Sorry, but I have a hard time believing that some guy in the sky magically made things. I tend to believe in things that can be proven (i.e., science). And, at least scientific theories have some basis in fact.
Besides, if religion is so sacred, how come it's been changed with the passage of time to accomodate what were (at the time) non-Christian beliefs? At least when scientific views change, it's an attempt to make things make more sense.
"Religion is the opiate of the masses." -- Karl Marx
"... the Bible is a... [work of] fiction..." -- Janeane Garafolo (paraphrased)
Also, I haven't read the article yet, but this sounds highly theoretical to me. Do you know what a black hole is? It's a tightly-packed core of super-dense matter that becomes a massive gravity well, sucking in matter because of its extremely strong gravitational field. However, the only way I've ever heard of to create a REAL black hole is the collapse of a star. Maybe it's just me... but I'm not going to get too worked up over this.
Besides, I know I'd rather know that we were trying to learn and improve ourselves, rather than hide our heads in the dirt and chalk all the mysteries of our world/galaxy/universe/whatever to religious things.
Some people have been saying that MS's Media Player/Netshow supports Mpeg4. I would call this really early support at best as they treat it as a codec not a file ormat.
Well, two points on that:
MPEG-4 WILL be a codec-type arrangement. Apparently, it's been officially stated that MPEG-4 will drop into the QuickTime multimedia framework, and that'll be the native container format for it.
MPEG-4 isn't available yet. From what I understand, MS Media Player uses MP4 (not actually MPEG-4).
I don't know if they were actually willing to consider it or not - their answer was just simply, from what I understand, something to the tune of "we can't do it because of our licensing agreement with Apple"... Maybe they would otherwise. Then again, maybe not.
Microsoft never released Media Player for any UNIX, afaik. They for a very long time claimed it was "coming soon", but no further progress was made (typical Microsoft vaporware policy?), so I assume it's a dead proposition, thankfully.
Oh, wah. Sorry, but as more games get more and more 3D stuff, they require 3D acceleration. If you want to play it, stop your whining, and lay out some cash for the hardware it takes for serious gaming. Otherwise, don't waste our time complaining that the requirements for high-end gaming are going up.
Yes, that's right, but there are software renderers for OpenGL (including Mesa's software GL renderer). It has nothing to do with that, per se. It's strictly a performance issue. Trying to do software OpenGL is just plain not fast. There's no 2 ways about that. As another guy said, measuring your frame rate in seconds per frame isn't much fun.
Actually, Ghostscript does support PDF distillation (PDF-format writing). I don't know if it tries to use the LZW compression format or not for what it writes (likely not - that'd cause problems with the currently GPL'd version as well, I think). Don't believe me? Do gs -help to see for yourself.
I doubt anything would happen, even if that started occurring. Microsoft would find some way to wash their hands of all responsibility for it (as usual) and point the blame at the users.
Far as I know, Navigator/Communicator have supported PNG for most of the 4.x line (if not all). I've heard IE's PNG support is broken though (gee. what a shock.), so I wouldn't trust it.
Maybe Rob can add checks to the scripts for Slashdot, and use PNGs for browsers that support them. (Ok, that might be worthless, on second thought.)
Well, GD has support for reading in a GIF image and making modifications to that. I think that may be where the problem is coming in (because you never know when you'll have to read an LZW-compressed GIF image...)
No one necessarily is overly worried about JPEG compressing the images overly well - just having some acceptable file format to stuff images into is enough. (preferably one without the LZW encumbrance)
I was thinking that too. How many browsers that provide graphical page display support the PNG format? (i.e., not Lynx o other character-cell browsers) If only enough did, we could throw GIF away forever...
I will vigorously disagree with your contention that people are "lazy" and that is why they want to use a Graphical Interface to work with the comptuer[sp].
If you've never been a sysadmin (especially in a public school district) you have no idea what you're talking about. People are most assuredly lazy. 99% of people, given the option of 2 ways of doing something, will pick the one that requires the least expenditure of energy, I assure you. And don't tell me that doesn't qualify as lazy.
Perhaps a simple text-based menu work work as well as the GUI in many cases.
Sorry. No matter how much you do to try to make things simple, there will always be those that are just too dumb/lazy/etc. to pick up on ANYTHING. You seem to be convinced that no one can be just plain stupid. I hate to say it, a lot of people won't want to hear it, but it's true - there are a lot of just plain stupid people out there.
Well, that is certainly interesting, but hard to quantify. Is that including EVERY component that you can install for Debian? (at least, every item from the Main install tree) Because that would include a WHOLE lot more stuff than Windows, even Windows 2000, includes.
As I've mentioned before, IE for Unix can hardly be called a "port". It's just IE compiled against Win32 compatibility libraries for Solaris/SPARC or HP-UX. They really overexaggerate what it takes to do that.
Yes, I think most of us know (though apparently someone didn't) that NTFS is a journalling filesystem.
If you use a nice distro (like, oh, Debian), you might not have such a hard time setting up a PPP dialin account (pppconfig is pretty damn easy - simple Q/A setup).
Unix (and by proxy, Linux) wasn't designed for "non-computer users". It's getting more user friendly (tho I'm not sure I like all the baggage that brings), but as it is now, Linux assumes you, the user, actually have something called a CLUE.
Journalling filesystems are being developed for Linux (journalling extensions for ext2, reiserfs, and ext3). As one other person said tho, I'm not sure I'd trust a Microsoft product to take care of dirty writes like that.
Just picking products off the NT HCL doesn't guarantee jack. Do you have an MCSE? Or do you just believe everything you read?
I'm glad your NT server (server? what are you serving? how much? what kind of load?) is so stable. As for some of the rest of us, we'll let you dink around with NT 5^H^H^H^HWindows 2000 and we'll be happy with our Linux installs.
Tried? Yea, they've tried on at least 2 separate occasions, and failed in both cases. The NT boxes were just plain unstable. They could only run them for a few hours before they just flat out crashed, from what I heard. So HotMail continues to run on FreeBSD and Solaris. What a shame. (not)
Then why do NT preinstalls like to crash? And why's it so hard to setup a decent NT install? Gee, Linux is a lot like Unix, but it's not that hard to get a working install. Besides, so many NT drivers don't work as advertised (drivers can and do contribute to the instability of their OSes).
White papers. Oh yes, WHITE PAPERS. Yea, I really trust their white papers. Come on, be serious. After the crashprone piles that Microsoft calls software and they've chosen to release, I wouldn't trust their white papers. And from what I've heard, both the predecessor product (Wolfpack) and the product on which Janus is supposed to be largely based are pretty damn lousy. (I don't run NT at work. Thankfully.)
I believe in the best tool for the job also. I just happen to not believe that NT is a decent tool for 99% of the jobs I'd want/need to do.
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Sorry, but I have a hard time believing that some guy in the sky magically made things. I tend to believe in things that can be proven (i.e., science). And, at least scientific theories have some basis in fact.
... [work of] fiction ..." -- Janeane Garafolo (paraphrased)
Besides, if religion is so sacred, how come it's been changed with the passage of time to accomodate what were (at the time) non-Christian beliefs? At least when scientific views change, it's an attempt to make things make more sense.
"Religion is the opiate of the masses." -- Karl Marx
"... the Bible is a
s/foolhearty/foolhardy/
Also, I haven't read the article yet, but this sounds highly theoretical to me. Do you know what a black hole is? It's a tightly-packed core of super-dense matter that becomes a massive gravity well, sucking in matter because of its extremely strong gravitational field. However, the only way I've ever heard of to create a REAL black hole is the collapse of a star. Maybe it's just me... but I'm not going to get too worked up over this.
Besides, I know I'd rather know that we were trying to learn and improve ourselves, rather than hide our heads in the dirt and chalk all the mysteries of our world/galaxy/universe/whatever to religious things.
Well, two points on that:
So, there.
Then you obviously don't understand how 'micros~1' came about. Oh well, if you insist. :p
I don't know if they were actually willing to consider it or not - their answer was just simply, from what I understand, something to the tune of "we can't do it because of our licensing agreement with Apple"... Maybe they would otherwise. Then again, maybe not.
Microsoft never released Media Player for any UNIX, afaik. They for a very long time claimed it was "coming soon", but no further progress was made (typical Microsoft vaporware policy?), so I assume it's a dead proposition, thankfully.
That was my general thought. But then, you never know what the real meanings of marketing terms are.
I thought most people talked that way anyway, so it shouldn't be a shock, unless you're a little kid with "virgin ears" (yea, right).
Oh, wah. Sorry, but as more games get more and more 3D stuff, they require 3D acceleration. If you want to play it, stop your whining, and lay out some cash for the hardware it takes for serious gaming. Otherwise, don't waste our time complaining that the requirements for high-end gaming are going up.
Yes, that's right, but there are software renderers for OpenGL (including Mesa's software GL renderer). It has nothing to do with that, per se. It's strictly a performance issue. Trying to do software OpenGL is just plain not fast. There's no 2 ways about that. As another guy said, measuring your frame rate in seconds per frame isn't much fun.
Actually, Ghostscript does support PDF distillation (PDF-format writing). I don't know if it tries to use the LZW compression format or not for what it writes (likely not - that'd cause problems with the currently GPL'd version as well, I think). Don't believe me? Do gs -help to see for yourself.
I doubt anything would happen, even if that started occurring. Microsoft would find some way to wash their hands of all responsibility for it (as usual) and point the blame at the users.
Ok, well, Communicator 4.5 and later apparently do. So, that's something, I guess...
Far as I know, Navigator/Communicator have supported PNG for most of the 4.x line (if not all). I've heard IE's PNG support is broken though (gee. what a shock.), so I wouldn't trust it.
Maybe Rob can add checks to the scripts for Slashdot, and use PNGs for browsers that support them. (Ok, that might be worthless, on second thought.)
Well, GD has support for reading in a GIF image and making modifications to that. I think that may be where the problem is coming in (because you never know when you'll have to read an LZW-compressed GIF image...)
No one necessarily is overly worried about JPEG compressing the images overly well - just having some acceptable file format to stuff images into is enough. (preferably one without the LZW encumbrance)
How about you make a diff, post it on a web site, and give us a URL to it? Slashdot's comment system is mangling your code.
I was thinking that too. How many browsers that provide graphical page display support the PNG format? (i.e., not Lynx o other character-cell browsers) If only enough did, we could throw GIF away forever...
I will vigorously disagree with your contention that people are "lazy" and that is why they want to use a Graphical Interface to work with the comptuer[sp].
If you've never been a sysadmin (especially in a public school district) you have no idea what you're talking about. People are most assuredly lazy. 99% of people, given the option of 2 ways of doing something, will pick the one that requires the least expenditure of energy, I assure you. And don't tell me that doesn't qualify as lazy.
Perhaps a simple text-based menu work work as well as the GUI in many cases.
Sorry. No matter how much you do to try to make things simple, there will always be those that are just too dumb/lazy/etc. to pick up on ANYTHING. You seem to be convinced that no one can be just plain stupid. I hate to say it, a lot of people won't want to hear it, but it's true - there are a lot of just plain stupid people out there.
Well, that is certainly interesting, but hard to quantify. Is that including EVERY component that you can install for Debian? (at least, every item from the Main install tree) Because that would include a WHOLE lot more stuff than Windows, even Windows 2000, includes.
As I've mentioned before, IE for Unix can hardly be called a "port". It's just IE compiled against Win32 compatibility libraries for Solaris/SPARC or HP-UX. They really overexaggerate what it takes to do that.
Yes, I think most of us know (though apparently someone didn't) that NTFS is a journalling filesystem.
If you use a nice distro (like, oh, Debian), you might not have such a hard time setting up a PPP dialin account (pppconfig is pretty damn easy - simple Q/A setup).
Unix (and by proxy, Linux) wasn't designed for "non-computer users". It's getting more user friendly (tho I'm not sure I like all the baggage that brings), but as it is now, Linux assumes you, the user, actually have something called a CLUE.
Journalling filesystems are being developed for Linux (journalling extensions for ext2, reiserfs, and ext3). As one other person said tho, I'm not sure I'd trust a Microsoft product to take care of dirty writes like that.
Just picking products off the NT HCL doesn't guarantee jack. Do you have an MCSE? Or do you just believe everything you read?
I'm glad your NT server (server? what are you serving? how much? what kind of load?) is so stable. As for some of the rest of us, we'll let you dink around with NT 5^H^H^H^HWindows 2000 and we'll be happy with our Linux installs.
Guess you didn't catch the sarcasm at the end of the message.
Tried? Yea, they've tried on at least 2 separate occasions, and failed in both cases. The NT boxes were just plain unstable. They could only run them for a few hours before they just flat out crashed, from what I heard. So HotMail continues to run on FreeBSD and Solaris. What a shame. (not)
Then why do NT preinstalls like to crash? And why's it so hard to setup a decent NT install? Gee, Linux is a lot like Unix, but it's not that hard to get a working install. Besides, so many NT drivers don't work as advertised (drivers can and do contribute to the instability of their OSes).
White papers. Oh yes, WHITE PAPERS. Yea, I really trust their white papers. Come on, be serious. After the crashprone piles that Microsoft calls software and they've chosen to release, I wouldn't trust their white papers. And from what I've heard, both the predecessor product (Wolfpack) and the product on which Janus is supposed to be largely based are pretty damn lousy. (I don't run NT at work. Thankfully.)
I believe in the best tool for the job also. I just happen to not believe that NT is a decent tool for 99% of the jobs I'd want/need to do.