I really like your firefox extension idea - makes me want to develop it myself, but I know there's a mountain of knowlege I'm missing that I'd need to make it happen. Either way, great idea.
A few misconceptions, though: X doesn't have to run with the desktop. Windows can float freely in your existing environment (it's a matter of configuration options or runtime arguments).
Second, the look and feel of the widgets can depend entirely on the X server. I'm talking the "X server" that's running on your local workstation, not the server on which the X application resides. An X server could be customized to run on your OSX that would have all of the Aqua look and probably even many of its features (like spell check). Much of that stuff isn't there yet simply because it hasn't been implemented, but not because it's not permitted by the design of X.
I recently visited an old colleague of mine and we talked tech a bit. He was getting into citrix, an amazing server-side application deployment method... all of the benefits of which have been covered by X for ages. It's sad that people don't know about such impressive technologies simply because they don't have a marketing budget to make it happen.
X has been ahead of its time for quite a while. It's sad to see it still wallowing in obscurity while people reinvent the wheel, slap a fancy label on it, and charge exorbitant amounts of money for it.
That's one of the reasons Linux still has such a small following, IMHO. It may not be a tiny following, but it's smaller than it could be if people really knew what they were missing. I just got hired on at a new place, slicked my workstation and put Ubuntu on it with Beryl. Everyone was so impressed with the usability and beauty of the interface, and they were all amazed that this is what Linux could look like. They'd never heard of it (but they'd heard of OS X and Vista) despite its superior features.
If you re-read the Grand-Parent it actually says Linux has a steeper learning curve than "your run-of-the-mill Windows admin would like".
That doesn't mean it has a steeper learning curve than Windows, it means that it's harder to learn than someone who already knows Windows would like. It could, in fact, have a much more shallow learning curve than Windows and yet someone who knows Windows and doesn't know Linux could still not think the curve is worth it.
So I think what the Grand-Parent, I think he/she is saying that in general Linux is viewed as being "too hard to be worth it", and that it's a misconception.
I don't think it is all about the apps. I think they're a large part, but it's really not all about the apps. After using AmaroK (music player for KDE) I get frustrated at Windows Media Player and iTunes and Winamp. Most consumers don't use their computers for anything but surfing the web, e-mail, music, IM, and typing up a report, and Firefox, Thunderbird, AmaroK, gaim, and OpenOffice do all that just fine.
No, I don't think it's an issue with killer apps. I think it's marketing. People are told that Linux is hard and it's for geeks. Yet when I sit one of these people down in front of a Gnome or KDE desktop, they know how to use it just fine. Those "killer apps" were there the whole time, but ignorance defended the misconception they weren't and wouldn't ever be.
Actually, yes. Since most of their users are Windows users, they want their drivers to be Microsoft approved and signed. Microsoft can take however long they want in this process, or even extend it indefinitely. I really doubt Microsoft will be as friendly to companies that ship Linux drivers as they are to those that don't. They've never shown such altruism in the past.
"just what's going to cost you the least number of hours over the long haul."
Not sure if I agree on that point. It seems like a big investment/sacrifice now to fight the status quo. Truthfully, though, if everyone made the simple investment of short term sacrifice, we'd see the monopoly disappear. We'd see the open market and competition return. We'd see progress like we haven't for a long time. If you really want to talk long term, think about that.
The demo scene is soooo old. It springs from the 286 and earlier. At that point in time the only license that was imposed was the honor system, enforceable only by defamation. I have countless mods/s3ms/xms that have comments/descriptions griping about people that ripped samples or patterns, and that was all that they could do. Now rights are a much more legally enforced thing. Artists in the demo-scene haven't (in many circles) really buckled down and started choosing licenses because legal issues weren't an issue for their role models. A few have had the wisdom to specify licenses for their works, but it's not really a norm yet:-\ I wish they didn't need to. The honor system is my favorite system, but it's seriously flawed because it actually assumes people will be honorable.
That's the thing about the demo scene: it's not about royalties or profit, it's about the art. When someone rips that off and starts charging others for it (without so much as even giving you credit for all your work), it's completely against everything the work was originally composed for. It's like you get a gift for your kids and some jerk steals it from you, re-wraps it, and sells it to your brother as the perfect gift for his nieces/nephews.
When I was reading this I just started cracking up. This is exactly what I do! I just graduated with a CS degree this fall. The last year and a half I got the best grades even though I was in far tougher courses than the earlier years, and it's because I started doing just what the article said. I tell myself it has to be done 4 days before it really does, and I always get it done at least 2 days before it's due. This kind of thinking really changed things around for me.
I agree with the parent. I was writing 686 optimized assembly when I was 12, and calling it from within QBASIC in DOS. Hey, I'm somewhat smart, but not exceptional: if I could do that at 12 I think navigating an unpopular filesystem with an unpopular ( but very usable) interface is quite reasonable.
I think that really depends on the size of your code and the flexibility of the language syntax though, wouldn't it?
Large programs are hard enough for most programmers to comprehend even when written with descriptive variable names. I don't know how much of this is possible in JavaScript, but if you replaced all the strings with ASCII character codes(possible?), replaced semicolons with commas (??), that'd make some stuff pretty darn hard to read, and it'd probably fool an indenter. At very least though an intelligent obfuscater can inject multiple intermediate variables that go through strange arithmetic for a statement like "i = i + 1", change the variable "numberOfKittens" to "akr1189Rnej_orp14n2jjjf__", and the function name "translateToTurkish()" to "k()". It could replace hardcoded numeric values with lengthy boolean computations that produce the same result, and replace a single function call to multiple calls through functions that contain strange if() and else statements that it knows won't get executed and meaningless computations that will.
Sure, some of this stuff is very reasonably reversible (someone could pretty easily script something to compute all those weird equations that can be reduced to constant values), but the reverse obfuscation is likely to be a more buggy process than the obfuscation, and that'd make it error-prone and unreliable.
One irreversible loss of information would be the variable and function names, though. No amount of intelligence in anti-obfuscation could really determine the roles of the symbols except in a few really simple cases.
I'm not trying to say you're wrong, I'm just saying obfuscation can be more formidable than you made it sound if you include logic obfuscation. The obfuscater knows what the code is supposed to do, but anyone (or anything) trying to reverse-obfuscate it has to try and read a very deranged mind.
I see where the misunderstanding is, then. The direct quote from me is "most of the time I respect the intelligence of a person more when their spelling and grammar is correct". This only states that I get a positive impression of people with correct grammar. You implicitly assumed the inverse, which is a reasonable thing to do most of the time, but this time it wasn't correct. To me, correct grammar is evidence of intelligence, but I don't believe incorrect grammar is evidence against it: it's no evidence at all. It confused me when you said I was "debasing the intelligence of others based upon poor grammar" because that's something I make a pointed effort not to do: it didn't sound like something I'd say.
The noun "people" takes an irregular plural form. This makes it an exception to general grammar rules. I'd respect your integrity more if you didn't make the petty move of intentionally ignoring the fact that grammar mistakes on irregular plural possessives are something people do quite commonly and are often even typos. You're clearly using that intentional denial of reason as an ad-hominem attack to discredit my reason and believe what you want to.
Oh, and I'd respect your intelligence more if you realized that ad-hominem attacks don't even address the issues being discussed. If you'd like to debate an issue, debate the issue, not the opponent.
I can speak in support of this comment. I've been absolutely stunned at Qt's ability to scale to an OS's capabilities, and much more importantly its resource management capabilities. It's made optimizations I was "about to make" more time than I can count. Absolutely amazing.
Nothing can be _pure_ Ruby. Ruby binds itself to the lowest level architecture it can through C. Hey - it's better than assembler. That'd just create maintenance headaches up the yin-yang: they'd have to write their own implementation on every hardware platform rather than using the standard C ones, and every time the C implementations got an update they'd have to update their stuff by hand.
C is a language that is low enough level that I see no significant performance hits in abstracting to it over assembly.
Re:Who is Paying for All of This?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Have you ever actually used Rails? Just try Rails with the Goldberg generator once and you'll never go back. I've neverseen a site that one could customize so easily just by using it, including access permissions, view configuration, content, you name it. This is just one of very many powerful generators available for Rails.
Aside from all its technical merit, the fact that it's open source alone should tell you there's probably not much (if any) commercial backing to it. Businessmen, not generally (and I emphasize that I know I'm making a generalization) tech savvy, tend to look at open source projects and doubt them simply because the project is free and businessmen tend to think money always runs every part of the world. It makes them feel they can't trust it as an investment in any way.
As far as complaints about correct capitalization: most of the time I respect the intelligence of a person more when their spelling and grammar is correct. The words Ruby and Rails are proper nouns, and thus should be capitalized. When you're complaining that people aren't picking on capitalization, then saying it's a problem that peoples' capitalization is correct, should you be questioning whether or not you're making truly rational judgment?
I concede to your point about Solaris's scalability ( I hadn't thought about it in those particular terms), though I'd like to raise the consideration of IRIX for that kind of scalability.
On the rest of the stuff it looks like we'll probably just agree to disagree, and I thank you for being mature enough to do so. Rare. I think you may have misunderstood me as far as bias on Microsoft's products, though: I've admitted that supporting their company through use of their products won't reach serious consideration with me, but I make quite a lot of effort to evaluate the merit of their products with unbiased eyes. That said, anyone who claims to be truly 100% objective probably just doesn't realize their own biases.
Wow, this is the biggest piece of shit ad hominem attack I've seen in the Microsoft versus FOSS debate in a long time. How ironic... this particular is itsself an ad-hominem attack. Hmmmmm.......
FreeBSD is freer, Solaris scales better, Windows has wider application support, a broader user base for interoperability, and full hardware support, and both Windows and MacOS X make Linux desktops look like the shit Freer is a matter of debate, definitely. Your claim on scalability is laughable (look at Google's cluster), and as for desktop appeal:
Your ignorance is astonishing.
But that is also the reason some Linux users (and apologists) I believe you meant A reason. I can guarantee that's not the reason for me. I have legal copies of both Windows and OSX and choose Linux because of its usability.
The fact is, in many areas, Microsoft makes the most polished and/or easiest to use product I can't stand a lot of their stuff because it assumes you're an idiot. I'm sorry, but I don't want to click next a thousand times when I install software. Much of their stuff is easy to use for a new user, but much more difficult for a person that knows what he/she is doing. To contrast, in Linux most things have a graphical configuration wizard that I could use if I wanted, but also a freely editable config file. This is rarely the case in Windows.
See, the difference is, real IT professionals and engineers aren't fanbois of either system. Real IT professionals look at each offering, assess its value, and make a choice. Mr. Hypochrite, we finally agree.
See, my problem with Linux fanbois is, Microsoft comes out with something new, they assume it sucks ass, and that's that. Zero research on the possibility that maybe they came out with something really nice. My problem with Microsoft apologists is that if it wasn't for Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior, computing in general (be it web server software, OS's, anything) would have progressed server. They could cure cancer at this point and still have a net negative impact. Supporting anything they do is allowing them to keep holding back progress.
You want to know why some Microsoft products don't suck? Pull your head out of the fucking sand and try them out, rather than ranting about the Evil Empire and the terrible Microsoft fanbois that offend you so much. Ass. If it offends you so much, stop supporting a monopoly that hinders the advancement of technology and hurts our economy, bigger ass.
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I really like your firefox extension idea - makes me want to develop it myself, but I know there's a mountain of knowlege I'm missing that I'd need to make it happen. Either way, great idea.
A few misconceptions, though: X doesn't have to run with the desktop. Windows can float freely in your existing environment (it's a matter of configuration options or runtime arguments).
Second, the look and feel of the widgets can depend entirely on the X server. I'm talking the "X server" that's running on your local workstation, not the server on which the X application resides. An X server could be customized to run on your OSX that would have all of the Aqua look and probably even many of its features (like spell check). Much of that stuff isn't there yet simply because it hasn't been implemented, but not because it's not permitted by the design of X.
I recently visited an old colleague of mine and we talked tech a bit. He was getting into citrix, an amazing server-side application deployment method... all of the benefits of which have been covered by X for ages. It's sad that people don't know about such impressive technologies simply because they don't have a marketing budget to make it happen.
X has been ahead of its time for quite a while. It's sad to see it still wallowing in obscurity while people reinvent the wheel, slap a fancy label on it, and charge exorbitant amounts of money for it.
That's one of the reasons Linux still has such a small following, IMHO. It may not be a tiny following, but it's smaller than it could be if people really knew what they were missing. I just got hired on at a new place, slicked my workstation and put Ubuntu on it with Beryl. Everyone was so impressed with the usability and beauty of the interface, and they were all amazed that this is what Linux could look like. They'd never heard of it (but they'd heard of OS X and Vista) despite its superior features.
Yeah, because Hitler was all about freedom, right?
You're clearly very delusional. Take very much medication, ok?
If you re-read the Grand-Parent it actually says Linux has a steeper learning curve than "your run-of-the-mill Windows admin would like". That doesn't mean it has a steeper learning curve than Windows, it means that it's harder to learn than someone who already knows Windows would like. It could, in fact, have a much more shallow learning curve than Windows and yet someone who knows Windows and doesn't know Linux could still not think the curve is worth it. So I think what the Grand-Parent, I think he/she is saying that in general Linux is viewed as being "too hard to be worth it", and that it's a misconception.
Realizations like that are part of the reason that they're the #1 software company on the planet.
Yeah, and the blatant patent infringements, sabotage of competition, and disregard for court orders helps a bit. But mostly the realizations.
I don't think it is all about the apps. I think they're a large part, but it's really not all about the apps. After using AmaroK (music player for KDE) I get frustrated at Windows Media Player and iTunes and Winamp. Most consumers don't use their computers for anything but surfing the web, e-mail, music, IM, and typing up a report, and Firefox, Thunderbird, AmaroK, gaim, and OpenOffice do all that just fine. No, I don't think it's an issue with killer apps. I think it's marketing. People are told that Linux is hard and it's for geeks. Yet when I sit one of these people down in front of a Gnome or KDE desktop, they know how to use it just fine. Those "killer apps" were there the whole time, but ignorance defended the misconception they weren't and wouldn't ever be.
Actually, yes. Since most of their users are Windows users, they want their drivers to be Microsoft approved and signed. Microsoft can take however long they want in this process, or even extend it indefinitely. I really doubt Microsoft will be as friendly to companies that ship Linux drivers as they are to those that don't. They've never shown such altruism in the past.
"just what's going to cost you the least number of hours over the long haul."
Not sure if I agree on that point. It seems like a big investment/sacrifice now to fight the status quo. Truthfully, though, if everyone made the simple investment of short term sacrifice, we'd see the monopoly disappear. We'd see the open market and competition return. We'd see progress like we haven't for a long time. If you really want to talk long term, think about that.
You can also use ext2 in Windows.
The demo scene is soooo old. It springs from the 286 and earlier. At that point in time the only license that was imposed was the honor system, enforceable only by defamation. I have countless mods/s3ms/xms that have comments/descriptions griping about people that ripped samples or patterns, and that was all that they could do. Now rights are a much more legally enforced thing. Artists in the demo-scene haven't (in many circles) really buckled down and started choosing licenses because legal issues weren't an issue for their role models. A few have had the wisdom to specify licenses for their works, but it's not really a norm yet :-\ I wish they didn't need to. The honor system is my favorite system, but it's seriously flawed because it actually assumes people will be honorable.
That's the thing about the demo scene: it's not about royalties or profit, it's about the art. When someone rips that off and starts charging others for it (without so much as even giving you credit for all your work), it's completely against everything the work was originally composed for. It's like you get a gift for your kids and some jerk steals it from you, re-wraps it, and sells it to your brother as the perfect gift for his nieces/nephews.
When I was reading this I just started cracking up. This is exactly what I do! I just graduated with a CS degree this fall. The last year and a half I got the best grades even though I was in far tougher courses than the earlier years, and it's because I started doing just what the article said. I tell myself it has to be done 4 days before it really does, and I always get it done at least 2 days before it's due. This kind of thinking really changed things around for me.
It's also missing anything in /usr. Thanks for nothing, Apple. What if I want to troubleshoot a Rails generator?
I agree with the parent. I was writing 686 optimized assembly when I was 12, and calling it from within QBASIC in DOS. Hey, I'm somewhat smart, but not exceptional: if I could do that at 12 I think navigating an unpopular filesystem with an unpopular ( but very usable) interface is quite reasonable.
I think that really depends on the size of your code and the flexibility of the language syntax though, wouldn't it?
Large programs are hard enough for most programmers to comprehend even when written with descriptive variable names. I don't know how much of this is possible in JavaScript, but if you replaced all the strings with ASCII character codes(possible?), replaced semicolons with commas (??), that'd make some stuff pretty darn hard to read, and it'd probably fool an indenter. At very least though an intelligent obfuscater can inject multiple intermediate variables that go through strange arithmetic for a statement like "i = i + 1", change the variable "numberOfKittens" to "akr1189Rnej_orp14n2jjjf__", and the function name "translateToTurkish()" to "k()". It could replace hardcoded numeric values with lengthy boolean computations that produce the same result, and replace a single function call to multiple calls through functions that contain strange if() and else statements that it knows won't get executed and meaningless computations that will.
Sure, some of this stuff is very reasonably reversible (someone could pretty easily script something to compute all those weird equations that can be reduced to constant values), but the reverse obfuscation is likely to be a more buggy process than the obfuscation, and that'd make it error-prone and unreliable.
One irreversible loss of information would be the variable and function names, though. No amount of intelligence in anti-obfuscation could really determine the roles of the symbols except in a few really simple cases.
I'm not trying to say you're wrong, I'm just saying obfuscation can be more formidable than you made it sound if you include logic obfuscation. The obfuscater knows what the code is supposed to do, but anyone (or anything) trying to reverse-obfuscate it has to try and read a very deranged mind.
I see where the misunderstanding is, then. The direct quote from me is "most of the time I respect the intelligence of a person more when their spelling and grammar is correct". This only states that I get a positive impression of people with correct grammar. You implicitly assumed the inverse, which is a reasonable thing to do most of the time, but this time it wasn't correct. To me, correct grammar is evidence of intelligence, but I don't believe incorrect grammar is evidence against it: it's no evidence at all. It confused me when you said I was "debasing the intelligence of others based upon poor grammar" because that's something I make a pointed effort not to do: it didn't sound like something I'd say.
The noun "people" takes an irregular plural form. This makes it an exception to general grammar rules. I'd respect your integrity more if you didn't make the petty move of intentionally ignoring the fact that grammar mistakes on irregular plural possessives are something people do quite commonly and are often even typos. You're clearly using that intentional denial of reason as an ad-hominem attack to discredit my reason and believe what you want to.
Oh, and I'd respect your intelligence more if you realized that ad-hominem attacks don't even address the issues being discussed. If you'd like to debate an issue, debate the issue, not the opponent.
My misconception. Thank you for clearing that up.
I can speak in support of this comment. I've been absolutely stunned at Qt's ability to scale to an OS's capabilities, and much more importantly its resource management capabilities. It's made optimizations I was "about to make" more time than I can count. Absolutely amazing.
Nothing can be _pure_ Ruby. Ruby binds itself to the lowest level architecture it can through C. Hey - it's better than assembler. That'd just create maintenance headaches up the yin-yang: they'd have to write their own implementation on every hardware platform rather than using the standard C ones, and every time the C implementations got an update they'd have to update their stuff by hand.
C is a language that is low enough level that I see no significant performance hits in abstracting to it over assembly.
Have you ever actually used Rails? Just try Rails with the Goldberg generator once and you'll never go back. I've neverseen a site that one could customize so easily just by using it, including access permissions, view configuration, content, you name it. This is just one of very many powerful generators available for Rails.
Aside from all its technical merit, the fact that it's open source alone should tell you there's probably not much (if any) commercial backing to it. Businessmen, not generally (and I emphasize that I know I'm making a generalization) tech savvy, tend to look at open source projects and doubt them simply because the project is free and businessmen tend to think money always runs every part of the world. It makes them feel they can't trust it as an investment in any way.
As far as complaints about correct capitalization: most of the time I respect the intelligence of a person more when their spelling and grammar is correct. The words Ruby and Rails are proper nouns, and thus should be capitalized. When you're complaining that people aren't picking on capitalization, then saying it's a problem that peoples' capitalization is correct, should you be questioning whether or not you're making truly rational judgment?
I concede to your point about Solaris's scalability ( I hadn't thought about it in those particular terms), though I'd like to raise the consideration of IRIX for that kind of scalability.
On the rest of the stuff it looks like we'll probably just agree to disagree, and I thank you for being mature enough to do so. Rare. I think you may have misunderstood me as far as bias on Microsoft's products, though: I've admitted that supporting their company through use of their products won't reach serious consideration with me, but I make quite a lot of effort to evaluate the merit of their products with unbiased eyes. That said, anyone who claims to be truly 100% objective probably just doesn't realize their own biases.
Oh how I would mod you up if I could.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cQTEZPTZL4
Your ignorance is astonishing. But that is also the reason some Linux users (and apologists) I believe you meant A reason. I can guarantee that's not the reason for me. I have legal copies of both Windows and OSX and choose Linux because of its usability. The fact is, in many areas, Microsoft makes the most polished and/or easiest to use product I can't stand a lot of their stuff because it assumes you're an idiot. I'm sorry, but I don't want to click next a thousand times when I install software. Much of their stuff is easy to use for a new user, but much more difficult for a person that knows what he/she is doing. To contrast, in Linux most things have a graphical configuration wizard that I could use if I wanted, but also a freely editable config file. This is rarely the case in Windows. See, the difference is, real IT professionals and engineers aren't fanbois of either system. Real IT professionals look at each offering, assess its value, and make a choice. Mr. Hypochrite, we finally agree. See, my problem with Linux fanbois is, Microsoft comes out with something new, they assume it sucks ass, and that's that. Zero research on the possibility that maybe they came out with something really nice. My problem with Microsoft apologists is that if it wasn't for Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior, computing in general (be it web server software, OS's, anything) would have progressed server. They could cure cancer at this point and still have a net negative impact. Supporting anything they do is allowing them to keep holding back progress. You want to know why some Microsoft products don't suck? Pull your head out of the fucking sand and try them out, rather than ranting about the Evil Empire and the terrible Microsoft fanbois that offend you so much. Ass. If it offends you so much, stop supporting a monopoly that hinders the advancement of technology and hurts our economy, bigger ass.
Most people I've met that speak like this are just massively ignorant, not dishonest. Could be either. Let's hope he's not too proud to learn.