I might expect to see X11 preinstalled on Macs when they can make X11 disappear -- i.e., when X11 applications don't interact with the system differently then Aqua applications. Obviously they are going to look different (though maybe we'll see them port and preinstall GTK/Gnome and/or Qt/KDE with Aqua themes), but right now you have one X11 application with subapplications, and that won't do. Well, it won't do for mass consumption, it's not that big a deal otherwise.
I think it's imporant to remember that Debian's anal approach to licensing has been constructive, not just restrictive. I think that Qt is licensed under the GPL is largely thanks to Debian's analness -- not just complaining about KDE's license violation, but excluding them from the distribution until they got their act together. Now everyone benefits from a clearer licensing situation in KDE, including the KDE developers.
I'm sure many other vague licensing situations for smaller pieces of software have also been sorted out due to the diligence of debian-legal. Hopefully MPlayer will as well.
The exaggeration made fun of/.ers and others who are always harping on Joe Sixpack. They weren't making fun of Windows.
The whole point is that there's too many people who use "Joe Sixpack" as an excuse to make unreasonable and often ignorant demands. Then when people point it out, they insist that Linux is just made by a bunch of people who think they are 31137 and don't understand what it takes to make something that appeals to this mythical Average User.
People act similarly when they ask whether Linux is ready to go Prime Time. Not that long ago I actually saw someone who said Linux wasn't really ready for Prime Time until it supported some Important Applications that were only available on Irix. Still makes me smile when I think about it... yeah, Linux just can't compare to the application support that Irix has. it's amazing how much people will take their own desires, and then make them into universal requirements.
Indeed -- CAs are naturally monopolistic, we might as well have a monopoly at least nominally controlled by the public. And CAs are naturally bureaucratic, so we might as well have a bureaucracy run by the Original Bureaucracy.
It's one of the few paths I can imagine to ubiquitous public keys. Of course the current (US) government is so anti-privacy that it's probably not a good idea right now.
I think the Post Office should run a public key system. It kind of fits, they need something electronic to do, and they have a good reputation when it comes to the important parts: they are non-political, provide a fair price, they provide ubiquitous service, there's already laws in place specifically protecting them from fraud, and they have the governmental connection to make those keys official.
People think this is funny, but Emacs is an operating system, at least for some definitions of operating system.
Obviously Emacs is an environment to build applications. Many applications have been built on Emacs beyond text editing. News reader, instant messengers, email readers, a web browser... these aren't even all that text-editor like (and strangely word processor isn't really on that list).
But it's more than that. When you are programming an Emacs program, you are programming in a fairly insular environment. And the result of your code can be run on multiple operating systems (Emacs is fairly well ported). It's providing the basic services that an operating system might provide. It provides ways to selectively load and execute code, it provides a user input/output mechanism, and it even provides a (tiled) windowing system. It's a high-level OS.
It doesn't fit into the article very well, but the article is kind of stupid. Emacs doesn't have any real protection, but it's a single-user OS. That's not that unusual.
I wouldn't really agree. Well, it might go okay, but I think there's a real benefit in specializing. As time has gone on I've become more and more specialized in the tools, languages, and environments I use. In part I can do this because I get to choose my environments, which I know isn't possible in lots of jobs. But still -- if you commit to something, and you're thoughtful enough to commit to something that warrants it, it pays off.
For instance, I write about 95% of my code these days in Python. I'm really good at Python. Yeah, I know, a good programmer can learn any language quickly, and knowledge of a language doesn't make you a good programmer. But it makes a big difference for productivity. It also means that you can get more attention in those jobs that require your specific skill. My experience in other languages is very important to me, but there's another kind of experience that you can only achieve with expertise.
The jack of all trades is sometimes called for. But the jack of all trades must rely on networking -- because there's a lot of them out there. Sure, some are better than others, but you're still just an IT handyman. You'll need to distinguish yourself with something other than your resume.
The specialist may have only a small pool of jobs they are right for. But they are very right for those jobs. You can be good, you can attain real expertise in your field, people outside of your workplace might even know who you are. If you aren't good at networking through personal connections, then specialization is the only way you'll become networked.
Of course, you're betting on the technology, and if you bet long enough you'll always lose. Becoming a Tcl expert a while ago would have probably worked well, but now it's tanked. The mainframe specialists are all having hard times now. Eventually you'll become out of date, so you have to know when to jump ship for another specialty.
Python Zope - minimum memory foortprint is about 11 megabytes
Of course Zope is not really equivalent to either of the other given web frameworks -- Zope is a CMS. And it's got all the complexity (and memory) of a CMS. There's a lot of much lighter Python web frameworks. I personally use Webware, which uses a servlet style.
Just to clarify, Numeric Python is just Python as well -- it's just a set of modules. It doesn't require a separate interpreter, and it doesn't preclude using the full range of Python modules available.
Python still doesn't have as many modules as Perl, but it has enough. And of course they both have vastly more than MATLAB.
In the Python world Numeric is also used for a lot of non-scientific data work. Games are popular, for instance -- anyplace where the overhead of Python objects is too much. You can cram lots of floats into a Numeric array compared to a normal Python list (which can be heterogeneous). It becomes an interesting way to solve some of the problems associated with dynamic languages; I'm sure Perl can use PDL similarly.
I looked ar Rebol some -- it was cute, but I failed to see how it was as cool as they were trying to say it was. It's really based on Logo, not so much Scheme (though the two languages are cousins). I looked at it because I was interested in what a properly fleshed out Logo implementation could look like.
I don't really see the similarity to Smalltalk, either in Zope or Python. I mean, obviously they are influenced by Smalltalk, since every OO language after Smalltalk was influenced. But I don't think the similarity is distinctive.
If you're just thinking Zope is like Smalltalk because of ZODB, you're fishing -- persistence (in this case not entirely orthogonal) is not some Smalltalk invention. Using a VM and bytecodes is entirely conventional these days. And Python's cross-platform philosophy is different from Smalltalk's -- Smalltalk tends to create an insulated environment where the platform doesn't matter. Python tends to live much more closely to the platform than Smalltalk implementations.
And Zope might be a semantically confused pile of crap, but I wouldn't give Smalltalk credit or blame for that. Smalltalk doesn't have anything like Zope's Acquisition. No decent programming language does -- it's just another name for dynamic scoping.
I also wouldn't emphasize Python's syntactic similarity to C/C++/Java. It's really not there. They share a function syntax, the infix operators, and the use of "." for member access. That's about it. Python uses newlines for statement terminators, "=" is not an operator, uses ":" to start code blocks and indentation to signify scope, does not require parenthesis around conditionals, and has a completely different "for" statement. Sure, it's syntax is based in Algol, unlike Smalltalk (which I might guess is a weird spinoff of Logo)... and while that makes it easier to learn, it's still not nearly as conventional as Java was when it was introduced.
Ditto on the Kinesis keyboard -- I have one that has helped me tremendously. After using the Kinesis for a few years I no longer feel pain from flat keyboards (like I did before I used it), but I can still feel the difference after long periods. And after the short learning period, my typing accuracy improved considerably using the Kinesis without any loss of speed. I recently started using a trackball, which also seems to help -- especially with my thumb doing the clicking (which it can do forever without tiring, unlike my fingers), while at the same time I've set up my environment so that I use the mouse less anyway (using , a very neat window manager).
I also made the choice not to treat myself in many other ways. I occassionally take ibuprophen before I go to sleep, which reduces swelling and I believe that helps me heal. I never take it during the day, or ice, or use any other sort of physical intervention. I have feared that will just address my symptoms, while the underlying problem becomes even greater since I no longer get the painful feedback... when it finally catches up with me it might be worse than ever. My difficulties were only uncomfort and a limiting of my time on the computer -- I know other people have had much more serious conditions, and whatever happens I never want to get there.
Maybe MorphOS won't be a BeOS, but a PalmOS -- there is room for a new operating system, so long as it doesn't compete on the entrenched operating systems territory.
Well, okay, MorphOS probably won't be that. But a new OS is possible, you just might not recognize it when it comes around.
The way tax-payer funded elections are working here in the US is all wrong. I'm on the left, but I don't really agree with the way reform has been phrased -- it's set up by incumbants who want to keep the system closed, and pansy liberals who want to play the political game.
The way it's looking, you get money based loosely on how many votes your party got in the last election. This doesn't make any sense to me -- it creates a feedback loop where votes give money gives votes. There's a little box on tax returns about donating to the presidential fund, and I will always check no because of the way it's set up. They don't give money to people who represent me, and they never will.
When I lived in Minnesota they had a much better system. On your tax returns you didn't just indicate whether you wanted money to go into the fund -- to be distributed through the equations set up by existing politicians -- but you indicated what party you wanted the money to go to. They had about 6 parties when I left -- R, D, Libertarian, Green, Grassroots, Independent... I think there were some other weird ones too.
So even if I couldn't vote for a Green candidate for a certain position -- either because I felt forced to vote for the lesser of two evils, or because the Greens weren't running a candidate last time around -- I could still give money to them. It was democratic, because every person (who did a tax return) could donate and it did not effect how much you payed. It was also much more significant: $50, not the $1 for presidential elections.
This could potentially be extended to giving a certain portion as credits, as opposed to actual cash. The credits could be used to buy air time -- I hate to see tax money funneled into the media's pockets, just to buy back the air space that's the people's property anyway.
I'm using SmartHosting, which I imagine is a similar ($100/mo), though ServerBeach sounds like they give you more. One nice thing, I was able to have any OS, so I could get Debian. They installed the base system, and then I customized it for my needs remotely.
Support also sounds about the same. Which would be fine, except I had a bad experience with them when they gave me a server with a bad hard drive. Bad hardware happens sometimes -- but they denied the problem and tried to blame it on me for quite a while, which shouldn't happen.
But most of the time I don't need them to do anything, and everything works well.
...I'm afraid I still don't understand what is hardware accelerated here. If I want to render a translucent, rotated window, is this done in software?
I believe it is coded in terms of OpenGL -- that is, the drawing primitives are OpenGL calls. So presumably someone else writes the OpenGL layer, in effect an accelerated driver, and Fresco just uses it.
I don't really think it's fair to say PicoGUI is less ambitious -- after all, Fresco is not attempting to handle low-end devices, and it is not dealing with novel interfaces (as necessitated by small devices). For instance, PicoGUI uses predominantly tiled spaces, as opposed to overlapping windows; I personally consider this vastly superior for 99% of application use (BTW, I'm using Ion on X). It's a sort of less-is-more. I don't think pragmatism should be confused for unambitious.
As far as NeWS, it went further than either Fresco or PicoGUI has gone so far (in terms of functionality and practicality). It was truly novel -- I really think it deserves serious thought from any wannabe-X-redesigner, both for its successes and failures. As is often the case, many of the most important choices are made early on, and many of the most important alternatives are forseen by those involved. Of course, the best choices are not always made, we all know what some of the shortcomings of X are, and some of the outright failures of the original vision. But there were important ideas on all sides.
PicoGUI, discussed here recently, seems very similar to Fresco. What is the advantage of Fresco over PicoGUI? PicoGUI actually seems to be somewhat usable right now because it has been made for a very practical purpose, and has gotten real use. A library or system that isn't really used has a hard time developing quickly and responding to real (not imagined) needs.
I think it's also neat that PicoGUI supports multiple (programming) languages simply by having a documented net protocol -- language bindings talk directly with the renderer over the net, instead of wrapping some C interface.
PicoGUI is also small and cross platform. It's certainly not as old as Fresco, but it looks like they're going to lap Fresco pretty easily.
On another front -- what's Fresco's comparison to
NeWS? NeWS, a competitor to X from Sun (late 80's?), had some concepts that were similar to Fresco (and PicoGUI). Considerably more display logic was on the server (renderer). It apparently had lots of bugs and issues, but it actually did reach a usable state. Have they learned from this predecessor? Neither project seems as flexible (NeWS used Postscript for its widgets, so new widgets could be nearly arbitrarily complex)... that flexibility may have been NeWS downfall.
Anyway, it always seemed like a neat idea and an important project to learn from.
I was involved in the development of a prototype Personal Rapid Transit system that would have well served the needs of more dense inner-ring suburbs, but the political will wasn't there from the state government to fund construction.
Were you involved in the Taxi 2000 O'Hare project? I've read vague things about it, but it was never clear what happened to it. It sounded like the Taxi 2000 people had a different vision from the Chicago engineers, and then there's always funding issues to make things difficult...
In good news Taxi 2000 has just gotten the first round of funding to make a very short test track. Hopefully this won't be a false start like other attempts, as the project is funded without compromising the core ideas.
Fourth, those who want to save money buying a relatively new used $40,000 car aren't going to be willing to lose money on a local tax. They'll just drive where the prices are cheaper. I mean this has to be the most silly tax I've ever heard of. People who buy used cars want to save money. For them, it's worth it to go elsewhere.
Someone else has already pointed out this doesn't apply to this situation, but I thought I'd also note that it's also incorrect. I don't know specifically about Washington, but in most places you pay sales taxes based on where you live, not where you bought the car. In theory this is how all sales tax works, but they don't enforce it except with large sales (like cars).
OS X runs on a BSD kernel which runs on a Mach kernel... weird but true! Similar to mkLinux of yore (same people, I think), and of course just like NeXT.
Computer venders aren't going to preinstall Linux in place of Microsoft simply because they don't see enough profit in it; not enough to risk Microsoft's ire, at any rate.
Maybe you didn't notice, but computer vendors are preinstalling Linux. Sure, it's only small guys (like Microtel). They don't have much to lose and Microsoft isn't likely to scare them. What's MS going to do, charge outrageous prices for something they aren't buying anyway?
Companies just offering a Linux option probably aren't going to be the ones to bring Linux to the desktop. It's going to be a little company that actually commits to Linux and doesn't just use it as a bargaining chip in negotiations. It'll either be those Taiwanese manufactures who feel they can win when the computer is a commodity (and is running a commodity OS), or a high quality manufacturer that wants to compete with Apple and can only do it when they can control their OS and not just their hardware.
This is why MacOS X uses a BSD kernel but doesn't uses X windows as the desktop.
But, interestingly enough, it uses mostly (only?) open source server software. They've changed the desktop, but they didn't really change the other stuff (though they did change some -- the user-visible filesystem is different, for instance).
That's why pure-BeOS seems a little silly. Linux (or BSD) is a good kernel, and certain parts of the over-all operating system (that GNU/ part:) are very good quality. Why duplicate that?
If you want to create a whole new desktop, more power to you. That's what BeOS seems to be about. But if that's what it's about, why recreate the other stuff too? It's not that there aren't good ideas in kernels, file systems, etc... but you need to focus, and that's not where a BeOS reimplementation should be focused.
Blue-Eyed OS seems like a much more reasonable effort to me. (Though as far as from-scratch implementations, I still favor GNUStep...)
I saw the movie a couple days ago. Like the first movie, the second movie is very true to the book (which is why it's two hours and fourty minutes long). I can understand why -- unlike most movies, people who read the book are a very major market; you want to make them happy. Still, I feel like the movies should have added something to make them unique from the books -- an expansion of the series, not just a visual interpretation of it. Heck, one of those musical interludes wouldn't have been out of place (the central friendship really isn't well justified).
Anyway: if you liked the first movie, you'll like the second. If you didn't like the first movie at all, you'll feel the same about the second -- it's not qualitatively different.
The movie was actually fairly scary, and the action scenes were done quite well. If I was taking small children I would be a bit concerned. Considering that the third and fourth books were both darker and considerably more scary than the first two books, I'll be interested to see where the movies go. And if the Chamber of Secrets goes 2:40, is the Goblet of Fire going to be a six hour long epic? There will have to be more adaptation for the later books, and the director and script writer are going to have to put their own voices into those movies.
And if you haven't read the books, just read them before you see the movies. The books are easy and enjoyable reads, and there's so many copies about you should be able to borrow one easily.
The key to a successful project is design. Even OSS projects have a design. Anybody can attempt to write for the project but if it doesn't fit with the design or is too far off base to incorporate into the design, that code doesn't get into the next release.
I think the problem with your perspective, and with waterfall-type methodologies, is that they distinguish "design" from "implementation". This isn't engineering, and programmers aren't construction workers building to the blueprint.
A program is a design. It is the formal specification of what the computer (the real construction worker) is supposed to do. Every piece of code written should be a plan and a design.
Of course, that is not always true -- there's a lot of boilerplate and code that requires no thoughtfulness. But it is up to good programmers to eliminate this as much as possible -- to abstract away the parts that require no thoughtfulness, to eliminate portions that are redundant, and to build ourselves tools that will concentrate our effort.
Slashdot Mirror
I might expect to see X11 preinstalled on Macs when they can make X11 disappear -- i.e., when X11 applications don't interact with the system differently then Aqua applications. Obviously they are going to look different (though maybe we'll see them port and preinstall GTK/Gnome and/or Qt/KDE with Aqua themes), but right now you have one X11 application with subapplications, and that won't do. Well, it won't do for mass consumption, it's not that big a deal otherwise.
I'm sure many other vague licensing situations for smaller pieces of software have also been sorted out due to the diligence of debian-legal. Hopefully MPlayer will as well.
The whole point is that there's too many people who use "Joe Sixpack" as an excuse to make unreasonable and often ignorant demands. Then when people point it out, they insist that Linux is just made by a bunch of people who think they are 31137 and don't understand what it takes to make something that appeals to this mythical Average User.
People act similarly when they ask whether Linux is ready to go Prime Time. Not that long ago I actually saw someone who said Linux wasn't really ready for Prime Time until it supported some Important Applications that were only available on Irix. Still makes me smile when I think about it... yeah, Linux just can't compare to the application support that Irix has. it's amazing how much people will take their own desires, and then make them into universal requirements.
It's one of the few paths I can imagine to ubiquitous public keys. Of course the current (US) government is so anti-privacy that it's probably not a good idea right now.
I think the Post Office should run a public key system. It kind of fits, they need something electronic to do, and they have a good reputation when it comes to the important parts: they are non-political, provide a fair price, they provide ubiquitous service, there's already laws in place specifically protecting them from fraud, and they have the governmental connection to make those keys official.
Obviously Emacs is an environment to build applications. Many applications have been built on Emacs beyond text editing. News reader, instant messengers, email readers, a web browser... these aren't even all that text-editor like (and strangely word processor isn't really on that list).
But it's more than that. When you are programming an Emacs program, you are programming in a fairly insular environment. And the result of your code can be run on multiple operating systems (Emacs is fairly well ported). It's providing the basic services that an operating system might provide. It provides ways to selectively load and execute code, it provides a user input/output mechanism, and it even provides a (tiled) windowing system. It's a high-level OS.
It doesn't fit into the article very well, but the article is kind of stupid. Emacs doesn't have any real protection, but it's a single-user OS. That's not that unusual.
For instance, I write about 95% of my code these days in Python. I'm really good at Python. Yeah, I know, a good programmer can learn any language quickly, and knowledge of a language doesn't make you a good programmer. But it makes a big difference for productivity. It also means that you can get more attention in those jobs that require your specific skill. My experience in other languages is very important to me, but there's another kind of experience that you can only achieve with expertise.
The jack of all trades is sometimes called for. But the jack of all trades must rely on networking -- because there's a lot of them out there. Sure, some are better than others, but you're still just an IT handyman. You'll need to distinguish yourself with something other than your resume.
The specialist may have only a small pool of jobs they are right for. But they are very right for those jobs. You can be good, you can attain real expertise in your field, people outside of your workplace might even know who you are. If you aren't good at networking through personal connections, then specialization is the only way you'll become networked.
Of course, you're betting on the technology, and if you bet long enough you'll always lose. Becoming a Tcl expert a while ago would have probably worked well, but now it's tanked. The mainframe specialists are all having hard times now. Eventually you'll become out of date, so you have to know when to jump ship for another specialty.
Python still doesn't have as many modules as Perl, but it has enough. And of course they both have vastly more than MATLAB.
In the Python world Numeric is also used for a lot of non-scientific data work. Games are popular, for instance -- anyplace where the overhead of Python objects is too much. You can cram lots of floats into a Numeric array compared to a normal Python list (which can be heterogeneous). It becomes an interesting way to solve some of the problems associated with dynamic languages; I'm sure Perl can use PDL similarly.
I looked ar Rebol some -- it was cute, but I failed to see how it was as cool as they were trying to say it was. It's really based on Logo, not so much Scheme (though the two languages are cousins). I looked at it because I was interested in what a properly fleshed out Logo implementation could look like.
If you're just thinking Zope is like Smalltalk because of ZODB, you're fishing -- persistence (in this case not entirely orthogonal) is not some Smalltalk invention. Using a VM and bytecodes is entirely conventional these days. And Python's cross-platform philosophy is different from Smalltalk's -- Smalltalk tends to create an insulated environment where the platform doesn't matter. Python tends to live much more closely to the platform than Smalltalk implementations.
And Zope might be a semantically confused pile of crap, but I wouldn't give Smalltalk credit or blame for that. Smalltalk doesn't have anything like Zope's Acquisition. No decent programming language does -- it's just another name for dynamic scoping.
I also wouldn't emphasize Python's syntactic similarity to C/C++/Java. It's really not there. They share a function syntax, the infix operators, and the use of "." for member access. That's about it. Python uses newlines for statement terminators, "=" is not an operator, uses ":" to start code blocks and indentation to signify scope, does not require parenthesis around conditionals, and has a completely different "for" statement. Sure, it's syntax is based in Algol, unlike Smalltalk (which I might guess is a weird spinoff of Logo)... and while that makes it easier to learn, it's still not nearly as conventional as Java was when it was introduced.
I also made the choice not to treat myself in many other ways. I occassionally take ibuprophen before I go to sleep, which reduces swelling and I believe that helps me heal. I never take it during the day, or ice, or use any other sort of physical intervention. I have feared that will just address my symptoms, while the underlying problem becomes even greater since I no longer get the painful feedback... when it finally catches up with me it might be worse than ever. My difficulties were only uncomfort and a limiting of my time on the computer -- I know other people have had much more serious conditions, and whatever happens I never want to get there.
Well, okay, MorphOS probably won't be that. But a new OS is possible, you just might not recognize it when it comes around.
The way it's looking, you get money based loosely on how many votes your party got in the last election. This doesn't make any sense to me -- it creates a feedback loop where votes give money gives votes. There's a little box on tax returns about donating to the presidential fund, and I will always check no because of the way it's set up. They don't give money to people who represent me, and they never will.
When I lived in Minnesota they had a much better system. On your tax returns you didn't just indicate whether you wanted money to go into the fund -- to be distributed through the equations set up by existing politicians -- but you indicated what party you wanted the money to go to. They had about 6 parties when I left -- R, D, Libertarian, Green, Grassroots, Independent... I think there were some other weird ones too.
So even if I couldn't vote for a Green candidate for a certain position -- either because I felt forced to vote for the lesser of two evils, or because the Greens weren't running a candidate last time around -- I could still give money to them. It was democratic, because every person (who did a tax return) could donate and it did not effect how much you payed. It was also much more significant: $50, not the $1 for presidential elections.
This could potentially be extended to giving a certain portion as credits, as opposed to actual cash. The credits could be used to buy air time -- I hate to see tax money funneled into the media's pockets, just to buy back the air space that's the people's property anyway.
Support also sounds about the same. Which would be fine, except I had a bad experience with them when they gave me a server with a bad hard drive. Bad hardware happens sometimes -- but they denied the problem and tried to blame it on me for quite a while, which shouldn't happen.
But most of the time I don't need them to do anything, and everything works well.
As far as NeWS, it went further than either Fresco or PicoGUI has gone so far (in terms of functionality and practicality). It was truly novel -- I really think it deserves serious thought from any wannabe-X-redesigner, both for its successes and failures. As is often the case, many of the most important choices are made early on, and many of the most important alternatives are forseen by those involved. Of course, the best choices are not always made, we all know what some of the shortcomings of X are, and some of the outright failures of the original vision. But there were important ideas on all sides.
I think it's also neat that PicoGUI supports multiple (programming) languages simply by having a documented net protocol -- language bindings talk directly with the renderer over the net, instead of wrapping some C interface.
PicoGUI is also small and cross platform. It's certainly not as old as Fresco, but it looks like they're going to lap Fresco pretty easily.
On another front -- what's Fresco's comparison to NeWS? NeWS, a competitor to X from Sun (late 80's?), had some concepts that were similar to Fresco (and PicoGUI). Considerably more display logic was on the server (renderer). It apparently had lots of bugs and issues, but it actually did reach a usable state. Have they learned from this predecessor? Neither project seems as flexible (NeWS used Postscript for its widgets, so new widgets could be nearly arbitrarily complex)... that flexibility may have been NeWS downfall.
Anyway, it always seemed like a neat idea and an important project to learn from.
In good news Taxi 2000 has just gotten the first round of funding to make a very short test track. Hopefully this won't be a false start like other attempts, as the project is funded without compromising the core ideas.
OS X runs on a BSD kernel which runs on a Mach kernel... weird but true! Similar to mkLinux of yore (same people, I think), and of course just like NeXT.
Companies just offering a Linux option probably aren't going to be the ones to bring Linux to the desktop. It's going to be a little company that actually commits to Linux and doesn't just use it as a bargaining chip in negotiations. It'll either be those Taiwanese manufactures who feel they can win when the computer is a commodity (and is running a commodity OS), or a high quality manufacturer that wants to compete with Apple and can only do it when they can control their OS and not just their hardware.
That's why pure-BeOS seems a little silly. Linux (or BSD) is a good kernel, and certain parts of the over-all operating system (that GNU/ part :) are very good quality. Why duplicate that?
If you want to create a whole new desktop, more power to you. That's what BeOS seems to be about. But if that's what it's about, why recreate the other stuff too? It's not that there aren't good ideas in kernels, file systems, etc... but you need to focus, and that's not where a BeOS reimplementation should be focused.
Blue-Eyed OS seems like a much more reasonable effort to me. (Though as far as from-scratch implementations, I still favor GNUStep...)
Doesn't the Indian government use English for everything anyway (by law)?
Anyway: if you liked the first movie, you'll like the second. If you didn't like the first movie at all, you'll feel the same about the second -- it's not qualitatively different.
The movie was actually fairly scary, and the action scenes were done quite well. If I was taking small children I would be a bit concerned. Considering that the third and fourth books were both darker and considerably more scary than the first two books, I'll be interested to see where the movies go. And if the Chamber of Secrets goes 2:40, is the Goblet of Fire going to be a six hour long epic? There will have to be more adaptation for the later books, and the director and script writer are going to have to put their own voices into those movies.
And if you haven't read the books, just read them before you see the movies. The books are easy and enjoyable reads, and there's so many copies about you should be able to borrow one easily.
A program is a design. It is the formal specification of what the computer (the real construction worker) is supposed to do. Every piece of code written should be a plan and a design.
Of course, that is not always true -- there's a lot of boilerplate and code that requires no thoughtfulness. But it is up to good programmers to eliminate this as much as possible -- to abstract away the parts that require no thoughtfulness, to eliminate portions that are redundant, and to build ourselves tools that will concentrate our effort.