This is actively working against evolution. I demand this stop immediately. Not only do we allow blind, deaf, ugly, and stupid people to pro-create, but now we're going to start allowing sterile people to procreate? Someday, we'll all end up stuck in the matrix feeding tubes, and it won't be imposed on us by some AI run amuck.... it will be done by our own choice.
This is as stupid as saying that gay people will eventually "weed themselves out" because they can't breed. Some traits are not hereditary.
Also who's to know that breeding for apparently bad traits won't lead to unforseen beneficial traits. For example, perhaps ugly people have ESP. Who knows.
But I have an idea. Develop a system that implements the exact same interface as X but does no marshalling/demarshalling.
Impossible. The X11 protocol is incompatible with this idea.
Pixels can be written directly to the framebuffer. So you are thinking, "Yeah, but I want to use X apps without recompiling". Ok, use library interposition. This also allows you to use a "local" and "global" X library to maintain client/server capabilities. For those who aren't familar which library interpositioning, it essentially takes advantage of dynamic linking (set LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Unix). If you want to run a X program that directly writes to the framebuffer, then switch your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to a different directory before the program is executed. This could get annoying, but a Window Manager like Gnome could take care of this automatically.
This has been tried. See the D11 paper by Kilgard.
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/125132.html
The idea is called Direct Rendering and it is not a significant performance win for most graphics ops. The obvious exception is high bandwidth graphics such as OpenGL and streaming video. You'll notice that XFree86 already has direct rendering for OpenGL and streaming video.
Summary: X11 is not the bottleneck on your desktop.
She had the free will to get a new job, just like you have the free will not to use a product with a crappy EULA.
You also have legal rights. The EULA must ultimately be enforced by the government - all contracts and copyrights are enforced by the government - so if government does not enforce it then there's no obligation for you to follow it. The government doesn't enforce illegal or unfair contracts, for example.
There have been many famous cases of airtight legal contracts being nullified by the judiciary. Fleetwood Mac's contract with Davis is the classic example. The judge nullified the contract for 4 reasons; one of them was that the compensation Fleetwood Mac received from Davis was "grossly inadequate".
To put it simply: contracts aren't binding unless the government agrees. So it's not just a case of "love it or leave it". That's not the way the legal system works. The legal system has human judges because there is a need to apply human values to the judgements. Sometimes the law is not enough.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't OpenOffice use zipped XML as a native file format already?
It is zipped XML, but this is irrelevant. XML is a universal storage format but it doesn't dictate the meaning of the contents. You can still create proprietary formats on top of XML. For example, the new Microsoft Word format is zipped XML but thanks to OLE nasties there is still a need to reverse engineer the format.
The perfect analogy is TCP/IP. The TCP/IP protocols might be open and universal and conformed to by all the vendors. But TCP/IP itself doesn't dictate the meaning of the bytes in the application protocol (eg, HTTP, SMTP). Vendors are free to implement proprietary protocols on top of TCP/IP (eg, Real Streaming).
The point being made is that you can't trust a "scientist" with an agenda. The ICR page states outright that they intend to disprove evolution. The Real Scientist would start with no bias and would uphold their results, no matter whether they agreed or disagreed with the conclusions.
There might be scientists who are equally blind in their defence of evolution. You are correct that these people should be ignored as well. The point is that ICR is stating their bias upfront and therefore their results should be treated with suspicion.
"Legally its not theft, its breach of copyright...."
As if that makes it alrighty then.
It doesn't make it "alrighty" but the fact remains that copyright infringement is simply copyright infringement. To label it "theft" is completely out of line with your implied desire for an intelligent forum.
For a community is so vocal when it comes to screaming from the rooftops about breaches of the alleged rights contained with the GPL. Common decency & any notion of self respect would mandate that you defend the rights of others also, by paying for what you use.
It's amazing how often this fallacy needs to be corrected... but here I'll do it again. Did it occur to you that the people who infringe on copyright MIGHT NOT BE THE SAME PEOPLE who vocally defend the GPL? A community is formed from many people with a common interest, not from a bunch of like-minded clones.
This is not a "Unix bug," this is a bug in the way your MUA is interpretting your mbox-format mail spool. From_ quoting is normal in many varients of the mbox file format. The best fix is to use a better spool format like Maildir that doesn't require any content quoting.
It's not a bug in the MUA. It's a bug in the mbox format (as defined in the RFC). To say it's a bug in the MUA implies that the MUA could be fixed and we wouldn't see >From anymore. There's no way to fix the MUA. I agree with you that switching to Maildir is the best solution:-)
It's not just for the PHB. I also like the idea of single-purpose distros. Products like Smoothwall are enticing because you know they'll do one thing and do it well. They are not polluted with the "gotta do 1,000,000 unrelated things!" mentality that plagues other distros.
Unfortunately it seems the single-purpose distros are almost always commercial. Cobalt produces a very nice www-only distro, with easy-to-use FORMs based configuration, and so on. But you have to buy their Cobalt hardware to get their software. Similarly you can get a nicely packaged caching proxy server built upon Squid from Swelltech, but it only comes bundled with Swelltech's hardware.
Debian was making some progress towards creating a single distribution that could be "tasked" into a single purpose. It was almost at the point where you could go "apt-get install task-mail-server" followed by "apt-get install harden" and you would have a sufficiently locked down mail server. Sadly it seems this progress has slowed. I daresay the sheer size of Debian makes it difficult to build integrated environments of comparable quality to the Cobalts of the world.
I honestly look forward to the day when there is a good range of free single-purpose distros. I won't complain if my DNS server doesn't have a C compiler or if my SMTP server can't run X clients. I've already got access to dozens of general-purpose distros that can do 100s of tasks. What I want is a server that doesn't occupy my time to administer: I want to set it and forget it. I'm not getting that level of ease-of-use from the Gotta Do It All distros.
* The Task Switcher - requires 2 clicks to switch application, compared to 1 click with a Windows-style taskbar....
Tear off the task switcher and you have a
floating menu that only requires 1-click.
Also, if the previous directory window has been closed, it is now impossible to navigate backwards. Other systems (Windows included) have found solutions to this problem - why hasn't the Mac?
Apple-click the window titlebar on the folder
name and select the parent directory.
* Context Menus - The lack of a second button on the standard Mac mouse is for some a boon in terms of simplicity. However, for anyone past beginner level it is a serious usability handicap.
So replace the mouse with a 2-button model.
* Keyboard navigation - or the lack of it. You're stuffed on a Mac if you can't use the mouse. The menubar is totally off limits to you, which makes the computer all but useless.
You can access the menubar using the keyboard
in MacOS X.
Remember, not everyone has the faculties to use a mouse, and if this is the case for you, forget every other question about usability - a Mac just isn't usable.
Mouse Keys was specifically designed for
those people who can't use a mouse.
I recently listened to a Mac-hater claiming
that Macs don't run his favourite applications
such as DreamWeaver and Internet Explorer. Then
he started going on about the 1-button mouse. People who think only Linux and Mac users can be zealots need to take a good look at themselves.
I'm with you on this. I have no problem with my kid seeing naked people, but the violence that's on tv during primetime is way too much for him. I'd like to see a better rating system for the various media (tv, movies, games, music), with different scales for different things.
For all the faults with Australia's communications (his name begins with Senator and rhymes with Alston) we have a rating system like you describe. TV shows are often described as "strong language, adult themes, strong violence" or "adult themes, full nudity". The breakdown is rather good and you can often spot the shows worth watching by the extremely long list of ratings.
I believe the system is self-imposed by the TV stations, no doubt in a desperate attempt to make sure the government didn't impose some idiotic short-sighted regulations.
... because I'm not knowledgeable about them anyway. The ADV: string in the SUBJECT is plain stupid and is a perfect example of why a judge shouldn't be making technical decisions on the evolution of SMTP.
This string should have gone into it's own header, possibly even as an X-Header, for example X-Advertising. Then it would have been easy to put proper qualifiers on the nature of the spam, not just ADV: and ADV:ADULT.
What's wrong with typedef? enum? Why are you using switch statements instead of function pointers? Why doesn't your PIPE structure use a union? Why are you throwing assumptions into the default case instead of just asserting them at the start?
It's OK for you to have less than stellar C skills; nobody is born knowing C. But it's not OK for you to then make judgements about the relative merits of C versus an OO language. You need to be good at BOTH before you can make qualitative comparisons.
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2
Why is this relevant? Well, Monsanto is currently one of biggest proponents of GM (genetically modified) foods.
To claim that GM foods are bad because a corporation that have done evil things is a proponent of it,...
Neither the story nor the slashdot blurb claims that GM foods are bad. That seems to be your own knee-jerk reaction to the letters "GM".
For what it's worth, I'm a supporter of GM foods and I'm strongly opposed to Monsanto. You don't need to be anti-GM to want to spread the word about the evils of Monsanto.
Monsanto should not be allowed to develop or sell GM foods without extra strict regulation. The normal GM food regulations are not enough for this evil, evil company.
Last time I checked, you still needed to know the dot clock and monitor frequency settings in XFree86 in order to change the screen resolution and color depth.
Last time I checked (this morning in Debian) you go "Monitor Setup -> Simple -> 17 inch" and it works.
XFree86 also has DDC support (1 and 2) so it is highly unlikely you need to put in timing lines unless you're running non-standard (fixed frequency) monitors from the 80s.
Why have I been moderated as flamebait not just once, but twice? Konqueror is an excellent browser (KDE is my default desktop and Konqueror is my normal web browser) but I'm not naive enough to believe it's achieving the same scope as Mozilla.
Is this more proof that the anti-anti-KDE league is now much more vocal than the anti-KDE league? Both of them seem to be more vocal than the pro-KDE league! It seems they're flaming the people who support KDE (eg, myself) for daring to be objective!
Personally I'd like to see/. evolve a bit in 2002...beating the linux drum is a useful practice, but a raison d'etre, it does not make.
Now this interests me, because I think the "bash/." meme is now far more popular than the "bash Microsoft" meme. I just quickly counted the responses to this article and I've estimated a 3:2 ratio of "bash/." to "bash Microsoft".
I suspect the same holds for other once-popular memes. Whenever there's a BSD article I hear the same rhetoric that "/. is anti BSD" but I have the strongest suspicion that I have seen far more articles about BSD than Linux on/. in recent weeks!
Even articles that are unrelated to BSD receive a huge share of "BSD does it better" or "BSD did this first" in the talkback sections. I've personally been attacked for daring suggest that the early days of *BSD had their own fair share of bun fighting and political nonsense.
I strongly believe that/. is full of zealots of all walks of life. I see just as many pro-Microsoft and pro-BSD zealots as I see pro-Linux zealots. It seems the pro-Linux zealots are just being more quiet these days, or at least have been flamed often enough to be less outlandish in their claims.
Sadly I haven't yet seen the same tempered behaviour from the non-Linux zealots.
But copyright only exists because the government intrudes. If the government didn't intrude then we'd have the situation of 200 years ago where people were copying data freely, much to the annoyance of the authors and publishers. If anything, the poster you were responding to was asking that the government intrudes less.
I don't want the government to be able to force anyone to release information that they don't want to
And nobody was asking them too. You seem to have confused copyright with privacy.
Microsoft once again leads the way for Linux. Amazing, isn't it, how many Linux projects are simply clones of existing Microsoft software.
Ok, I'll bite.
Need a word processor? Get a Word clone.
Microsoft Word is itself a clone of WordPerfect or Multimate or WordStar (depending on who you ask). Linux word processors don't need to clone Word: they can clone an original.
Need a flowchart tool? Get a Visio clone.
Except Microsoft didn't write Visio. They bought it as a finished product with an existing userbase. Linux vector drawing programs were cloning Visio well before it joined the Microsoft stable.
Need a vector illustrator? Get an Illustrator clone.
...taking something you don't have a right to is stealing...
Ok, I'll accept that.
... whether it is digital or material
But when it's digital you are copying it, not taking it. This is why it's called copyright infringement. Your attempt to equate "copying" with "stealing" is disingenuous.
Slashdot Mirror
This is as stupid as saying that gay people will eventually "weed themselves out" because they can't breed. Some traits are not hereditary.
Also who's to know that breeding for apparently bad traits won't lead to unforseen beneficial traits. For example, perhaps ugly people have ESP. Who knows.
Impossible. The X11 protocol is incompatible with this idea.
This has been tried. See the D11 paper by Kilgard.
The idea is called Direct Rendering and it is not a significant performance win for most graphics ops. The obvious exception is high bandwidth graphics such as OpenGL and streaming video. You'll notice that XFree86 already has direct rendering for OpenGL and streaming video.
Summary: X11 is not the bottleneck on your desktop.
You also have legal rights. The EULA must ultimately be enforced by the government - all contracts and copyrights are enforced by the government - so if government does not enforce it then there's no obligation for you to follow it. The government doesn't enforce illegal or unfair contracts, for example.
There have been many famous cases of airtight legal contracts being nullified by the judiciary. Fleetwood Mac's contract with Davis is the classic example. The judge nullified the contract for 4 reasons; one of them was that the compensation Fleetwood Mac received from Davis was "grossly inadequate".
To put it simply: contracts aren't binding unless the government agrees. So it's not just a case of "love it or leave it". That's not the way the legal system works. The legal system has human judges because there is a need to apply human values to the judgements. Sometimes the law is not enough.
It is zipped XML, but this is irrelevant. XML is a universal storage format but it doesn't dictate the meaning of the contents. You can still create proprietary formats on top of XML. For example, the new Microsoft Word format is zipped XML but thanks to OLE nasties there is still a need to reverse engineer the format.
The perfect analogy is TCP/IP. The TCP/IP protocols might be open and universal and conformed to by all the vendors. But TCP/IP itself doesn't dictate the meaning of the bytes in the application protocol (eg, HTTP, SMTP). Vendors are free to implement proprietary protocols on top of TCP/IP (eg, Real Streaming).
The point being made is that you can't trust a "scientist" with an agenda. The ICR page states outright that they intend to disprove evolution. The Real Scientist would start with no bias and would uphold their results, no matter whether they agreed or disagreed with the conclusions. There might be scientists who are equally blind in their defence of evolution. You are correct that these people should be ignored as well. The point is that ICR is stating their bias upfront and therefore their results should be treated with suspicion.
No, it's just stupid. I can only hope that his wife forgives him.
It doesn't make it "alrighty" but the fact remains that copyright infringement is simply copyright infringement. To label it "theft" is completely out of line with your implied desire for an intelligent forum.
It's amazing how often this fallacy needs to be corrected... but here I'll do it again. Did it occur to you that the people who infringe on copyright MIGHT NOT BE THE SAME PEOPLE who vocally defend the GPL? A community is formed from many people with a common interest, not from a bunch of like-minded clones.
It's not a bug in the MUA. It's a bug in the mbox format (as defined in the RFC). To say it's a bug in the MUA implies that the MUA could be fixed and we wouldn't see >From anymore. There's no way to fix the MUA. I agree with you that switching to Maildir is the best solution :-)
You idiot! The whole point of a secret is not to go blurting it out. Somebody mod the parent down into oblivion.
I'm no genius but it took me 30 seconds to decipher the code. It's base 4 with the letters numbered consecutively.
It's not just for the PHB. I also like the idea of single-purpose distros. Products like Smoothwall are enticing because you know they'll do one thing and do it well. They are not polluted with the "gotta do 1,000,000 unrelated things!" mentality that plagues other distros.
Unfortunately it seems the single-purpose distros are almost always commercial. Cobalt produces a very nice www-only distro, with easy-to-use FORMs based configuration, and so on. But you have to buy their Cobalt hardware to get their software. Similarly you can get a nicely packaged caching proxy server built upon Squid from Swelltech, but it only comes bundled with Swelltech's hardware.
Debian was making some progress towards creating a single distribution that could be "tasked" into a single purpose. It was almost at the point where you could go "apt-get install task-mail-server" followed by "apt-get install harden" and you would have a sufficiently locked down mail server. Sadly it seems this progress has slowed. I daresay the sheer size of Debian makes it difficult to build integrated environments of comparable quality to the Cobalts of the world.
I honestly look forward to the day when there is a good range of free single-purpose distros. I won't complain if my DNS server doesn't have a C compiler or if my SMTP server can't run X clients. I've already got access to dozens of general-purpose distros that can do 100s of tasks. What I want is a server that doesn't occupy my time to administer: I want to set it and forget it. I'm not getting that level of ease-of-use from the Gotta Do It All distros.
Spelling flames are lame because everybody makes mistakes. There is no reason to hold Rob to higher standards than you set for yourself.
Ok, I'll bite...
Tear off the task switcher and you have a floating menu that only requires 1-click.
Apple-click the window titlebar on the folder name and select the parent directory.
So replace the mouse with a 2-button model.
You can access the menubar using the keyboard in MacOS X.
Mouse Keys was specifically designed for those people who can't use a mouse.
http://www.osdata.com/holistic/disable/disable.htm
I recently listened to a Mac-hater claiming that Macs don't run his favourite applications such as DreamWeaver and Internet Explorer. Then he started going on about the 1-button mouse. People who think only Linux and Mac users can be zealots need to take a good look at themselves.
You're right. Nobody ever bought the memory card peripheral for the PSX.
Oh no, wait, there was 100% market saturation for that peripheral.
I guess you're wrong.
For all the faults with Australia's communications (his name begins with Senator and rhymes with Alston) we have a rating system like you describe. TV shows are often described as "strong language, adult themes, strong violence" or "adult themes, full nudity". The breakdown is rather good and you can often spot the shows worth watching by the extremely long list of ratings.
I believe the system is self-imposed by the TV stations, no doubt in a desperate attempt to make sure the government didn't impose some idiotic short-sighted regulations.
... because I'm not knowledgeable about them anyway. The ADV: string in the SUBJECT is plain stupid and is a perfect example of why a judge shouldn't be making technical decisions on the evolution of SMTP.
This string should have gone into it's own header, possibly even as an X-Header, for example X-Advertising. Then it would have been easy to put proper qualifiers on the nature of the spam, not just ADV: and ADV:ADULT.
No wonder, you write shit like this...
What's wrong with typedef? enum? Why are you using switch statements instead of function pointers? Why doesn't your PIPE structure use a union? Why are you throwing assumptions into the default case instead of just asserting them at the start?
It's OK for you to have less than stellar C skills; nobody is born knowing C. But it's not OK for you to then make judgements about the relative merits of C versus an OO language. You need to be good at BOTH before you can make qualitative comparisons.
Neither the story nor the slashdot blurb claims that GM foods are bad. That seems to be your own knee-jerk reaction to the letters "GM".
For what it's worth, I'm a supporter of GM foods and I'm strongly opposed to Monsanto. You don't need to be anti-GM to want to spread the word about the evils of Monsanto.
Monsanto should not be allowed to develop or sell GM foods without extra strict regulation. The normal GM food regulations are not enough for this evil, evil company.
This company cannot be trusted.
Last time I checked (this morning in Debian) you go "Monitor Setup -> Simple -> 17 inch" and it works.
XFree86 also has DDC support (1 and 2) so it is highly unlikely you need to put in timing lines unless you're running non-standard (fixed frequency) monitors from the 80s.
Why have I been moderated as flamebait not just once, but twice? Konqueror is an excellent browser (KDE is my default desktop and Konqueror is my normal web browser) but I'm not naive enough to believe it's achieving the same scope as Mozilla.
Is this more proof that the anti-anti-KDE league is now much more vocal than the anti-KDE league? Both of them seem to be more vocal than the pro-KDE league! It seems they're flaming the people who support KDE (eg, myself) for daring to be objective!
Now this interests me, because I think the "bash /." meme is now far more popular than the "bash Microsoft" meme. I just quickly counted the responses to this article and I've estimated a 3:2 ratio of "bash /." to "bash Microsoft".
I suspect the same holds for other once-popular memes. Whenever there's a BSD article I hear the same rhetoric that "/. is anti BSD" but I have the strongest suspicion that I have seen far more articles about BSD than Linux on /. in recent weeks!
Even articles that are unrelated to BSD receive a huge share of "BSD does it better" or "BSD did this first" in the talkback sections. I've personally been attacked for daring suggest that the early days of *BSD had their own fair share of bun fighting and political nonsense.
I strongly believe that /. is full of zealots of all walks of life. I see just as many pro-Microsoft and pro-BSD zealots as I see pro-Linux zealots. It seems the pro-Linux zealots are just being more quiet these days, or at least have been flamed often enough to be less outlandish in their claims.
Sadly I haven't yet seen the same tempered behaviour from the non-Linux zealots.
Without belittling Konqueror, as it is truly an excellent browser, it is not in the same league as Mozilla.
But copyright only exists because the government intrudes. If the government didn't intrude then we'd have the situation of 200 years ago where people were copying data freely, much to the annoyance of the authors and publishers. If anything, the poster you were responding to was asking that the government intrudes less.
And nobody was asking them too. You seem to have confused copyright with privacy.
Ok, I'll bite.
Microsoft Word is itself a clone of WordPerfect or Multimate or WordStar (depending on who you ask). Linux word processors don't need to clone Word: they can clone an original.
Except Microsoft didn't write Visio. They bought it as a finished product with an existing userbase. Linux vector drawing programs were cloning Visio well before it joined the Microsoft stable.
Illustrator isn't even a Microsoft product.
3 strikes. You're out.
Ok, I'll accept that.
But when it's digital you are copying it, not taking it. This is why it's called copyright infringement. Your attempt to equate "copying" with "stealing" is disingenuous.