Here in France we have a big problem: the mayor of Paris has been elected partly thanks to the vote of more than 3k dead people.
He and his wife are currently under investigation!
It sounds like a joke? Unfortunately, it is real!
So, even in the real world (tm), authentification of the voters is a big problem! On the Internet, I fear that the authentification of the voters will remain a big problem for a loonng time, and this will prevent any serious voting on the Internet.
PS: Just a question, are you really sure that in UK the system has not been abused?
Dynamo has an advantage: it was working on code compiled for the same processor: there wasn't any "translation" from one ISA to another.
I'm not convinced that the cost of the translation/adaptation won't offset the benefit of the recompilation.
Remenber when Apple came with the PPC, there were several 80x86/680xx interpretor which came along, and each time they came with the same argument that they could use the additional runtime information to be better than the original CPU and each time they fail to deliver.
Java is another example of hype where proponents say that interpreted code can be faster than compiled code. So why is TowerJ (a compiler for Java), is always the best in benchmarks ?
At least for the design: Eros is an OS which is GPL'd and its security model (based on capabilities) has been demonstrated secure with a formal proof.
Of course demonstrating something with a formal proof is different from using formal spec and formal testing. But that's a first step.
Now can open source use formal spec, formal testing, etc? I don't know but given the current mindset (use C because it is the most well-known language, patch now and release soon to fix later), its seems quite unlikely.
Those who have moderated the above posts as insightfull, must think twice.
1) first point: "evolution takes place on a scale of tens of thousands of years". Wrong: see the other replys.
2) second point: "Bill Gates wouldn't last a week in the savannas where australopithecine thrived; none of them would ever be able to live in a human city". On a personnal note, using Bill Gates in this context seems a bit stupid. But the real problem here is that you are confusing biological evolution and cultural differences. Take Bill Gates'baby, and send it to the savannas where he will be educated by local tribes (or vice-versa), will he have fewer chance to survive than the other? I'm not convinced. (it works also the other way..).
As for the final chapter, I have nothing to say:-)
But am I mistaking or Mozilla has its own component architecture?
And in linuxtoday Frederik C. talks about another component architecture tailored for high performances: > Check out this link for an explanation form the > developer of aRts/MCOP: > > http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde/arts-mcop-doc/why- not-dcop.html
Would it be possible to have only ONE component architecture ?
The ISA were thought out for easing the task of compilers, not human! That's why you can find hand-coding in assembly for RISC more difficult than for a CISC.
Read Hennsy & Patterson: Computer Architecture, a quantitative approach to understand why RISC CPU's are making those trade-off.
Some reviewers are agreeing that the power of the AMD CPU's won't be fully used until the new chipset has arrived: the new chipset (760 ?) is due to Q3/Q4 2000, it will enable "good" AGP 4x (hopefully) and will support PC 266 DDR SDRAM.
But I think that AMD should also add support for Firewire bus on their chipsets, this would differentiate them from Intel's offering (as Intel is a die hard supporter of USB/USB 2, I doubt very much that they would add also Firewire support on their chipsets).
I think that people would appreciate much more to plug easily their DV camera to their computer (without having to buy an expensive card) than going from 88 to 95 fps in Quake III or things like that...
The most you can expect usually from the C brain damaged type system is something like sizeof(short) == 2 sizeof(long) >= 4 sizeof(long long) == 8 if it exists..
In any case, I think that it is the C language which is brain damaged here!!
be-fan is right when he says that for a desktop Linux is bloated. If you want to use all the cool apps you needs both Qt and GTK loaded at the same time.
You obviously are running Linux as a server and you feel that Linux is good, but that's not the point. He was talking about the CLIENT so you are "off-topic".
I feel also that Linux is quite poor on the client (too many unfinished apps), diversity is good but consistency and avoiding wasting memory by having to load n equivalent toolkit at the same time matters too.
so the "portability" of DCOP you are talking about doesn't exists !!!
Cool but driver support will be a problem.
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
at the beginnings at least..
That's really too bad, there is one OS (Linux) which has good driver support, but each time someone starts a new OS (free or not), a lot of time must be spent again writing the device drivers, talk about reinventing the wheel again!
Does anyone have ideas in order to diminish the problem ? At one time I thought that I2O could be solution but the folks from the kernel seems to think that it is a bad idea because of efficency issue (and concerns about binary only drivers), and I'm afraid that any "standard" device driver would cause the same efficiency problems..
Anyway, AtheOS seems a neat OS and I like the idea (beside I don't beleive in any god, so of course I like the name:-).
> technology will always only be as smart as those > who made it, never smarter
Once upon a time, being good at playing chess was viewed as being smart. Then Deep blue beat Kasparov... Are you going to say that Deep Blue programmers were better than Kasparov ??
I doubt it very, very much !!!
Bottom line: think more before making such definitive declarations.
> Take voting in an election as a good example. > People want most of all to vote > for the winner. So, whether they > understand, believe in, or agree with, a > candidate is moot. They will vote for > the candidate that they believe will win.
Uh? I vote for the man which I think is capable and has some "nice" idea. Polls says that he won't be the winner, so what ? I can vote as a reaction if the polls says that someone that I really don't like, I may vote for his direct opponent even if I like better a "smaller" candidate.
But voting for "the winner" ?? It sounds ridiculous, I think that you'd better ask around other peoples opinions before saying things like this.
First, even if I'm french, I'm not sure that I would classify Napoleon (nor Gengis Khan) into the "great people" category, killing people/conquerring a country is not that great from my moral point of view.
Second, Napoleon has written a book if I remember well... A book contains mostly the same informations (text and pictures) that you can find in a website, they are just organised diffently (and a website is more fashionable right now).
Hey, when the JDK1.3 will become stable, Java may become a real usable solution for both client and server!
From my POV, Java was a really poor solution: JDK1.0 was poor in many respects, 1.1 was better but still buggy and AWT is a braindead API (yes, I know that Swing could be used indepently of the JDK1.1.x), the JDK1.2 contains vastly improved APIs but they were quite buggy for a looong time (the bugParade was full of bitter complaints, Sun was constantly adding new API but bugs weren't corrected).
The JDK1.3 seems to correct many,many bugs from the bugParade:-):-) Good!
I've been burnt badly by Java in the past: for me it was hyped to death while still being very imature (from a client point of view anyway).
The Sun's JDK1.3 is still in the Release Candidate status (if I remember correctly, it was supposed to be released in January), and IBM's JDK is a beta release.
When they finally become stable release, I think that I will take another look at Java.
Because for the vast majority of Linux users runs it on a x86 PC, so submiting patch for a machine that you don't use is quite difficult...
If you are talking about "endianness patch" then I agree: IMHO code which depends on the endianness are pure evil.
On a side note, how good is GCC on the PowerPC ? On one hand, the numerous registers, the "normal" floating point unit of the Power architecture should help the optimiser, on the other hand there has been much more effort to tune the GCC compiler to the x86 CPUs than to the Power architecture.
Just wondering...
Re:The problem with Rambus compared to SDRAM...
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
·
· Score: 1
You are a bit nitpicking, yes the clock is at 400 Mhz but data are also transfered when the clock goes up and when the clock goes down.
So you have 400 MHz x 2 x 16 bits which is still 1.6Gbytes/sec.
The author complains about skinnable apps because it allows people to make skins which are usually ugly and it complains also that Apple did a bad job for its Quicktime4 player.
See the contradiction? If the Apple's app was skinnable, it would have enabled the users to customise it at will, so they wouldn't have complained as much.
True, I think also that many skins sucks. So what? The author who created it must have liked it otherwise he/she wouldn't have released it.
With some kind of ratings of skins on websites, it allows people to find easily popular skins, and one could imagine websites which would "link" skins ie "you liked skins X for this app, have a look at skin Y for that app, you may like it..".
In the end what matters is that the default look and feel of this apps is good and that distro makers include for each apps a handfull of really good skins...
What I would like also would be to choose a skins as a base and to be able to tweak it at will with a simple point-and-click utility. for me, a graphical utility makes more sense for tweaking the appereance than a command-line, but both are NOT mutually exclusive.
There is a great deal that could be said about this but here is the short version...
Genesis 1.0 is the first release of the code from Eclipse.
The Eclipse assets were acquired by a company called Wild Tangent. They release an update called Genesis 1.1 - it is under the same licensing agreement as the original 1.0 code.
Wild Tangent also took the next version of the Genesis code and rolled it into a new product that they are creating as part of an Internet connectivity package. It has new and different licensing.
David Stafford retained some of the rights to the code and turned it into the Jet3D project. The Jet3D code also has some different licensing restrictions than the original Genesis code - so you need to check out the restricitons to make sure that you can live with them.
Basically, none of the license agreements are that onerous, they do limit what you can and can't build with various versions, and they protect the rights of both companies to make money in their own ways.
The biggest difference to you at a development level is the difference between Genesis 1.0 and 1.1 editor and the Jet3D and Wild Tangent editors. The former is similar to many other Doom and Quake editors. The latter is a real-time CSG (constructive solid geometry) editor which creates levels just as they appear in your game.
Slashdot Mirror
it should have been the "whole GNU software movement" instead of "whole free software movement".
Ooops.
It was because he couldn't access the sources of a printer's driver.
In a way, you could say that it is because the driver was under a "bad" license (closed source) instead of open source.
So in a waym "bad" (restrictive) licenses started the whole free software movement!
Here in France we have a big problem: the mayor of Paris has been elected partly thanks to the vote of more than 3k dead people.
He and his wife are currently under investigation!
It sounds like a joke? Unfortunately, it is real!
So, even in the real world (tm), authentification of the voters is a big problem!
On the Internet, I fear that the authentification of the voters will remain a big problem for a loonng time, and this will prevent any serious voting on the Internet.
PS:
Just a question, are you really sure that in UK the system has not been abused?
As long as OSs don't use a REAL security model, we'll still hear some sad stories like this for a loooonng time.
I don't know if EROS will ever become mainstream, but it's capability model sure looks interesting.
Who created God ?
Greeks had also Gods (many of them in fact) and I'm not sure that they would agree with your definition..
Dynamo has an advantage: it was working on code compiled for the same processor: there wasn't any "translation" from one ISA to another.
/adaptation won't offset the benefit of the recompilation.
I'm not convinced that the cost of the translation
Remenber when Apple came with the PPC, there were several 80x86/680xx interpretor which came along, and each time they came with the same argument that they could use the additional runtime information to be better than the original CPU and each time they fail to deliver.
Java is another example of hype where proponents say that interpreted code can be faster than compiled code. So why is TowerJ (a compiler for Java), is always the best in benchmarks ?
At least for the design: Eros is an OS which is GPL'd and its security model (based on capabilities) has been demonstrated secure with a formal proof.
Of course demonstrating something with a formal proof is different from using formal spec and formal testing. But that's a first step.
Now can open source use formal spec, formal testing, etc?
I don't know but given the current mindset (use C because it is the most well-known language, patch now and release soon to fix later), its seems quite unlikely.
Any times someone talk about interpreted language or about virtual machines, I have a reflex (due to a poor Java experience) what about performances ?
Does anyone here has used, the Inferno system?
What is the performance?
And since it is a "new" product, is-it usable? Is there many bug left ?
PS: I'm not trying to start a flamewar, just looking about some hands-on experiments.
Those who have moderated the above posts as insightfull, must think twice.
:-)
1) first point: "evolution takes place on a scale of tens of thousands of years".
Wrong: see the other replys.
2) second point: "Bill Gates wouldn't last a week in the savannas where australopithecine thrived; none of them would ever be able to live in a human city".
On a personnal note, using Bill Gates in this context seems a bit stupid.
But the real problem here is that you are confusing biological evolution and cultural differences. Take Bill Gates'baby, and send it to the savannas where he will be educated by local tribes (or vice-versa), will he have fewer chance to survive than the other? I'm not convinced. (it works also the other way..).
As for the final chapter, I have nothing to say
KParts and Bonobo merge: Great!
- not-dcop.html
But am I mistaking or Mozilla has its own component architecture?
And in linuxtoday Frederik C. talks about another component architecture tailored for high performances:
> Check out this link for an explanation form the
> developer of aRts/MCOP:
>
> http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde/arts-mcop-doc/why
Would it be possible to have only ONE component architecture ?
The ISA were thought out for easing the task of compilers, not human!
That's why you can find hand-coding in assembly for RISC more difficult than for a CISC.
Read Hennsy & Patterson: Computer Architecture, a quantitative approach to understand why RISC CPU's are making those trade-off.
Some reviewers are agreeing that the power of the AMD CPU's won't be fully used until the new chipset has arrived: the new chipset (760 ?) is due to Q3/Q4 2000, it will enable "good" AGP 4x (hopefully) and will support PC 266 DDR SDRAM.
But I think that AMD should also add support for Firewire bus on their chipsets, this would differentiate them from Intel's offering (as Intel is a die hard supporter of USB/USB 2, I doubt very much that they would add also Firewire support on their chipsets).
I think that people would appreciate much more to plug easily their DV camera to their computer (without having to buy an expensive card) than going from 88 to 95 fps in Quake III or things like that...
I don't think that it is really an issue.
The most you can expect usually from the C brain damaged type system is something like
sizeof(short) == 2
sizeof(long) >= 4
sizeof(long long) == 8 if it exists..
In any case, I think that it is the C language which is brain damaged here!!
be-fan is right when he says that for a desktop Linux is bloated.
If you want to use all the cool apps you needs both Qt and GTK loaded at the same time.
You obviously are running Linux as a server and you feel that Linux is good, but that's not the point. He was talking about the CLIENT so you are "off-topic".
I feel also that Linux is quite poor on the client (too many unfinished apps), diversity is good but consistency and avoiding wasting memory by having to load n equivalent toolkit at the same time matters too.
so the "portability" of DCOP you are talking about doesn't exists !!!
at the beginnings at least..
:-).
That's really too bad, there is one OS (Linux) which has good driver support, but each time someone starts a new OS (free or not), a lot of time must be spent again writing the device drivers, talk about reinventing the wheel again!
Does anyone have ideas in order to diminish the problem ?
At one time I thought that I2O could be solution but the folks from the kernel seems to think that it is a bad idea because of efficency issue (and concerns about binary only drivers), and I'm afraid that any "standard" device driver would cause the same efficiency problems..
Anyway, AtheOS seems a neat OS and I like the idea (beside I don't beleive in any god, so of course I like the name
> technology will always only be as smart as those
> who made it, never smarter
Once upon a time, being good at playing chess was viewed as being smart. Then Deep blue beat Kasparov... Are you going to say that Deep Blue programmers were better than Kasparov ??
I doubt it very, very much !!!
Bottom line: think more before making such definitive declarations.
> Take voting in an election as a good example.
> People want most of all to vote
> for the winner. So, whether they
> understand, believe in, or agree with, a
> candidate is moot. They will vote for
> the candidate that they believe will win.
Uh? I vote for the man which I think is capable and has some "nice" idea.
Polls says that he won't be the winner, so what ?
I can vote as a reaction if the polls says that someone that I really don't like, I may vote for his direct opponent even if I like better a "smaller" candidate.
But voting for "the winner" ?? It sounds ridiculous, I think that you'd better ask around other peoples opinions before saying things like this.
First, even if I'm french, I'm not sure that I would classify Napoleon (nor Gengis Khan) into the "great people" category, killing people/conquerring a country is not that great from my moral point of view.
Second, Napoleon has written a book if I remember well... A book contains mostly the same informations (text and pictures) that you can find in a website, they are just organised diffently (and a website is more fashionable right now).
Have a nice day.
Hey, when the JDK1.3 will become stable, Java may become a real usable solution for both client and server!
:-) :-) Good!
From my POV, Java was a really poor solution:
JDK1.0 was poor in many respects, 1.1 was better but still buggy and AWT is a braindead API (yes, I know that Swing could be used indepently of the JDK1.1.x), the JDK1.2 contains vastly improved APIs but they were quite buggy for a looong time (the bugParade was full of bitter complaints, Sun was constantly adding new API but bugs weren't corrected).
The JDK1.3 seems to correct many,many bugs from the bugParade
I've been burnt badly by Java in the past: for me it was hyped to death while still being very imature (from a client point of view anyway).
The Sun's JDK1.3 is still in the Release Candidate status (if I remember correctly, it was supposed to be released in January), and IBM's JDK is a beta release.
When they finally become stable release, I think that I will take another look at Java.
Because for the vast majority of Linux users runs it on a x86 PC, so submiting patch for a machine that you don't use is quite difficult...
If you are talking about "endianness patch" then I agree: IMHO code which depends on the endianness are pure evil.
On a side note, how good is GCC on the PowerPC ?
On one hand, the numerous registers, the "normal" floating point unit of the Power architecture should help the optimiser, on the other hand there has been much more effort to tune the GCC compiler to the x86 CPUs than to the Power architecture.
Just wondering...
You are a bit nitpicking, yes the clock is at 400 Mhz but data are also transfered when the clock goes up and when the clock goes down.
So you have 400 MHz x 2 x 16 bits which is still 1.6Gbytes/sec.
I find this article a bit self-contradictory.
The author complains about skinnable apps because it allows people to make skins which are usually ugly and it complains also that Apple did a bad job for its Quicktime4 player.
See the contradiction?
If the Apple's app was skinnable, it would have enabled the users to customise it at will, so they wouldn't have complained as much.
True, I think also that many skins sucks. So what?
The author who created it must have liked it otherwise he/she wouldn't have released it.
With some kind of ratings of skins on websites, it allows people to find easily popular skins, and one could imagine websites which would "link" skins ie "you liked skins X for this app, have a look at skin Y for that app, you may like it..".
In the end what matters is that the default look and feel of this apps is good and that distro makers include for each apps a handfull of really good skins...
What I would like also would be to choose a skins as a base and to be able to tweak it at will with a simple point-and-click utility.
for me, a graphical utility makes more sense for tweaking the appereance than a command-line, but both are NOT mutually exclusive.
From the forum:
Jet3d and Genesis 1.0
There is a great deal that could be said about this but here is the short version...
Genesis 1.0 is the first release of the code from Eclipse.
The Eclipse assets were acquired by a company called Wild Tangent. They
release an update called Genesis 1.1 - it is under the same licensing agreement as
the original 1.0 code.
Wild Tangent also took the next version of the Genesis code and rolled it into a
new product that they are creating as part of an Internet connectivity package. It
has new and different licensing.
David Stafford retained some of the rights to the code and turned it into the Jet3D
project. The Jet3D code also has some different licensing restrictions than the
original Genesis code - so you need to check out the restricitons to make sure that
you can live with them.
Basically, none of the license agreements are that onerous, they do limit what you
can and can't build with various versions, and they protect the rights of both
companies to make money in their own ways.
The biggest difference to you at a development level is the difference between
Genesis 1.0 and 1.1 editor and the Jet3D and Wild Tangent editors. The former is
similar to many other Doom and Quake editors. The latter is a real-time CSG
(constructive solid geometry) editor which creates levels just as they appear in
your game.