> Web applications are becoming more AJAX'y all the time, and they are not sequential at all.
AJAX is not CPU intensive. In fact, everything on the web is bound pretty much by your network connection and the load on the server. Yes, serves will benefit from lots of cores, but you, on the desktop, will not.
> Watching a video while another tab checks my Gmail is a parallel task.
With a modern video card, your video decoding is offloaded almost completely to the GPU. That is, of course, unless you are running Linux and have no specs for that... Checking Gmail requires no CPU time at all, since Gmail supports IMAP, which notifies the client when new mail is available without any need to poll. See IMAP IDLE RFC.
> Have you ever listened to a song through your computer while coding, > running an email program, and running an instant messaging program?
Email is already idle, as explained in the above RFC. IM is pretty much the same way, waiting on the network 99.99% of the time. Your editor spends the majority of its time waiting on you. Your music is processed by the sound card, unless you are a cheapskate and use AC97 onboard crap. In fact, the only time you put any appreciable load on your CPU is when you are compiling. The compiler does benefit from multiple cores, but only to a point. 2 cores I can fill, 4 or 8 might get used with a large project. Anything more might help, but is probably not worth paying for. You need to think now and then, you know; might as well do it during the four seconds it takes to build your subproject.
> Imagine the song compressed with a new codec that is twice as > efficient in terms of size but twice as compute intensive.
So you process half the data at half the speed?:) Can you divide?
> Imagine the email program indexing your email for efficient search, > running algorithms to assess the email's importance to you, and > virus checking new deliveries.
Most of us get email rather infrequently. I don't think I've ever had more than ten messages a day. But say you're Linus, and get a thousand messages per day. Each one might have a few kilobytes of text. So let's say, 10M total input. My hard disk can read 10M in 0.2s, actual indexing is a single pass through the data, and you might write 10-20k of index results. I doubt this will take more than a few seconds. You can use a PIII for that. If you do it on the fly, it will take even less time. Virus checking is a little more intensive, but if the mail program is smart enough to do it in the background, you won't notice that either.
> Imagine your code editor doing on the fly analysis of what you are coding, and making suggestions.
You mean like Visual Studio does with its API lookup dropdowns? That probably takes no CPU at all, being a database lookup. If you are thinking about AI, I'll laugh at you. It ain't happening any time soon. Anything that is happening any time soon will not be computationally expensive.
> Now that fast computers are cheap, people who never edited video or photos are doing it.
Photo editing is not CPU intensive, with the exception of filters, which can indeed be parallelized. But the performance improvement is again not something worth paying for. Filters aren't even used all that often.
> If you want a significant market besides gamers who need more cores, > it is people making videos, especially HD videos.
Yeah, that's what we need. More idiots making fools of themselves in HD video. As if YouTube didn't teach you anything.
> And don't forget about virus writers. They need a few cores to run on as well!
Are you suggesting I support virus writers?
> Computer power keeps its steady progress higher, and we keep finding interesting things to do with it all.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see any of those interesting new things. Even video editing was around and quite usable bac
Re:I've seen an effect
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1, Troll
> No matter how good you think the intentions you have are. If *insert corporation > here* wants your code they can take it and use it to create restrictions for the user.
Well, duh! The point is that I don't care. If they take my code and put restrictions on it, I still don't care: no matter what happens, I still have my code. Anyone who wants to get my code can still get my code. What they can't get is the *insert corporation here*'s code that they added to my code, and the one very important point the GPL camp misses is that only a communist would lay claim to that code. The corporation wrote it, it's theirs. They can keep it, or sell it, or give it away. But it is immoral for me to force them to give it away. I can do what I want with my free software; I have no right to dictate others what to do with the code they write, even if it is using my code that they legally obtained from me. When I release free software, it's free software. Period. No friggin' GPL strings attached.
Re:I've seen an effect
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
> If you want to share the code, then why are you licensing it?
Because of the liability disclaimer. Public domain does not provide you with any liability protection in the US, and while I have not heard of anyone being sued for his public domain programs, it could happen, and I certainly don't want to be the first.
> You're going to have to pull a quote on that. > I highly doubt anyone in the history of the universe has ever said that "Java is the best thing ever,
And how am I going to do that? Slashdot search is not exactly Google. All I have is my memory now. But Java was most definitely hyped as "the best thing ever" when it first appeared. "It will make all apps platform-independent", they said (it didn't). "It is so much better at memory management than C++", they said (it isn't). And "everyone will be using it", they definitely said (and that certainly isn't true either).
> I do recognize that it's a good fit in embedded device applications, which is what it was designed for in the first place.
Are you nuts? Running a huge JVM on an embedded device? Of course, these days "embedded" just means it is not a desktop, and has a crappy OS interface. Back when Java first came out, that certainly was not true. Memory on embedded devices was seriously scarce, and so was processing power. Running a JVM would have been absolutely out of the question. Java was designed as a safe generic language, correcting the perceived faults of C++, as it were.
> As for Slashdot specifically, if anything, this site seems to be pretty hostile to Java.
Now it is, that it is out of favor. People are switching to Python and Ruby in droves.
> If you don't beleave that the normal application is dieing check out you computer store and compare it 10 years ago.
Of course the "normal application" is dying. I'm usually the one to bring up that point in the first place. The problem is that it isn't being replaced by anything. To put it bluntly: web apps are crap. The interface is unusable. The latency is hair-raising. The functionality is nonexistent. The security is atrocious. Oh, and you don't get to keep your files any more. Some online company has it, reads it, and uses it to serve you ads. The normal application really is important. Just because nobody makes them any more, doesn't mean they aren't needed. Nobody makes them because the skill has been lost. And Java and interpreted languages are at least partly to blame.
> Back in them olden day we needed an app to do anything. CD's with encylipedias, application > to connect to online services (AOL Disks) $5.00 games of cards.
You need an app to do anything now too. Sure, information is now online, but that's it. It's about learning stuff, not doing stuff. If you want to do anything, to create anything, you need a desktop application. You aren't going to be writing a novel on a cellphone. You aren't going to edit an animated movie on "Google Movie Editor". You aren't going to design a circuit board, print it, iron it, and etch it. All of these things need real apps. Online just doesn't cut it.
> Today if you are board and want to play a quick game just go on the web and play a flash based game
Yeah, like there are any flash games worth playing. If you are easily amused, try Minesweeper. If you want a real game, like say Civilization, you need an app. You are not going to play the damn thing on a cell phone. You need performance, you need decent graphics, and you need good gameplay. None of these things can be done in a web app. Graphics can be done on the desktop, but the other two requirements can no longer be implemented due to lack of skills.
> You don't really need extra software to access companies information
What people forget these days, that information is not an end in itself. You don't just go looking for information without a reason. If you do, you are wasting time. You need information so you can do stuff. It is a means to an end. Yes, you can find information on the web, but you need a desktop app to do stuff, and that latter part is what's really important. Information doesn't make the world go around. People doing real things make the world go around. You can try building an "information economy", but you will not succeed unless there are enough people actually doing stuff who can support you. It's basic economics. You need producers. If you have no producers, your economy will die. It's that simple, and is amply illustrated by what's going on in the United States today.
> you can make apps and do more realtime chanages to the code vs. compiling it over and over again.
Oh, and this is bullshit too. Compiling an application doesn't take long, unless you have a bloated behemoth like OpenOffice with a gigabyte of source code. But in that case, all the time you save by not compiling it, you'll lose by interpreting it. Heck, just the loading time alone will probably do it.
I find it funny that we have statements like "Java never mattered except to sell books", while I distinctly remember hordes of posters on this very site only a few years ago, rabidly arguing that Java is the best thing ever and that nobody will be using anything but Java in the future. Now, we have hordes of Ruby, Python, and what-not advocates saying the same things. I guess it's their turn. I'll just keep my C++, thank you very much, which nobody advocates these days, and everyone says is obsolete, too complicated, and inherently broken. Go ahead, mod me as flamebait! I'm used to it.
> Gee, you THINK you can do X because it's perfectly legal syntax and it makes sense because > you do X in other object-oriented languages, but in C++ it either fails outright or its > undefined behavior in the language
This is precisely my point. You learn some "object-oriented language" and then come here bashing C++ when it fails to conform to your academic ideas on how a language ought to behave. Well, don't do that! C++ is not an "object-oriented" language in the academic sense. You need to get out of your ivory tower more.
> For example, if you declare even one virtual member function, you HAVE to declare your destructor virtual.
No you don't. The reason you declare a virtual function is to use an object through a pointer. The reason you declare a virtual destructor is to delete an object through a base pointer. Just because you do one, doesn't mean you do the other. C++ gives you control over how you use your objects, and it is a good thing. If you learn the C++ concepts in the C++ way, instead of through the lens of some other language, you will not be suffering from delusions.
> This, most emphatically, is not "you let the language shape your thoughts", this is psychosis.
Yes, when you try to combine your ideology with the C++ way, psychosis is precisely what will result. Give in! Surrender! The C++ way is the one true way!:)
> When I'm driving my car and I turn the steering wheel right, I expect the car to run right, without having to think
That's what I would expect when using your software, because that is the proper analogy to driving the car. Programming is more like designing the car, and yes, you do want to know what the steering wheel does. What if car designers just had little modules described as "this thingy makes the car turn right"? Then they would just snap the parts together and secure them with duct tape. Would you drive a car designed in this manner? I thought not.
Whenever you want to use a language, you must learn it first. That's true even of Visual Basic. The reason you see those problems of yours as "gotchas" is that you don't understand how the language (and, in the case of C++, the computer) works. If you let the language shape your thoughts instead of trying to cram your crummy thoughts into C++, it would have been much easier and simpler for you.
> The moment I start having to think about implementation detail, I know I'm using the wrong language.
In other words, you don't want to know how your program really works. A fine attitude for a PHB. I suggest you switch to english.
> Wait...are you trying to claim that somehow the GPL is a communist license and the BSD license is not?
Communism is not about giving things away for free. It is about being forced to give away things for free.
> Care to share why you would "not even consider contributing anything to a GPL project?"
I release open source code under MIT license because I want to give the code away; for personal reasons rather than political ones. If I were to use the GPLed license I would only be giving my code to the GPL camp, and nobody else would be able to use it. MIT licensed code can be used by anyone. Since I dislike the GPL camp, the choice is clear.
Not everyone agrees with GNU's communist philosophy. Personally, I release all my open source code under the MIT license (which is what this new 2-clause BSD license really is), and would not even consider contributing anything to a GPL project. If you got out more, you might have met some people who disagree with you like I do.
> The problem is, when they hit a midlife crisis, rather than do something MEANINGFUL, like bug out of the rat race
How do you know what is meaningful to you? You probably have spent your entire life without thinking about it. Just went from college to your job, and worked there ever since. How do you know what you need to do? Maybe a trophy girl really is what you need. Maybe you really do want to race cars, or just get drunk and do nothing all day. Until you try, it is sometimes hard to tell. So don't go too hard on those who make mistakes.
> Me? I turned 40 and flipped out, but instead of the bleeth and the car, I talked with my > wife, went back to school and got into academia.
Oh yeah. I tried that. But academia is not the place to be if you aren't willing to play politics and subscribe to their extreme left views. I lasted all of one year before remembering all the little things I hated about being in college. Needless to say, it's not for everyone.
> I thought a mid-life crisis was a rebellion against being tied down
No, a midlife crisis is about taking a look at your life and finding it wanting. We all have high hopes and dreams in our young years, and what do we get as we age? We get to watch our dreams die. One after another. It really really hurts. And at some point you just think, "what is this all for? Is this all there is to life? Kids, a car, a wife, a bland and safe life, a boring job, and a mortgage?" and then you think forward and imagine yourself dying of old age, having accomplished nothing of significance. Then you'll realize that only a few years after you die, nobody will even remember you existed. Only your kids will remember, with memories that will get weaker. Eventually they'll die too and every trace of you will be gone from the universe. That's what midlife crisis is all about, and it's frigging serious. What you do about it is up to you, but I guarantee you, if you don't do something, you'll end up in the depth of depression.
> Wait eight years. Add a mortgage and a couple of kids. Get used to the > independence. Suddenly a stable job that pays the bills sounds a lot better.
Wait ten more years. You'll find out you hate it more and more every day, culminating in what is known as the "midlife crisis", where you quit your lousy boring job, get a backpack, and go live on the Appalachian trail. Human beings are not suited to being cogs in a machine. Yes, you can tolerate it for a while, but eventually you'll go nuts.
> I don't really understand the view that because someone succeeded they must be smart. This isn't > necessarily true at all. Success is often a matter of luck or timing that had nothing to do with skill.
It has everything to do with skill. It just not necessarily the skill you have, so it might look like magic to you instead. Could I have invented Facebook, for example? Technically, sure. There's nothing difficult about it; I would probably have even done a better job with the implementation. Why didn't I? Because I don't need it and I can't imagine why it would be useful, and so wouldn't have ever thought of it as a sellable idea. In fact, I still can't understand what all those social networking sites are for. It's not an idea that has any meaning to my generation. Yes, I tried it. I have a MySpace profile. I puttered around the site for a few days and just couldn't figure out what the big fuss was about. It took some serious amount of cultural knowledge to see that this idea would sell. I don't know why it sells, but that's why I'm not the Facebook owner. It is not about luck or timing here. It's about knowing things I do not.
> Sure, "to sell metered access to software, music or movies" > Good is a subjective judgement.
Let's not forget poor struggling shareware authors. "Metered access" could be used to offer the 30 day trial period, so let's not blindly lump it all into the "evil" category.
> The point is, if you don't like it, you can write your own.
Why no, the point was that nobody wants to work on X.Org. Suggesting that I write my own is irrelevant, since that would neither make working on X.Org any easier, nor attract more developers to it.
> I would love to see a site where people on the left, right and center could come together > to discuss the issues in a calm and principled manner. Hell for that matter, I'd love
Sometimes, an out-of-context quote is all it takes to answer a question.;)
> The code's low quality is the fault of the community, too. Who do you think wrote that complex code?
Well, I am certainly not the part of that community, since I haven't written a single line of it.
> why not spend a little of your time patching that existing code to factor out some of the unnecessary complexity?
You can't carve rotten wood. X.Org does not need a patch. It needs a complete rewrite.
> Instead, you're spending your time yelling at me on Slashdot, which does precisely nothing.
Neither does whining about how "the community" should do something about X.Org. You ask us what to do about X.Org? I tell you what to do about X.Org: start from scratch and rewrite the whole bloody thing.
Well, excuuuse me! Blame the community. I would blame the code instead. I happen to be one of those few people who actually wanted to contribute something. Specifically, there was this bug where the server would crash after a VT switch, so I thought I'd take a look. Have you seen the X.Org tree? It's not just huge. It's unreadable. I honestly didn't even know where to start. Documentation was minimal. If you wanted to trace one of your Xlib calls, you wouldn't be able to. There are modules, but they don't seem to have any clear purpose. There are libraries that are wrappers around something which is a wrapper around something else. Try and find the real code! I dare you! Even just building the damn thing is a major ordeal. With the current XOrg tree from git, I can't do it at all. Yes, that's right: I can't even compile it, and that ought to be the simplest thing you can do with a project. You want to know why I'm not helping the XOrg project? Because it's a pile of steaming crap, that's why, and I have better things to do with my time than trying to build a windowed skyscraper out of it.
> I say NEVER let a bunch of software engineers try to design a hardware chip.
Well, as a software engineer, I think I would do a pretty good job in designing a hardware chip. Could you please disillusion me in a more detailed manner?
Slashdot Mirror
> Web applications are becoming more AJAX'y all the time, and they are not sequential at all.
AJAX is not CPU intensive. In fact, everything on the web is bound pretty much by your network connection and the load on the server. Yes, serves will benefit from lots of cores, but you, on the desktop, will not.
> Watching a video while another tab checks my Gmail is a parallel task.
With a modern video card, your video decoding is offloaded almost completely to the GPU. That is, of course, unless you are running Linux and have no specs for that... Checking Gmail requires no CPU time at all, since Gmail supports IMAP, which notifies the client when new mail is available without any need to poll. See IMAP IDLE RFC.
> Have you ever listened to a song through your computer while coding,
> running an email program, and running an instant messaging program?
Email is already idle, as explained in the above RFC. IM is pretty much the same way, waiting on the network 99.99% of the time. Your editor spends the majority of its time waiting on you. Your music is processed by the sound card, unless you are a cheapskate and use AC97 onboard crap. In fact, the only time you put any appreciable load on your CPU is when you are compiling. The compiler does benefit from multiple cores, but only to a point. 2 cores I can fill, 4 or 8 might get used with a large project. Anything more might help, but is probably not worth paying for. You need to think now and then, you know; might as well do it during the four seconds it takes to build your subproject.
> Imagine the song compressed with a new codec that is twice as
> efficient in terms of size but twice as compute intensive.
So you process half the data at half the speed? :) Can you divide?
> Imagine the email program indexing your email for efficient search,
> running algorithms to assess the email's importance to you, and
> virus checking new deliveries.
Most of us get email rather infrequently. I don't think I've ever had more than ten messages a day. But say you're Linus, and get a thousand messages per day. Each one might have a few kilobytes of text. So let's say, 10M total input. My hard disk can read 10M in 0.2s, actual indexing is a single pass through the data, and you might write 10-20k of index results. I doubt this will take more than a few seconds. You can use a PIII for that. If you do it on the fly, it will take even less time. Virus checking is a little more intensive, but if the mail program is smart enough to do it in the background, you won't notice that either.
> Imagine your code editor doing on the fly analysis of what you are coding, and making suggestions.
You mean like Visual Studio does with its API lookup dropdowns? That probably takes no CPU at all, being a database lookup. If you are thinking about AI, I'll laugh at you. It ain't happening any time soon. Anything that is happening any time soon will not be computationally expensive.
> Now that fast computers are cheap, people who never edited video or photos are doing it.
Photo editing is not CPU intensive, with the exception of filters, which can indeed be parallelized. But the performance improvement is again not something worth paying for. Filters aren't even used all that often.
> If you want a significant market besides gamers who need more cores,
> it is people making videos, especially HD videos.
Yeah, that's what we need. More idiots making fools of themselves in HD video. As if YouTube didn't teach you anything.
> And don't forget about virus writers. They need a few cores to run on as well!
Are you suggesting I support virus writers?
> Computer power keeps its steady progress higher, and we keep finding interesting things to do with it all.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see any of those interesting new things. Even video editing was around and quite usable bac
> No matter how good you think the intentions you have are. If *insert corporation
> here* wants your code they can take it and use it to create restrictions for the user.
Well, duh! The point is that I don't care. If they take my code and put restrictions on it, I still don't care: no matter what happens, I still have my code. Anyone who wants to get my code can still get my code. What they can't get is the *insert corporation here*'s code that they added to my code, and the one very important point the GPL camp misses is that only a communist would lay claim to that code. The corporation wrote it, it's theirs. They can keep it, or sell it, or give it away. But it is immoral for me to force them to give it away. I can do what I want with my free software; I have no right to dictate others what to do with the code they write, even if it is using my code that they legally obtained from me. When I release free software, it's free software. Period. No friggin' GPL strings attached.
> If you want to share the code, then why are you licensing it?
Because of the liability disclaimer. Public domain does not provide you with any liability protection in the US, and while I have not heard of anyone being sued for his public domain programs, it could happen, and I certainly don't want to be the first.
> You're going to have to pull a quote on that.
> I highly doubt anyone in the history of the universe has ever said that "Java is the best thing ever,
And how am I going to do that? Slashdot search is not exactly Google. All I have is my memory now. But Java was most definitely hyped as "the best thing ever" when it first appeared. "It will make all apps platform-independent", they said (it didn't). "It is so much better at memory management than C++", they said (it isn't). And "everyone will be using it", they definitely said (and that certainly isn't true either).
> I do recognize that it's a good fit in embedded device applications, which is what it was designed for in the first place.
Are you nuts? Running a huge JVM on an embedded device? Of course, these days "embedded" just means it is not a desktop, and has a crappy OS interface. Back when Java first came out, that certainly was not true. Memory on embedded devices was seriously scarce, and so was processing power. Running a JVM would have been absolutely out of the question. Java was designed as a safe generic language, correcting the perceived faults of C++, as it were.
> As for Slashdot specifically, if anything, this site seems to be pretty hostile to Java.
Now it is, that it is out of favor. People are switching to Python and Ruby in droves.
> If you don't beleave that the normal application is dieing check out you computer store and compare it 10 years ago.
Of course the "normal application" is dying. I'm usually the one to bring up that point in the first place. The problem is that it isn't being replaced by anything. To put it bluntly: web apps are crap. The interface is unusable. The latency is hair-raising. The functionality is nonexistent. The security is atrocious. Oh, and you don't get to keep your files any more. Some online company has it, reads it, and uses it to serve you ads. The normal application really is important. Just because nobody makes them any more, doesn't mean they aren't needed. Nobody makes them because the skill has been lost. And Java and interpreted languages are at least partly to blame.
> Back in them olden day we needed an app to do anything. CD's with encylipedias, application
> to connect to online services (AOL Disks) $5.00 games of cards.
You need an app to do anything now too. Sure, information is now online, but that's it. It's about learning stuff, not doing stuff. If you want to do anything, to create anything, you need a desktop application. You aren't going to be writing a novel on a cellphone. You aren't going to edit an animated movie on "Google Movie Editor". You aren't going to design a circuit board, print it, iron it, and etch it. All of these things need real apps. Online just doesn't cut it.
> Today if you are board and want to play a quick game just go on the web and play a flash based game
Yeah, like there are any flash games worth playing. If you are easily amused, try Minesweeper. If you want a real game, like say Civilization, you need an app. You are not going to play the damn thing on a cell phone. You need performance, you need decent graphics, and you need good gameplay. None of these things can be done in a web app. Graphics can be done on the desktop, but the other two requirements can no longer be implemented due to lack of skills.
> You don't really need extra software to access companies information
What people forget these days, that information is not an end in itself. You don't just go looking for information without a reason. If you do, you are wasting time. You need information so you can do stuff. It is a means to an end. Yes, you can find information on the web, but you need a desktop app to do stuff, and that latter part is what's really important. Information doesn't make the world go around. People doing real things make the world go around. You can try building an "information economy", but you will not succeed unless there are enough people actually doing stuff who can support you. It's basic economics. You need producers. If you have no producers, your economy will die. It's that simple, and is amply illustrated by what's going on in the United States today.
> you can make apps and do more realtime chanages to the code vs. compiling it over and over again.
Oh, and this is bullshit too. Compiling an application doesn't take long, unless you have a bloated behemoth like OpenOffice with a gigabyte of source code. But in that case, all the time you save by not compiling it, you'll lose by interpreting it. Heck, just the loading time alone will probably do it.
I find it funny that we have statements like "Java never mattered except to sell books", while I distinctly remember hordes of posters on this very site only a few years ago, rabidly arguing that Java is the best thing ever and that nobody will be using anything but Java in the future. Now, we have hordes of Ruby, Python, and what-not advocates saying the same things. I guess it's their turn. I'll just keep my C++, thank you very much, which nobody advocates these days, and everyone says is obsolete, too complicated, and inherently broken. Go ahead, mod me as flamebait! I'm used to it.
> Gee, you THINK you can do X because it's perfectly legal syntax and it makes sense because
> you do X in other object-oriented languages, but in C++ it either fails outright or its
> undefined behavior in the language
This is precisely my point. You learn some "object-oriented language" and then come here bashing C++ when it fails to conform to your academic ideas on how a language ought to behave. Well, don't do that! C++ is not an "object-oriented" language in the academic sense. You need to get out of your ivory tower more.
> For example, if you declare even one virtual member function, you HAVE to declare your destructor virtual.
No you don't. The reason you declare a virtual function is to use an object through a pointer. The reason you declare a virtual destructor is to delete an object through a base pointer. Just because you do one, doesn't mean you do the other. C++ gives you control over how you use your objects, and it is a good thing. If you learn the C++ concepts in the C++ way, instead of through the lens of some other language, you will not be suffering from delusions.
> This, most emphatically, is not "you let the language shape your thoughts", this is psychosis.
Yes, when you try to combine your ideology with the C++ way, psychosis is precisely what will result. Give in! Surrender! The C++ way is the one true way! :)
> When I'm driving my car and I turn the steering wheel right, I expect the car to run right, without having to think
That's what I would expect when using your software, because that is the proper analogy to driving the car. Programming is more like designing the car, and yes, you do want to know what the steering wheel does. What if car designers just had little modules described as "this thingy makes the car turn right"? Then they would just snap the parts together and secure them with duct tape. Would you drive a car designed in this manner? I thought not.
> C++ is a language of a million gotchas.
Whenever you want to use a language, you must learn it first. That's true even of Visual Basic. The reason you see those problems of yours as "gotchas" is that you don't understand how the language (and, in the case of C++, the computer) works. If you let the language shape your thoughts instead of trying to cram your crummy thoughts into C++, it would have been much easier and simpler for you.
> The moment I start having to think about implementation detail, I know I'm using the wrong language.
In other words, you don't want to know how your program really works. A fine attitude for a PHB. I suggest you switch to english.
> Wait...are you trying to claim that somehow the GPL is a communist license and the BSD license is not?
Communism is not about giving things away for free. It is about being forced to give away things for free.
> Care to share why you would "not even consider contributing anything to a GPL project?"
I release open source code under MIT license because I want to give the code away; for personal reasons rather than political ones. If I were to use the GPLed license I would only be giving my code to the GPL camp, and nobody else would be able to use it. MIT licensed code can be used by anyone. Since I dislike the GPL camp, the choice is clear.
> In fact, if you still think the BSD is a "good license", read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html
Not everyone agrees with GNU's communist philosophy. Personally, I release all my open source code under the MIT license (which is what this new 2-clause BSD license really is), and would not even consider contributing anything to a GPL project. If you got out more, you might have met some people who disagree with you like I do.
> The problem is, when they hit a midlife crisis, rather than do something MEANINGFUL, like bug out of the rat race
How do you know what is meaningful to you? You probably have spent your entire life without thinking about it. Just went from college to your job, and worked there ever since. How do you know what you need to do? Maybe a trophy girl really is what you need. Maybe you really do want to race cars, or just get drunk and do nothing all day. Until you try, it is sometimes hard to tell. So don't go too hard on those who make mistakes.
> Me? I turned 40 and flipped out, but instead of the bleeth and the car, I talked with my
> wife, went back to school and got into academia.
Oh yeah. I tried that. But academia is not the place to be if you aren't willing to play politics and subscribe to their extreme left views. I lasted all of one year before remembering all the little things I hated about being in college. Needless to say, it's not for everyone.
> I thought a mid-life crisis was a rebellion against being tied down
No, a midlife crisis is about taking a look at your life and finding it wanting. We all have high hopes and dreams in our young years, and what do we get as we age? We get to watch our dreams die. One after another. It really really hurts. And at some point you just think, "what is this all for? Is this all there is to life? Kids, a car, a wife, a bland and safe life, a boring job, and a mortgage?" and then you think forward and imagine yourself dying of old age, having accomplished nothing of significance. Then you'll realize that only a few years after you die, nobody will even remember you existed. Only your kids will remember, with memories that will get weaker. Eventually they'll die too and every trace of you will be gone from the universe. That's what midlife crisis is all about, and it's frigging serious. What you do about it is up to you, but I guarantee you, if you don't do something, you'll end up in the depth of depression.
> Wait eight years. Add a mortgage and a couple of kids. Get used to the
> independence. Suddenly a stable job that pays the bills sounds a lot better.
Wait ten more years. You'll find out you hate it more and more every day, culminating in what is known as the "midlife crisis", where you quit your lousy boring job, get a backpack, and go live on the Appalachian trail. Human beings are not suited to being cogs in a machine. Yes, you can tolerate it for a while, but eventually you'll go nuts.
> I don't really understand the view that because someone succeeded they must be smart. This isn't
> necessarily true at all. Success is often a matter of luck or timing that had nothing to do with skill.
It has everything to do with skill. It just not necessarily the skill you have, so it might look like magic to you instead. Could I have invented Facebook, for example? Technically, sure. There's nothing difficult about it; I would probably have even done a better job with the implementation. Why didn't I? Because I don't need it and I can't imagine why it would be useful, and so wouldn't have ever thought of it as a sellable idea. In fact, I still can't understand what all those social networking sites are for. It's not an idea that has any meaning to my generation. Yes, I tried it. I have a MySpace profile. I puttered around the site for a few days and just couldn't figure out what the big fuss was about. It took some serious amount of cultural knowledge to see that this idea would sell. I don't know why it sells, but that's why I'm not the Facebook owner. It is not about luck or timing here. It's about knowing things I do not.
Have you noticed how "spore demo" is the 77th top search? On the WHOLE INTERNET! :)
> Bah! I can think of three female programmers immediately
Ah, lucky man...
> Sure, "to sell metered access to software, music or movies"
> Good is a subjective judgement.
Let's not forget poor struggling shareware authors. "Metered access" could be used to offer the 30 day trial period, so let's not blindly lump it all into the "evil" category.
> The point is, if you don't like it, you can write your own.
Why no, the point was that nobody wants to work on X.Org. Suggesting that I write my own is irrelevant, since that would neither make working on X.Org any easier, nor attract more developers to it.
> I would love to see a site where people on the left, right and center could come together
;)
> to discuss the issues in a calm and principled manner. Hell for that matter, I'd love
Sometimes, an out-of-context quote is all it takes to answer a question.
With NASA's record, they ought to have named this project "Icarus", 'cause that's what will happen to it.
> The code's low quality is the fault of the community, too. Who do you think wrote that complex code?
Well, I am certainly not the part of that community, since I haven't written a single line of it.
> why not spend a little of your time patching that existing code to factor out some of the unnecessary complexity?
You can't carve rotten wood. X.Org does not need a patch. It needs a complete rewrite.
> Instead, you're spending your time yelling at me on Slashdot, which does precisely nothing.
Neither does whining about how "the community" should do something about X.Org. You ask us what to do about X.Org? I tell you what to do about X.Org: start from scratch and rewrite the whole bloody thing.
Well, excuuuse me! Blame the community. I would blame the code instead. I happen to be one of those few people who actually wanted to contribute something. Specifically, there was this bug where the server would crash after a VT switch, so I thought I'd take a look. Have you seen the X.Org tree? It's not just huge. It's unreadable. I honestly didn't even know where to start. Documentation was minimal. If you wanted to trace one of your Xlib calls, you wouldn't be able to. There are modules, but they don't seem to have any clear purpose. There are libraries that are wrappers around something which is a wrapper around something else. Try and find the real code! I dare you! Even just building the damn thing is a major ordeal. With the current XOrg tree from git, I can't do it at all. Yes, that's right: I can't even compile it, and that ought to be the simplest thing you can do with a project. You want to know why I'm not helping the XOrg project? Because it's a pile of steaming crap, that's why, and I have better things to do with my time than trying to build a windowed skyscraper out of it.
> I say NEVER let a bunch of software engineers try to design a hardware chip.
Well, as a software engineer, I think I would do a pretty good job in designing a hardware chip. Could you please disillusion me in a more detailed manner?
"Scientific American" is kinda becoming an oxymoron these days...