Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What's happening to Linux? (Score 2) 257

EVERYTHING you can do in life boils down to a) taking actions b) saying words c) sleeping. There's nothing more that you, as a human, can do with your life.

Now, I'm not totally sure what point you were trying to make, and I certainly don't intend to discuss it with you any further, but a funny thing happens when you 'boil things down'; You lose what it was you were talking about in the first place. Boiled down to dust like that, nothing has any meaning, and discussion ceases to be possible or profitable for either party.

Comment Re:What's happening to Linux? (Score 2) 257

ui is only complex if you want to get dumb peolple to do smart things

And this attitude is part of the whole problem - not that having to use professionally-designed operating system UI's is a problem of course, but it's not free. I do very smart things with my computers thank you very much, but wrestling with their configuration to make them actually work does not number amongst them.

Comment Re:But guys... (Score 1) 257

Most of the time there is no channel for reporting bugs unless you are a multi-seat corporate customer!

Apple has a bug reporting tool, and one that actually gets responses too. If you use OS X Server you even get an email address for problems, and they even reply - it's astonishing. Most of the commercial software that I've actually bought (which is normally pretty cheap software to be honest) also had pretty responsive support. Now if you buy Microsoft software, or Adobe software, or whatever, then sure - they don't listen but they do collect crash reports & so-on (if you let them). I'm not sure that they qualify as 'most software' though, I suppose it depends on how you count it.

Comment Re: But guys... (Score 1) 257

hard lockup bugs in every major version of the OS that I have used from Windows 95 to 7,

Well, Windows 95 & 98 sure - everything prior too. But I've not seen a lockup bug in Windows since then, and I use the damn thing every day at work. Hell, OS X locks up more than Windows, and I've only ever had that happen when I was doing bad things to the graphics driver while writing openGL code.

those have never been and will never be fixed.

The implication of this statement is that not only do you know what these bugs are, but you are able to reproduce them and are maybe even willing to share the details on them. I'd like to find out what they are, if only to cause my workmate's machines to lock up when they're out getting coffee...

Comment Re:What's happening to Linux? (Score 1) 257

weirdness about having to menu click within the selected text to pull up a copy menu.

Or right click if you use a regular mouse (I never could get the hang of Apple mice), or two-finger click/tap on a trackpad, or just Cmd-C.

Mac's GUI design with a single global menu is just *terrible* on a multi-monitor setup

Yosemite has somewhat solved this, but the menu in most applications is more of a lookup for the keyboard shortcut than something you actually use. In Yoseimite you get a menu and a dock on every monitor, and it's better, but it's not perfect. I do wonder about that top menu bar, but at the same time it's nice being able to glance to the top of the screen to see what application is active. And of course, it's really easy to hit with a mouse.

Comment Re:What's happening to Linux? (Score 1, Insightful) 257

Linux is for embedded, and for servers. It excels in both areas, and should rightly be admired for what it has achieved. Linux on the desktop though, is an exercise in futility. The reason is that a desktop user interface is at least an order of magnitude more complex and nuanced that writing a server OS. Not to mention the fact that building a coherent desktop user experience requires pretty solid leadership - something the Open Source community necessarily lacks.

Sorry guys, but that's just how it is. Carry on playing with your desktops, and your Unity and your Pulseaudio and all that. I'm sure it's fun, and I'm sure that I'd have been pretty into it when I used to write code as a hobby. But it's probably best if you just stop trying to pretend that what you're building is in any way comparable to either Windows or OS X.

Comment Re:Saltwater and MTBF (Score 1) 90

It's not a question of whether or not it can be handled. Of course it can be handled, you just take the thing out of the water every x hours and repair/clean/repaint/whatever it. The question is, what's the value of 'x', and what's the associated cost, and at what point does that prevent the whole enterprise from being uneconomical?

Comment Re:By the same logic (Score 1) 335

There are entire languages that are restricted in such a way that ALL programs you can write in them are guaranteed to halt.

They don't sound all that Turing Complete. Examples?

Realtime operating systems even guarantee things are completed in a particular amount of time.

while(1);

I don't think pre-empting an infinite loop counts as 'halting' in this context.

Comment Re:By the same logic (Score 1) 335

It's perfectly possible to prove that a particular program will halt.

In trivial cases yes. In the general case no (of course).

It's also perfectly possible to determine whether any given program will finish or not in a particular amount of time.

Only by running it for that long, which is kind of cheating.

Comment Re: By the same logic (Score 1) 335

The proof may be contrived, but that doesn't make the result any less true. The point is that correctness cannot be proven for software by software. It is provably impossible to write bug-finding software that finds all bugs - even if one could describe to the bug-finder what the program is supposed to do.

Turing machines are contrived too - no-one ever builds a Turing machine to actually do anything, we use real computers instead. But Turing showed that all algorithms are homeomorphic to some Turing machine, and that all results that apply to Turing machines also apply to all other classical computers.

Hence the halting problem is important in that it places fundamental limits on what can and cannot be computed.

Slashdot Top Deals

Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel

Working...