Linux-Advocacy Digest #742, Volume #29 Thu, 19 Oct 00 11:13:03 EDT
Contents:
Re: Is there a MS Word (or substitute) for Linux? (Harry Lewis)
Re: Windows 2000 challenges GNOME/KDE (2:1)
Re: Linux to equal NT 3.51???? (2:1)
Re: Is there a MS Word (or substitute) for Linux? (Harry Lewis)
Re: Why is MS copying Sun??? (=?Windows-1252?Q?Paul_'Z'_Ewande=A9?=)
Re: Because programmers hate users (Re: Why are Linux UIs so crappy?) (Roberto
Alsina)
Re: Because programmers hate users (Re: Why are Linux UIs so crappy?) (Donal K.
Fellows)
Re: Because programmers hate users (Re: Why are Linux UIs so crappy?) (Roberto
Alsina)
Re: KDE starting to stress out a little? (Donal K. Fellows)
Re: Is there a MS Word (or substitute) for Linux? (Grant Edwards)
How to detect sensors using gameport? (Walter)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Harry Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Is there a MS Word (or substitute) for Linux?
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:01:20 +0100
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >I agree with what you say, but my point is that, these days, using a
> >computer for word processing is all about content management. A good
> >word processor will provide you with better facilities for this than a
> >program that evolved from a typesetting tool.
>
> Actually, that sounds backwards. Better content management should
> be achieved by tools that segregate content from formatting. Tools
> like Latex do this more cleanly and produce more easily parsable
> output.
Maybe it's the way I use Word (oops - did I just admit to using Word?),
as I start with an outline, then proceed in "document view" without any
formatting (other than the auto formats provided by Word (oops - did I
just admit to using Word "features"?)), then apply the formatting when I
actually need the text in output, but - to me - Word is very good at
separating content from its ultimate rendition (oops - did I just admit
to liking Word).
Well, it looks like I've just condemned myself to a barrage of abuse!
Harry
------------------------------
From: 2:1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Windows 2000 challenges GNOME/KDE
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 16:57:29 +0100
Haoyu Meng wrote:
>
> Windows 2000 is rock solid. I have used it for almost half a year. Only
> had to reboot twice, both times due to conflict from newly installed
> hardware devices.
>
> Windows 2000 is stable, powerful, and easy to use. So does anyone see it
> as seriously challenging the relevance of pushing Linux to the desktop?
Windows 2000 is only easy to use (if indeed it is) when you know how to
use it. Personally, I find Linux a whole lot easier to use than Windows
2000.
If you've only been using Win2K for half a year. Many Other OS boxes
have had uptimes ov years in length. Win2K has not been around long
enough yet to prove its stability.
-Ed
--
Konrad Zuse should recognised. He built the first | Edward Rosten
binary digital computer (Z1, with floating point) the | Engineer
first general purpose computer (the Z3) and the first | u98ejr@
commercial one (Z4). | eng.ox.ac.uk
------------------------------
From: 2:1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Linux to equal NT 3.51????
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 16:59:03 +0100
MH wrote:
>
> Once again, these "experts" such as MW and MLW and the rest, really don't
> know how to *even use* the product they are denigrating. Makes you
> think..."hmm...I think I know why they were having so much trouble with
> windows now....."
>
> It's so silly, really. This guy takes the time to tell us all about
> something windows does not have, when it is there all the time. No, I take
> that back. It's not silly, it's plain sad.
Does proove that 'doze isn't as easy to use an intuitive as you
winvocates would have us all believe.
-Ed
> If these are our IT experts, we're in deep shit people!
>
> "LinuZ TorvaldZ" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:O4qH5.2857$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> >
> > "Matthias Warkus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> skrev i meddelandet
> > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > > It was the Sat, 7 Oct 2000 12:09:08 -0700...
> > > ...and Jim Richardson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > > One annoyance I have with the windows explorer vs KDE's Konqueror, is
> > that
> > > > Konqueror lets you "drill down" the dirtree, just grab a file, and
> drag
> > it
> > > > over a dir, and after a half second, the dir opens and you can drop
> down
> >
> > errrr??...Windows 98 has that...witch Windows was the last you tried?
> > Windows 3.11?
> >
> >
--
Konrad Zuse should recognised. He built the first | Edward Rosten
binary digital computer (Z1, with floating point) the | Engineer
first general purpose computer (the Z3) and the first | u98ejr@
commercial one (Z4). | eng.ox.ac.uk
------------------------------
From: Harry Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Is there a MS Word (or substitute) for Linux?
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:09:10 +0100
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Joseph Dalton wrote:
>
> Harry Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> ...
> >
> > I agree with what you say, but my point is that, these days, using a
> > computer for word processing is all about content management. A good
> > word processor will provide you with better facilities for this than a
> > program that evolved from a typesetting tool.
> >
> > Harry
>
> I disagree. a so-called "good" word processor may give that appearance
> but the reality can be vastly different. Let me quote Neal Stephenson
> from "In the Beginning was the Command Line":
>
> <quote>
> Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old,
> circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0
> It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an
> earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to
> recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the
> document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run
> through a log chipper--the words I'd written were interrupted by
> spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.
>
> Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this
> sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go
> along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter
> programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer
> whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of
> written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting.
> ...
> </quote>
>
> Most companies producing word processors do not have the pristine
> condition of your content at heart, but rather continual churn to
> the next version of the software. As can be seen from the above
> quote this can really play hell with your content management.
>
> Furthermore, features of LaTeX, or even SGML+LaTeX, can offer
> features, in combination with other tools (CVS, some DB) that
> can manage content as well, or even better than most word
> processors.
What you say is entirely true - looking at a Word file, your document
looks like gibberish, not content in its raw form. However, this isn't
evidence that word processors aren't about content - it's evidence of
the fact that word processors use proprietary formats to tie you into
the product. Once inside the system, in my opinion, you're looking at
content (which you can export in a number of formats, inlcuding
unformatted text).
This is not to say that I wouldn't find it easier to extract content
from the source file of a tool like LaTeX than from Word file - it's
just that working with source files definitely isn't what it's all about
- it working with content using the tool that matters!
However, I'm not going to try and convert people to word processing - if
LaTeX works for you, use it!
Harry
------------------------------
From: =?Windows-1252?Q?Paul_'Z'_Ewande=A9?= <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.lang.java.advocacy
Subject: Re: Why is MS copying Sun???
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 16:25:12 +0200
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a écrit dans le message news:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<SNIP> Some stuff </SNIP>
> >> ...much like saying something is the best perfumed dung.
> >
> >And? I'd say calling it dung is pretty harsh -- it does its job.
Certainly
>
> That's disputable.
It runs some people's software [legacy *and* modern] on some people's
hardware, with the added benefit for MS to move the market and developers
from DOS/Win16 to Win32, something that WinNT which makes less compromises,
wouldn't have been able to do.
> >isn't an operating system that I would run out of choice -- but I have to
> >run it on at least one of my computers for compatibility testing.
>
> There is really no excuse to run Win9x.
Sure there is. Supports a wide selection of hardware and software, and runs
on cheap hardware, well, greater than the other consumer level OS..
Now, IMO, Win9x has lived, and should step aside in favor of Win2K.
Paul 'Z' Ewande
------------------------------
From: Roberto Alsina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Because programmers hate users (Re: Why are Linux UIs so crappy?)
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 11:32:12 -0300
El jue, 19 oct 2000, FM escribió:
>Donal K. Fellows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>These are not the only paradigms in use in programming though. The
>>two others that are well known are (the wildly successful) structural
>>programming and OO (not quite as good, but still very useful when
>>modelling the real world.) However, the lessons they teach can be
>>applied fairly to the computational models described above[*] since
>>they do not state how to ascribe semantics to what they describe.
>>They are very useful though.
>
>The only reasons why I think OO is helpful (or the parts of
>the philosophy that I find actually applicable to problem
>solving), are that it forces the programmer to codify more
>abstract type information and that it promotes a higher
>degree of code reuse. On the other hand, these can be done
>without much of the garbage that OO brings.
OO is way overrated, specially among the "practical" programmers, because,
sadly, many believe what they are told, and many have been told good things
about objects in a overly optimistic fashion.
However, OOP is a pretty good compromise. It allows the programmer to write
fairly neat code (unlike strict procedural), it's easy to apply (or easier that
functional, at least IMHO), so people can get productive rather quick with a
minimum of design overhead, since you *can* tack things post facto in OOP,
which on functional is pretty much a pain.
While this ability to survive without design could be considered a bad, or even
evil thing for a technique to allow, it does let a OO programmer produce code
that can adapt to a changing specification. Which, as we all know, is the only
kind there is ;-)
While Prolog and the like are nice (and indeed worth learning), in my
experience they lead to a path of tough code maintenance. It is possible that
this is due to the nature of prolog itself, or the paradigm, but I have no idea
of which one is to blame. Personally, I find the prolog mindset pretty alien,
so I have trouble wrapping my mind around code written using it, perhaps it's
the paradigm. At least *I* don't think the way a prolog program works :-)
--
Roberto Alsina
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donal K. Fellows)
Subject: Re: Because programmers hate users (Re: Why are Linux UIs so crappy?)
Date: 19 Oct 2000 14:24:24 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Richard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The ObjectMemory (a Persistent Otore that stores all objects permanently)
> encodes the class and value of small integers into their objectPointers.
> Since objectPointers have to be word-aligned, that leaves a whole bunch
> of objectPointer values that can't be valid pointers. These are the small
> integers. There is no overlap between the byte representation of small
> integers and that of object pointers.
Ah, yes, I'd forgotten that way of doing it. It has the side effect
of increasing the complexity of computing with the numbers and
reducing the range of those numbers. Even with hardware support for
enforcing that all pointer accesses are word-aligned (which is rather
architecture dependent) you've still got a fairly grotty mechanism
there, IMHO. It also limits the number of these sorts of classes that
you can have (since you've not got many bits to use.)
Just wondering, how does it handle floating point numbers? For many
applications, doing them efficiently is slightly vital, and it is
amazing how up tight some people get if you force them to go through a
dereference for every access or sacrifice some bits to type
indication...
Donal.
--
"[He] would have needed to sell not only his own soul, but have somehow gotten
in on the ground floor of an Amway-like pryamid scheme delivering the souls
of kindergarten students to Satan by the truckload like so many boxes of Girl
Scout Cookies." -- John S. Novak, III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
From: Roberto Alsina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Because programmers hate users (Re: Why are Linux UIs so crappy?)
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 11:39:12 -0300
El mié, 18 oct 2000, Richard escribió:
>Roberto Alsina wrote:
>> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>> Richard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > The only object-oriented alternative to classes (in fact, the *more*
>> OO
>> > alternative to classes) is prototypes. If a language has objects
>> without
>> > any class, is it possible to create more of these objects by asking
>> them
>> > to copy themselves?
>>
>> Sure. Not at runtime, though.
>
>IOW, no you can't.
Not at runtime, as I said.
>> > Is it possible to mutate the type of these objects
>> > by, say, adding instance variables and methods to them?
>>
>> Sure, not at runtime, though.
>
>IOW, no you can't. You can do this in ALL prototypical
>languages, even Omega which is statically typed.
Not at runtime, I said.
>> > Is it possible to
>> > override the + operator of one instance of the 'int' primitive type
>> and
>> > not another?
>>
>> No, because int is not a class, not an object (in C++, at least).
>
>What the fuck does that have to do with anything?
It's an answer to your question. Can I do that? No.
>In classless OO languages (ie, prototypical languages) every object
>keeps track of its own methods and you can add/change/delete its
>methods at will.
Sure. As you can in some languages with classes. Python, for instance.
>> Indeed I do. I didn't think I should need to spell it to you, though.
>>
>> In this imaginary language, a class could be a object that doesn't
>> belong to a class, while other objects belong to that specific class.
>>
>> In that way, "what class is X supposed to belong to?" is an illogical
>> question if you are trying to prove X is or not an object (since all
>> answers can be true of things that are objects)
>
>Wrong. An object can either belong to a class or it can be a prototype.
In a language with no classes are all objects prototypes?
>Either way, its methods have to be changeable at will.
Says who?
> *At runtime*.
>Claiming that a class is an object and that it belongs to no class
>doesn't make it so.
Claiming that it ain't doesn't do much either.
>You still haven't proved any kind of contradiction, nor even that you
>know what the word means.
Whatever.
>> Therefore, your quip about classes doesn't lead anywhere in your
>> argument about classes not being objects.
>
>Classes are not objects in C++.
Why?
> Neither are primitive types.
I agree.
> And
>you are confusing a whole bunch of stuff, probably because you don't
>understand what's being said.
Maybe.
>> > > I did provide the quotes. You deleted them. Too bad.
>> >
>> > Here you go:
>>
>> Actually, you reversed them.
>
>I copied them off your article.
You changed the order, IIRC. or I could recall wrongly.
>> > "1) primitive types are not objects. What the class are they supposed
>> to be
>> > of anyways?" and,
>> >
>> > "I don't believe classes should exist in the system at all. New
>> objects should
>> > be created by copying prototypes."
>> >
>> >
>> > Now please provide the logical transformations you used to arrive at
>> your
>> > nonsense starting from these two statements.
>>
>> It's a pleasure. Or rather, would be if you had not deleted the quote
>> you want me to reach. I can't recall it exactly anymore.
>
>Man, you are a lazy asshole. Here:
Lazy? Indeed.
>"So, in short: having a class is not a necessary characteristic of an object.
>So, not belonging to classes doesn't prove classes are not objects." -- Roberto
1) You don't believe classes should exist in the system at all.
2) Therefore, there is possible to have a OO language without classes.
3) Therefore there is possible to have objects in a classless system.
4) On the other hand, objects can belong to a class, in a OO language that has
classes.
5) Therefore: having a class (being member of one) is not a necessary
characteristic of an object.
6) Classes themselves don't belong to a class.
7) Since belonging to a class is not a necessary characteristic of an object, 6
doesn't prove classes are not objects. In fact, it proves nothing one way or
another.
Happy, or do you want symbols?
>> > And perhaps being arrogant, aggressive and belligerent on a newsgroup
>> > (especially one such as this) says absolutely nothing about being a
>> > good human being.
>>
>> I believe it does.
>
>How so?
How do I believe? Sorry, I lack the introspection to understand my belief
process.
--
Roberto Alsina
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donal K. Fellows)
Subject: Re: KDE starting to stress out a little?
Date: 19 Oct 2000 14:39:30 GMT
In article <8sjp8n$crd$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Kobus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Your sig should be about 5 lines long, not 36........
No, .sigs should be a *maximum* of four lines long.
Donal.
--
"[He] would have needed to sell not only his own soul, but have somehow gotten
in on the ground floor of an Amway-like pryamid scheme delivering the souls
of kindergarten students to Satan by the truckload like so many boxes of Girl
Scout Cookies." -- John S. Novak, III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Grant Edwards)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Is there a MS Word (or substitute) for Linux?
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 14:48:54 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Harry Lewis wrote:
>Maybe it's the way I use Word (oops - did I just admit to using Word?),
>as I start with an outline, then proceed in "document view" without any
>formatting (other than the auto formats provided by Word (oops - did I
>just admit to using Word "features"?)), then apply the formatting when I
>actually need the text in output, but - to me - Word is very good at
>separating content from its ultimate rendition (oops - did I just admit
>to liking Word).
I've never seen anybody else use Word like that.
All the people I've worked with spend 90% of their time from
the very beginning futzing with fonts and margins and
backgrounds and colors and whatnot rather than actually
producing content. It would almost be excusable if they ended
up with something nice looking but vacuous. But the don't.
They end up with something ugly and vacuous.
With LaTeX, at least the output looks nice, even if it's drivel.
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! RELAX!!... This
at is gonna be a HEALING
visi.com EXPERIENCE!! Besides,
I work for DING DONGS!
------------------------------
From: Walter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.hardware
Subject: How to detect sensors using gameport?
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 01:48:23 +1100
Hi folks,
I was wondering if there are any utilities out there that can make use
of the game port to read external sensors (such as switches being
opened/closed, or electrical resistance being increased/decreased,
similar to what a joystick does).
I kinda know how I could detect a switch using a serial port (i.e.: the
switch can short 2 of the rs/232 pins, therefore one could check for the
status of the particular signal, or check for a loop condition). But the
game port seems to be more versatile since it is made to be able to read
multiple sensors simultaneously.
Any information would be appreciated.
Please respond to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Many thanks in advance,
--
Walter Lolham | Sanderson Local Government Solutions
| 13th Level, 33 Berry St, North Sydney, NSW, Australia
| Phone: +61-2-9926-2800 (-2888 FAX)
| E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
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