I never said terrorists weren't responsible for their actions. But to think that terrorism exists because of psychotic leaders is absurd (though apparently a view widely held).
People value their lives. For a person -- whole groups of people -- to be driven to a suicidal and murderous hatred requires something much more than just a crazy charismatic leader. Psychotic leaders bent on destruction are the stuff of cartoons and James Bond movies.
Hatred comes from injustice. That does not mean that the hatred is always directed correctly, or that acting on hatred is justified. But it doesn't appear spontaneously. In a more just world I don't think something like this would ever happen.
Guess what no one has hijacked a jet
leaving Israel since. The only way to deal with dictators and thugs it it hit them so hard
that they don't get up again. Ever.
Israel has hardly been successful. They've only managed to become the biggest thugs on the block. They don't have peace, stability, or justice in their nation. The path they've chosen will never lead to anything but violence -- the only success they might have would be that they will perpetrate the violence rather than be victimized by it. I could imagine no worse model the US could follow, though unfortunately I can imagine model more likely.
1. Kill them all. Every last one of them. And anyone who ever cared about them. No one will be
left to carry out revenge. No future generations will rise up.
OR
2. Forgive.
Since number two is not incumbent upon us, and we can not force another group to
forgive, you seem to have hit upon the one solution that works.
Mmm... yes, genocide always works pretty well. We can just kill anyone around the world who hates the United States -- what, there must be a few dozen such people, right? -- and then everyone left over will like us a lot.
Oh, wait, there's millions of people around the world that hate the United States. After killing all of them, do you think all the people left will feel good about the United States?
Terrorism comes from injustice. I don't mean to imply that terrorists are then on the side of justice -- but only that if people are treated justly and allowed redress for their grievences, they will not resort to self-destructive, violent behavior like this. This is not a call for forgiveness in particular, but rather for justice. Indiscriminate bombing -- hell, nearly any bombing at all -- is not justice; nor is murder. Justice must be patient and cannot be formed in anger.
Well, I just don't see what I can do with NetHesive that I can't do with my current tools -- and I don't think NetHesive looks like it will be any easier.
I'm not going to program web applications using C or Fortran or VB. I don't need to -- Python can interact with whatever legacy code that's around just fine, and if there's something that needs to be in C, I'll program a module for Python, not for the web at large.
I'm sure NetHesive could speed up development in languages like C, C++, and VB. But you can do this stuff pretty easily in Python already. Perl probably has this stuff already, and PHP will eventually -- PHP has a pretty messy foundation, but if the incentive is there it'll happen. I bet even funny little languages like Pike and Erlang could get onboard. If this XML/SOAPish interaction is so great, there's no reason it can't be duplicated N times for N languages. If it's a meaningful standard then duplication isn't harmful.
Maybe the problem is component-think. We don't need components in an OSS world. We don't need blackbox objects with certain particular interfaces. When the source is available and freely copiable in part or in whole, you are free to make the interface as good as possible. And because people share things so freely, even if it isn't as easy as it might be to create that nice interface/abstraction, collectively it will still get done.
So, no, I still don't get it. I haven't seen the detailed example that I can believe that justifies Web Services. There's always a really fuzzy part, like "the original service finds a complementary service"... uh, sure. That's a big, gaping whole to paper over. How are real people actually going to use this stuff? Without that justification, I'll stick with quality incremental improvements. I'll leave the next-best-thing-since-Push technology to others.
I looked at a little demo y'all put up, and I'm way underimpressed. This configuration file is supposed to make my life easier? I mean, for something on the level of "hello world" that takes a hell of a lot of typing.
Maybe I'm missing the point when it comes to SOAP and all that -- but I've yet to see a really good description of why the hell I (as a web developer) should really care. It's not like I can't communicate over the net already. This makes the communication a bit more robust, perhaps... or maybe more easily integrated. But you can put a wrapper around all the various protocols you need and get the same thing. And you can do that now, with systems that are set up now, everywhere. That's why we use real programming languages and not XML.
The website also seems to imply that NetHesive will be closed source. In other words, I care as much about it as I do about web-enabled COBOL environments. If you can get people to use it and buy it, fine. But you aren't saving anyone. You won't be part of any revolution -- there are already more than enough niche commercial web products around. Hell, there's more than enough niche OSS web products around... but they usually whither and die more quickly, leaving the space more clean.
If there's a salvation for OSS, it's in the fact that people who actually get things done will still be doing things. Hell, if 44% of attempts to purchase online failed, I don't think web services are where attention needs to be focused. A good website/service is not a commodity yet, and most of the problems aren't things SOAP/.NET/NetHesive address.
The Sligh stuff looks nice. I think the Ikea-style of furniture is a bit over-designed. Real nice if you are ready to replace everything in your space with similarly designed furniture, lamps, and everything else... but in the real world, where you buy things piece by piece the highly designed stuff looks out of place.
The Sligh stuff probably would look a bit out of place next to my plastic drawer set, but obviously plastic drawers means they are out of my range anyway. But if they were in my range, I could imagine fitting them together with other things. And wood is always attractive in a very natural way -- unassuming and undemanding.
OTOH, I'm not a big fan of moulding and , which covers most of Sligh's stuff. But I suppose there's lots of other places with that style too, if you look for it.
Slashdot self-hate is getting really tedious. Why the hell would anyone mod up this pointless comment? It's like all the fucking comments that just say "of course, ignorant slashdotters will mod this down, but I'll say it anyway." As though baseless self-critique is somehow a purifying influence, or puts you people above the Masses.
It's disturbing that not only do so many commenters have a negative opinion of slashdot, but moderators think empty criticisms like this are actually worth points. If you have criticism that isn't just glib, go ahead, but otherwise if you don't like it just go the fuck away or keep it to yourself. And please don't encourage this shit by moding it up!
I usually don't swear, and I usually don't like the "if you don't like it, go away" response, but the pretentions of these sorts of posts piss me off. They remind me of high school and the all the idiots who thought they were cool because they insulted everything and everyone.
2. Combine word with CVS and give complete modification histories, and keep all undos in
files. Sure, they grow large, but you could also show precise branches and replay changes
done by one person on another file.
I don't know if I think the rest of the features are so important, but CVS-like abilities would really be an incredible feature. You can track changes in Word, but it's not nearly as general and powerful as CVS.
To a degree perhaps it could just be done with CVS and a backend ASCII-with-markup representation that worked nicely (i.e., equivalent documents would really have equivalent code).
I do some work at a publishing company, and they (like all publishers) are incredibly tied to Word. I've never even really considered mentioning any weening off of Word (the pain has been mitigated by wvWare, though). But with CVS-like features... well, even if I couldn't convince them, their ears would certainly perk up when I listed the possibilities.
I mean, I've almost started thinking of getting them to use Word like an HTML editor, and actually store the HTML in CVS -- which is forgoing most of the features of Word anyway.
The only negative -- freelancers, with their own software, have to be able to work in the system. They all have Word, and it would be twice as hard to change them over (since they work with other publishers and all that).
The Gimp ain't perfect, but it doesn't deserve to be lumped with Star Office. It can't really be used for print work, but for other graphics work it is quite capable and pretty stable.
The Gimp is a real piece of Free Software. It was built as such, with the more modest goals that go with it. Star Office is very commercial, even as it's been freed. Hobby programmers don't like making something that does everything, but does everything poorly. Commercial programmers are forced to make that sort of thing.
Something with more modest goals has a real chance to be like the Gimp -- not full-featured, not a complete replacement, but a pretty darn good piece of software in its own right, with at least some real advantages over the commercial counterpart. Maybe AbiWord can be this -- they are certainly working small to large, and paying more attention to sound design and robustness than featuritis.
Gnumeric is pretty decent already. I don't know what all is going on in the KDE world, but it seems like pieces of an office suite are coming about there too. Good pieces will win out over steaming pile of integrated software that is Star Office. I think Smart Suite and the like have failed in the way SO is failing, no need to go down that path yet again.
Hell, if just wvWare can be made really good you'll have half the features needed (for anyone to use) -- real Word import.
I think the pragmatist opinion that beauty is secondary to usefulness comes out of a confusion of beauty and generality. I'm not saying that usefulness isn't most important -- but beauty for beauty's sake doesn't conflict with usefulness very often.
There's a tendency in people who Think Big, or maybe Beautiful, to make software that is more general than it needs to be. This monolithic design process -- where you Conceive The Program in one fell swoop, then Implement The Design -- that usually ends up ugly and not very useful.
But when you appreciate that beauty is the balance between small and general, then you make things that are really useful.
I third, or fourth, or whatever that opinion. I haven't read the Amber Spyglass yet, but the first two books have been really great. I also like that they maintain the mystical, adventurous feel of a fantasy novel, while the worlds aren't just arbitrary -- either arbitrarily Tolkien/ADD style, or otherwise cliched like most fantasy.
And while there is a theological bend to the books, I really quite enjoy it -- there's something subtle to it. I'm under the impression there's much more of this in the last book. I reread the Narnia Chronicles a while ago, and the Christian basis of them was just painful -- I'm glad I didn't notice it the first time around. There's something about "Good Christian" art (music, fiction, etc.) that tends to be so tedious, unimaginative, and unchallenging.
I must say, even as a true believe, I don't think Linux is a very stable workstation computer. I think it's perfectly good on a server -- I've never had a problem -- but I have to do a hard reboot nearly once a week (I never need to do normal reboots, though).
That's not that bad, but it's no better than Windows 2000. Seriously, the Linux kernel development has not focused on real stability issues, and seems to have little intention to do so. One area that has caused me considerable problems, but will no doubt be fixed, is VM issues. If some rogue program takes up all my virtual memory my computer becomes unusable. I can't even telnet it and kill the offending program most of the time, the system is so sluggish.
The other real problem is one that Linus has decided to, basically, never fix: X. X is really part of the operating system. It does an operating system job -- provides the "safe" interface between software and hardware. Of course, it's not safe. X can bring down your system. Or, even more easily, the X-based interfaces can become unavailable (keyboard lock, some weird focus issue, etc), and there's no way to kill the offending program (unless you have close access to a computer to telnet in).
Linus has decided that graphics are Too Hard, and he's not willing to deal with it. Which is, if you ask me, totally lame. It's like saying virtual memory is Too Hard, and people should just make sure they have enough RAM. Linux is DOS-level when it comes to graphics.
And, yeah, X is complicated. Because it does a lot of non-OS stuff too. But that's what caused programmers of yore to create concepts like abstraction and interfaces -- concepts which seemed to have escaped X designers.
The annoying part is that people really wanted to fix this situation: GGI/KGI (KGI being the kernel level stuff). But, at least from what I understand, they've been put off by Linus and can't get into the kernel. As a result the development has been extremely slow, because the motivation has been understandably low. Looking at the website, though, there's been some activity in the last few months, which is good.
You can't just consider patches to be public domain. The author has to explicitly put them in the public domain, or otherwise give you free license or whatever. They don't strictly need to give you the copyright -- a BSD license is fine. Then you both have the right to do whatever you want with it.
But you really have to be explicit about that situation. You can't just go putting a line at the bottom of some web page saying "hey, and by submitting a patch to me you give me exclusive rights to that code." You need to *ask* the contributor. Personally, I might or might not let you do that. Only if it was really important to me would I assign you ownership. I'd put it under BSD if the entire project was BSD, and it wasn't a seperate component that I wrote.
Three lines doesn't mean anything, though. I don't believe there's been any precedence as to what the limit is -- like there is with sampling a song -- but 3 lines definitely falls below the limit. I believe some of the GNU/FSF position papers reference this.
Then maybe the artists should use all those spiffy tools to make the art, but still have a more restricted (isometric) final product.
Anyway, if the artist has to punt on some things -- like walking and slashing at the same time -- the result will still look considerably better than the 3D equivalent. Artists seem to be pretty good at faking fluid action, while 3D can actually do the fluid action but it still looks like it's faking.
Maybe the artists will become better with the technology and they'll take over from the programmers. I think that's what needs to happen -- 3D can be another medium for the artist, but only if they can take artistic license. It doesn't seem like current systems have that flexibility. An artist can't say "yes, theoretically that's how this should look, but aesthetically or for perceived realism, we will make it look like this."
That's what a good director does when shooting a movie and that's what a game artist should do too.
The learning curve is incredibly small if you're a web developer with some Python experience. This is no major feat. Learning Python is extremely easy.
Python is easy but Zope isn't. I knew Python pretty well going into Zope (a little over a year ago), and it was not easy going. Zope is very opaque. It also has some funny semantics -- aquisition is bizarre, integral, and I think highly flawed. There are other similar parts of Zope.
Admittedly, the documentation has gotten far better since I used it -- it was simply disgraceful when I was using it (an undocumented framework is not very useful). But I seriously doubt that the concepts have become any easier since then.
Honestly, I think it has a lot of the problems that MS products have -- at a certain level, it's dead easy. But as soon as you try to understand what you are doing, you realize the underlying logic is spotty, the metaphors not really complete, and the whole thing doesn't feel deterministic.
I was seduced by the promise of Zope, mostly I think by other people who thought Zope would be really cool as soon as they really learned it. So with this I caution others.
RMS is stuck playing
catch-up to the newcomer now, and it's anyone's guess as to whether he bows out of the race
or starts making good on the HURD's promises.
RMS has said that the HURD had some serious technical problems which has severely hindered its growth. Mostly due to the difficulty of debugging. Others feel Mach is a burden. But RMS has (as far as I know) no technical (or political) problems with the Linux kernel, and that is the standard kernel for GNU.
Of course, the HURD still lives on as long as someone has interest in it. That's how Free Software works. But there's no GNU vs. Linux or RMS vs. Linus competition going on. For the foreseeable future HURD is an experimental system, of interest mostly to OS developers. At one point Linux was in a similar position. Many OSes have never gone past that. So it goes.
Looking at the docs, it can insert HTML not just at the top and bottom, but also before or after any tag. Particularly interesting tags are and .
Consider a situation where people are using WYSIWYG editors. Maybe they are all using the same editors -- but probably not. Some are probably even using Word. And even if you standardize on an editor, my experience with the templates these editors provide is that they are less than robust. They also require training -- it's very easy for someone to create a page that seems to fit with the overall site look, but are actually static and won't update.
A preprocessor won't work, because then there's a whole complexity to updating the site -- they can't simply upload a page, because it will be in a raw form and the preprocessor has to be run. That sucks. All the programs just support FTP, everything else requires all sorts of training and the inevitable mistakes.
PHP sucks for this. Really. WYSIWYG don't let you create invalid HTML pages -- that means there will be a <head> and all that, and if people have to put the <? echo header(); ?> crap in their pages you are burdening them with a lot for little benefit.
So this leads you to mod_layout. I've implemented the same thing before in PHP, Perl, and Python -- which is only to say: it's really useful, I've really used this sort of thing and been happy with it, and I bet an Apache module will do it faster than the P* languages.
No one ever ever ever would use "shortcut" to mean hypertext link except Microsoft. That was my point.
Yes, like a shortcut, MS's filesystem shortcuts get you someplace quicker, but half the time don't work. That's fine if they think shortcut is a better word there. But using it for hypertext links is stupid -- there is nothing except the link, there is no long path that a link is a shortcut to. It makes no sense, any metaphor that it implies is incorrect.
The whole point of usability is not to do anti-intuitive, anti-conventional things like that (no matter how small a detail the word might be). So I would hope that no one would adopt that term in an effort to match MS.
Another thing this reminds me of -- lots of people talk about the importance of the early learning curve, and the ease for new users. And then people talk about the power for highly experienced users. But there is little talk about moving from post-newbie to power user.
A large portion of computer users are quite serious -- they spend a large portion of their time using computers. It is reasonable for them to invest time into improving their performance and expanding their abilities. They don't need to learn how to move files around or whatever -- they've figured out all that -- but they need to learn how to be the true masters of their computer.
No one pays much attention to that step however. You are on your own -- some make the leap, some stumble. Not much effort is put into making this easier, though.
Despite what people seem to think (not you, but many of the repliers), following MS is a bad strategy. As with many of their technical decisions, MS compromises usability and convention in order to make users who are familiar with MS uncomfortable with other systems. This has to be deliberate.
MS uses the term "shortcut" where everyone else in the world uses "link". Not just those lame "shortcuts" in the filesystem, but IE uses that term for HTML links. This is from usability testing? Yeah, right.
In FrontPage instead of having templates, like most HTML editors, FrontPage uses shared borders and themes, while "template" is used for something different. And it uses the term "web" where everyone else uses "site" -- the way they use "web" is simply stupid.
I can't recall any others at the moment, but everytime I use some MS product I notice these minor, strange namings. They often forgo convention to use their own odd words. They want to invent a lingo so everyone is confused when they try something new, just like these people were.
Trying to immitate that would be like using the Word.doc format for file saves -- it's hard enough just to import the crap, you can't expect to become the crap.
In his opinion, he should have been arrested since he did commit an illegal act.
If he's defending the FBI, who actually did the arresting... well, I suppose that's fine. It wasn't really up to the FBI to make judgement on this. But otherwise...
Your dad is probably not well informed on the subject -- on what Sklyarov actually did, and how that was illegal. If he was actually well informed, and the thinks that it was right that Sklyarov's actions were illegal then, quite simply, your dad is a fascist.
Because, if he thinks criticizing a product is itself wrong, and thus justly illegal -- well, that's just plain fascist. Or, even worse, if he thinks that it's simply wrong to do something illegal -- that the law defines morality -- than he is even more fundamentally fascist. To think that authority creates morality is... well, if that doesn't seem wrong to you already it doesn't much matter what I say about it.
Do you have any domains registered? I get at least one email a month telling me to move my domain or my hosting else where (no thinks on both counts). I also know I got some snail junk mail based off whois...
Yes, I have domains registered. I get a lot of spam from the address listed in WHOIS, and I occasionally get junk mail and phone calls from it too. And yet, somehow, I find the strength to go on.
I can appreciate arguments based on the importance of anonymity, though I don't feel that WHOIS is any great threat to anonymity of speach -- you can't anonymously own land, either, and it doesn't harm dissidents considerably.
But arguments based on the inconvenience of hitting delete do not impress me.
Why do people care so much if they're listed? I've had my address and phone number public in various places on the net for years, just because. I've gotten one phone call from someone I didn't know over that whole time (and they were nice), and no one's shown up to vandalize my home or anything. Is this so strange?
If you think your privacy is so important, you need to get over yourself. No one gives a damn about you, personally; unless they know you, in which case what does the privacy serve?
Maybe other people just attract more attention than I do, or seem more enjoyable to victimize, or something of that sort. Or maybe people just watch too many news specials on the TV, and haven't learned that most of the world isn't out to get you. And if you have a problem with a specific person, deal with that person -- hiding from the entire world is not really justified unless you went state's evidence or are hiding from the law.
And this isn't a big privacy concern -- it's not like WHOIS has records of sexual activity or brain scans. It's just a freaking address.
For the price of one Britney video, they could run a "great music you've never heard of" promotion for a year. So why don't they? I assume because they reckon they can make more by spending it on filming Britney oiled up a bathtub of vibrators (or whatever's next).
I have a theory on this. They like Britney and the Backstreet Boys because they lack a well-rounded talent. I mean, Britney can dance okay, and the Backstreet Boys can sing alright if you like that sort of thing. But neither could ever go on their own. They are wholely corporate owned and controlled. They aren't going to have artistic differences with the label. They aren't going to go off and found their own label. They aren't going to write slave on their face. They'll take what the corporation gives them, and they will be thankful for it. Because if they're not they are very close to obscurity. They can't write songs, they can't play instruments. They've never booked a gig in their life. They are slaves, bred by their masters to be hobbled and incomplete.
It's a much better investment plan than dealing with all those damn artists.
Slashdot Mirror
People value their lives. For a person -- whole groups of people -- to be driven to a suicidal and murderous hatred requires something much more than just a crazy charismatic leader. Psychotic leaders bent on destruction are the stuff of cartoons and James Bond movies.
Hatred comes from injustice. That does not mean that the hatred is always directed correctly, or that acting on hatred is justified. But it doesn't appear spontaneously. In a more just world I don't think something like this would ever happen.
Oh, wait, there's millions of people around the world that hate the United States. After killing all of them, do you think all the people left will feel good about the United States?
Terrorism comes from injustice. I don't mean to imply that terrorists are then on the side of justice -- but only that if people are treated justly and allowed redress for their grievences, they will not resort to self-destructive, violent behavior like this. This is not a call for forgiveness in particular, but rather for justice. Indiscriminate bombing -- hell, nearly any bombing at all -- is not justice; nor is murder. Justice must be patient and cannot be formed in anger.
I'm not going to program web applications using C or Fortran or VB. I don't need to -- Python can interact with whatever legacy code that's around just fine, and if there's something that needs to be in C, I'll program a module for Python, not for the web at large.
I'm sure NetHesive could speed up development in languages like C, C++, and VB. But you can do this stuff pretty easily in Python already. Perl probably has this stuff already, and PHP will eventually -- PHP has a pretty messy foundation, but if the incentive is there it'll happen. I bet even funny little languages like Pike and Erlang could get onboard. If this XML/SOAPish interaction is so great, there's no reason it can't be duplicated N times for N languages. If it's a meaningful standard then duplication isn't harmful.
Maybe the problem is component-think. We don't need components in an OSS world. We don't need blackbox objects with certain particular interfaces. When the source is available and freely copiable in part or in whole, you are free to make the interface as good as possible. And because people share things so freely, even if it isn't as easy as it might be to create that nice interface/abstraction, collectively it will still get done.
So, no, I still don't get it. I haven't seen the detailed example that I can believe that justifies Web Services. There's always a really fuzzy part, like "the original service finds a complementary service"... uh, sure. That's a big, gaping whole to paper over. How are real people actually going to use this stuff? Without that justification, I'll stick with quality incremental improvements. I'll leave the next-best-thing-since-Push technology to others.
Maybe I'm missing the point when it comes to SOAP and all that -- but I've yet to see a really good description of why the hell I (as a web developer) should really care. It's not like I can't communicate over the net already. This makes the communication a bit more robust, perhaps... or maybe more easily integrated. But you can put a wrapper around all the various protocols you need and get the same thing. And you can do that now, with systems that are set up now, everywhere. That's why we use real programming languages and not XML.
The website also seems to imply that NetHesive will be closed source. In other words, I care as much about it as I do about web-enabled COBOL environments. If you can get people to use it and buy it, fine. But you aren't saving anyone. You won't be part of any revolution -- there are already more than enough niche commercial web products around. Hell, there's more than enough niche OSS web products around... but they usually whither and die more quickly, leaving the space more clean.
If there's a salvation for OSS, it's in the fact that people who actually get things done will still be doing things. Hell, if 44% of attempts to purchase online failed, I don't think web services are where attention needs to be focused. A good website/service is not a commodity yet, and most of the problems aren't things SOAP/.NET/NetHesive address.
The Sligh stuff probably would look a bit out of place next to my plastic drawer set, but obviously plastic drawers means they are out of my range anyway. But if they were in my range, I could imagine fitting them together with other things. And wood is always attractive in a very natural way -- unassuming and undemanding.
OTOH, I'm not a big fan of moulding and , which covers most of Sligh's stuff. But I suppose there's lots of other places with that style too, if you look for it.
It's disturbing that not only do so many commenters have a negative opinion of slashdot, but moderators think empty criticisms like this are actually worth points. If you have criticism that isn't just glib, go ahead, but otherwise if you don't like it just go the fuck away or keep it to yourself. And please don't encourage this shit by moding it up!
I usually don't swear, and I usually don't like the "if you don't like it, go away" response, but the pretentions of these sorts of posts piss me off. They remind me of high school and the all the idiots who thought they were cool because they insulted everything and everyone.
To a degree perhaps it could just be done with CVS and a backend ASCII-with-markup representation that worked nicely (i.e., equivalent documents would really have equivalent code).
I do some work at a publishing company, and they (like all publishers) are incredibly tied to Word. I've never even really considered mentioning any weening off of Word (the pain has been mitigated by wvWare, though). But with CVS-like features... well, even if I couldn't convince them, their ears would certainly perk up when I listed the possibilities.
I mean, I've almost started thinking of getting them to use Word like an HTML editor, and actually store the HTML in CVS -- which is forgoing most of the features of Word anyway.
The only negative -- freelancers, with their own software, have to be able to work in the system. They all have Word, and it would be twice as hard to change them over (since they work with other publishers and all that).
The Gimp is a real piece of Free Software. It was built as such, with the more modest goals that go with it. Star Office is very commercial, even as it's been freed. Hobby programmers don't like making something that does everything, but does everything poorly. Commercial programmers are forced to make that sort of thing.
Something with more modest goals has a real chance to be like the Gimp -- not full-featured, not a complete replacement, but a pretty darn good piece of software in its own right, with at least some real advantages over the commercial counterpart. Maybe AbiWord can be this -- they are certainly working small to large, and paying more attention to sound design and robustness than featuritis. Gnumeric is pretty decent already. I don't know what all is going on in the KDE world, but it seems like pieces of an office suite are coming about there too. Good pieces will win out over steaming pile of integrated software that is Star Office. I think Smart Suite and the like have failed in the way SO is failing, no need to go down that path yet again.
Hell, if just wvWare can be made really good you'll have half the features needed (for anyone to use) -- real Word import.
There's a tendency in people who Think Big, or maybe Beautiful, to make software that is more general than it needs to be. This monolithic design process -- where you Conceive The Program in one fell swoop, then Implement The Design -- that usually ends up ugly and not very useful.
But when you appreciate that beauty is the balance between small and general, then you make things that are really useful.
And while there is a theological bend to the books, I really quite enjoy it -- there's something subtle to it. I'm under the impression there's much more of this in the last book. I reread the Narnia Chronicles a while ago, and the Christian basis of them was just painful -- I'm glad I didn't notice it the first time around. There's something about "Good Christian" art (music, fiction, etc.) that tends to be so tedious, unimaginative, and unchallenging.
That's not that bad, but it's no better than Windows 2000. Seriously, the Linux kernel development has not focused on real stability issues, and seems to have little intention to do so. One area that has caused me considerable problems, but will no doubt be fixed, is VM issues. If some rogue program takes up all my virtual memory my computer becomes unusable. I can't even telnet it and kill the offending program most of the time, the system is so sluggish.
The other real problem is one that Linus has decided to, basically, never fix: X. X is really part of the operating system. It does an operating system job -- provides the "safe" interface between software and hardware. Of course, it's not safe. X can bring down your system. Or, even more easily, the X-based interfaces can become unavailable (keyboard lock, some weird focus issue, etc), and there's no way to kill the offending program (unless you have close access to a computer to telnet in).
Linus has decided that graphics are Too Hard, and he's not willing to deal with it. Which is, if you ask me, totally lame. It's like saying virtual memory is Too Hard, and people should just make sure they have enough RAM. Linux is DOS-level when it comes to graphics.
And, yeah, X is complicated. Because it does a lot of non-OS stuff too. But that's what caused programmers of yore to create concepts like abstraction and interfaces -- concepts which seemed to have escaped X designers.
The annoying part is that people really wanted to fix this situation: GGI/KGI (KGI being the kernel level stuff). But, at least from what I understand, they've been put off by Linus and can't get into the kernel. As a result the development has been extremely slow, because the motivation has been understandably low. Looking at the website, though, there's been some activity in the last few months, which is good.
But you really have to be explicit about that situation. You can't just go putting a line at the bottom of some web page saying "hey, and by submitting a patch to me you give me exclusive rights to that code." You need to *ask* the contributor. Personally, I might or might not let you do that. Only if it was really important to me would I assign you ownership. I'd put it under BSD if the entire project was BSD, and it wasn't a seperate component that I wrote.
Three lines doesn't mean anything, though. I don't believe there's been any precedence as to what the limit is -- like there is with sampling a song -- but 3 lines definitely falls below the limit. I believe some of the GNU/FSF position papers reference this.
Anyway, if the artist has to punt on some things -- like walking and slashing at the same time -- the result will still look considerably better than the 3D equivalent. Artists seem to be pretty good at faking fluid action, while 3D can actually do the fluid action but it still looks like it's faking.
Maybe the artists will become better with the technology and they'll take over from the programmers. I think that's what needs to happen -- 3D can be another medium for the artist, but only if they can take artistic license. It doesn't seem like current systems have that flexibility. An artist can't say "yes, theoretically that's how this should look, but aesthetically or for perceived realism, we will make it look like this."
That's what a good director does when shooting a movie and that's what a game artist should do too.
Admittedly, the documentation has gotten far better since I used it -- it was simply disgraceful when I was using it (an undocumented framework is not very useful). But I seriously doubt that the concepts have become any easier since then.
Honestly, I think it has a lot of the problems that MS products have -- at a certain level, it's dead easy. But as soon as you try to understand what you are doing, you realize the underlying logic is spotty, the metaphors not really complete, and the whole thing doesn't feel deterministic.
I was seduced by the promise of Zope, mostly I think by other people who thought Zope would be really cool as soon as they really learned it. So with this I caution others.
Of course, the HURD still lives on as long as someone has interest in it. That's how Free Software works. But there's no GNU vs. Linux or RMS vs. Linus competition going on. For the foreseeable future HURD is an experimental system, of interest mostly to OS developers. At one point Linux was in a similar position. Many OSes have never gone past that. So it goes.
Consider a situation where people are using WYSIWYG editors. Maybe they are all using the same editors -- but probably not. Some are probably even using Word. And even if you standardize on an editor, my experience with the templates these editors provide is that they are less than robust. They also require training -- it's very easy for someone to create a page that seems to fit with the overall site look, but are actually static and won't update.
A preprocessor won't work, because then there's a whole complexity to updating the site -- they can't simply upload a page, because it will be in a raw form and the preprocessor has to be run. That sucks. All the programs just support FTP, everything else requires all sorts of training and the inevitable mistakes.
PHP sucks for this. Really. WYSIWYG don't let you create invalid HTML pages -- that means there will be a <head> and all that, and if people have to put the <? echo header(); ?> crap in their pages you are burdening them with a lot for little benefit.
So this leads you to mod_layout. I've implemented the same thing before in PHP, Perl, and Python -- which is only to say: it's really useful, I've really used this sort of thing and been happy with it, and I bet an Apache module will do it faster than the P* languages.
Yes, like a shortcut, MS's filesystem shortcuts get you someplace quicker, but half the time don't work. That's fine if they think shortcut is a better word there. But using it for hypertext links is stupid -- there is nothing except the link, there is no long path that a link is a shortcut to. It makes no sense, any metaphor that it implies is incorrect.
The whole point of usability is not to do anti-intuitive, anti-conventional things like that (no matter how small a detail the word might be). So I would hope that no one would adopt that term in an effort to match MS.
A large portion of computer users are quite serious -- they spend a large portion of their time using computers. It is reasonable for them to invest time into improving their performance and expanding their abilities. They don't need to learn how to move files around or whatever -- they've figured out all that -- but they need to learn how to be the true masters of their computer.
No one pays much attention to that step however. You are on your own -- some make the leap, some stumble. Not much effort is put into making this easier, though.
MS uses the term "shortcut" where everyone else in the world uses "link". Not just those lame "shortcuts" in the filesystem, but IE uses that term for HTML links. This is from usability testing? Yeah, right.
In FrontPage instead of having templates, like most HTML editors, FrontPage uses shared borders and themes, while "template" is used for something different. And it uses the term "web" where everyone else uses "site" -- the way they use "web" is simply stupid.
I can't recall any others at the moment, but everytime I use some MS product I notice these minor, strange namings. They often forgo convention to use their own odd words. They want to invent a lingo so everyone is confused when they try something new, just like these people were.
Trying to immitate that would be like using the Word .doc format for file saves -- it's hard enough just to import the crap, you can't expect to become the crap.
Your dad is probably not well informed on the subject -- on what Sklyarov actually did, and how that was illegal. If he was actually well informed, and the thinks that it was right that Sklyarov's actions were illegal then, quite simply, your dad is a fascist.
Because, if he thinks criticizing a product is itself wrong, and thus justly illegal -- well, that's just plain fascist. Or, even worse, if he thinks that it's simply wrong to do something illegal -- that the law defines morality -- than he is even more fundamentally fascist. To think that authority creates morality is... well, if that doesn't seem wrong to you already it doesn't much matter what I say about it.
jcristof@adobe.com,
dstyerwa@adobe.com,
lvacante@adobe.com,
ablatchf@adobe.com,
skrueger@adobe.com,
gbabbit@adobe.com,
wsaso@adobe.com,
jwarnock@adobe.com,
cgeschke@adobe.com,
bchizen@adobe.com,
snarayen@adobe.com,
mdemo@adobe.com,
gfreeman@adobe.com,
cpouliot@adobe.com,
jstephens@adobe.com,
mdyrdahl@adobe.com,
lepstein@adobe.com,
lsellers@adobe.com,
blamkin@adobe.com
As well as the phone number (408) 536-6000
I can appreciate arguments based on the importance of anonymity, though I don't feel that WHOIS is any great threat to anonymity of speach -- you can't anonymously own land, either, and it doesn't harm dissidents considerably.
But arguments based on the inconvenience of hitting delete do not impress me.
If you think your privacy is so important, you need to get over yourself. No one gives a damn about you, personally; unless they know you, in which case what does the privacy serve?
Maybe other people just attract more attention than I do, or seem more enjoyable to victimize, or something of that sort. Or maybe people just watch too many news specials on the TV, and haven't learned that most of the world isn't out to get you. And if you have a problem with a specific person, deal with that person -- hiding from the entire world is not really justified unless you went state's evidence or are hiding from the law.
And this isn't a big privacy concern -- it's not like WHOIS has records of sexual activity or brain scans. It's just a freaking address.
It's a much better investment plan than dealing with all those damn artists.