCM data we can add reverb, chorus, delay, and equalize the output? Why not add cab simulation, and we'd better take advantage of 3D sound hardware on PC sound cards (because it's there, right?), and, well, the interface looks almost kinda like what we started with.
After we're done with sound, let's put a 3D VRML viewer, and handle MIDI sequences via external sequencer devices, and since most of our work is graphical we should provide our own accelerated graphics card drivers in place of the operating system's native drivers. Printed output is important, so besides redistributing all the printer drivers we might need, we'd better make sure we can master content to digital media. Let's write and include a handy CD mastering applications suite, so at the click of a mouse button, the user can save entire sites to CD! Perfect!
Back to news... not only will we read news, decode multi-part pornography so the user doesn't have to learn uudecode, thread our messages, handle MIME attachments, and maintain address books, we will also let the user contribute messages! Yes, and in spectacular fashion! For this purpose we will need an editor for the user... but since this is the King of All Web Browsers, it must be the King of All Editors! Emacs is nothing... we will dynamically interpret not only lisp, but perl, scheme, Java, and even Python! Our editor will be infinitely extensible using all of these languages simultaneously, and we will rejoice in the technical majesty it has brought.
AND FTP! Yes, no browser is complete without an incomplete FTP client! We will list directories, you betcha, and let the user download multiple files at once! The user will have no fine grained session control, but it will be grand!
And last, and probably least, we will even speak the HyperText Transfer Protocol, and transfer documents through it. They will have the ability to traverse links to other pages, but will never do so since he will spend an average of 29 days simply "exploring" the "premium dynamic content" by way of our super extensible plug-in All Media Handling functionality. In fact, he will probably never leave his "start page", since the web is crap and there's nothing good out there anyway.
HTTP Error 403 403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later. Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists. ------------- dogbert [~] telnet 24.1.112.72 80 Trying 24.1.112.72... Connected to 24.1.112.72. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 [...] -------------
I wish people would consider using real software to serve web content. Following links these days is like enduring eye surgery by way of pointy chunk of plywood. At least use a _tool_ for the job; a flash of the label marked "Fisher Price" isn't a good sign.
Emacs is very different. Emacs uses Lisp to play the roles you've mentioned (news reader, mail client, IRC client, web browser). Check out XEmacs (www.xemacs.org), release 21 has become very modular. The design has been enhanced so that the base XEmacs is quite small (relative to the previous 18 MB download to get all the lisp functionality). XEmacs asks for a list of package servers when a user runs it, and at any time the user can tell XEmacs to go fetch a package (Lisp code to provide new functionality) and install it locally. No restart, no root priveledges (unless you want to install site packages), and 3 clicks of a mouse.
I assume this is also a feature of GNU Emacs version 21 but I haven't checked so I'll stick with the XEmacs terminology. A quick check of the Vim archives show the latest version weighing in at 1660 KB (source code and run-time library data), and XEmacs at 6330 KB.
Why can't people use a web browser to read HTTP content, a news reader to read NNTP content, an e-mail client for e-mail, and a chat client for real-time two-way communication? It seems like the average communications application is 15 MB; and they all poorly implement the same small set of features not quite well enough to make any serious user happy.
I've never been pleased with Real Audio. I can run it full out over a T1, with correct program settings and all, and even on higher bitrate streams it just doesn't seem as crisp as streaming MP3s. This was also an old version of the Linux Real Audio player, probably version 5 or so (I don't know what version may be available now). The format is just another proprietary scheme with a single... "lacking" player implementation. I can't even encode the material--why would I want to use it?
HTTP Error 403 403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later. Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists. ------------ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:29:45 GMT ------------ Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a real operating system.
SMP - I forgot where I read it - maybe on the FreeBSD site - but FreeBSD outperforms linux SMP by 17% - so obviously there's room for improvement, no?
That seems backwards, at least on Intel machines. Could you provide a reference for this? Last I checked up on the latest FreeBSD docs, SMP was listed as needing much improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
www.oed.com
The Oxford English Dictionary comes in twenty volumes. It costs about a thousand dollars. If you think your Dude's Handy Pocket Reference to English has every word in the language, such thoughts are gravely erroneous.
How does this affect me now, half a decade after the primary concerns which prompted the development of these devices have evaporated? I, and millions of others, have the opportunity to take a "job" in an industry which offers exciting things. I enjoy my work; it certainly doesn't bore me. That's what those archaic devices provided me.
Looks like no one's bitten yet.
Do your knives crash often too? Can you only use one implement at a time, or can Knife 8.5 now work with Fork 8.5 simultaneously for more efficient eating?
OK, workstations. But the only thing I'm in awe of is that people consider Intel processors to be worth more than the multi-colored cardboard box they come in. I'm not sure why a completely proprietary memory bus and supporting chipset would impress anyone either.
Uhm... but these are Intel machines, right? There didn't seem to be a mention of any real hardware in the article.
Rather use MacOS than Linux? Do you cut your steak with a tennis racket too?
I wasn't clear. If I can't redistribute it, it's not worth the time to modify it. What time am I saving if everyone else has to do the same work to get the same results when the associated cost of replicating my work is zero?
Thanks for the tip about the "free source" definition. I had briefly scanned over the definition of this odd term and had missed the redistribution and modification restrictions statement. I have seen "free source" used to mean the same thing as "free software" before, as a sort of compromise between the vagueness of "Open Source" (What is open? If I can see it is it open? If I can change it is it open? Can I sell it?) and the double meaning of "Free Software" (beer vs. speech). This time it meant "freeware" and having no cost is hardly very special to me. Bits are inherently cost-less, as is light from the sun, but I don't enjoy them because I'm not paying for them, I enjoy them because they're useful--I can make USE of them.
I had filled out lengthy answers, accounts of real-life experiences and real software. I listed the projects to which I can remember contributing. I filled out every field as best I could, but with the misconception that "free source" meant I cared about. It didn't at all; I don't support software that can be had for no cost but doesn't allow me the right to change it. I should have read more closely.
Realizing I have never had any specific motivation to encourage others to prohibit modification and redistribution of anything, I removed all my comments. I support free software, call it "Open Source" if you wish--the useful stuff.
Glade pops up. It looks like Visual Basic or Visual C++'s form designer, but behaves quite differently (if you know how GTK packing and layout works, you'll understand these differences). You create a window, fill it with containers (horizontal boxes, vertical boxes, tables, fixed position regions, etc.), then fill those containers with widgets (buttons, combo boxes, labels, pictures, etc.). You can make your window a resizable top-level, a fixed size dialog, whatever--when you're done with all your dialogs, save your project, then hit "Write Source Code" and pick a directory. It builds a project base full of GNU autoconf scripts to generate Makefiles for the code it wrote.
If you run "configure", and run "make", you get a program. Run it and windows appear, they don't do anything. You get to edit the code it wrote (or transplant the window construction into another project) and add events, data, etc. It's a very, very handy tool (I use it to lay out AbiWord's dialogs) and I'd love to send a case of beer to the guy who wrote it.
Glade does more than just lay out widgets. It allows the user to set properties of these widgets through its properties panel window, set and edit named GTK widget styles, and more. Because GTK is pretty darn nifty, Glade is actually constructing widgets on the fly when you add them to your window area. These widgets act like they will in your program, respond to events like they will in your program, and can even take a bit of data right there for a test drive (for example, you can supply example entries for a drop-down list box and see how the pop-down window sizes up). What you see is what you get.
Glade is not a complete development environment, and I'm glad it doesn't try to be. I have XEmacs to do my editing work, and I really don't need another editor I won't use laying around.
I use Glade to build my dialogs (and it works very nicely), write soruce code to an empty directory, and I cut out the dialog construction code and place it into a class dialog wrapper. It works wonderfully, and if you take the time to name your GUI elements in Glade, the code it writes is surprisingly easy to maintain by hand.
But it's not available now. It's available whenever people get done adding yet another feature that just can't be left out of the program.
After we're done with sound, let's put a 3D VRML viewer, and handle MIDI sequences via external sequencer devices, and since most of our work is graphical we should provide our own accelerated graphics card drivers in place of the operating system's native drivers. Printed output is important, so besides redistributing all the printer drivers we might need, we'd better make sure we can master content to digital media. Let's write and include a handy CD mastering applications suite, so at the click of a mouse button, the user can save entire sites to CD! Perfect!
Back to news... not only will we read news, decode multi-part pornography so the user doesn't have to learn uudecode, thread our messages, handle MIME attachments, and maintain address books, we will also let the user contribute messages! Yes, and in spectacular fashion! For this purpose we will need an editor for the user... but since this is the King of All Web Browsers, it must be the King of All Editors! Emacs is nothing... we will dynamically interpret not only lisp, but perl, scheme, Java, and even Python! Our editor will be infinitely extensible using all of these languages simultaneously, and we will rejoice in the technical majesty it has brought.
AND FTP! Yes, no browser is complete without an incomplete FTP client! We will list directories, you betcha, and let the user download multiple files at once! The user will have no fine grained session control, but it will be grand!
And last, and probably least, we will even speak the HyperText Transfer Protocol, and transfer documents through it. They will have the ability to traverse links to other pages, but will never do so since he will spend an average of 29 days simply "exploring" the "premium dynamic content" by way of our super extensible plug-in All Media Handling functionality. In fact, he will probably never leave his "start page", since the web is crap and there's nothing good out there anyway.
This was a rant. The web sucks. Get over it.
HTTP Error 403
403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later.
Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists.
-------------
dogbert [~] telnet 24.1.112.72 80
Trying 24.1.112.72...
Connected to 24.1.112.72.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
[...]
-------------
I wish people would consider using real software to serve web content. Following links these days is like enduring eye surgery by way of pointy chunk of plywood. At least use a _tool_ for the job; a flash of the label marked "Fisher Price" isn't a good sign.
Emacs is very different. Emacs uses Lisp to play the roles you've mentioned (news reader, mail client, IRC client, web browser). Check out XEmacs (www.xemacs.org), release 21 has become very modular. The design has been enhanced so that the base XEmacs is quite small (relative to the previous 18 MB download to get all the lisp functionality). XEmacs asks for a list of package servers when a user runs it, and at any time the user can tell XEmacs to go fetch a package (Lisp code to provide new functionality) and install it locally. No restart, no root priveledges (unless you want to install site packages), and 3 clicks of a mouse.
I assume this is also a feature of GNU Emacs version 21 but I haven't checked so I'll stick with the XEmacs terminology. A quick check of the Vim archives show the latest version weighing in at 1660 KB (source code and run-time library data), and XEmacs at 6330 KB.
Why can't people use a web browser to read HTTP content, a news reader to read NNTP content, an e-mail client for e-mail, and a chat client for real-time two-way communication? It seems like the average communications application is 15 MB; and they all poorly implement the same small set of features not quite well enough to make any serious user happy.
I've never been pleased with Real Audio. I can run it full out over a T1, with correct program settings and all, and even on higher bitrate streams it just doesn't seem as crisp as streaming MP3s. This was also an old version of the Linux Real Audio player, probably version 5 or so (I don't know what version may be available now). The format is just another proprietary scheme with a single... "lacking" player implementation. I can't even encode the material--why would I want to use it?
Streaming audio:
mpg123 http://www.server.com:7000/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:33:38 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDFFFFCDDH=PIMBKNKALGKHCHKFMBAGPACB; path=/
Cache-control: private
HTTP Error 403
403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later.
Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists.
------------
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:29:45 GMT
------------
Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a real operating system.
Many of them carry pagers.