I'll reiterate my previous post: adobe acrobat is proprietary (and evil)
Acrobat format is owned by Adobe, but you are free to implement it yourself, the specs are available on the Adobe web site. I have written several programs which generate PDF output. You can easily create PDF files from TeX or HTML. PDF is is basically a trimmed down, streaming Postscript format, what makes it evil? There certainly isn't a better way to present equations - HTML with a ton of inserted gifs doesn't cut it. I also find that the acrobat readers do a much better job of extracting text than ghostscript does on PS. Converting from PDF to PS is trivial and can be done with ghostscript, xpdf, or Acrobat Reader on UNIX. Yes, I am PDF's bitch, but only because it is a cool format.
There's no reason for Motorola to crank the MHz much above 500 MHz at the moment
So with Altivec the Motorola chips whup the x86's brain dead fp. Big deal. Why don't they crank up the MHz and whup everyone's ass (Alpha, MIPS, etc) in integer and fp? There are only two reasons I can think of: Milk every last penny out of customers on a slow upgrade cycle or Motorola engineers are incompetent. Since IBM seems to get better results out of the chips I think it's a bit of both. Too bad IBM isn't looking for the mass market.
Motorola charged for their documentation, while Intel made it readily available for anyone who wanted.
Are you sure about this? I remember getting a free programmers guide for their 65HC11 microcontroller. Maybe they have different policies for their different products.
I don't think people should be allowed to change channel when ads come on the television either! We all the responsibility to click on every banner ad we see. Anything less would be communism! How dare people chose not to download something.
Of course this would probably hasten the slide of do nothing.coms.
The reason people don't use Ada is because its blocks are delmited by indentation. Every knows that's just ugly. Real hackers would use a language like Python instead.
I wonder if the opinions of the/. readership would be different if a new company named O'rily published a booked called "Programming Perl" and it had a 2 humped camel on the cover.
Phrases I'd like to trademark: We're the F in FU! X for Syphilitic Monkeys (ie Quantum Field Theory for Syphilitic Monkeys) Where would you like to go tonight? Your place or mine?
This is one case where I am not sure that a standard would be appropriate. Standards are great for ensuring compatability, but they can hinder innovation (I sound like microsoft...). If there were a standard laptop platform I don't think that we would be seeing the incredibly small Vaio and similar offerings from IBM and Hitatchi. Perhaps when all laptops are low power ARM run with USB & 1394 and hard drives fit in a 1/2 inch form factor will it be time for such a standard platform.
I don't buy DVDs, I don't plan to; yet I support DeCSS. Why you ask? Because I believe it's wrong to make software illegal, especially when no laws were broken in its creation. I am against the MPAA because I am against further restriction of individual rights in favor of corporate demands to make more profit.
The arguments presented on/., on both sides of the issue, misunderstand the legalities 90% of the time.
Re:Who here is using KDevelop at work for producti
on
KDevelop 1.2 is out
·
· Score: 2
So, why flame KDevelop? It won't prevent you to work as you like, and it will surely won't prevent you from using gcc/gmake/bash/grep
KDevelop seems like a nice application very similar to VC++. It still leaves the original question of how many UNIX developers are using it for development. I would guess that outside of KDE application developers, very few. UNIX developers tend to be very stubborn about what tools they use. Usually a general unhapiness with other OSs led them to the cult of UNIX, so I don't think it's likely they would use such a Windows like tool for development. Personally I'm a emacs/vi/xterm/blackbox guy, for what it's worth.
Hehe, now that I look at the stl_vector.h file in my Mandrake install, I see exceptions and all. The wierd thing is that when I look at my school's install, all the exception stuff is commented out, not just ifdef'd. I got the impression that g++ didn't fully support exceptions when I was reading my school's header files.
C++ includes this. It's included this for quite some time. It's not possible to bounds-check a C array, but it's trivial to bounds-check a C++ container (list, vector, etc.).
It's too bad that the SGI STL that comes with versions of g++ doesn't seem to support exceptions: you can't use the at() function for arrays.
What really sucks is that all school work is done in metric, but real world stuff is imperial. So I can't do calculations in imperial, but I couldn't judge how far a km was if you paid me.
On the same token, it seems that Chinese characters have become 'en vogue' and are showing up everywhere from Gap T-Shirts to store windows. Of course only the (usually native born) Chinese and Japanese understand what it means.
On another note, here at Berkeley there are many different accents of English that one encounters during a normal day. The most amusing thing is that in a class taught by someone from China let's say, the native english speakers have an easier time understanding his accent than the Chinese students.
The argument that the people who download the music will then go out and buy the CD is specious. I remember college and I know that if I had music from 600 CDs already recorded somewhere, not only would I not feel any need to buy the music, I would not be able to afford it.
Purely anectodotal, but I am a college student (doing ok financially at this point) who uses napster from time to time. This year I have purchased 4 CDs that I wouldn't have even considered except I came upon them somewhat by accident - for example a group remixed by one I was looking for. I have also downloaded tracks that I was too lazy to rip myself (yes, it is easier to click one button than to dig up my CD and start up cdparanoia, then notlame, then set the ID3 tags correctly). The best part of Napster though is downloading remixes and live tracks that you just can't find anywhere else.
Of course, this is all anectdotal, and I know there are people out there with 30GB of music that they will never listen to.
Godamnit, why doesn't my Ferrari get 35 miles per gallon!
Mandrake is specificly targeted as a pentium optimized, latest & greatest desktop distro. Don't complain because it isn't targeted for low end hardware. There are many distros & mini-distros targeted for such things.
For some reason Mandrake 'feels' better than RedHat to me. Though I did have a number of problems with the 6.1 release - I had to install the redhat egcs package because the Mandrake pgcc or whatever wouldn't let me debug C++ programs. I also had to fiddle with some wierd scripts because they kept overwriting the xsession file for some wierd reason.
Good points with 6.2 were better packages included than redhat, and it wouldn't install gnome if I didn't want to.
I'll have to try 7.x when I feel like wasting time on my computer again.
I've got to show this article to my girlfriend! Then I can tell her that my massive, 3GB porn collection is nothing but a form of protest. Yeah, that's the ticket...
It is truly pitiful that a grad student is asking slashdot for advice. You would be much better off walking down the hall or waiting for a department meeting and ask people what they use. Read papers and see what packages they use. I'll give you advice anyway, because I feel sorry for you. A place to start would be Biocat.
The difference between little-endian & big endian is that on a little endian machine: int x = 1; char c = *((char*)&x); Will assign 1 to c. On a big endian machine c would be 0. By the way, the line just assigns the lowest byte of the word x to c.
This can cause major headaches if you are doing bit-twiddling or mucking around with funny casts.
why do we keep making cleaner architectures and faster chips if we're going to sit around spending all our time to trying to make compilers spit out hand-tuned machine code?
The original point of RISC was moving complexity out of the hardware and into the compiler. Of course the hardware is still going to be doing crazy branch prediction and whatnot, but the compiler should still do its best to keep those pipelines filled.
And hey, if you can make a program run faster without having to dip your mobo in mineral oil, why not?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll reiterate my previous post: adobe acrobat is proprietary (and evil)
Acrobat format is owned by Adobe, but you are free to implement it yourself, the specs are available on the Adobe web site. I have written several programs which generate PDF output. You can easily create PDF files from TeX or HTML. PDF is is basically a trimmed down, streaming Postscript format, what makes it evil? There certainly isn't a better way to present equations - HTML with a ton of inserted gifs doesn't cut it. I also find that the acrobat readers do a much better job of extracting text than ghostscript does on PS. Converting from PDF to PS is trivial and can be done with ghostscript, xpdf, or Acrobat Reader on UNIX. Yes, I am PDF's bitch, but only because it is a cool format.
You deserve a good whack with a cluestick.
Why are all of todays stories so inflammatory?
/. crew sent their brains on vacation. Today's front page is a new all time low. If I had a life I'd stop reading /. this instant!
Maybe the
There's no reason for Motorola to crank the MHz much above 500 MHz at the moment
So with Altivec the Motorola chips whup the x86's brain dead fp. Big deal. Why don't they crank up the MHz and whup everyone's ass (Alpha, MIPS, etc) in integer and fp? There are only two reasons I can think of: Milk every last penny out of customers on a slow upgrade cycle or Motorola engineers are incompetent. Since IBM seems to get better results out of the chips I think it's a bit of both. Too bad IBM isn't looking for the mass market.
Motorola charged for their documentation, while Intel made it readily available for anyone who wanted.
Are you sure about this? I remember getting a free programmers guide for their 65HC11 microcontroller. Maybe they have different policies for their different products.
I don't think people should be allowed to change channel when ads come on the television either! We all the responsibility to click on every banner ad we see. Anything less would be communism! How dare people chose not to download something.
.coms.
Of course this would probably hasten the slide of do nothing
Of course I'm too lazy to investigate, but I have heard that NT journals metadata, but your still screwed if a file is corrupted.
The reason people don't use Ada is because its blocks are delmited by indentation. Every knows that's just ugly. Real hackers would use a language like Python instead.
That and it's named after a girl.
I wonder if the opinions of the /. readership would be different if a new company named O'rily published a booked called "Programming Perl" and it had a 2 humped camel on the cover.
Phrases I'd like to trademark:
We're the F in FU!
X for Syphilitic Monkeys (ie Quantum Field Theory for Syphilitic Monkeys)
Where would you like to go tonight?
Your place or mine?
This is one case where I am not sure that a standard would be appropriate. Standards are great for ensuring compatability, but they can hinder innovation (I sound like microsoft...). If there were a standard laptop platform I don't think that we would be seeing the incredibly small Vaio and similar offerings from IBM and Hitatchi. Perhaps when all laptops are low power ARM run with USB & 1394 and hard drives fit in a 1/2 inch form factor will it be time for such a standard platform.
I don't buy DVDs, I don't plan to; yet I support DeCSS. Why you ask? Because I believe it's wrong to make software illegal, especially when no laws were broken in its creation. I am against the MPAA because I am against further restriction of individual rights in favor of corporate demands to make more profit.
/., on both sides of the issue, misunderstand the legalities 90% of the time.
The arguments presented on
So, why flame KDevelop? It won't prevent you to work as you like, and it will surely won't prevent you from using gcc/gmake/bash/grep
KDevelop seems like a nice application very similar to VC++. It still leaves the original question of how many UNIX developers are using it for development. I would guess that outside of KDE application developers, very few. UNIX developers tend to be very stubborn about what tools they use. Usually a general unhapiness with other OSs led them to the cult of UNIX, so I don't think it's likely they would use such a Windows like tool for development. Personally I'm a emacs/vi/xterm/blackbox guy, for what it's worth.
Hehe, now that I look at the stl_vector.h file in my Mandrake install, I see exceptions and all. The wierd thing is that when I look at my school's install, all the exception stuff is commented out, not just ifdef'd. I got the impression that g++ didn't fully support exceptions when I was reading my school's header files.
C++ includes this. It's included this for quite some time. It's not possible to bounds-check a C array, but it's trivial to bounds-check a C++ container (list, vector, etc.).
It's too bad that the SGI STL that comes with versions of g++ doesn't seem to support exceptions: you can't use the at() function for arrays.
What really sucks is that all school work is done in metric, but real world stuff is imperial. So I can't do calculations in imperial, but I couldn't judge how far a km was if you paid me.
Why does the US still use such a non-portable, strange measuring system? I
mean come on, its the 21st century (almost)...
In the US we have 12 fingers, se feet/inches makes sense.
On the same token, it seems that Chinese characters have become 'en vogue' and are showing up everywhere from Gap T-Shirts to store windows. Of course only the (usually native born) Chinese and Japanese understand what it means.
On another note, here at Berkeley there are many different accents of English that one encounters during a normal day. The most amusing thing is that in a class taught by someone from China let's say, the native english speakers have an easier time understanding his accent than the Chinese students.
The argument that the people who download the music will then go out and buy the CD is specious. I remember college and I know that if I had music from 600 CDs already recorded somewhere, not only would I not feel any need to buy the music, I would not be able to afford it.
Purely anectodotal, but I am a college student (doing ok financially at this point) who uses napster from time to time. This year I have purchased 4 CDs that I wouldn't have even considered except I came upon them somewhat by accident - for example a group remixed by one I was looking for. I have also downloaded tracks that I was too lazy to rip myself (yes, it is easier to click one button than to dig up my CD and start up cdparanoia, then notlame, then set the ID3 tags correctly). The best part of Napster though is downloading remixes and live tracks that you just can't find anywhere else.
Of course, this is all anectdotal, and I know there are people out there with 30GB of music that they will never listen to.
Read Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelman & Sussman. It's the intro CS book at MIT & Berkeley, probably lots of other places.
Godamnit, why doesn't my Ferrari get 35 miles per gallon!
Mandrake is specificly targeted as a pentium optimized, latest & greatest desktop distro. Don't complain because it isn't targeted for low end hardware. There are many distros & mini-distros targeted for such things.
For some reason Mandrake 'feels' better than RedHat to me. Though I did have a number of problems with the 6.1 release - I had to install the redhat egcs package because the Mandrake pgcc or whatever wouldn't let me debug C++ programs. I also had to fiddle with some wierd scripts because they kept overwriting the xsession file for some wierd reason.
Good points with 6.2 were better packages included than redhat, and it wouldn't install gnome if I didn't want to.
I'll have to try 7.x when I feel like wasting time on my computer again.
I've got to show this article to my girlfriend! Then I can tell her that my massive, 3GB porn collection is nothing but a form of protest. Yeah, that's the ticket...
If I hear one more person say that Americans are too violent I'll bash their fucking skull in!
It is truly pitiful that a grad student is asking slashdot for advice. You would be much better off walking down the hall or waiting for a department meeting and ask people what they use. Read papers and see what packages they use. I'll give you advice anyway, because I feel sorry for you. A place to start would be Biocat.
The difference between little-endian & big endian is that on a little endian machine:
int x = 1;
char c = *((char*)&x);
Will assign 1 to c. On a big endian machine c would be 0. By the way, the line just assigns the lowest byte of the word x to c.
This can cause major headaches if you are doing bit-twiddling or mucking around with funny casts.
why do we keep making cleaner architectures and faster chips if we're going to sit around spending all our time to trying to make compilers spit out hand-tuned machine code?
The original point of RISC was moving complexity out of the hardware and into the compiler. Of course the hardware is still going to be doing crazy branch prediction and whatnot, but the compiler should still do its best to keep those pipelines filled.
And hey, if you can make a program run faster without having to dip your mobo in mineral oil, why not?