If it is the Microsoft compiler that is causing the performance gain, how do you explain the performance increase on running Firefox through Wine. Surely, since Wine and the Linux system that it is running on are built with gcc, you'd expect it to run slower, or have marginal difference to native Linux.
That's not to say that the Microsoft compiler isn't any good. It's more likely that the Windows binary has had profile guided optimisation enabled and is better organised for branch prediction and the other insane things that CPUs do nowadays to keep things in the CPU cache longer.
It will depend on what compiler settings were used to build the glibc library, what architecture it was tuned for, whether or not the glibc library is targeted to the specific version of the kernel you are using. It also depends on what options were used to build the companion libraries, as well.
Also, the last time this was discussed on slashdot, I seem to remember that it was Profile Guided Optimisation (PGO) that helped FF on Windows. This would allow the compiler to better structure the machine code to keep as much of the program running in the CPU cache as possible (by pre-loading branches in conditional statements that are executed more frequently).
A while back, I ran some tests on Firefox 3 with Wine vs Linux native (http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pCaFy3jQwNj5XFrxvcYJxPA&gid=3). Results: Firefox 3 Windows executable with wine built using the -O3 compiler setting was the winner (although, on average there wasn't much difference between the different wine versions).
This was with the V8 tests. I haven't tested FF 3.5rc2 yet, nor have I experimented with the build options.
This is one of the cool things I like about Linux. You don't have to have things one way.
Want to use the Amiga-style workbench - sure, no problem. Like the look and feel of Windows - sure. Prefer a Mac-style UI - check. Want to go back to those good old command line only days - got that too.
Linux, the BSD's and OpenSolaris are flexible enough so that you can customise the UI to be what you want. This is both a blessing and a curse, but you can provide entry-level distributions.
There is a balance between stable, functional and reliable vs bleeding edge, innovative UIs. There is room enough for both.
It's not so much the programming language -- that is just used to glue things together. What is important here are the libraries and toolkits that are built on top of those.
What you are probably interested in is improving the community interaction at the project level and how that interacts with the revision control systems.
There are tools that allow translators to easily update translations and add support for languages if the program is using PO files (which is standard on GNU/Linux - and possibly other - systems).
What is needed is better interaction with these tools for things like localisation, typos and graphics and have them as core features on project hosting sites like github, sourceforge and gitorious.
From my understanding, the IE8 page is not lying. IE8 does have (per thread, not process like Chrome) tab isolation and crash recovery (like Firefox); it does comply with CSS2.1; it does have Active Directory and Group Policy Object support for better deployment and management on Windows systems. However, the article is rigged to cover items that show it in a decent light, just like the Firefox one.
IE8 *may* be faster at loading commonly browsed to pages. However, note the wording. It does not say that it has the fastest JavaScript performance because that is not true. It does not say that it is the fastest at running AJAX-based websites, since those would require better JavaScript performance. Chrome set the bar for this, and other browsers have followed (except for IE).
It's like the Darren Brown TV program about a fool-proof way of predicting the outcome of horse racing. There, he also got a coin to come up heads 10 times in a row. That may be true, but you are not seeing all of the picture. Same with this -- where is the SVG support? Where is the MathML support? Those have been standards for years now.
if (IE)
show_page( "We're sorry, we use web standards like SVG and HTML5 to provide a rich, entertaining user experience. Unfortunately, you are using Internet Explorer and so cannot view this page. Please download Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari for a richer experience on the web!" ); else
display_the_actual_page();
In the same vein as "You need Windows and Windows Media Player", or "This site requires Silverlight."
So why does FF have a cross-platform UI engine (XUL) and have native theme support for Mac and Linux as well as XP and Vista. Or are you talking about Chrome/Chromium that was written to the Windows API?
TBH, 93% is a *very* respectable score. Yes, it's not 100% like Opera and WebKit (Safari, Chrome,...), *but* it is leagues better than IE.
If you want to help out, see http://www.wg9s.com/mozilla/firefox/ for an Acid3 testing build of FF (currently at 97%). The thing to remember is that care needs to be made so that the fixes (a) don't break extensions, (b) don't cause rendering regressions for popular websites. The remaining issues seem to be (1) that some of the tests are failing intermittently (bug 335998), (2) lack of SVG font support, (3) favicon being dispalyed at the end of the tests and (4) some of the tests running slowly, failing the smooth animation requirement.
The thing that really annoys me, though is the piece of crap that is IE. IE doesn't have support for the CSS min-width attribute. IE doesn't support SVG. Just about the only thing that IE has going for it is that it has native JSON support.
It is not Firefox that is holding back the web - the competition with Opera, Safari and Chrome is a good thing - IE is holding back the web. In the new web wars around standards compliance, Acid test conformance and JavaScript performance IE is losing. So take back the web!
Exactly. And you can simplify this to the "standard" story archetype of "Boy meets girl. Boy looses girl. Boy gets girl back." and cover even more stories. The one you mentioned is a variant of this.
If you look at stories in any domain, there are hundreds of different concepts. Hell, just look at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tropes for an attempt to catalog them. Even slashdot has them -- I am not a meme!
The thing is that a good story (book, play, TV episode, film, game,...) will have many of these tropes. It may even have a different take on the tropes. Having good, fleshed out characters is also needed and is equally important to the story.
They don't need to. If they develop an average search engine with interesting posibilities (like the search engine previously known as Live Search which is now Bing) and open up the code / algorithm / apis and get people interested in it, like by emphasising community like FLOSS, wikipedia and the social networking sites do then everyone else will help improve it. That is, do for the web and search engines what FLOSS has and is doing for the desktop.
That is the point the GP was making. Microsoft clearly won't do this, but I wonder if someone else will.
And because it is Microsoft's attempt at something cloud based, it will blow up in a Blue Smoke of Death and blow away leaving a clear Azure sky behind it with no cloud in site!
Oh, forgot to mention -- any GUI library/framework that requires you to use a graphical editor/IDE to create the UI in is crap. You can choose to use a graphical editor (e.g. a HTML designer for HTML/CSS and Glade for Gtk), but the point is that you shouldn't need to.
You don't need a graphical tool to create a GUI. If your GUI interface requires you to hand-position all of the controls (Windows RC files, anyone) then you are using the wrong GUI API. Hand positioning GUIs just results in inconsistent spacing, sizing and layout of controls. All the decent GUI toolkits (Java, Gtk, XUL - not sure about Qt or Cocoa/Carbon) all allow you to specify the structure of the UI (i.e. the box model) and will auto-position the controls at runtime. This makes things like localisation, right-to-left vs left-to-right ordering and resizable dialogs a snap to implement (there is no extra effort on the part of the developer).
Also, Gtk and Java (and possibly the others as well) allow you to dynamically create the UI on the fly at runtime. With an API that doesn't support auto-reflow, you have to write a lot of repositioning code which is harder to maintain.
The solution is not to have IDEs churning out reams of crappy code for you, the solution is to provide decent APIs that abstract the routine stuff so that you are actually specifying what the program does.
That main declaration should only be for C++/CLI code (it is using C++/CLI syntax). Check the options that you have specified and the project type (is it a C++ Win32/Console application?).
As far as standard support goes, VC2003 and upward are very good. The only things that they don't support are export (which isn't used anyway and is generally agreed that it is broken anyway), throw specifications for anything but throw() (it will parse them, just not interpret them) and two-phase template instantiation. Also, the VC2010 compiler is adding support for quite a few new C++0x features.
Code completion is one of the first things I turn off in Visual Studio. Ever try adding a link tag around some text and have VS helpfully add the closing tag immediately afterward. I also turn off the pretty formatting. Keeping the same indentation level that I am at (and no, replacing the spaces with tabs does not count) is useful.
I do turn on the view visible whitespace, as this is useful to identify where whitespace is inconsistent. Sometimes though, I wonder if I'm better off not knowing -- having 3 spaces followed by a tab, or "inti;" make me want to throw VS out of the window (it oh so helpfully adds the tab when you start typing from having moved the cursor in virtual whitespace mode).
I want an editor to preserve what I am typing and get out of the way.
I don't know how the Windows GDI and DDB/DIB logic work in great detail, nor do I understand how it is implemented in Wine or works with DirectX. What I do know is that doing something this big is extremely difficult to get right. You need a decent migration strategy and someone who understands the architecture (both how it currently works and how it is intended to work).
I suspect that there are interesting DIBDDB and DIBEngineWineX11X11 and DIBEngineWineD3DOpenGL issues that make it more of a challenge.
> 1 & 2) I'm not seeing anything on bug reports or the mailing list about specific issues.
What do you mean by "specific issues"?
> 3. That's not an explanation, that's an excuse for not having an explanation. Any design is a mix of architectures, would you reject a patch for the sole reason that it used events/and/ polling?
I am not Alexandre. That said, Massimo's DIB engine is a combination of Jesse's attempt and Huw's attempt.
This is not a matter of using events and polling. It's about creating something that is maintainable.
> 4. RTFA: "DIB Engine : Passing all tests"
I did. I also read Austin's note that not all tests were passing (and Massimo's subsequent comment that a fix will be available in a future - possibly already available release). So it almost, not quite passes the tests.
In addition to this, Massimo's engine causes some of the todo's in the bitmap tests to pass (a good thing). Those todo's would need to be removed once the DIB engine lands (and if it is optional, there would need to be support for getting the non-DIB engine version not triggering the todo blocks).
> 5. The code it's replacing doesn't render anything in many places. WINE would prefer a stub to a mostly working implementation? Anyway, where is this report, I see Steven Edwards has posted a single image to the bug and called it a "comparison".
From what I understand, the code it is replacing does (mostly) work, just painfully slowly because it round trips to the X server to do the rendering. The code it is replacing is not a stub.
> Having a Prima Donna at the helm of a project is not the same as "high standards". WINE has achieved some marvelous things, but the pace of development is very slow. Making people who have contributed their time to help play guess-what-the-project-leader-wants looks like a major cause of this. How much code has gone to waste because the devs couldn't guess what was required of them?
If you want to know what Alexandre thinks about a patch or design, go to the #winehackers IRC and *ask* him. He *is* approachable.
And if you want to go through the hundreds of patches that Wine gets per day, while replying to each one that does not get accepted giving a detailed explanation why, and trying to maintain a level of quality be my guest. Just accept being called a Prima Donna and have people complain about you because their patches are not accepted and they don't know why.
Distributions contain patches not in upstream code for various reasons, so effectively, there is a different version of each project for each distribution.
From what I understand: Alexandre has made his opinion clear on the IRC. However, he hasn't replied on the mailing list. So saying that Alexandre hasn't said why he doesn't like it is wrong.
Sarah: "Mum, why can't I watch TV?" Mum: "Well, the TV/Computer/Game Console is broken."
or:
Sarah: "I want to watch TV." David: "I want to play Halo 10." Mum: "Sorry, but I'm using the TV/Computer/Gaming Console at the moment to write up my report."
While I can understand the frustration, and sympathise with Chris, this is only part of the story: 1. Massimo has been invited to the IRC to discuss the architecture with Alexandre, but hasn't; 2. Conversely, Alexandre hasn't commented on any of the DIB threads - but other people (such as Roderick Colenbrander) have made comments summarising what Alexandre has been saying on IRC; 3. One of the reasons that Alexandre doesn't like the design is that it is a mix of 3 architectural designs; 4. Massimo's engine does not currently pass all the Wine tests (a requirement to get in) -- but is getting there; 5. A recent report from Steve Edwards says that, yes the DIB engine is faster, but it has rendering glitches.
Massimo's work is great, but even if it had Alexandre's approval needs more work. It's like rewriting Firefox's CSS support to allow for CSS3, but regressing on the Acid2 tests and not rendering pages correctly.
Getting code into Wine is difficult. I know because some of my stuff took 5 attempts to get in. When it did get in, the code was a lot better for it.
Wine has a quality bar that is required for code to be committed. This especially goes for something that is at the core of the project (which in this case is the gdi32 code, but also applies to DirectX and other areas).
Is Wine perfect? No. but a fork here will not help.
If they are going to use the pornography argument, at least cite something like "Fannie Hill" (at least cite the *good* stuff!) So what are they going to ban now: 1. web browsers -- I can search the web, including Guttenberg. Oh and "The internet is for porn" http://www.avenueq.com/videoclips.html, http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=5430343841227974645 2. music players -- 'cause I can listen to libravox's reading of "Fannie Hill" 3. etext readers -- c.f. TFA 4. image viewers -- for obvious reasons 5. video players -- also, for obvious reasons 6. everything! 7. ??? 8. not profit!!
Slashdot Mirror
If it is the Microsoft compiler that is causing the performance gain, how do you explain the performance increase on running Firefox through Wine. Surely, since Wine and the Linux system that it is running on are built with gcc, you'd expect it to run slower, or have marginal difference to native Linux.
That's not to say that the Microsoft compiler isn't any good. It's more likely that the Windows binary has had profile guided optimisation enabled and is better organised for branch prediction and the other insane things that CPUs do nowadays to keep things in the CPU cache longer.
It will depend on what compiler settings were used to build the glibc library, what architecture it was tuned for, whether or not the glibc library is targeted to the specific version of the kernel you are using. It also depends on what options were used to build the companion libraries, as well.
Also, the last time this was discussed on slashdot, I seem to remember that it was Profile Guided Optimisation (PGO) that helped FF on Windows. This would allow the compiler to better structure the machine code to keep as much of the program running in the CPU cache as possible (by pre-loading branches in conditional statements that are executed more frequently).
A while back, I ran some tests on Firefox 3 with Wine vs Linux native (http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pCaFy3jQwNj5XFrxvcYJxPA&gid=3). Results: Firefox 3 Windows executable with wine built using the -O3 compiler setting was the winner (although, on average there wasn't much difference between the different wine versions).
This was with the V8 tests. I haven't tested FF 3.5rc2 yet, nor have I experimented with the build options.
This is one of the cool things I like about Linux. You don't have to have things one way.
Want to use the Amiga-style workbench - sure, no problem. Like the look and feel of Windows - sure. Prefer a Mac-style UI - check. Want to go back to those good old command line only days - got that too.
Linux, the BSD's and OpenSolaris are flexible enough so that you can customise the UI to be what you want. This is both a blessing and a curse, but you can provide entry-level distributions.
There is a balance between stable, functional and reliable vs bleeding edge, innovative UIs. There is room enough for both.
+1
It's not so much the programming language -- that is just used to glue things together. What is important here are the libraries and toolkits that are built on top of those.
What you are probably interested in is improving the community interaction at the project level and how that interacts with the revision control systems.
There are tools that allow translators to easily update translations and add support for languages if the program is using PO files (which is standard on GNU/Linux - and possibly other - systems).
What is needed is better interaction with these tools for things like localisation, typos and graphics and have them as core features on project hosting sites like github, sourceforge and gitorious.
From my understanding, the IE8 page is not lying. IE8 does have (per thread, not process like Chrome) tab isolation and crash recovery (like Firefox); it does comply with CSS2.1; it does have Active Directory and Group Policy Object support for better deployment and management on Windows systems. However, the article is rigged to cover items that show it in a decent light, just like the Firefox one.
IE8 *may* be faster at loading commonly browsed to pages. However, note the wording. It does not say that it has the fastest JavaScript performance because that is not true. It does not say that it is the fastest at running AJAX-based websites, since those would require better JavaScript performance. Chrome set the bar for this, and other browsers have followed (except for IE).
It's like the Darren Brown TV program about a fool-proof way of predicting the outcome of horse racing. There, he also got a coin to come up heads 10 times in a row. That may be true, but you are not seeing all of the picture. Same with this -- where is the SVG support? Where is the MathML support? Those have been standards for years now.
How about:
if (IE)
show_page( "We're sorry, we use web standards like SVG and HTML5 to provide a rich, entertaining user experience. Unfortunately, you are using Internet Explorer and so cannot view this page. Please download Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari for a richer experience on the web!" );
else
display_the_actual_page();
In the same vein as "You need Windows and Windows Media Player", or "This site requires Silverlight."
So why does FF have a cross-platform UI engine (XUL) and have native theme support for Mac and Linux as well as XP and Vista. Or are you talking about Chrome/Chromium that was written to the Windows API?
TBH, 93% is a *very* respectable score. Yes, it's not 100% like Opera and WebKit (Safari, Chrome, ...), *but* it is leagues better than IE.
If you want to help out, see http://www.wg9s.com/mozilla/firefox/ for an Acid3 testing build of FF (currently at 97%). The thing to remember is that care needs to be made so that the fixes (a) don't break extensions, (b) don't cause rendering regressions for popular websites. The remaining issues seem to be (1) that some of the tests are failing intermittently (bug 335998), (2) lack of SVG font support, (3) favicon being dispalyed at the end of the tests and (4) some of the tests running slowly, failing the smooth animation requirement.
The thing that really annoys me, though is the piece of crap that is IE. IE doesn't have support for the CSS min-width attribute. IE doesn't support SVG. Just about the only thing that IE has going for it is that it has native JSON support.
It is not Firefox that is holding back the web - the competition with Opera, Safari and Chrome is a good thing - IE is holding back the web. In the new web wars around standards compliance, Acid test conformance and JavaScript performance IE is losing. So take back the web!
Exactly. And you can simplify this to the "standard" story archetype of "Boy meets girl. Boy looses girl. Boy gets girl back." and cover even more stories. The one you mentioned is a variant of this.
If you look at stories in any domain, there are hundreds of different concepts. Hell, just look at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tropes for an attempt to catalog them. Even slashdot has them -- I am not a meme!
The thing is that a good story (book, play, TV episode, film, game, ...) will have many of these tropes. It may even have a different take on the tropes. Having good, fleshed out characters is also needed and is equally important to the story.
They don't need to. If they develop an average search engine with interesting posibilities (like the search engine previously known as Live Search which is now Bing) and open up the code / algorithm / apis and get people interested in it, like by emphasising community like FLOSS, wikipedia and the social networking sites do then everyone else will help improve it. That is, do for the web and search engines what FLOSS has and is doing for the desktop.
That is the point the GP was making. Microsoft clearly won't do this, but I wonder if someone else will.
And because it is Microsoft's attempt at something cloud based, it will blow up in a Blue Smoke of Death and blow away leaving a clear Azure sky behind it with no cloud in site!
Oh, forgot to mention -- any GUI library/framework that requires you to use a graphical editor/IDE to create the UI in is crap. You can choose to use a graphical editor (e.g. a HTML designer for HTML/CSS and Glade for Gtk), but the point is that you shouldn't need to.
You don't need a graphical tool to create a GUI. If your GUI interface requires you to hand-position all of the controls (Windows RC files, anyone) then you are using the wrong GUI API. Hand positioning GUIs just results in inconsistent spacing, sizing and layout of controls. All the decent GUI toolkits (Java, Gtk, XUL - not sure about Qt or Cocoa/Carbon) all allow you to specify the structure of the UI (i.e. the box model) and will auto-position the controls at runtime. This makes things like localisation, right-to-left vs left-to-right ordering and resizable dialogs a snap to implement (there is no extra effort on the part of the developer).
Also, Gtk and Java (and possibly the others as well) allow you to dynamically create the UI on the fly at runtime. With an API that doesn't support auto-reflow, you have to write a lot of repositioning code which is harder to maintain.
The solution is not to have IDEs churning out reams of crappy code for you, the solution is to provide decent APIs that abstract the routine stuff so that you are actually specifying what the program does.
What, so you are not hand-crafting the machine code using Vi??? What is wrong with you man ;)!
That main declaration should only be for C++/CLI code (it is using C++/CLI syntax). Check the options that you have specified and the project type (is it a C++ Win32/Console application?).
As far as standard support goes, VC2003 and upward are very good. The only things that they don't support are export (which isn't used anyway and is generally agreed that it is broken anyway), throw specifications for anything but throw() (it will parse them, just not interpret them) and two-phase template instantiation. Also, the VC2010 compiler is adding support for quite a few new C++0x features.
Code completion is one of the first things I turn off in Visual Studio. Ever try adding a link tag around some text and have VS helpfully add the closing tag immediately afterward. I also turn off the pretty formatting. Keeping the same indentation level that I am at (and no, replacing the spaces with tabs does not count) is useful.
I do turn on the view visible whitespace, as this is useful to identify where whitespace is inconsistent. Sometimes though, I wonder if I'm better off not knowing -- having 3 spaces followed by a tab, or "inti;" make me want to throw VS out of the window (it oh so helpfully adds the tab when you start typing from having moved the cursor in virtual whitespace mode).
I want an editor to preserve what I am typing and get out of the way.
So you're happy to have something like the Gnome session manager issues http://np237.livejournal.com/22014.html?thread=113662?
I don't know how the Windows GDI and DDB/DIB logic work in great detail, nor do I understand how it is implemented in Wine or works with DirectX. What I do know is that doing something this big is extremely difficult to get right. You need a decent migration strategy and someone who understands the architecture (both how it currently works and how it is intended to work).
I suspect that there are interesting DIBDDB and DIBEngineWineX11X11 and DIBEngineWineD3DOpenGL issues that make it more of a challenge.
> 1 & 2) I'm not seeing anything on bug reports or the mailing list about specific issues.
What do you mean by "specific issues"?
> 3. That's not an explanation, that's an excuse for not having an explanation. Any design is a mix of architectures, would you reject a patch for the sole reason that it used events /and/ polling?
I am not Alexandre. That said, Massimo's DIB engine is a combination of Jesse's attempt and Huw's attempt.
This is not a matter of using events and polling. It's about creating something that is maintainable.
> 4. RTFA: "DIB Engine : Passing all tests"
I did. I also read Austin's note that not all tests were passing (and Massimo's subsequent comment that a fix will be available in a future - possibly already available release). So it almost, not quite passes the tests.
In addition to this, Massimo's engine causes some of the todo's in the bitmap tests to pass (a good thing). Those todo's would need to be removed once the DIB engine lands (and if it is optional, there would need to be support for getting the non-DIB engine version not triggering the todo blocks).
> 5. The code it's replacing doesn't render anything in many places. WINE would prefer a stub to a mostly working implementation? Anyway, where is this report, I see Steven Edwards has posted a single image to the bug and called it a "comparison".
From what I understand, the code it is replacing does (mostly) work, just painfully slowly because it round trips to the X server to do the rendering. The code it is replacing is not a stub.
> Having a Prima Donna at the helm of a project is not the same as "high standards". WINE has achieved some marvelous things, but the pace of development is very slow. Making people who have contributed their time to help play guess-what-the-project-leader-wants looks like a major cause of this. How much code has gone to waste because the devs couldn't guess what was required of them?
If you want to know what Alexandre thinks about a patch or design, go to the #winehackers IRC and *ask* him. He *is* approachable.
And if you want to go through the hundreds of patches that Wine gets per day, while replying to each one that does not get accepted giving a detailed explanation why, and trying to maintain a level of quality be my guest. Just accept being called a Prima Donna and have people complain about you because their patches are not accepted and they don't know why.
Distributions contain patches not in upstream code for various reasons, so effectively, there is a different version of each project for each distribution.
From what I understand: Alexandre has made his opinion clear on the IRC. However, he hasn't replied on the mailing list. So saying that Alexandre hasn't said why he doesn't like it is wrong.
Amarok 2 is still in development. Give it time. Report bugs. Submit code if you can.
Sarah: "Mum, why can't I watch TV?"
Mum: "Well, the TV/Computer/Game Console is broken."
or:
Sarah: "I want to watch TV."
David: "I want to play Halo 10."
Mum: "Sorry, but I'm using the TV/Computer/Gaming Console at the moment to write up my report."
While I can understand the frustration, and sympathise with Chris, this is only part of the story:
1. Massimo has been invited to the IRC to discuss the architecture with Alexandre, but hasn't;
2. Conversely, Alexandre hasn't commented on any of the DIB threads - but other people (such as Roderick Colenbrander) have made comments summarising what Alexandre has been saying on IRC;
3. One of the reasons that Alexandre doesn't like the design is that it is a mix of 3 architectural designs;
4. Massimo's engine does not currently pass all the Wine tests (a requirement to get in) -- but is getting there;
5. A recent report from Steve Edwards says that, yes the DIB engine is faster, but it has rendering glitches.
Massimo's work is great, but even if it had Alexandre's approval needs more work. It's like rewriting Firefox's CSS support to allow for CSS3, but regressing on the Acid2 tests and not rendering pages correctly.
Getting code into Wine is difficult. I know because some of my stuff took 5 attempts to get in. When it did get in, the code was a lot better for it.
Wine has a quality bar that is required for code to be committed. This especially goes for something that is at the core of the project (which in this case is the gdi32 code, but also applies to DirectX and other areas).
Is Wine perfect? No. but a fork here will not help.
If they are going to use the pornography argument, at least cite something like "Fannie Hill" (at least cite the *good* stuff!) So what are they going to ban now:
1. web browsers -- I can search the web, including Guttenberg. Oh and "The internet is for porn" http://www.avenueq.com/videoclips.html, http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=5430343841227974645
2. music players -- 'cause I can listen to libravox's reading of "Fannie Hill"
3. etext readers -- c.f. TFA
4. image viewers -- for obvious reasons
5. video players -- also, for obvious reasons
6. everything!
7. ???
8. not profit!!