Uh, saying 'common API' and putting both GTK and Qt in the same example is a joke: GTK and Qt does the same thing and have a 4/6 repartition of users so this is not a common API, more like a fragmented API with average interoperability..
In the real Linux world it's even worse: try copy/paste with: NEdit (a very good editor but based on Lesstif I think), Mozilla, a KDE app, a Gnome app, this is very likely that some copy/paste fails in the process: I know this happens to me from time to time..:-(
Even if you had the 'best tool in the world' packaging with circular dependencies, incoherent software version, from different source will create DLL hell.
I'm not convinced that pkg is superior to rpm, it's just that Debian is a good source of packages, whereas when you mix RPMs from different sources..
While I agree with the gist of your argument, the website you linked about the "British police used powers that are likely unconstitutional in the US" is so vague that it is useless. And as every sword has two edge, I would advise watching the movie "In the Name of the Father" which is inspired by a real case where British police abused its power. As always who guards against the guardians?..
And letme tell you that when you're working with someone who always shake his head (to say yes for him) which means 'no' for you is quite distracting: you feel like he is rejecting everything you say and you must often reminds yourself that he is not disagreeing with you..
>The incredulity that this mathematician might have been more interested in the challenge of the work than fame and fortune in the Western world practically oozes from each sentence.
That and also while he did the hard work, that he didn't really contribute to the full proof, which is also weird.
I'm curious why making a VAX fast is such a problem?
Sure some VAX instruction such as 'list management' cannot really be made fast, but the x86 has also such kind of instructions, but those instructions are irrelevant, they can be trapped and handled by microcode, and the compiler writers avoid those instruction as they know that they are slower than doing it 'by hand'.
I would have thought the 16(if memory serves) orthogonal registers would have made a nice target for compilers, contrary to the ridiculous number of (non-orthogonal) registers on x86..
>The naive conclusion was that complex instructions are useless. The correct conclusion was that the original VAX compiler was a pile of manure.
Note that the 'naive conclusion' and the 'correct conclusion' are not contradictory: I remember an article recently where it was shown that the Alpha had three times the power of a correspondig VAX, which made nicely the point that CISC is shit.
Now as Intel has shown, given enough efforts and money even x86 the poorest CISC ISA ever (VAX ISA was much nicer than x86 ISA: more registers, orthogonal design) can be competitive and sofware compatibility makes the rest..
>Will we finally get beyond the x86 instruction set?
Well in one way we already have: look at the GPUs, they're not using x86 ISA..
But for the main CPU, I doubt it very much: x86-64 will probably rule the world for a long time, and if I remember well Intel has announced plans to build very low-power x86, so it's quite possible that x86 could make a comeback on (some) embedded devices.
Too bad, the x86 ISA is still ugly as sin: low-endian, non-orthogonal, urgh..
That most computers have if you're a light sleeper..
As for FF its memory consumption is not very high (well not for a computer with 1GB of RAM), but it's getting very slow quite fast (I don't know which resource it leaks, but it *is* sluggish as hell quite fast), it take more time for Opera to become slow and when it does, it's easy to restart without loosing state as by default (no need to fetch a stupid extension), as it remembers your tab.
I despise having to buy hardware to make up for software flaws: - BeOS booted in 14s (up to the desktop, no less), but Linux&Windows are much slower to boot on much faster computers? -->Leave the computer on, or buy a (pricy) disk with integrated flash! - BeOs also was very responsive (on a Celeron333) but Linux&Windows are sluggish? -->Buy a dual-core CPU!
*Sigh* Recently I switched from FF to Opera, it's much more responsive than FF or Mozilla which get slow very quick (without extension and on a beefy Athlon64 with 1GB of RAM!), finally some *good* software (not perfect mind you: its tab management is quite strange when you come from Mozilla but that's more bearable than FF slowness).
Using the same method as everywhere: accounts which can only be opened by humans and reputation ratings. This avoids 'brute force' or stupid attacks, and insidious attack's impact can be reduced by correlation (if 99% says X is true then it's true), but they could still be a problem.
Plan9's simplicity is great (Limbo is nice too), too bad its GUI suck. BeOS responsiveness (and order of magnitude better than Linux, Windows) was great also, too bad it's mostly dead.
Both have in common to have very little software unfortunately..
>it will reboot and scale all fonts appropriately.
Not it will not, those font looks terrible with a high DPI on WindowsXP. Which is quite unfortunate as reading PDF on a high resolution screen is really nice..
If Vista fix this, I hope that there will be competition with vendors selling high-resolution LCD and that those who makes webpage will finally stop making webpage which cannot be resized correctly..
The table leg seems to be a very real mistake of the police, but: - the unarmed man fled the police (from police report), something which is never wise to do - and the lighter looked like a gun.
>Should religion be taught in schools? I don't mind.
I don't mind either if religionS are taught in school, explained, compared (especially if the atheism, agnoticism are also explained) , I do mind quite a lot when a specific religion is taught in school as if it was *the truth*, talk about brainwashing.
So on one hand we have memory manufacturers who have colluded to maintain high prices of memory, on the other hand, we have Rambus which has used submarine patents to gain humongous royalties subverting JEDEC process.
Surprisingly in this case apparently the FTC and the governements appears to do the right thing (if very slowly) and will (hopefully) punish all these crooks. Of course in the meantime consumers have payed more that they should have and the punishement will not change this..
> BSD-like licensing in actuality has little to do with freedom and more to do with technological research without regard to the sustained openness
Mmm, the fact that BSD OS are still very strong show with their code still open show quite clearly that BSD licensed' code is also a sustained source of openness. Plus, as evidenced by the widespread usage of BSD TCP-IP stack, BSD isn't only about research but is very good for interoperability. I would say that the LesserGPL could be very good for interoperability, if this license didn't suck, but as shown by the number of variants of the LGPL, it is very poor..
'A shortcoming' imply a value judgement, I just said that files having a very rigid interface are not true objects, that's all.
Just a remark: the read/write interface is well suited to console/script interaction, but now applications have mostly moved to GUI, where the 'everything is a file' is not so useful: as evidenced by the fact that Plan9 didn't manage to fit a 'mozilla' like web browser in their setup.
Also, the textual interface while being very useful has also some inherent difficulties: many script which parse the output of say 'ps' are very fragile in fact, because the text output of this command is not very good (well maybe with the adequate option, it is easy to parse, but this isn't helped with the dozens of possible options).. Text interface are very good for human interfaces, but let's not forget that they have sometimes some downside too..
Except that normal objects have a complex interface (public methods) whereas files are restricted to read/write interface. So these two things are very different..
As you asked about what should be implemented: In KDE on RHE3, when I use a shortcut to iconify all the window on the desktop, if one of my window is open on all the workspaces, it is iconified only on this workspace not on all the workspace, and the iconfication is only temporary if I switch workspace and come-back, the these window are opened again, grrr.
Plus when I click on a window on the task bar which is already opened, KDE iconify it, I'd prefer KDE to put it on the front.
Well I hope that there were video recorders too because otherwise I come in with a bucket of sand and a 'pese personne' (don't know how to say this in English), pick what I want, and ensure that my total weight stay the same easily.
Slashdot Mirror
> "common API" (it's there: libc, GTK, Qt, etc.).
:-(
Uh, saying 'common API' and putting both GTK and Qt in the same example is a joke: GTK and Qt does the same thing and have a 4/6 repartition of users so this is not a common API, more like a fragmented API with average interoperability..
In the real Linux world it's even worse: try copy/paste with: NEdit (a very good editor but based on Lesstif I think), Mozilla, a KDE app, a Gnome app, this is very likely that some copy/paste fails in the process: I know this happens to me from time to time..
Well, is the problem the tool or the packages?
Even if you had the 'best tool in the world' packaging with circular dependencies, incoherent software version, from different source will create DLL hell.
I'm not convinced that pkg is superior to rpm, it's just that Debian is a good source of packages, whereas when you mix RPMs from different sources..
While I agree with the gist of your argument, the website you linked about the "British police used powers that are likely unconstitutional in the US" is so vague that it is useless. ..
And as every sword has two edge, I would advise watching the movie "In the Name of the Father" which is inspired by a real case where British police abused its power.
As always who guards against the guardians?
And letme tell you that when you're working with someone who always shake his head (to say yes for him) which means 'no' for you is quite distracting: you feel like he is rejecting everything you say and you must often reminds yourself that he is not disagreeing with you..
>The incredulity that this mathematician might have been more interested in the challenge of the work than fame and fortune in the Western world practically oozes from each sentence.
That and also while he did the hard work, that he didn't really contribute to the full proof, which is also weird.
I'm curious why making a VAX fast is such a problem?
Sure some VAX instruction such as 'list management' cannot really be made fast, but the x86 has also such kind of instructions, but those instructions are irrelevant, they can be trapped and handled by microcode, and the compiler writers avoid those instruction as they know that they are slower than doing it 'by hand'.
I would have thought the 16(if memory serves) orthogonal registers would have made a nice target for compilers, contrary to the ridiculous number of (non-orthogonal) registers on x86..
>The naive conclusion was that complex instructions are useless. The correct conclusion was that the original VAX compiler was a pile of manure.
Note that the 'naive conclusion' and the 'correct conclusion' are not contradictory: I remember an article recently where it was shown that the Alpha had three times the power of a correspondig VAX, which made nicely the point that CISC is shit.
Now as Intel has shown, given enough efforts and money even x86 the poorest CISC ISA ever (VAX ISA was much nicer than x86 ISA: more registers, orthogonal design) can be competitive and sofware compatibility makes the rest..
>Will we finally get beyond the x86 instruction set?
Well in one way we already have: look at the GPUs, they're not using x86 ISA..
But for the main CPU, I doubt it very much: x86-64 will probably rule the world for a long time, and if I remember well Intel has announced plans to build very low-power x86, so it's quite possible that x86 could make a comeback on (some) embedded devices.
Too bad, the x86 ISA is still ugly as sin: low-endian, non-orthogonal, urgh..
>Having a loud computer is a hardware flaw.
That most computers have if you're a light sleeper..
As for FF its memory consumption is not very high (well not for a computer with 1GB of RAM), but it's getting very slow quite fast (I don't know which resource it leaks, but it *is* sluggish as hell quite fast), it take more time for Opera to become slow and when it does, it's easy to restart without loosing state as by default (no need to fetch a stupid extension), as it remembers your tab.
I despise having to buy hardware to make up for software flaws:
- BeOS booted in 14s (up to the desktop, no less), but Linux&Windows are much slower to boot on much faster computers?
-->Leave the computer on, or buy a (pricy) disk with integrated flash!
- BeOs also was very responsive (on a Celeron333) but Linux&Windows are sluggish?
-->Buy a dual-core CPU!
*Sigh*
Recently I switched from FF to Opera, it's much more responsive than FF or Mozilla which get slow very quick (without extension and on a beefy Athlon64 with 1GB of RAM!), finally some *good* software (not perfect mind you: its tab management is quite strange when you come from Mozilla but that's more bearable than FF slowness).
And a lot of people live in small flat where they cannot leave their computer on and sleep at night..
Using the same method as everywhere: accounts which can only be opened by humans and reputation ratings.
This avoids 'brute force' or stupid attacks, and insidious attack's impact can be reduced by correlation (if 99% says X is true then it's true), but they could still be a problem.
Plan9's simplicity is great (Limbo is nice too), too bad its GUI suck.
BeOS responsiveness (and order of magnitude better than Linux, Windows) was great also, too bad it's mostly dead.
Both have in common to have very little software unfortunately..
>it will reboot and scale all fonts appropriately.
Not it will not, those font looks terrible with a high DPI on WindowsXP.
Which is quite unfortunate as reading PDF on a high resolution screen is really nice..
If Vista fix this, I hope that there will be competition with vendors selling high-resolution LCD and that those who makes webpage will finally stop making webpage which cannot be resized correctly..
The table leg seems to be a very real mistake of the police, but:
- the unarmed man fled the police (from police report), something which is never wise to do
- and the lighter looked like a gun.
So you're post is distorting the facts.
>I'd like to see Safari for Windows. That would REALLY PISS Microsoft off.
Uh, why would it piss off Microsoft? They make no money on IE..
OTOH if Apple would use the OpenDocument format on their wordprocessor and compete on Windows, this could be interesting
>Should religion be taught in schools? I don't mind.
I don't mind either if religionS are taught in school, explained, compared (especially if the atheism, agnoticism are also explained) , I do mind quite a lot when a specific religion is taught in school as if it was *the truth*, talk about brainwashing.
So on one hand we have memory manufacturers who have colluded to maintain high prices of memory, on the other hand, we have Rambus which has used submarine patents to gain humongous royalties subverting JEDEC process.
Surprisingly in this case apparently the FTC and the governements appears to do the right thing (if very slowly) and will (hopefully) punish all these crooks.
Of course in the meantime consumers have payed more that they should have and the punishement will not change this..
> BSD-like licensing in actuality has little to do with freedom and more to do with technological research without regard to the sustained openness
Mmm, the fact that BSD OS are still very strong show with their code still open show quite clearly that BSD licensed' code is also a sustained source of openness.
Plus, as evidenced by the widespread usage of BSD TCP-IP stack, BSD isn't only about research but is very good for interoperability.
I would say that the LesserGPL could be very good for interoperability, if this license didn't suck, but as shown by the number of variants of the LGPL, it is very poor..
As said in the article, this is a 'pilot test' only, it's not obvious at all that the real price will be similar..
'A shortcoming' imply a value judgement, I just said that files having a very rigid interface are not true objects, that's all.
Just a remark: the read/write interface is well suited to console/script interaction, but now applications have mostly moved to GUI, where the 'everything is a file' is not so useful: as evidenced by the fact that Plan9 didn't manage to fit a 'mozilla' like web browser in their setup.
Also, the textual interface while being very useful has also some inherent difficulties: many script which parse the output of say 'ps' are very fragile in fact, because the text output of this command is not very good (well maybe with the adequate option, it is easy to parse, but this isn't helped with the dozens of possible options)..
Text interface are very good for human interfaces, but let's not forget that they have sometimes some downside too..
Except that normal objects have a complex interface (public methods) whereas files are restricted to read/write interface.
So these two things are very different..
As you asked about what should be implemented:
In KDE on RHE3, when I use a shortcut to iconify all the window on the desktop, if one of my window is open on all the workspaces, it is iconified only on this workspace not on all the workspace, and the iconfication is only temporary if I switch workspace and come-back, the these window are opened again, grrr.
Plus when I click on a window on the task bar which is already opened, KDE iconify it, I'd prefer KDE to put it on the front.
Electric cars are cheaper to maintain?
Only if you forget to include the price of changing the batteries periodically in the maintenance cost, as you did..
> weighed you on the way in and out
Well I hope that there were video recorders too because otherwise I come in with a bucket of sand and a 'pese personne' (don't know how to say this in English), pick what I want, and ensure that my total weight stay the same easily.