Posts by CRConrad 435 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2012
the GPL2 [...] definitely does not oblige a binary distributor to put the source code up on a publicly accessible repo despite the expectations of many in the modern era.
Depends on what you mean by "binary distributor". If you mean "distributor of binary code", then yes, they're damn well obligated to distribut the source code too. Only if you mean "distributor of the output of that binary code", then they aren't obligated -- by the GPL 2 -- to distribute source code. That's why the GPL 3 was created.
But yes, they're not obligated to put it on, specifically, a publicly accessible repo. Only to provide it to the recipients of their binaries (AIUI, in some reasonably convenient way).
Most people's expectations is that OSS is available on a public repository of some sort (git, svn, web, or at the very least a tar ball on an ftp site). I'm sure that most developers have that in mind when they contribute to a project. But, the OSI specifically bars a license from mandating such a thing.Are you sure the OSI explicitly forbids that in a new [version of an] Open Source license, or is it just that none of the current ones (like the GPL 2) demands it, and the OSI doesn't require them to?
Yeah, but that crummy data in the analytics has to come from somewhere. In practice, it's often because in a data warehouse you're joining stuff from many different source systems, where the same (supposedly) thing is stored in different formats. But in this case, it sounds like this "data warehouse" gets data from pretty much only this one system, so... Where does the crap come from, if not from that?
"...is held within Dynamics 365 which is our system of record," the spinner continued. "This solution and the data held within it, is secure and well documented. It does not rely on any SQL database...."
So where does "Dynamics 365" store its data, if not in a database (Microsoft SQL Server, that is)?
When I started as an... "assistant lecturer"? Naah, too fancy. When I started as a Teaching Assistant at Uni in ~1987-88, I was given a key to an office I shared with a guest researcher. As she handed the key over to me, the faculty administrator duly noted that I was now the holder of that key to that office, in her Keyholders... Document. In DW4 -- DisplayWriter 4, an IBM DOS (and OS/2) word processor.
Is there an email client out there that is *so* broken that it automatically quotes all previous correspondence to everyone else *but also* automatically hides such quotes from its own end-user?Depends what you mean by “hides”. My guess is it didn't intentionally hide anything; the older content was just “hidden” by virtue of being further down, off-screen, and they didn't bother to scroll down and forgot it was there.
Imagine the need to comment on such a comment.Pretty much the opposite, in fact: For someone claiming it's unimportant, that begs the question, “Then why are you even bothering to comment?” For someone who thinks it is important, OTOH, it's quite natural and sensible to ask the ostensibly disinterested party precisely that question.
Sooo... Care to answer it, at long last?
No, 72.
It's quite simple, rwally: 80 characters is not just the length of a line in everything from VGA text mode too oodles of older terminals, but also a generally pretty good compromise for legibility.
Cutting down from that to 72 leaves a margin (kind of literally) for quoting up to four levels with " >" at the start of each line (or eight levels if you skip the space, but that's ugly (both skipping the space and quoting so many levels)).
That's really all there's to it; all the guff about ancient TTYs and punch cards is merely coincidental.
The worth of a person or their work is not the same as how much money they have. Phrases like “He's worth $300 million” are just examples of a somewhat recent (probably American) idiom, not what the word “worth” originally – and still! – means. “I won't pay fifty bucks for a loaf of bread, it's only worth two”, “that peace treaty isn't worth the piece of paper it's printed on”, and “Mitchell Baker's yearly work contribution to Mozilla isn't worth anything near seven million dollars” are all examples of perfectly correct usage of the word “worth”. HTH!
It's the AI increasing productivity, not you. Therefore, the AI should get the benefit.Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, just like when widgets started to be manufactured on lathes in stead of whittled with a knife, part of the increased revenue was paid as wages not to the lathe operators – the workers – but to the lathes, right?
All obvious BS: The fault with walking was that it was much slower than a horse; the fault with riding a horse was that it was much slower and carried much less cargo than the train; the fault with swimming was that it was much slower and carried much less cargo than a boat (and you got wet all over), and so on and on. There is not a single such obvious advantage to any newfangled GUI convention.
A few definitely non-newfangled ones had some, like IBM’s Workplace Shell and other such initiatives. (Perhaps Lotus Improv also belongs here?) But they didn't really change the basic WIMP premise at all, nor even the “desktop” metaphor all that much. And they were all from the 1980s and 90s; in more recent decades we've got shit like Ribbons, phone interfaces on 32-inch desktop monitors, and Flat Everything on screens large and small. Try to point out a single concrete advantage over the current desktop metaphor to any of those before next spouting off about “progress” in general.
On the other hand, this tends to stifle innovation and is why we're still using the same basic desktop metaphor almost a half-century later.On the gripping hand,
1) Maybe the reason we're still using the same basic desktop metaphor almost a half-century later is simply that it works better than anything else. And
2) That much-ballyhooed “innovation” is usually form-over-function bullshit like Kai's Power Tools, so you might well want to be careful what you wish for.
Kate (KDE Atdvanced Text Editor) manages both an ellipsis and an arrow for Save with encoding - the arrow indicates a further menu for the choice of encodings and the ellipsis the save dialog which will follow once you've chosen the encoding.That seems pretty darn silly. The dialogue-ellipsis belongs only on those sub-menus; the higher-level one should have only the arrow.
And that's why CUA actually failed. If it was an IBM "initiative", not going to waste my time. [...] And by 1993, no one cared any more as Win 3.x sales quickly caught up with MS/DOS sales.Tell me you either didn't read or didn't understand the article without telling me you either didn't read or didn't understand the article... Thanks to the humongous success of Windows 3.x, CUA was also a humongous success, since Windows 3.x and its interface guidelines for developers were an implementation of CUA.
...CUA version of WS2000 kicking around the building in San Rafael but like the OS/2 version got shelved for the Win 3.x version.As per the above, the Win 3.x version was the CUA version.
You need a rigorously enforced standard GUI (which is enforced by a vendor) if you want a mass market software environment.Which is exactly what Microsoft did for the CUA.
Holy fuck is it annoying when people who don't know WTF they're talking about confidently spew their drivel all over the Internet.
"But its[CUA] influence never reached one part of the software world: the Linux (and Unix) shell."So what? Just because something is there before doesn't mean it can't be reached by outside influences. Like, “Notwithstanding all his other achievements, Napoleon Bonaparte never reached the peak of Mount Everest”. Perfectly true, even though Everest was there long before Napoleon was born.It would be more accurate to put this the other way around. The Unix shell was in place well before CUA.
Likewise, “CUA’s influence never reached the Linux and Unix shell” has nothing to do with whether the shell existed before CUA.
Screen space is valuable and not to be wasted with on-screen menus that are not needed.Easily solved, and AIUI right there in the CUA standard (otherwise, an easy addition, as witnessed by the many applications that already do it): Keep menus hidden until you press Alt.
they're key-board oriented and we ancient curmudgeons are well aware that if your UI is designed to work solely with the key-board taking your hands off that to faff about with a mouseTell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article: The author goes on a bit about how being able to use applications without having a mouse is a vital and integral part of the CUA standard. Freaking Windows still does that! (At least up to version 10; only used 11 for a couple months, about a year ago.) You really never grokked what the underlined letters in the menus mean?!?
Sheesh.
As well as this, the menus listed the keyboard shortcuts and corresponding icons, so you could build a mental model of what is where.AFAICR icons started showing up in menus only with Windows 95 / NT 4, and only got widespread in the XP era. But floating tooltips on toolbar icons, with a bit of luck including the keystroke (and not requiring Alt to be held down IIRC) were pretty much everywhere from 1995.
Ah - a mere youth then - almost 3 years younger than me!Bah, you whippersnapper, the kid is almost
four years younger than me.
I only got into vi around a decade ago, PuTTYing into our DB / ETL servers at work to run, modify, and in the end create the shell scripts that ran our jobs. Think I saw ed in use for real once, in about 2001-02, over the shoulder of a coworker as I assisted him in installing Oracle on AIX at a client's facilities. Could be misremembering, could have been vi.
An example missing feature is that Wayland does not let windows position themselves - a big issue for a bunch of scientific apps which typically spawn multiple windows next to each other for their UI.Not only those, but other kinds too. Above all (IMO), VB/Delphi-style IDEs, of which there are still several around (Free Pascal / Lazarus being the first that comes to mind). Probably a lot of others too, that I don't know of.
The common denominator between them all is that you'd usually want all windows to resume their previous positions when you reopen a project... And that would have to be handled by the application.
In my opinion the mere fact that this hasn't even occurred to the Wayland developers until now is a sign of their utter shortsightedness. (To be honest, feels pretty much like the only thing they've cared about so far is GNOME, and the whole mentality feels eerily similar.) And the fact that they didn't fall all over themselves in gratitude and immediately accepted the first version of this suggestion by, wossname, Mathias Klump?, is even worse. Just fricking ridiculous.
If I weren't so utterly above any hints of paranoia I'd think the whole idea of Wayland was just another stepping-stone in Red (Blue!) Hat's quest to turn Linux into their proprietary OS.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
