From: Seebs Date: 2010-03-20T21:41:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Why no TextMate for Linux? On 2010-03-19, David Masover wrote: > A cat is a living creature, which complicates things. True. But it's certainly a kind of thing you can own, and have, say, the legal right to kill whenever you want to. (Moral rights, well, maybe not. Or maybe so. Certainly, most pet owners I know eventually hire someone to kill their pets, unless their pets die quickly and unexpectedly.) > It's probably better with some sort of compromise in certain circumstances, > but I lean much towards the end of letting the end-user do arbitrary things > than letting the content creator add arbitrary restrictions. I lean towards letting them make whatever agreement they want, and if you don't like a particular vendor's agreement, don't buy their product. :) >> I'm not sure of this. It might be that the result would be more expensive >> phones with shorter contracts, because the subsidies really do reduce the >> cost of the phone. Many cell phones are sold for less than they cost to >> produce -- with the excess being covered out of the contracts. > Well, right, but the contracts do cost more over the long run, and they lock > you in. I am not sure that they actually "cost more over the long run" -- as in, I am not sure that I would get enough better rates without that contract to cover the full costs of the phones. I'm not even sure I'd get better rates at all without a contract. > No one who had the money would seriously consider a monthly plan for a > computer. I think it would depend on the terms. > Yet with cell phones, people tend towards the slightly higher monthly fee with > a long-term contract. I suppose we also do that with cars and houses, but it > still seems odd that otherwise-intelligent people, who have the money to spend > on the phone up front, would choose this. Is the fee actually higher? > However, I would first try every alternative that's reasonable. For example, > if I have to use Word, fine, but I'm going to try OpenOffice first. Oh, sure. > If Microsoft stops delivering security patches for XP, it's going to take > significantly more effort on your part to keep it working. Disabling txtmt > URLs in TextMate is one thing, running XP in a completely isolated and > firewalled VM (or a physically-disconnected machine) is another entirely. Yup. >> And if 10% sounds high to you, lemme tell you, it is not unreasonable at >> all. > I'm not skeptical that any text editor can be 10% more productive than any > other. I am skeptical that TextMate is 10% better than _all_ current > alternatives. I don't know. For me, nvi works well enough that I haven't used other stuff much. However, I've certainly heard people speak highly of its relative performance. >> Well, as an obvious example, I use C because I can be pretty confident that >> any OS out there will be able to run simple C programs. > Pretty much any OS that can run C probably has a Ruby port, and failing that, > Perl is _everywhere_. I have at least one machine that hasn't got Ruby because it's in a state where I can't build or upgrade packages -- it's just sitting there waiting for me to replace it with a new machine. The other reason I do C is that I do stuff which isn't possible in other languages. This could not be done sanely in Ruby: http://github.com/wrpseudo/pseudo > Right, but I'm still not seeing where Ruby is particularly vendor-dependent. > It runs on most Unices and Windows. I'm aware there are strange other beasts > out there, but it's already well beyond vendor lock-in. How many Matz are there? I only know of the one... And I'm not totally sure that code for MRI will work for other Ruby implementations, because there's not really a formal standard to compare with yet. > The difference between single-vendor lock-in and not being ported to > everywhere C runs is significant, I think. Oh, sure. There's a ton of variety. But as I understand it, right now, I have a mildly broader range of targets for PHP than I do for Ruby. Not enough to make me tolerate it, though. > That's why another huge factor I use to choose software is whether a package > exists yet. Certainly a good thing to look for in some cases. > Also, there's a particularly brutal hack I've used from time to > time involving starting a 'screen' instance... Heh. -s -- Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam@seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!